My future self came to me and told me a parable

   The parable goes like this:
   The astronomer's wife is watching TV and hears the breaking news: scientists have just discovered that a nearby star, soon to be quasar, will (within a decade) irradiate the earth and the space around it hundreds of light years in every direction, wiping out all known life. Overtaken with the horror of it and stricken with panic, the wife dashes from their cottage and into the observatory where her husband has isolated himself for the evening. “A star is going to explode and kill us all!” she screams.
   “I know,” he replies calmly, but not dismissively.
   “What?” she asks dumbfounded, seeing as this is breaking news and he has had no means of communication with the outside world save his giant telescope.
   “Sweetheart,” he says lovingly, “I’ve known for years, I just didn’t want to worry anyone.”

I've been accused, lovingly, of a certain degree of didacticism. That is not my intention. But what have intentions ever counted for in art? Also, remember, ask and ye shall receive (permissions to reprint this elsewhere).

The Appalling Snow

   When you die you will leave behind nothing that will not also perish. What few memories and mementos remain proclaiming you will only accelerate their decomposition in your absence. You are not the point of the universe. You are not its pinnacle or its spectacle; you are a single breath. You are one inevitable interplay of all that makes up the cosmos and you are not important. You will not be counted anymore than you will count up your own breaths.

   You are, though—through no choice of your own—participating in something vital, if anything can be called vital at all: you are the host of billions of molecules playing together like children, defining new possibilities.

   Before there were stars, hydrogens intermingled in darkness; before there were planets, giants of ice and solid rock tumbled into one another in space; before there was life, stars sick with energy spewed themselves into loneliness; and before the next grand unimaginable cosmic expression—before the next breath—there was you and I.

If all we have is each other, it seems only proper that we ask one another permission when sharing or using the other's property.

an IM to a friend

me: with a Godspeed You Black Emperor Pandora station on Pandora every 15 minutes is like the moment the death of your mother finally hits you and you have to pull over into some gas station to breath it out through tears, and all you needed was someone to care, and so when the attendant notices you crying and comes out to check on you you know right then and there that your lucky to be alive and you know you have to leave this town you've been in since you were born because, damnit, this just isn't living, is it?

No really, it is. Try it. Also, you can like or roll your eyes and the sentiment expressed but do try your best in the future to make art in all the places you shouldn't. On facebook posts or in IM conversations. On the backs of envelopes or on a building wall. Of course every moment of life and love is art and blah blah blah... but if that's true it should be an excuse to make it more evidently so!, not an excuse to lean on the natural beauty of things and add nothing. Plus it breaks my creative habits. A history lesson:

In the 1980's, after Vietnam ended, a lot of veterans were left with longterm heroin habits. And they almost immediately started dieing of overdoses as soon as they got home. Thing was: these weren't stupid, risk-taking tried-to-get-too-high-and-died accidents. These vets had been shooting up to deal with war and the memories of war, and they were doing so in the same veins, in the same quantity, and with heroin of the same potency. But they were still overdosing. The reason? 

That dark bunker, or that musty corner of the jungle, where they'd shot up had left an imprint in their mind. After time and time again of shooting up in the same kind of place the body would start to prepare for an oncoming dose based on location, before the user ever decided to do it. Back home, in bathrooms, or laying on a mattress in an empty but safe room, their body didn't prepare itself. It had never been trained for a situation like that.

So If art is only in a word document on a laptop then the mind might just only bother to try when you open one up. That's why I do art at uncommon times. It's a chance, hopefully, to make art possible more often.

Feel free to reprint the IM without premission. I'd like to be cited, but I won't hold it against you.