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.