unless you can’t, halt yourself from trying to love the idea of love.

I wonder when it is that i will stop. I wonder when i will stop wanting what i want, wanting to feel a certain way. when will those things change? but maybe i need clarity to what it is i want.

it feels like a long time ago, but i met a girl, and we fell for each other. it was an amazing thing. i am no jilted lover, i am no unrequited piner, i am a person who acts openly and honestly and meaningfully. Would it have been better to have let it all go when she wanted to leave. instead i gave her a reason to stay, i showed her the person i truly am capable of being, and she knew that she wanted to be with me. so where did that love go after it had left and came back? when did it change after it had stopped being love and turned back into it? Where is it now, now that my life is different, now that i’m not holding on so dearly, so tightly. i was willing to let go once, after i realized i could not force someone to love me back, but that feeling never left. that fear i had of losing love was so strong, but to let that go was liberating, to be no longer a victim of the way the heart pulls at its own strings, the way that it sways your life like a tiny toy boat in the ocean, it wasn’t the boss of me. I finally felt like i was in control. but i was wrong. it still tugs and sways and turns me over. now, i’m just more willing to let go, knowing that i’ll be alive at the end, knowing that i’ll survive, and that no matter the severity of the scars that remain, i’ll come back able to use my heart, able to feel, willing to love again.

And in a moment, a split second of my life, i meet someone else, someone other than my other. Ini, her name that i gave her here, became something. someone to hope for, someone to cloud my dreams and occupy my thoughts. i knew that i was heading towards these feelings, but what could i do to stop them. it had felt that the trajectory was set, that i was going to feel the way i feel, no matter what i had done. And i was frightened. i was afraid of forcing a moment, losing a friend, overstepping my boundaries, being a cad, hurting feelings, bruising my ego, diminishing my pride, and there are many others i could list. but the one thing i wasn’t afraid of, but maybe i should have been cautious of, was falling in love. and that is what happened. i could tell you all the reasons that she was worthwhile to fall for, but that is mine, that is for me and her to know.

i fell for a girl in a moment, when on the other side of my world i was falling out with another. but none of that had solidity, had any foundations. It was all, and still is a fluid thing. this life is not static, nor is it set in stone. it has no path, it will go where it goes, i can try to steer it, try to divert it, but i am at its mercy.

and i told ini, i told her how i felt, how i was willing to risk all that i was afraid of for her. and in return she said things that were reasonable and understandable. she spoke with clarity and grace, and it made my actions feel brash and misguided. but they aren’t, they weren’t. I try to mean what i say and say what i mean, i prescribe to an economy of words (although that may not be apparent here) and try to be sincere with utmost sincerity. But the things she said, i’m not sure what it means, because in my mind, as it races and retraces the syllables hitting my ear, i dig in deep into semantics and context. The conversation we had had takes on nuances that may or may not have existed, that may or may not have been concocted in my head. And i am yearning for simplicity, and completely mortified of it. A ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ feels so decisive and permanent. Where are the grey areas? But the truth is it is those grey areas are what mess me up. It makes me make up hunches, it lets me play with the permutations, and lets me make hypotheses that probably would never occur.

So where does it end. Where did it even begin. I have such strong feelings for ini, but there are so many circumstances that could prevent reciprocation. And i think that at the top of my list i play with the idea of how she ultimately feels about me. is she as conflicted as i am, albeit not for the same reasons but conflicted nonetheless, or is this easy. I like to think that i am not so crazy as to think that she has something stirring inside of her for me. that there is some sort of mutual desire towards one another, and that i am not so me strange person who over reads a situation, who misunderstood simple friendliness as something more. i want to believe that she cares for me, that she might even like me, might even want me.

Maybe i am that misunderstanding guy, and if that were the case, i’m not sure that that would be all that bad. i am capable of hoping that i could have something grand, even if that were so unfathomable. what do we have if we have no hope.

But then where does it end. Wanting her. wanting to be with her. that might be moot. that might not ever be in the cards. when do i give up hope. hoping that this might be amazing if we ever get to the point of letting it be more amazing than it already has been. and it has been amazing. i want to amplify that to some ultimate proportions. And in my head, one of those hypotheses, is the idea that maybe it’s not right right now. maybe somewhere down the road, in some future tense, we will be amazing together.


and i wonder if that is a problem. because when does hope give up. if not now, if with the prospect of maybe later, when? do i even need hope to give up? i don’t want to think that this is some sort of feeling that i can quit. because it isn’t. she is

would it be easier to know that she won’t ever love me?



i have nothing to say about that.











——————————————————————————————————–



so something new to listen to, maybe not new to you, not even new to me, but new in terms of me writing it down here, and hopefully you maybe reading it.


ZZ Hill ‘that aint the way you make love’ is a great song. it was used on madvillian’s ‘fancy clown’ and Kon&Amir ‘off track 6′, which are both amazing amazing things to listen to if you haven’t heard them. But the original is a hard plea to make things better. And listening to it makes me think of Marvin Gayes’ ‘Save the Children-God is Love-Mercy Mercy Me’ trilogy off of the What’s Going On album. But Hill has a good simple voice that recalls redding and bobby womack. And since i’m on a roll, listen to Bobby Womack’s “the womack live/safety zone” album (you can get it on itunes). I found this tape in my garage, the womack live one, way back in 94, it must have been my dad’s or my uncle’s from the 70s, and it changed my world. For anyone that is into performers, this album is a tight lesson in how to work the crowd. I would have loved to have been in that new orleans hall back in 197(?). The safety zone part is ok, but the live one makes this worth buying. I still have the tape, although i’ve had to change the plastic casing twice. That’s how good it is, and i don’t even have a working tape player anymore.



I like to think that i might know what an interesting image is. I am an art teacher after all. Although in my experience, being an art teacher does not always mean a person is qualified at knowing what is good or bad. But that being said, i enjoy photography, although i am not at all skilled in it, so my efforts tend to be more haphazard. But here are some images that i have taken.

rescue my love from the grasp of my heart

I’m quickly on my way back to my life away from where i have grown up, and i’m a little saddened by it. I had not thought about returning to responsibilities at all. Returning to some idea of professionalism. The only thing i thought about was the girl ini. She is up there. she is part of that place. but she transcends it. she is not tethered to my living there, the way that other things are when i am physically there. But i look forward to being within the same sort of zone as her. I look forward to interacting.

and i’m not sure if it is entirely out of romantic intention. I look forward to seeing her because she is a friend. and in my life i have a small list of friends. I was always friendly with a majority of people, and others have found me easy to talk to and get along with, and the things i say insightful and genuine, but a real level of closeness is sort of exclusive for me. and she and i have that.

and i know that she probably reads this, so this might sound like some sort of reasoning out loud to make me appear a certain way, but it isn’t. and i’m not even sure what my point was with breaking the paragraph and stating this. Like some sort of safety net, or written proof that i’m not hopelessly infatuated. but then maybe i am because i just reasoned against it.

but anyway, i look forward to nights turning into days. i look forward to getting close to someone, only to know that we will be sad when we go different ways. And that feeling of this whole thing ending, at least in proximity, is so frightening and looming on the horizon. and i’m worried and scared of losing this amazing thing, but i believe that it is more then proximity and circumstance that makes her and i click. It is the wanting of something amazing, and maybe not just for ourselves but for each other and the world.

and that, thinking of that makes me want her more.

so my other and i talked. we talked about breaking up. and i aired everything with her. without specifics, i told her it all. and we are still holding on. holding on to hope that maybe this can all work out. i know that it will all work out, i just don’t know how or with who. but that is all semantics i suppose.

but it makes me wonder if we are with people because they are the best, or because there is no one that we’ve found who is better. It is the small change in language that alter the sentiment so greatly and profoundly, that it makes a world of difference. I really believe what a friend once wrote, “the pursuit of happiness is an admission of sadness”. Am i, are any of us just looking for the next best thing? does that even make sense, it seems so unfair. I want to think that i can be that, someone’s best.

a smallish thing to know, although you probably noticed.

i was just trying to jazz it up. it being this blog. tell me what you think, i kind of feel that maybe the music starting up on its own might be a bit much. if it bugs you i’ll probably turn it off auto play.

i like making change, and this feels like a new direction that seems worth checking out.

new post in a day.

quiet your heart, listen to your head for once. scratch that, do what you want.

so, i’m back.

i went on some strange vacation. i want to talk about it.

I have never been on a cruise before. it was an interesting experience. my entire maternal family went, 20 total. that was including my other. my mom had kept it under wraps for a long time, but i found out only a couple days before the trip that she was coming along. it was a nice surprise. I thought it was weird to not go with her, and i offered her to buy her a ticket so she could go (i found out about the cruise for christmas) and she declined. I thought that was strange, but whatever. I would go and do something, i guess figure out how people vacation. So she came along. And she was excited. i was too.

This was going to be the first time we had seen each other for almost a month and a half, and we very rarely talk on the phone, maybe 3 times a week. So we were going to do nothing but be together for a week straight. i was nervous. we do well together. we are comfortable with one another, and we enjoy each other’s company. so why feel like that this was going to be hard? because that is how i felt.

we had only talked in some sort of non-serious way, maybe it was serious at times, about calling it quits. it was serious. is serious. we had only talked about some daily pleasantries and the heaviness of talking about us being over for the last 3 or 4 weeks. it was nice to be honest about the lack of feeling that we were sharing, and in that act it let us both feel like there was something brewing still. But that was over the safety of distance afforded by telephone conversation. This was going to up close and personal for 7 straight days.

but we didn’t really talk about it.

we laid around.

and we hung out and enjoyed each other’s company, just like she and i both anticipated. But there was something else. And i’ll be frank. we are at different places in terms of what we want from each other physically. I want it all, i want the passion and excitement of how things were when we first got together. I want to touch her and kiss her and make her feel. i want to run my hands across her body. i want her to reach out and touch me. i want her to initiate some sort of intimacy. She wants me to message her back. she wants to fall asleep. she wants me to not snore so loud and let her sleep. she has no interest in sex. and that is where a lot of problems are coming from, because i still am very interested in it. I need that physical dynamic. my reasoning is that without it, what separates our relationship from any normal friendship. And i know that there is more to love than sex. more to it than the physical. And i have that. i love her. my heart breaks because it hurts to know that she doesn’t feel excited the way that i do. the way that she used to. And i don’t know what to do. i don’t feel like giving up. but i do. but we were far from intimate. it feels labored at times when it does happen. she is disinterested in sex. and to me, i extend that to ultimately mean that she is disinterested in me. and that hurts too.

and all of that has gone on for longer than it should. and i feel like a heel for bringing it up, making it sound like i am only interested in having sex. that that is how i define what we had built and maintained. and it is not, however the fact that it is nonexistent (not completely) and such a sore point of contention makes me know that it is important enough to take notice of. it’s far too early to be this cold. and that makes me wonder why does it, relationships in general, even venture towards some sort of coldness? I don’t believe that it has to. i want to think that it can be amazing forever. is that immature of me to want that? if so, then let me believe. i don’t want to give that up. i want to believe that love is real, that the way it should be is the way it can be. i want to have that.

and honestly, i’m not sure that this is it.

but what do i do?


i want to think that this can work. i don’t want to give up on her, on us. but we talk about the idea that we might be better as friends. and i tell her we are already friends. and she just laughs at me. i’m afraid of losing her, and afraid of keeping her.

and i want to leave her. i want to find the thing i want to find. maybe it’s not real. maybe i’m dumb and hopeful. i can live with being dumb, especially if my hope has any validity. i feel like i found someone that would be amazing. and that makes me sad. it pains me to know that i was looking for something i already thought i had. but i can’t lie about how i feel about her. about anything. it does me no service to lie about how i feel. to hide how i feel. and this girl, i don’t know how she feels. i’ve told her. i’ve acted on my heart. i’ve put myself out there. i can live with what comes next. i’m ready.

and it feels like i’m waiting for life, all the while life is happening all around. i want to break the spell of normalcy. i want it to be amazing, and i really believe that it can be. i can’t think of having it any other way.

and about the cruise. it was fun. a week was 2 days too long. it was an eye opening experience to see how people have vacations. i prefer different things, i prefer feeling like i’ve set out on adventure, and being on a cruise is a bit too safe, too touristy for my liking. it was a strange endeavor. i’m not sure that it is something i’d do again in the near future. but the fun thing now is trying to get back my land legs. it’s been 3 days since we’ve gotten off the boat, and the room is still swaying back and forth. and every time i sit, i feel like i’m sliding out of my chair. it feels like life is out of my control. if feels like my body and my head are not in sync with one another. that i’m doing things and thinking things that have a hard time coalescing with me living life.

persuade me to stay, and my heart will be yours

So i had a quick little flurry of posts going for a moment it feels. It was nice to get into a rhythm of making a new entry. fun to force myself to find something to write about. I am not there yet with this post. I am going on a vacation in a few short hours, and it feels like i deserve it. The last 10 weeks have been some of the most arduous moments in succession that i have ever experienced. It has left me physically and mentally, and visually, tired. I have had a hard time concentrating. I had been thinking about too many things in too short a time span. I have had a hard time finding a normal sleep pattern, or even rewarding sleep. I look like all these things are taking their toll on me. even now, i am not asleep, even though i could be, should be.



But i wanted to write something to you. something to tell you not to forget me. I feel like if i turned the corner, i would disappear from your life. It is irrational. and it reveals my insecurities in a way that makes me insecure. It exposes the fact that i need you in my life, and i am afraid of not being able to have that happen. I don’t know if it really is better to have loved and lost. I sort of believe the other old adage that ignorance is and more than likely bliss. but then it conjures the conundrum of being too dumb to appreciate your own ignorance, or too smart to know that you’re missing out on simplicity.

When i come back there will be new elements added to this blog that i will try to incorporate.

In a few moments i will be back again, but for now sleep. think about me as i think about you. maybe we can be together in our twilight dreams.

opposite of sanity. that’s where i should be.

so in the craziness that is my life, I have rebelled against acclimating to daylight savings, i have gone and done some crazy things, other crazy things that i did not due occurred, and i bought 1 piece of luggage.


so daylight savings. yeah. i am against the practice, mainly because it is archaic and insane, but also because i live a relatively nocturnal life. actually my days consist of lots of time spent awake both during the day and the night. i only sleep at the max 6 hours at a time. this does not sync up very well with most people i share space with. my roommate, my other, my family, my friends. it makes for a lot of time alone. a lot of time to think about my self by myself. A lot of time to let my mind wander and think of how life could be or would be or should be if i only did something different. if only. if only. but i don’t agree with the practice of changing the time. I agree that people should be able to operate on the time schedule of their choice. But then i live such a life of leisure that it would disgust you. it really would, if you saw the things that i do, or don’t do, it would blow your mindgrapes so hard. What i want, not that it would change daylight savings because i just want to not practice it at all, but what i want is a metric measurement of time. that sounds interesting. how do you split up time in tens. i want it all the way to days and weeks and months and years. that sounds crazy. sometimes when i’m alone, i think of how to do that, and what the parts would be called. I don’t want to write it down because then i don’t get to rethink them up (they’re different every time).



So in my recent purchase of an ipod touch, i have integrated the thing into a daily routine. To school it goes, allowing me the chance to get online and search and check my mail. but a few days ago i lost my stock headphones. that was a bummer. but i have headphones galore. so no worries. i used a pair of in-ear ones that i had, and from daily use and being in my pocket and out of my pocket, i lost one of the rubber things that makes it fit in your ear. this always happens. it is the worst because then you can’t do anything with the headphones, and you can’t buy replacement ones. i have gone through tons of pairs of these type, everything ranging from cheap to 30 bucks (expensive). and i had had enough. i realized i like the simplicity of the stock ones so i set out to get a pair. i was thinking of other brands, but i have tried most and they all feel like someone stepping on my ear. so the apple ones work well and they don’t hurt. Trust me i know, i rocked everything from way back when, when ipods were called walkmen, and we had to flip the tapes around and listen to slow songs as batteries died. but the apple ones are 30 dollars too. so that seemed crazy. and then as i was at the apple store, it dawned on me, the shuffle is 50 dollars. for 20 more dollars i could own another ipod. so that’s what happened. i now have 3 ipods, not counting the one i gave my other. it seems crazy, but slightly reasonable, all for a pair of headphones.



and on my way in tonight, around 2 am, my car broke down on the freeway. mind you that this is the car i got as a temporary replacement while i work on my other car. it is all so ludicrous.


And i bought a garment bag. nothing exciting there, just a piece of luggage for a cruise i’m going on. it should be fun, and hopefully i’ll get to read a bunch of books i’ve been using as dusty surfaces.


that’s it. just a little post of the crucial minutiae of my day.

lithe and fluid, we press forward.

So i finished writing this post, and then reread it, and realized that it was really inconsistent. I was thinking of deleting it, but then decided that it might be worth keeping, i should just put a disclaimer on it. I was going to add that at the end, but that feels like a trick, so up to the front it goes. to make up for the patchiness of it i have a music recommendation.

Go listen to Jason Collett ‘here’s to being here’. The BSSer channels the Band, the good songs of Wings, and the Traveling Willburries. It’s a tight album that makes you wish that you had a 1986 ford crown victoria, your friends, perpetual 3 o’clock spring sunlight, an old road map with no destination in mind. It makes you think of the days that love feels right, that moment while it’s still new.


I’ve been listening to Tegan and Sara ‘the con’, which in it’s own right is an album worth checking out, but it plays through and the next album on my itunes is That Dog ‘Retreat from the sun’. Anna Waronker’s mid 90s indy pop band. I loved this album right after high school. it makes me think of the time i spent languishing in community college. Waronker worked with weezer on ‘i just threw out the love of my dreams’. Anyway, fun songs, great harmonies, plus violin. She has a knack of singing ‘you’ and ‘me’ in a way that makes you wish it was about you. Another thing from that time period is ‘Mission Hill’ the cartoon series. definitely worth a look.


And something a little different musically. Amnesty’s ‘Free your mind’. the bands only full length recording from 1973. It is a funky exploration into the groove. It never feels rushed, it just builds and builds. It is, without a doubt, a complete album worth listening to in its entirety, although you may have heard the title track on the ‘cold heat’ compilation from a couple years back. If you like ozomatli (they have great live shows) this will be right up your alley, this is how it was done. near perfect.



so here’s the original post.

————————————————————————-

Life is life. it is an astounding thing that makes the world interesting. My life as of late has been interesting at points, boringly tedious at others. It makes for a dynamic experience.

Most of my days have been spent at school. In fact i am hard pressed to think of the last time that i wasn’t at school, even briefly. It’s hard to avoid it when it is the only thing that i have in my life up here, away from my life down there(somewhere else). All the people i know, all the things that i do, stem from the academic system i am integrated with. So i am, and have been, at school every single day, since god knows when, probably the last 3 or 4 weeks. That is until i leave. So the year so far has been either me not being anywhere for more than 3 days in a row, to me being only one place for far too long. That, i suppose, is some balance. Sort of like staying up for 3 days in a row, then sleeping for 18 hours. however, what i want instead is maybe the weekends off, the time to go be me where i need that to happen. Like a normal 8 hour sleeping pattern (i will never have a normal sleeping pattern, at least not as far as i can tell, but i did want to finish the analogy to life and sleeping that i started).


But for as tired (read: exasperated) as i am with being in this situation, I’m not sure that i’d do it differently. I get nervous excitement from having this ridiculous life. Waking up, teaching, art, trying to figure out love, everything. I feel like i never want to close my eyes, because even in the still quiet moments, I might miss something.


i want to talk about a lot of different things, but i keep talking about love, about falling in like with someone, about how that permeates the everything of everything i know. But right now, it feels like it has frozen. Not gone cold, just not moved from any point noteworthy to write about. And maybe that is something to write about. I have not seen or interacted in a meaningful way with either my other or with ini. Scratch that, there just haven’t been that many in such a seemingly long amount of time. My days are filled with other people and other things, activities that feel repetitive. I truly believe that i painted a door, the same door, 5 days in a row. I have been to home depot more than 3 times a week for the last 4 weeks. I am dulled. All the days have bled together and it takes a surprisingly large amount of thought to figure out what day of the week it is. Blah! I just bored myself.


So that is sort of the point, I want to start to alter the direction of some of the posts, so as not to get stiff and repetitive. But i am almost certain that they will all end up back to the original thrust in some round about way.


And with that, something new.


I believe in retail therapy. It makes me happy to buy something and enjoy it and figure out how to make it a part of my daily life. So i recently bought an ipod touch. It’s fun. i can go online if i can get a signal. It has enough space for me to listen to what i need to listen to. it’s fancy in a way that the normal ipod isn’t, i think due in part to the ubiquitous existence of the normal ipod. and it let’s me check my email. I was going to wait it out until they added some sort of camera option, but i found a great deal on it, and i had sold some art, and i figured that the camera would be crappy and i’d have to carry a higher quality camera anyway, that i bought it. It’s pretty awesome. But it renders my other one useless. so now i have too many things that are overlapping in their functional usefulness to me. I have some redundancies. It seems like i do this a lot. I have more cameras than i know what to do with. And to top it off i take lots and lots of bad pictures. I am going to buy a new computer, even though my current one works really well (i am still thinking this over and have yet to commit). I used to have 3 of the same backpack, albeit different years. And i thought to myself that having 3 backpacks was ridiculous, so i gave my 2 older ones to people that needed them. But there is a pattern there.


I leave this place i’m at in 5 days, and they are going by like some torturous trickle. I have never been on a vacation before that did not require me to do anything. I tend to take vacations that make me work harder. I like that, it makes me feel good, it makes me feel like i am accomplishing something. I am going on a trip where all my time will be leisure time, and i’m not sure how well i will do with that. i have this bold plan to bring books and read as much as possible, but the thought of that makes my skin crawl. To me that seems like closing my eyes. I want them open, i want to not miss anything.

knowing exactly everything is overrated.

I have no answers, only more questions. I like the open-endedness of how life functions. I like that there are so many permutations that could occur from one instance. It feels like it renders any real sort of plans as futile or ridiculous. It gives the chance that anything might happen.


I’ve forever been good at math. the logic of it all. there is no trickery involved, it is all apparent. Math is a translucent activity, while it may not be completely clear at the outset, it has the potential to be seen through. It is the singular constant truth in my life, it is immutable. Either something exists or it doesn’t. that makes sense. science, in comparison, is closely related and builds on principles of mathematic functions, yet requires hypothetical theory. Science is based on if x happens most of the time because of y, then it is more than likely that it will continue to occur in a similar manner for as long as we can surmise. Math leaves no error, no chance. And while we use math to describe the chance or percentage of x occurring because of y, science is not absolute. But for the rigors of daily life, science is more often than not true, it is absolute enough to get us through the day. We assume that the gas in our tank will combust in a way that is expected, that the air we breath will be the right mix of oxygen and nitrogen and other gases. And it works. and i can live with that. that’s good enough for me.


Life, the time we spend ruminating our lives, the time we spend living our lives, the things we occupy our lives with, is so far from any sort of rational, solidified, truth. We try to adhere to some sort of constant, some sort of consistency, to make our lives feel like we have ownership over them. But this is all just a clever ruse. Life changes, life goes in directions that are unforeseeable. There is no rhyme or reason, only a chaotic series of events that we are left to piece together into some patchwork quilt of a life. And that makes it worth living.


Math and science are boring compared to life. There is hardly a margin to expand and create and change. It (math and its ilk) is frozen and true. It either is or isn’t. But life, life is the thing of beauty, the thing that makes the world go round. Life is the thing that makes living worth living. This sort of logic is circular and collapses under intense scrutiny, but it exists as an irrational expression, and cannot be examined rationally. The potential for never knowing enough, never having it all figured out excites me. It makes the world worth waking up to. I always get destiny and fate mixed up. They seem the same. throw in kismet and it becomes even more blurred. But that lack of clarity, whether it was something we were all led to or if we arrived there at our own volition, is more amazing than anything i could know. i have no clue of how to describe it. It seems magical.


Love is an amazing thing. While math dictates that something is either present or absent, we allow for degrees of love to occur, we allow for time to dictate loves existence. We allow that we can fall in love if given enough time, or that we will never fall in love no matter how long it might take. There is no proof. It seems crazy to me. So crazy in fact that i am not sure where to go from this point. I am talking about this post, but it sounds like that might elude to something more, so i’ll let it mean that as well.


I don’t want to know everything, I want to struggle to know everything. I want to want to figure it all out, knowing full well that i’ll never get there.


close your eyes, and let me place my lips across your lips. and that right there, we’ll know that that happened, that that was absolute like math.

just tell me what you want and i’ll give you it all.

for whatever reason i haven’t talked about art in any way whatsoever on any of these posts. I am an artist and a i am a teacher, but these posts have been mainly about a girl and a guy. I feel that if i were to talk about my art in some way, it would reveal myself at a rate that i don’t want to have occur. I still cower a bit behind the ability to be anonymous. It still allows me to be frank and open, something that i would be remiss to do if i were completely exposed, for personal and professional reasons. But i love art. I love making art. there are few things in this world that concern me more than art. But in the grander scope of things, art is such a trifle fanciful thing to be engaged in. It is essentially entertainment, and nothing more. While it has the ability to elicit deeper, more thoughtful tangents to occur, art at its root is for our enjoyment. And that does not singularly mean that art should make us happy. We don’t only see movies that make us laugh, we see things that make us cry, but there is something that is enjoyable in what it is that we are witnessing. Art is that, and that is art. I see no separation.

But art, in all its forms, is a vehicle for the viewer to place themselves and their personal histories, their education, their entire catalogue of experiences into it. It serves as an entry point that allows the audience to advance to a destination that they get to themselves. The artist, author/creator, has the responsibility to be intelligent enough to use the devices of visual language in a way that does not pander, yet does not go above the heads of the audience. There has to be an honesty in the gestures that are displayed. I’m not at all touchy-feely or hippy-ish when it comes to art, but it does have to come from inside of the person. Don’t construe that as making art about your feelings, what that means is that the artist has to honestly enjoy what it is they make. it’s that simple. make stuff you like. maybe other people will like it, maybe they won’t. oh well. don’t make work that tries to be something that it isn’t.


it sounds so simple. so easy to agree with, but so many people have such a hard time reinvesting themselves into art after they become inundated with the idea that it has to mean something on a greater level of profundity. it can. but it doesn’t have to.


i feel like i’m airing my grievances. i feel that with teaching, i find more people that don’t have a natural way about them. for whatever reason (probably some romantic notion of how artists should be and think) students tend to overreach when they make work, or they are just lazy (but that’s an entirely different thing), they try to go for these broad topics that other artists have made a career exploring. I think that might be good to be that ambitious, but you also have to be realistic. What most people lack could be described as an easy-genius. Just a natural way of handling themselves and being confident in what they produce.


Ini has this quality. such an ease and grace at the things she does. such a level of confidence in her ability to do something worth doing, even though she doesn’t feel confident at times. It’s an attractive quality. people gravitate to others who are successful, we align ourselves with those we respect. So it’s natural to have jumped into some strange attempt at courtship with her. (that word courtship sounds so bizarre and anachronistic) I was initially attracted to that innate talent she harbored. I saw in her, things i saw in myself. is that narcissistic? a bit, yes. But she poses some insane level of potential, and i wanted to watch it happen. like some sort of supernova or big bang about to happen. And in my experience, i had yet to see someone exist at that level that early on. And furthermore, in art, you can’t have enough people as friends. Even though it is an insular world to exist in (the art world), you need people to look out for you and that you would look out for them. friends keep you honest and keep you working and help you when you need it. It feels impossible to make art in a bubble. it doesn’t feel worth it.


My life, for the last 7 years, has been dedicated to art. it is everything. but yet it isn’t. At the end of it all, i may love art, but by no means is art better than love. this life i have eked out, this thing i have made, this amazing thing, is worth more than painting or sculpture. I told someone before that i would give up art for love. I know that my life is impossible to divorce from art, that art has made me the person i am. but so had love. i make art, i am an artist because of love. luckily the person i said that to would never ask me to choose because they knew that art had made me this way. I know that that might not make sense. i know it rambles, but both of them are irrational, and have no solidity for me to place a proper definition onto, and that’s why it is forever written about ad nauseum. I want you to know that it’s all real. that i can make as much sense of it as i can make no sense of it…