I believe there are two kinds of artists—the good kind and the unimportant. I was among the latter. Of course, before I dive into the why of it all, I believe I’ll have to tell you what being a good artist meant.
The good were the ones who pointed out things beyond the human pursuit. They looked to the stars. They showed you new things, creating art out of thin air. They were about what could be, and that was their strength. It set them apart from the common folk.
The unimportant ones, people like me, were artists born in morbidly human bodies caught in mundane human effort. We didn’t transcend any limits nor were we interested in the heavens. We only cared about the truth. The truth was often ugly and rarely satisfactory, but we told it. We were all about what is, and we could blend in.
I only wrote about what I knew. There was no way I could imagine things. My imagination had long been dead. I couldn’t create a story out of thin air. A lie was the best I could do on most days. I only saw what I saw and I could only tell you how I saw it. It was nothing but the shit people went through every day. I couldn’t not talk about it.
People like me often enjoyed their obscurity. They didn’t need any eyes on them. It took away from our watching of the world around us. We didn’t want to escape or run away. We wanted to crawl through the mud every day, spend time with people; hate them, love them, and fight or argue with them, sometimes.
My art was all about blending into the world and throw out an obvious observation in the simplest of words, sometimes. On most days, I was running to save my own life, really. I barely gave a damn about anything else. I didn’t, couldn’t care.
The only thing I cared about was living a real life I could tell someone about, and not have them stare at me as if I’m some God descending from the heavens. If anything, I wanted them to think, “if this fuck can put a few words together, maybe, I’ll try tonight too!”
That was why we existed, actually. Not to elevate, but only to describe. We made the idea of art reach the regular Joes you’d find at a bar or a café or the street; some of whom then learned they were good artists.