Stories, Thoughts and Snippets
Independence 1 Independence 2 Independence 3 Independence 4
Guitar had come easily. Success with a guitar was not yet on the horizon. My parents one success in their obligation to me, which as I saw it was to give me everything they possibly could and break their backs doing it, was to give me a guitar when I turned 10 and pay for lessons, which I did not need or want after the first year. Once the basics found their home in me there wasn't a piece of music that I couldn't find on the fret board. I just needed to play it back a few times and I could pull it out of there.
Finding music in my head was much harder. I blamed my parents for that, what color could I possibly absorb in a middle class suburb that looked like every other middle class suburb in the whole damn country. What was I going to do? Sing about being average? Play the chords of my malaise and watch as the world fawned before me. A song about being bored will be boring, I'd learned it first hand. I needed something. I needed a girl to tear my heart out, or an oppressive institution I could throw myself at. My parents weren't even decent enough to treat me like shit, they just treated me like their son, and assumed my frustration was a phase I would grow through.
I needed a city or the road, I needed crime, culture, heroism, or heroin. A bunch of pampered kids smoking pot in a garage does not make a drug culture. I never even had a decent bully. I do not care about all that poor little reasonably well off kid shit either. Anyone can survive in this life, right up until they died, and if all they accomplished in that time was to make their personal space a little more comfortable than it might have been otherwise, then they have failed. Such is my opinion. Art is the only thing that separates us from the animals, and when I say 'art' I do not mean a pretty picture on the wall, or a song that sounds like every other song. I mean an original work, that says something the artist wants to say, even if other people don't want to hear it. Especially if other people don't want to hear it, the only real art is art that's made without regard to how it might be received by the public.
This does not mean that I consider every asshole that splashes paint on a canvas and says it is a statement of his personal rage and disaffection an artist. If you don't touch anyone with your work, you haven't made art. There has to be an audience, there have to be people who see what you've done, and feel something, who will look at the world in a different way. Perhaps you can consider yourself an artist if you have a small following, if you are able to survive on your work. But everyone will know the name of a great artist, their work will be instantly recognizable, and they will survive the passage of time. If a person does not achieve that station in life, they have failed, or if not failed entirely done nothing but support those who have, and prepared the way for those who will. I would not be satisfied with such a life.
When I was fifteen it became clear to me that I would never become a worthwhile person if I followed the natural course of my life. I was confident I could do better than my parents had, even under their terms, but it would still not be living, it would be surviving, comfortably. New York was only a hop and skip down the railway, and it was easy enough to survive on the street during the summer. I figured I would have about five months before it was too uncomfortable to continue. Though I had to admit that it wouldn't be pleasant at any point if I was unable to at least find a safe place to sleep and keep my things.