I am bathing in a quagmire of atrocity. Day by day, I just try to stay calm and not do anything stupid. To the greatest extent possible, I try to evade humanity. When I spend two consecutive days in my room, blogging, listening to music, writing poetry, staring out the window and watching college basketball, my roommate starts going all ballistic. He starts crying and screaming at the top of his lungs about things like murder and murderers. He’s like a big, dumb, loud version of Dennis the Menace and he is in no way capable of turning off the bathroom light when he’s done using it, repelling me from any delusion of his ability to empty the lint trap in the dryer after use and ergo avoid fire hazard.
In the last four weeks I’ve seen a person open a locked door of a bathroom in which someone was crapping and not express any remorse and I’ve also had my landlord walk out onto the roof and look in at my while I was showering. My entire body was visible to him and there is no shower curtain in the shower area.
I never wanted it to be like this.
I’ve always been a nice person. My personality is azure, which means, with all my ducks in a row, I get the natural impetus to help other people. I’m a former aspiring teacher who has been disallowed a teaching license because of my criminal background, which, at the time, consisted exclusively of victimless crimes.
I am worried about myself but I feel a little bit better than I did two hours ago. I am continually wondering how I am going to go on existing, particularly in a mental sense. I am in a state of inquiry as to what types of things I will be able to think, of how I will think, and to what it might lead. I start thinking of art, of artists, people who create. I have a current fixation on Diego Rivera and I’ve just today discovered a great poet named Michael Torres whose work is incredibly clear and gritty. It was not my intention to fixate on Hispanics but it seems it’s happened anyway.
I begin, I find myself, focusing on the exact fabric, the exact essence, of artistic expression. Today, I am taking the day off of work for reasons related to my mental health. I am in the library, which is probably my favorite place in town. I have no plans, and, aside from reading about four poems by Michael Torres, I’m pretty much just thinking, ruminating. Next to me, a lady is relating a tale about a guy driving his car into the river accidentally and drowning. I’m in a furious rush of stress, frenzy, and, I’d imagine, hypertension. Currently, as I’m writing this, I’m trying to get back to my former state of mind, which regarded the exact essence an artist is feeling when he wants to create. It’s not I want to create art. In fact, I’d much rather get back to a point of sanity. The reason why I’m fixating on the phenomenological requisite for the creation of art is that, in my current state, this is the only entity of which I am capable of wielding respect. Humanity has become repugnant to me, like a reprehensible waste species offering nothing of any value and simply undergoing quantifiable processes that are essentially meaningless.
Through art, however, I evade this mind state and observe that art, at its essence, is a storm in a teacup. Artists can identify other artists because they know exactly what needs to be expressed and what doesn’t. It’s always a storm in a teacup that will acknowledge an intense, broad landscape of humanity and imbue therein a sort of renewing paradigm. Rivera’s art is a little hard to understand and describe but I like it for its color clarity and its misanthropic avoidance of human forms, save for his excellent self-portrait, which may be his most famous work (and which, noteworthily, predated his Cubist phase in conspicuous fashion). The creation of rock and roll, too, is hard to describe, but possesses this transformative quality I mention earlier, necessarily, upon its materialization. The frequency, upon encountering of atrocity, is lowered, and this aspect of artistic creation becomes the sole component of one’s reality. This is why art must be the last thing to leave human society upon the race’s eventual demise.