God, my essays. I don't know how to ever find this balance between my need to rationalize and think, my capacity and desire to feel my psyche, and this raw carnal instinct that courses through me at times and makes me want to fucking scream.
Every time I sit down to actually write, I make it so proper. This is a story and therefore must have a plot. This is a poem and must have an opinion. This is a rant — but an artistic delusional rant that has merit in its own right but is not actually all that unique. Meanwhile the way I actually want to write is the way I already write every day. In my emails. In my notes to myself. In between things.
It's my psychosphere (cough True Detective), I am learning to call it. I have become quite taken with the idea of psychogeography. A concept that apparently will be making a debut in an offshoot of my sect's making — a game called Hopetown from the widowed corpse of Disco Elysium, the greatest game to ever exist. But to me this idea has come as a personal artifact. I don't know if it was me or them who thought of it first, but I don't think it matters at this point.
That is art, after all. Hearing ideas, dreaming ideas, feeling ideas, and creating ideas that blur the lines between theft, shared experience, or the blurry pale of endured experience.
The Pale, another concept from that game that has slowly become my own. The emptiness and preciousness of sentience. I am an amalgam of pop culture. Severance and Mumford & Sons and Tarantino and Dune and Blade Runner and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and my hatred of it. Columbus and Dan in Real Life and Secret Life of Walter Mitty. John Mayer. Timothée Chalamet. So much more.
I am a beast in the dark that spends most of its time raving at the dawn and I can't help but think I am also just a little entitled prick.
I have a wife and kids and they are so beautiful and loving and kind and good. I have a dream job and a dream best friend. I don't have my parents and siblings and I don't really care right now. And I am living and things are going to be fine, and debt is getting smaller and dreams are getting bigger and I am here complaining and whining and bitching about my own personal vendetta against being a former Mormon? But not just a former Mormon — an enlightened one. One of those that left the right way and did it for the right reasons! And yet I hold so much ego with so little pride. Because I endear those that are still in the church, yet the reckoning comes from instinct, and the empathy from emotion, and the dance between them from logic and I am just fucking twisted and broken and spinning and always god damn spiraling and living and becoming and one day I am going to die and that sucks and I don't know what happens and I don't want to care about what happens and so I am going to just ignore it and by the time I get the sense to enjoy the life right in front of me it is already gone, and a new spiral emerges. Like my clock is set just ten minutes behind everyone else. And that mindfulness is to get that clock in sync with reality.
But I have so many demons. Dead brother, suicide at nineteen and me sixteen crumbling. And fucked up dad who couldn't get his shit together and I feel terrible for him but man I was only sixteen and my mom and dad never even asked how I was doing? They never sat me down in a room and asked me what I was thinking? They were so tied up in their shit and I was holding this entire house together. And then I get older and I can't do anything right and they hate me and my wife tells me that I shouldn't care and that they are delusional but they are also my blood and she means well but sometimes the feeling like I just can't fucking go on anymore is disastrous.
And then I think about why I even want to do art. I think about the movies I would make and the games I would create and the books I would write if I had all this time. And I look at the great masterminds of everything that makes me, me. The pop culture that surrounds me and almost all of them are mad men and rarely family men at the age of nineteen when I got married. Kids at twenty-one. And I think maybe I would just like life more if I had a normal childhood and was able to explore myself more. Then I look at my children. I tickle my seven-year-old and play him in chess. I hold my little girl at five, and I swing her around and cuddle with her and watch YouTube. And I toss my one-year-old around on the bed and throw him in the air getting him to belly laugh for fifteen minutes straight. And I have the audacity to give a shit about anything that I give a shit about?
Why create art for a world that won't appreciate you when you have your kids to appreciate you (not a question). When you have a family. When you have a loving wife. When you have goodness in your life.
I sit at the edge of a cliff, where I feel I can't be an artist and the fullest potential of myself.
For years I have chased happiness, when I should have been chasing peace.
And I don't know if this is peace or just another spiral dressed up as a closing. But the dawn is coming. And I am still here, raving at it.