It's Everything That Is Connected And Beautiful

I find most art books to be utterly uninteresting and unengaging. I think it's the skill with which the art is photographed and reproduced on the page that puts me off. It's glossy, slick and perfect and it almost always bears no resemblance to what the artist created. There really is no substitute for being in the same physical space as a work of art, for sharing the same air and light as this thing. It becomes more real for me and I feel a real sense of communion that I never find from a reproduced image on a page.

Art in a book is separated from reality and the limits of the physical world. It becomes eternal and perfect, and I hate it. I hate it for the same reason that I am utterly bored by Superman. Because it is so removed, so unassailable and so fundamentally alien. It bores me.

But when I can see a piece of art, see the light reflected off of it with my own eyes, that is something very different. I never feel jaded when I stand face to face with a work of art, even the really shitty ones. Ultimately, I find beauty in the flaws. When I can see the grain of a canvas, or the irregular swirl in a brushstroke, or an errant drop of paint that landed on the picture in defiance of the artist's wishes, I see myself, and my flaws, and I find it very reassuring. We live in a flawed, beautiful world and seeing these works or art, and all of their cracks and blemishes, reminds me of just how beautiful this imperfect world can be.

There's also an impermanence to these objects. And they are, after all, simply objects. Paint, cloth, wood, bronze, clay, etc. These things begin as unremarkable pieces of stuff, and through human industry and invention become transcendent. That's fucking beautiful. But they remain things, existing in our physical world, and all things are impermanent. Things break down, they disappear. Each moment they are on display, each moment they exist, brings them one moment closer to their inevitable end. I work in an archive and the one thing I've picked up is that everything we try to preserve will one day perish from this earth, no matter what we do. Lock it up in a sealed, UV-protected vault at the Louvre all you want, but someday we will have to live in a world without the Mona Lisa. That's fucking beautiful. That's life. It's sad, and terrible and tragic and beautiful. It's perhaps the best metaphor for the human condition that I have ever found, and I'm constantly looking.

I just wanted you all to remember that I do have a soul as you listen to the hate-filled piece of shit I recorded at Othello's this week. And to all my friends who stuck around for the whole show, I apologize for throwing such a weird and embarrassing hissy. And thanks for coming out anyway, I hope you had a good time.

Winston Smith's Five Minute Hate

And go to the Oklahoma City Art Museum, dammit.

I See The Sky Above Me Like A Full Recovery

Fifteen years ago, I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease. It was right around this time of year, actually. It started right before Valentine's Day, with some symptoms that I won't enumerate here, and ended up taking (as I recall) two months of fever, pain and fear to diagnose. I was thirteen years old at the time.

I try not define myself by negative space, but that was my childhood trauma and that was what informed my adolescence. That's what turned me into who I am today. If you think back, you'll find that moment when the ground just fell away beneath you, when you realized that Mom and Dad were not all-powerful, and that the world wouldn't stop because something shitty happened to you. I almost feel like my life was split in two at that point. There's a thirteen-year-old me, stuck forever in the fear and pain of that time, and another me that was born the day I found out what was wrong with my body and what I could do to fix it.

I can't help but remember that bifurcation each spring.

I absolutely love spring. Springtime in Oklahoma makes the rest of the year tolerable. I have yet to see anything in this world as beautiful and terrible as the sky in March, April, and May. This dark, soft grayness just hangs in the sky, blotting out the world for miles in the middle of the day and the sun, no longer the harsh and angular tormentor of the winter months, falls soft and warmly upon the deep green of cross-timber foliage. It is birth, it is strength, it is verdant and beautiful. I've never missed a springtime in Oklahoma in 28 years. I try not to dwell on the death and destruction that follows so swiftly after that plush gray curtain in the distance.

But spring has held another meaning for me for the past fifteen years. Spring and Autumn are the times when I'm most likely to fall ill now. Maybe it's allergens in the air, maybe it's the changing temperatures. Who knows? For whatever reason, these seasons come tinged with dread. Will this be the year that I lose my colon? Will this be the year that my body no longer responds to my medication? Who knows? The thing about a chronic condition is that it's, well, chronic. I will never experience a full recovery. The condition I'm in, and I'm freakin' ecstatic about my condition, is the best that I will ever get. I will never wake up and suddenly not have Crohn's Disease. There will never be a year when I see that first wall cloud off in the distance without feeling a pang of fear.

We all have trauma, and triggers that bring us back to that pain. Maybe it's the book you were reading when you found out your Grandmother had died. Maybe it's song you sang right before the car crash. Maybe it's the lotion that Buffalo Bob made you use. Who knows?

I do know that the thirteen-year-old me is utterly useless at this time of year. He's nothing but fear and self-pity. But fifteen-year-old Seth is a different story entirely. He's handling things a lot better than he used to. And he's getting better at it every year.

Is There Life On Mars?

Maybe. Maybe not as much as there used to be. C'est la guerre. I'm just glad there was something there to be killed, if that makes any sense. And I'm glad it didn't embark on any bloody reprisals. We're pretty good with the smashy-smashy, and it was really just a matter of time before we let the hammer drop on another planet, right? Fortunately, there's still life here on Earth. Even in Oklahoma City. And things are gettin' lively for me, let me tell ya.

I found a new coffee shop last night, Sauced, on the Paseo. I'm glad I did. I went in last night and wrote a few jokes, and by being around other people I didn't feel quite so alone. It's strange, but once I get back to my apartment, I'm pretty well cut off from the rest of the world. I can't watch local television or listen to the radio, so either I sit in silence or I watch DVDs or listen to music. There's a real disconnect, because I know that no one else is sharing the experience with me out in the rest of the city. No one else is popping in Disc Three of Scrubs Season Four at 8:43 p.m. on a Monday night, and that uniqueness is not at all comforting. It just makes me feel more isolated, and weird, and apart. There's a familiarity in this solitude, and I hate it. I hate it's ubiquity. I hate it's ceaselessness. Mostly I just hate how utterly necessary it is.

But this isn't some whining from a sad sack who's trolling for invitations to sockhops or mixers down at the local youth center. I'm okay, and like I said, life is gettin' lively for me. So, here come the pro forma performance plugs:
I'm going to the Loony Bin tomorrow night, hopefully to do some standup.
I found out tonight that I will be doing some spoken word this weekend at Momentum. You can come and see me Friday and Saturday night. I won't be doing comedy, per se, but rather some humorous monologues. The whole thing feels a bit like high school speech and debate and maybe that's why I'm excited about it.
Also, I may be the opening act for an art show next month.

That's it. I don't really have an end to this blog, nor do I have a great life-lesson to tie it all together. Whatever.

Done.