THOSE WHO SUFFER LOVE
I think I've had updates like this before. It goes like this- In a lot of big backwards ways. It goes like this, because summertime is always pergatory, and this time I'm caught between bigger things, except that I am fourteen again, and this time the country's just the same and the people are even more foreign. It makes me wonder what would have happened if I'd just done what I wanted to, out of love and not of desperation.
Because they aren't people, you see. They aren't people because people don't act the way they do- They're just characters. They're what's left over of people. They're lines in books, examples in pamphlets. They're other people's idea of people. They're from some other country, some other planet, and we seem to be stuck in the same building with the same area code, and I can't quite figure it out.
Because they're all wearing eighty dollar jeans with keys to their mercedes in their pockets and popping xanax when the teacher isn't watching, which the teacher never does, and they're talking about Fred Segal and about the Village and who's relapsed and they keep dropping all these names like Mary Kate Olson and the son of Harrison Ford and how they're going to his apartment and talk about how they're in some reality program about the Sunset Strip and they're all on cocaine and keep talking about smoking themselves into comas and Tattoo Asylum in Venice Beach and Girl Culture and Coffee and Cigarettes and records by The Velvet Underground and Animal Collective and who's going to the Daft Punk concert this weekend? And they're all wearing the same clothes and they go to the same parties, and I still keep sitting their pretending that I'm not making them just slightly uncomfortable.
Because the Bible jokes just aren't quite as funny as they used to be, and I can't stand the thought of convincing myself that I think that they look the same as they did before they pulled out those cigarettes.
I always feel like such a child, or maybe just the opposite, when I'm sitting next to them, sharing the same easels and biting my tongue to stop any facial expression translate through, to say that I wasn't really sure that they were human or how they made me so ashamed to be from where I am or how I think they're all cowardly because people who do drugs and go to parties and wear their families around their necks always seem like such cowards to me, when I'm letting then borrow my pencils and helping them make their contacts.
And, see- see they don't know anything except what they learned in their prep schools. And even then, it's mostly social, mostly trivial- AP tests and studio art. They're all getting in good school and make only minimally interesting art work and they say they're only 'referencing' modernists and things like that. And they talk about Boticelli and MOMA and how they keep ruining all their boots with gesso and have paint in their hair (which of course they don't). And they- They make me feel like I don't know anything, and I have to keep stopping and remembering what art even is- Because it isn't this, and I know that- I know that what this is- It isn't anything, because it can't be- Because this isn't the real world and isn't real life, and it can't be art, or nothing means anything at all, and not even in a sort of liberating way. All it is is highschool and dress up and the same drilling of facts that doesn't mean anything at all.
School never taught me anything and I'm fucked for facts or references because all I ever got was insight. I've just got what I made for myself, because no one's been helping me along. I've had one art class in my entire life, and I've never taken an AP course- I almost failed out of highschool altogether. I don't even know how to contribute to conversations, because even humor slips past them, like it does with everyone else.
And there's just no romance to the kind of pictures their painting, and it hurts to even think about it. It's not real, it's just reference- And all I know is what I know. And I still take the bus every morning for an hour and a half, full of military personnel on their way to the aerospace engineering building, and then again down by the airport, with people who are not from here, and people who wish they weren't, and I still only dress the way I dress and look the way I look and like what I like because it just is, and I never stop and think aboutr it and I still have no money or motivation or ambition, and I'm still just riding on the idea that talent, or whatever that is, and morality will mean something to somebody. I keep just banking on the idea that people are actually good and that they actually exist and are kind and that suffering is universal, so judgement's nothing, even on yourself, and that somewhere, sometime- Not tomorrow and not next week, in a decade or so, I swear- I swear, you'll build up to something meaningful.
This headache's wearing on, and I've got my eyes shut because I can't even think of the idea that people will be like this where I am or where I'm going, because I swear they're not- I swear they're real. And it doesn't make any sense, but I just have to hope that all the blind leaps are getting me somewhere, and that it all means something somewhere along the road.
I just can't tell anymore.
I just can't tell what anything is for anymore.
See, it's like- It's like all you're the only example I have anymore that the entire universe is functional and that people really exist. Everybody just makes me want to run away and never look them in the face, and every time someone enages me in conversation I just want to gauge out my eyes, I can't stand any of it. You know, it's like- You find evidence of people who don't make you exhausted every time they open their mouths and are just, you know, just real people- Like you, especially- But they're just never quite... Tangible. I'm still waiting to just get my hands on someone real. It doesn't make sense to me...
I'm just so tired of wasting time...
I always count on Los Angeles being there for me, and now it's like I've got no home anymore. It's like I've got nowhere to go.