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Mosquito messages in our veins.

Page Update: First and last buttons, by popular request.  Not going back through the archives to add them to every page because I'm just too damn lazy.  The word bubble on the top banner will take you to the latest page anyway.

Forum Update: The forum looks awesome now!  Big thanks to my friend Alex!  Post in the new forum: www.PolkOut.com/forum.  It's hosted on my server, and if that starts getting laggy in the future I can just pay for more bandwidth.  Any artistic contribution to the forum would be terrific.  You can still check out the old forum, and older pages will still link to it for now, so... uh... do whatever with that intel.

Quick shit for newcomers: Forum (deviant bullshit), Feedback (fan art, comments, critiques), About (check it out and contribute).  Do you have a website of your own you want me to give a shout out to?  Want to do a crazy guest strip?  You can reach me through that email or on the forums. 

I turned twenty-one yesterday.  I hardly remember anything about that night… I know I vomited for the first time from alcohol ever.  Surprisingly, it felt pretty great.  I felt like a pitcher overflowing, and every time I’d lean down, a little bit would spill out.  It was beautiful.  I haven’t vomited in years… and I always remembered it as being unpleasant, always saw other drunk people and thought they must be having a horrible time.  It’s like that one really tall water slide at Splish Splash (a water park out here, for the uninitiated) that freaked the fuck out of me as a kid.  I wouldn’t go on it because it looked so damn scary, until one time I said fuck it and took the plunge.  It wasn’t so bad.  Didn’t feel as great as puking last night, but was certainly up there.

Apologies to all the people I harassed via text message last night.  Everyone was asleep and I was lonely and looking for conversation.  And I sometimes get depressed or meditative or abstrusely poetic (or just plain abstruse) when trashed, and I was most certainly trashed.  I’ve never been picked up off my ass and shoved into a cab before… Going home felt like I was being carried through the air by the tiny arms of a thousand cherubs, only it was three other drunk dudes and a train.  Glorious. 

The rest of this rant’s going to be a bit different… yeah, I know, they’re rarely ever all that consistent, but this time probably even less so.  It’s just about some thoughts that have been fluttering around my head, about the site, the comic, about what I’m doing.  So yeah, this is one of those alienating, pretentious rambles that you’re better off not reading.

Restless and awake for far too long, I rolled out of bed at seven in the morning and started formulating something that could maybe eventually resemble a personal statement for the applications I’ll be sending out this fall.  I say maybe because, like a lot of the stuff I tend to write, it was kind of… out there, to say the least.

I’ve been reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—we were all given free copies before we left for Prague, but I never really got into it because it seemed like work.  Well, I finished Ham on Rye and was jonesin’ for something to read on the train, and decided to pick it up.  I’m glad I did because it’s really a fascinating book; the prose is kind of directionless, in that we’re presented with a set of loosely related short stories whose endings are practically inconsequential, but it’s entrancingly meditative.  It’s like reading Thomas Wolfe; you don’t read his writing for the story, but for the pathos behind it, for the subtle melody of the syntax that in itself is more ambitious than some edge-of-your-seat Dan Brown adventure.  At its core, the book is about love, its weight, its profundity.  But there’s strong political overtone, which I would call neither liberal or conservative, but distinctly human.

My potential proto-statement was about what it means to be an artist, to be a writer.  I put a little sliver of paper in the book by the following paragraph:

“The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another.  In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.” 

Every human being feels they have a story to tell, every literate individual is, at least potentially, a writer.  Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal; we create this static of the unremarkable, where every person deludes themselves into thinking that their thoughts and feelings are entirely unique.  So what makes any of us any different?  What elevates Bukowski and Kundera out from the mediocrity of the average Twitterer?  Talent is one thing, but I think it’s their awareness, that contemplative detachment that comes from real damage, that makes them artists and not mere masturbators.  I’ve said this a number of times to friends of mine, so as may as well say it here: if you’ve never had an existential crisis, you’re not interesting; if you’ve never contemplated suicide, then you’re probably in that small slice of a demographic that really ought to.  Pain, anguish, the mercilessness of their lives, eats away at their hearts like embers easing into the center of a piece of paper.

If we could envision our lives as a plane, that forward potential ahead of us, our pasts behind, and our present reality encapsulating us from either side, I would look back and see a dim meandering trail cutting through a vast darkness.  Twenty one years worth of mistakes, missteps, and naiveté.  Ahead of me is only darkness; that vast, unfathomable expanse of potential.  I have no idea what will be, who I will be, what my life will look like.  Aside from that dim glow of that crooked path that is past, the only light that I can see is in my hands.   Those embers eating away at the only part of me that can’t bear the flames.  That caustic pragmaticism of our adult lives turns the child’s heart to ash.

From dust to dust, the artist reshapes their identity, escapes the darkness by descending into an autism of expression.  That wall of mirrors, a sensory depravation chamber, where our new worlds are governed by our own laws.  We can be sympathetic, we can be heroes, we can be great.  Sure these comics are all transcribed conversations, but it’s only a patchwork truth.  I reduce myself to some messy haired eccentric with a limited wardrobe; everything in between these little episodes is lost, leaving us with this deceit, this distilled reality, this new fiction.

“Who am I?”  The most dangerous question ever asked.  It’s fueled every war, it’s guided every crime, it’s shaped the very course of our lives. 

Ever watched Taxi Driver?  That’s one of my favorite movies.  It’s unapologetic juvenilia—and why is that?  What does it mean to be juvenile?  When naiveté is turned to ash and we are left to reshape those incinerated pieces at our own discretion, that transition, that is the juvenile.  I highly recommend reading some interviews with Paul Schrader from around the time of the film's release; his creative process, the things that he was going through at that point in his life, really flesh out the nature of that film as not just a marketable work of art, but as a cathartic device for its artist.

Sometimes, as we play with those ashes, some stray embers leave pinhole burns in the fabric of our culture, of our public consciousness.  I don’t think Kundera or Bukowski ever really set out to be famous, but in their exploration of themselves, they made those pinhole burns and thus became relevant.

I’ve been called a lot of things by a lot of people.  Disgusting, obnoxious, out of line, immature, paranoid.  But never naïve.  I wonder why that is… do I just hide it that well?

Have I ever talked about how Norman Rockwell’s my favorite artist?  I feel like I might’ve ranted about that already…  I understand he was a pop artist, paid to make his paintings for a very particular audience with very particular expectations, but that context aside, I always find myself enamored by the reality he presents in his paintings.

“You know it’s all bullshit, right?” Asked a particularly ornery feminist-hipster friend of mine (who was admittedly very helpful in bringing me water as I sat on the sidewalk puking).

“Yeah, of course it’s bullshit, it’s all bullshit, everything’s bullshit!”  You peer into Rockwell’s canvas and you see a world where wives don’t get beaten, children don’t get raped, parents stick together and pop’s gonna be at everyone one of little Timmy’s baseball game.  It’s utter bullshit, yet it’s almost messianic.  Here’s what human decency looks like, if that were even possible.  It’s not like Banksy, who tells us democracy is a lie, capitalism is destroying us, nothing that we have is to be trusted, to be valued, can be believed in.  He asks us to abandon while Rockwell asks us to dream.

It’s absolutely naïve and that’s why I love it.  It’s everything I could ever want out of life and will never have.  I’d wear a cardigan, smoke a pipe, and settle for that serene stability that only exists on these canvases.  The people in these paintings ostensibly lack free will, inspiration, any manner of real… pain or yearning.  They’re like rocks in a Zen garden.  And that’s just too goddamn irresistible.

I had a dream the other night where I was walking through a city, maybe New York.  Maybe it was the financial district; giant blue and white glass skyscrapers, growing and suffocating the streets like some metallic fungus.  I’d face a building, spread my arms up towards it, fingers spread, and it would collapse.  Just crumble to the ground in a pile of twisted steel, broken glass, and concrete.  I’d walk into the center of the rubble, curl up into a fetal position, and sleep.  When I awoke I’d walk up to another building and do it again.  Again and again.

If that’s not a reflection of some profound disenchantment, I don’t know what is.

Well, if you made it this far and any of this made any sense, why don’t you send me an email?  We could be pen pals and be pretentious together.

--End Transmission--

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