I’m an artist, so what am I gonna do about it?

I just finished listening to A Perfect Union of Contrary Things, the biography of Maynard James Keenan, and like the vast majority of audio books that I listen to, I realize that hour per hour it adds an order of magnitude more value to my life than does TV (currently watching the 2024 season of Kitchen Nightmares) and video games (still playing through the new Doom). I’m thinking more and more about just quitting TV and video games almost entirely, or like by 95%, down to just special occasions. After 25+ years of daily pot smoking, I have found that that wasn’t hard to quit–or you know, “quit”–I’ve still gotten high I think twice since I quit, but unlike tobacco, getting high once doesn’t automatically lead to a desire to do more… at least not for me, in my mindset.
It’s so weird to think just how wildly different my mental health has been over the years, like if you rated it on a scale, I would have to say my outlook on life is–do I dare use the phrase “order or magnitude” again so soon?–it’s so much better than I was 20 years ago, and 20 years ago I was an order of magnitude better off than I was five years before that and —
where am i going with this?
But this book about Maynard has got me thinking about art and my place in the artistic world, I mean, obviously I’m no painter or sculptor — I am a writer and programmer, and of course, like Maynard, a storyteller. I kept comparing my life to his–so many similarities, his unique way of looking at life, his intense frustration with the world, with the hypocrisy and lies that pervade society, that came out in his music and drawings. The way he looked at religion, horrified by the awful things that religious folks do in the name of their God when they don’t seem to have any real spiritual connection or understanding of the world around them.
I connected with Tool in the early nineties, so filled with angst and rage but with this deeper sense of a drive for something better and the belief that things can and will change, and over the years, for me, that anger has faded to be replaced with a sense of the world that is much deeper and spiritual, but still ultimately “atheist”, though “atheist” probably is not the right word. He described at one point deciding to believe in magic even though he knew it was bullshit because it put him in an emotional state where that allowed creativity to soar. And it feels like Tool’s music has advanced along a very similar emotional and spiritual path as my own, still every bit as intense and loud as it ever was, but without all the anger and dare I say it, hate. Without all that anger, it opens up to so many new, bigger and amazing possibilities. I feel like, with the possible exception of 10,000 days, every album has improved over every previous one.
But it’s like, when you’re young, for some reason, we need to get all that anger out first, before we can really open up and understand life–if you do it right. But some people never truly explore their anger in healthy ways–they never express it through art, so they bury it down and stew in it for the rest of their lives, or they live it out in actual real world violence.

I watched some YouTube video the other day about an experiment where some people who were struggling with deep trauma were told to write about the experience that brought them that trauma, like really focus on it in their writing for an hour a night, five nights in a row, and they found that these people benefitted greatly from this, far more than normal therapy sessions or prescription medication. This has definitely been the case for me. It’s like I’m a whole other person since I’ve started actually writing about my actual traumatizing experiences–I mean I used to write about them but through metaphors, fiction stories and police reform articles, when I should have been writing about the actual things that actually happened to me, how my cousin the cop assaulted me and promised to murder me if I ever talked about it, or about the officer who beat a man to death (I think he died anyway) right in front of me, or several other experiences.
Particularly the police beating–it was like, I spent years, every day at work, thinking about it, telling myself, “tonight I’m gonna sit down and write it all out” but then I never did. I went twenty freaking years, thinking almost on a daily basis, tonight is gonna be the night I write it all out, but then when it came down to it, I would chicken out and I’d write some fiction story, or some police brutality article that only vaguely related to what I’d seen, or I’d just turn on the TV, smoke some weed, and block it out.

But everything is different now. I never imagined I could be this comfortable with myself and the world around me. when I was younger, I didn’t even realize it was possible to be this emotionally healthy. I think most people in our society don’t realize the true potential we have and hiding from our feelings through drugs, consumerism, TV, sex, etc is so normalized and ingrained in our society that we just don’t realize how good we could have it if we just take that leap–well and work on it–I mean, yes you’ve got to leap off that metaphorical cliff, but it also takes an insane amount of work, but once you start doing it, you realize that it doesn’t feel like work.

So I think my next step is–well, two next steps. Next I need to message the people that I have in mind to hire as my social media “artists”, and empower them to promote me in the ways that they want to, and hand some power over to them and let them guide me in a way, to the next stage where my writing actually starts reaching people.
The other thing I’m gonna do is load up This Desert Life, my first novel, into a text-to-speech app and re-experience that. It’s been 20 years since I had anything to do with that story. In a way I disowned it because I was so embarrassed by it, but it did have a whole lot of value. I put it out for free on my first website called Get to Know a Marijuana Dealer, back in the early 2000’s, and I had a number of people messaging me telling me that it had changed their lives, that they’d read it all in one sitting etc, that it was the greatest thing they’d ever read, but at the same time, it had some real problems that over time embarrassed me more and more until I couldn’t handle it and I finally removed the book and tried to forget about it.

Now I want to go back and maybe even publish it on Amazon, but with a big author intro, acknowledging and analyzing the awful and cringe parts. I was thinking maybe I should write an entry here about it before I listen to it, then another after and could put both of them as the intro–but also, maybe split the author intro into many parts that come inside the book–cuz it always kind of sucks when an author rambles on and on about a book and what it means to them before getting into the actual story.

But the story of Maynard has gotten me really thinking about this. I’m an artist, but not with music and pictures like Maynard–I’m all about the words on a page, which for me, as much as I appreciate bands like Tool, open up something far deeper and valuable than anything music or pictures could ever provide. Like Maynard says, if you have a talent, if you have working legs, arms and a functioning brain, then you have a moral and spiritual obligation to your community and to the universe to create something with it.

Related posts

Leave a Comment