something.
i thought about converting this into an actual comic, but felt it wasn't really necessary. the nature of finding a scrap of paper and writing down an intense emotion in the midst of feeling it holds more weight to me than trying to translate that into symbols people find more "consumable" or resonate. whether anyone ever sees this or not, such things matter to me. and anyway, this (this feeling) is something that matters to me and no one else.
the sentence above where i describe feeling a snap, interestingly, was literal. i felt an actual snapping sensation inside my brain, and the epiphany hit me instantly.
i've always been kind of Tortured Artistically, but in a way i find really difficult to describe. it's made more difficult by the fact that art is often, for me, is an exploration of the self. no input from other people is required. if you want to better understand what i mean, you can watch this video, and in the "what is art?" section where they talk about the woman who took beautiful photographs she shared with no one, my conclusion is the opposite of theirs. art is what it is because you, the artist, had feelings about it when you made it. no other human being ever need enter the equation to bring art into existence, and no, it doesn't actually matter if no one else ever gets to experience that beauty. it's for you. this is for me.
i write everything i put on this website for a presumed audience, because i want it to be intelligible to anyone who might stumble across it. but everything i put here, i also put here with the secondary assumption that no one will see it. ever. no one will ever read it, and no one will ever care. this is what i want. unfortunately, neocities doesn't let me completely black out my website from discoverability, so it's not something i can control.
i've talked at length with my friend about why i put anything online if i don't actually want anyone to see it. the answer is complicated and hard to articulate. it's basically like a reverse parasocial relationship. in my mind, if you're the type of person to continue digging through my stuff after i've made every attempt to keep it as out of the way as possible, then you might be the kind of person to see it with clear eyes. that's a really loaded assumption, though, so let me be plain: i'm the kind of person to persist and snoot through other people's loose leaflets of themselves that they deem fit to sequester away somewhere on the internet. i want the people who see my things to be able to understand me.
the image i've posted and the words it contains are difficult to explain. why am i frustrated by banal nothings? why do i feel i lack a love for humanity? i don't, though, do i? why would i rummage through the scraps of other people's lives if i didn't care about people? i care deeply about people. but when i wrote that, i was going through a spell of extreme internal discordance, and to me the entire world was feeling artificial and ingenuine. some context missing from this whole ordeal, was that i had been stewing on the idea of producing personal art about one's own trauma and posting it to social media - an act that felt like, to me, turning the sharpest points of your own pain into chum, or trough slop. at some point, i realized that by thinking this way, i was dehumanizing the people who receive that art into themselves simply by being present on social media. the act of sharing art like that to a lot of people isn't what makes it perverse. i'd gotten it mixed it up in the slew of turbulant emotions i'd been feeling in my process of trying to detangle and understand them. what makes it perverse is that it's Clickable Content For Algorithms, and for baby-brained billionaires to monetize for their platforms where they spread fascism daily.
but i won't lie, there was quite a lot of disgust for the intentionality of turning one's own grief or pain into commodity for consumption on the lowest, basest altar available. there is no where more disgusting to me than a place like twitter, or instagram, or facebook. i know that people need money to live, and "going viral" helps with that. this doesn't change the feeling of rising vomit in my throat.
the problem isn't people, and i remember that now. something shifted, and i understood again. the problem is, as always, capitalism. your art still holds meaning no matter where you put it. it means something to you, who made it, and it means something to the people who see it and think about it.
that's all i want to do here. i want to carve out that meaning for myself and put it somewhere where, if you look hard enough, you might find it and maybe it will mean something to you. that's what these words are. this is me extending a branch of myself to offer understanding, which is something i have not done in approximately a decade.
most of the art i've made with any meaning, as of late, has been writing on this website. it's not usual for me, as someone who basically popped out of the pussy drawing comics, but it's what i find gets the message across most effectively. recently, i've found myself pissed off at the limitation of visual art. sometimes, an especially incisive sentence gets through to me better than any visual art has ever gotten close to doing.
so that's what these sections are. blogs, i guess. this is how i am manifesting my art in these moments.