august 20 gbb
I've been prolific of late and so I think instead of writing another longish one tonight I'm going to take a look at where the work has been going, lately, and whether I think it's worth going deeper.
That said, you should know that it brings me an inordinate amount of joy to say "the work," because it means that I am finally taking my writing seriously. I don't know what I was doing before, but it was decidedly unserious, detached, and blasé, which sucks, because I've always, always known who I was even though I didn't know what I was. I've always, always known I wanted to write and make things that resonated with other people, and because of this, I had to become something of an expert generalist (and a sensualist, and an epicurean) if only so that I would meet as many different kinds of people as I could.
I've always, always known that there is a large creative and very strange set of galaxies deep within me and that my life's mission almost necessarily had to be to find a way for that world to become explicable enough to externalize.
In short, I've always wanted to consider my writing and other creative work, most of which I don't show anyone (and no longer feel the need to show anyone) as my "life's work," but for a long time I was too sad, too drunk, too afraid. I had decided that the writers and other creatives I liked, knew, and came up with thought of me as inferior, when it was really me thinking of myself as inferior.
Not as good as.
Not deserving of.
Not palatable to.
In retrospect, being a brown Scarborough kid who got sent to a prep school and then ended up going to McGill really fucked with my head. It made me see art and literature as something like a gated community, which sounds like a comment about race but is really a comment about post-colonialism
tradition
class
and who gets to make art vs. who doesn't
Rest assured this is something I am exploring in some of the work I don't show anyone or post about. And it's because I do things like that, because I have been working on a peculiar mixed-media personal project called "Tender Wreckage" that I'm not sure I want to show anyone besides Nick Briz, Nora Rosenthal, my brilliant best friend, my son (who isn't my son but might be me from another timeline), and my partner.
In a very real way, my entire life has been about the shaping of an ouevre, about doing things that would one day constitute something I could call my life's work. I know that sounds overserious but that's not how I mean it. I just mean that part of having a good life, a life of true experience, love, and joy, starts the day you decide you want to live deliciously even if that means you that you will occasionally have to look foolish, be thought of as crazy, or cry in public.
🌲 gonna really
🌼 go meant
🌱 touch to
🌳 grass keep it
🌷 now short
Be good to yourself.
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