Hurts

What is it about pain that makes me want to share it?  Why would I want to burden anyone else with the awfulness?  I never understood that there was so much pain available.  I guess I thought it was for everybody else, and not me.  I've thought that I've been in pain before, sure.  It hurts all the time, just being alive, and the years add up.  I guess you can get used to anything though.  But who can get used to an artillery barrage?  That's what it feels like now, all the time.

Jerral is dead.  How can that be?  All I had to do was just say one word to him, just one word, and he'd still be alive.  One word.  Any word.  He'd still be alive.  I wasn't there when he needed to live.  Everybody tells me that it's not my fault, I can't blame myself.  Oh yes I can, because this isn't just any situation.  I knew Jerral.  I KNOW that if I'd just called him once he'd be alive right now.  It would have set a different sequence of events into motion, and he wouldn't be dead.  I wouldn't have let him die.

My brother... I'm so tired.  I can't.  There's too much grief, and it costs too much.  I don't have the energy to feed this pain continuously, and still breathe and eat and go to work and sleep and walk and look at things and hear and smell and live and type this.  I'll never have another conversation with my brother again.  My relationship with him is diminished.  My life is diminished.  The last coherent words we exchanged were words filled with anger.  I have nightmares about my brother every night now, that he's dying the saddest death imaginable.  I wake up boo-hooing and getting my pillow all messy, and my ears all plugged up, and that's the worst time to feel sad, is right after you wake up from a dream.  All of my dreams are linked together by an unbroken sadness now.

And Leah.  If ever there was a dead horse that just kept getting beat over and over and over again, it's this heartache bullshit.  I'm so sick of being heartsick.  Fuck this, I hate it.  It's a part of the new pain conglomeration now... Leah, Jerral and Matt.  I feel like crying all the time now, all the time I'm holding back tears.  If I let my mind indulge in any kind of memory or thought concerning these people I love and whom I've lost, then the tears start and I have to spend a hundred calories trying to suppress them, and that sucks.

How did this happen?  I thought it used to hurt.  What an idiot I am.  Now I know that it can keep hurting worse and worse and worse, and that there will always be a new level of pain to explore.  It all sucks now.  It hurts,

I think I'm gonna throw up now. Isn't that funny?

I think I figured out something about art tonight. I was walking home from work and listening to some music that I really love - a band called Pinback - and as I was listening, I saw my shadow marching before me, in step with the song. It's a dark no-moon night, so the available light was coming mostly from street lamps. The lights which were casting my shadow were about 100 yards behind me, and at the top of a hill. I was in this little valley with trees all around, and my shadow was long and surreal... like a caricature of me.

I began to feel separated from my shadow, as if I wasn't associated with it, but just watching it perform this marching step in time with the music, a rigid step-dance, independent from me. I saw it as this black description of an animated piece of negative space, forever marching away from me. Purposefully moving away from me, trying to get away from me, to disassociate itself from me.

And that's when I realized what art really is. It's an expression of everything, represented as a caricature of the artist, but separated from the artist on a thousand superficial levels. If we just look at it and then look away, then we only see the most shallow part, the just under the surface information which is meant to lead into the heart of the artist, but only gives vague directions. This is the view that most of us perceive when someone presents us with a thing that they want us to appreciate. Usually we just glance at it, or listen to a few seconds of it with half an ear, and say, "Cool," when what we actually mean is, "I really don't give a shit because it isn't about me. Now, have I got something to show you..."

So that's art in a nutshell. Just a method for trying to get people to understand that thing about ourselves that even we don't understand. The problem with it is, most of us are so self absorbed that we never recognize what's being said. We want you to look at us, but we don't want to look at you. But then again, what makes art a 'thing' to begin with is that shared connection among people who understand a particular something. The concept exists as a phenomenon - but independent of logic.

Isn't that funny?