Too Much of a Good Thing

I feel like I'm losing my way.

I have an idea for a painting I'd like to do someday, it would have to be quite a large piece. A barren landscape with a self-portrait, face down on the dirt, blood staining the dry ground. Over me stands a large, colorful tiger from the side, licking its red mouth clean.

When will this college shit end? I wish I just had personal time to develop my art as I see fit.

I've got to get back to painting.

It seems that Live Journal has finally kicked the bucket.

I must be getting more effeminate as I grow up. In the last month I've had two gay dudes hit on me, one of them was at the Antique's Roadshow, if you can believe that. He claims to be an ex-hairdresser for Gwen Stefani.

Denver is weird. I don't know how much I will miss it when I move out in a few days.

I want to say something but nothing comes to me.

I'll just leave it like this.

I tried to make an art piece but failed. I think I'm stuck because I've not left this apartment in weeks. I need things to change, to go somewhere. I imagine myself just driving off on roadtrips without telling anyone, but then I'm made a bit more rational by the fact that my car probably has some unaddressed mechanical issue that would stop me anyway.

I was reading things on the DEA site about marijuana and how it makes you lazy and stupid and boring, and while a case examination of myself might prove that I am indeed all three of those things, I've always had such qualities. When I was a very sober person I would procrastinate all the time. The fact that I am now insanely vegetative has more to do with my personality than my drug use.

I sometimes picture myself floating away weightlessly, with my arms crossed over my chest, through purple-red nebulas in space, and the silence is total.

It's 5AM now. I don't know how this happens every night. Actually, I'd surmise that it's by choice that I stay up this late. I'm just terrible at making choices. It's okay though. Whatever.

I wish I could just make my mind be quiet for a few hours. Oh, wait, that's called sleep.

Shit.

I can't describe how it feels to be growing up.

I'm incredibly sick and I puked today. I've just been sitting in this chair all day long, drinking water, wishing these horrible sensations in my stomach would stop.

I feel like a stupid piece of shit. I feel like I'm getting dumber as I get older. I've lost my genuine connection to art that I had all my life. Now I struggle with imagery, over-analyzing every little aspect. Art school is doing this to me. It's becoming a job, it's becoming something that I never wanted it to be. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've been pretty much dead-set my whole life that I wanted to become an artist, but shit, Illustration is ruining me, as I've said before.

I had my Sophomore Portfolio review, which is where the faculty of your given department critique your work over the whole year. They told me I had some great work and that I spoke clearly, yet at the same time they were so critical of my work because the storytelling is not obvious.

That's what Illustration is. It's fine art without any sort of vagueness, without any speck of interest in the things that you have to imagine, in the things you have to reach out and touch with your mind. Illustration is like an effort to make my art into advertising. That isn't art to me. Art is not about attracting attention immediately or getting a quick read across. Obviously my skills are not up to par with these ideologies, I'm only 20 years old. Yet I fear that if I remain in this stagnant program I will become another cliche in the world of mass-produced images. I really don't want that. I don't want clients, I don't want to be told what to do. Accepting criticism is easy for me, accepting suggestions is not. I have a very distinct idea in my mind of what my art is and the direction that I want to take it. Suggestions to alter my work fucking always ends up turning my idea into trite garbage. I admit it now: I fucking loathe Illustration to the core of my bones. It's a hack program. It's like self submission to creative slavery. I won't have it.

I can't formulate words for my thoughts. My conscience has buried all of my introspective efforts and now I stand above them on the ground. I'll convince myself that I'm finally on top of a brilliant thought and so I dig down into the wet earth of my mind, yet the digging never stops. I dig, and I dig, and I dig, and what seemed to be just below the lifeless surface of ground is nowhere to be found.

I want to find some people, somebody, something that can connect to this. I sometimes wish I could just speak to artists who I admire, living or dead. It's like I look around and see everyone else pursuing their niche while I sit like a child in a boat with no oars. I'm stranded in the middle of an endless body of water, drifting nowhere forever. One day I feel that my mind will drift so far away from all of this that I'll fall into a coma.

This is fucking horrible, I don't know what to do anymore. I can't make my thoughts stop or change, instead it's like listening to an old recording of my own voice again and again, always hearing the same things. But as I get older, it seems like parts of the tape are fading away and I'm just hearing a repetition of ever-dwindling subjects until one day it will just be the same sentence repeated over and over. The same images. The same feelings. The same inexplicable shifts in my moods. It's like I'm waiting for something to happen, something big, but it never comes.

I start to fantasize about my own death. Maybe I'm going to end up as one of the unlucky people who pass away before their time. Maybe I'll live to be 80. I see myself laying in some kind of hospital bed, stiffening up and panicking as I feel my life drain out of me. It's this particular moment that is always floating around in my mind: the few seconds of life left on this world. I can't solve the end of such a train of thoughts and so they repeat. They repeat again and again and again until my grasp of that moment feels so real that I'm too petrified to sleep. When I feel myself drifting off I start to worry. The world fades away behind my eyelids and is taken over by a startling nothingness, sound begins to fade out, hallucinatory voices always echoing in my head.

I just feel like I'm about to break down and lose it completely. I'm not depressed or sad or anything, but hopeless. I'm without vigor. I'm paranoid. I'm losing my fucking mind.

I desperately want this to stop. I had plenty of emotional problems as a kid, everyone does, but it's getting worse. A repulsive blend of facts and fears that never stop dancing away inside of my brain. I don't think in images anymore, I don't see finished art pieces in my mind. If I were to take any given word, let's say "tiger," I just can't see it in my head. I'm resigned to seeing only simple shapes that I can easily comprehend - squares, circles, triangles - and they only formulate when I draw them with my eyes. I have to physically trace their shapes in my head to make them appear. I don't see anything before I start drawing. My mind is blank and without direction.

I feel like I need to get the fuck out of here, I need something to change.

I've gotta get out of this place.
_______

Writing helps me, but it's hard. It's like a snowy morning when the car is covered in a thick, white blanket, so I get out my scraper and push it all off. Yet as surely as I am getting rid of the snow, it's done nothing. The snow I removed has simply been replaced in the flurry. This is how it feels. I expunge my fears from my mind through writing, but it's like new ones instantly crop up to take their place. My mind is over-capacity. Sometimes I swear I can feel the inside of my brain aching from it. I know all that gray paint in my skull is all I am. Just like everyone else, I am convinced of my individuality, I'm special, I'm a person, I've got a soul, I'm unique, I'm in control. I'm not. I'm just an organ inside a vehicle, too afraid to die and too pathetic to live. Isn't it fucked up to be tortured by the only thing that is objectively </i>you?</i>

No one is listening. Whether I were to type this out on the internet or sail it across the sky on a banner, it's like speaking to a statue. My mind is in solitary confinement. All of these useless words that I write to give some abstract sense of this existence are really nothing. No matter how many metaphors I can find, it's all fucking nothing.

I wish I could convince myself of easy things - I wish I could give into becoming trite and typical, for then I wouldn't have to worry about my creativity. I wish I could stop worrying about death so I could focus on life. I wish I could convince myself that there was a god so I wouldn't have to ask so many questions. I wish I could live a simple, motivated life that would be without such crippling doubts all the time.

I hate that I use the word 'I' all the time. I is not me. I am not me. I'm just a failed clump of neurons that are entirely too spastic to ever be successful. Isn't it fucked up how humans can be so incredibly precise in diagnosing the most complicated medical issues possible yet we can't even control our animal instincts? We twitch and cough and puke and shit and piss and we die and our hair stands on end and our bones break and we're overcome with sex drives and we cry and we sigh and we yawn and we itch and we bite our nails and we submit ourselves to things we don't want to. Humans are just animals. I'm a four-legged beast who can think, that's it. Every wild animal is exactly like me but without this looping series of thoughts. Our species accomplishes such brilliant things as society, or medicine, or machines, or philosophy, but we just aren't cut out for it. We're still just dirty primates living in the jungle.

I saw the Mystic Valley Band and they were great. Conor performs a lot better now than he ever did before and the concerts are actually fun and groovy. The new album he released is great, just go to youtube and type in "Conor Oberst Outer South" and you can pull up the entire CD in very high quality. I've actually got a copy if you guys want one.

I had been feeling very down about art before I saw that show. It was the first time I ever had a good view of him while he was performing. Just watching that band perform made me badly, badly want to create things. One song from the concert that stuck in my mind was Cape Canaveral, a rendition that isn't at all like the one on the first CD.



This was the image I made, at a very high resolution for print. It takes inspiration from the constantly growing and decaying patterns I see when my eyes are closed; flashes of bright fluorescent colors and simplistic shapes. At the same time, it's exactly like a memory - how convoluted details turn a once-clear event into an obscurity, or how my own mind grapples with its inability to formulate an image of the future. It's about the difference between real life and the world of thoughts.

I am done with this semester on Friday. That gives me 4 months to pursue my own art.

Til then I've got a shitload of homework to do.

I don't give a flying fuck about recognition of my art anymore. That's poison right now. I should care about that in college, using it as motivation to produce quality work. Truth be told, I've come to realize that I have always done art for myself, never for others. I used it as an outlet of emotional expression growing up, channeling a lot of my thoughts into it. I never sell pieces. Never. I've sold commissioned advertisements, but never art. I almost did once, but the deal fell through.

How can I turn this into a career? Art is not my job, it's not my business. It's something different to me, as utterly trite as that sounds. I don't sit down and structure my shit for clients. I did that in high school for the newspaper and found it creatively stifling and boring. I feel like I want to switch out of Illustration and into fine arts, maybe for one semester. I said a few days ago that Illustration feels like being on a leash. There is no room for ambiguity or artistic license. It must read quick and clear. By such standards, three quarters of the art in history books would be failures.

Sometimes I loathe art school. Sometimes I feel like it's fucking ruining me. Other times I see it as a positive motivation to meander into uncomfortable territory, and often times I end up successful. I am a pessimist, any armchair psychologist who has read three pages of my writing could tell you that. Producing a nice piece when taking big risks is very satisfying, especially when you can relate it to your peers' work. I don't mean judging which is better, I mean it as seeing each piece for what it is. It's just one mind's perspective of the outside world. It's funny, college is meant to sharpen your skills for the real world, and here we sit, some 15 - 20 students all drawing the same model from different viewpoints. You'd expect that all the pieces would have some semblance of continuity throughout them all, but in fact they're wildly different. Sometimes they don't even look like the same person.

That's the value in art, at least in my own opinion. Our brains are weird machines, capable of brilliant thoughts. We can synthesize the world scientifically, counting it all out, measuring it, building it, etc. Yet in art, it's complete instinct. Translating a three dimensional figure on to a two dimensional plane is painfully frustrating, especially having binary vision. Yet this is what gives us the van Goghs, Whistlers, Monets, and other pointless names I could drop that really have little significance to those outside art communities. I don't believe there's a God. I believe only in the abiotic processes of a physical, explainable world. Art is too complex for me to perceive in any tangible way. Sometimes I look back on pieces I did and wonder how I made such decisions, feeling like I was filled with some aesthetic instinct, at least for a while. What is that? I know the brain is just a complicated computer, but art just seems different to me.

I need to go to bed. God damn rambling bullshit. Oh well. Bye bye.

As I'm getting older, my mind is more often seeking out dark places. I've often times felt overcome with imagining my last moments of life. I don't think this is something many people have ever really considered. We will all one day experience an event as real as walking out the front door when our lives will expire. Cognitive dissonance, that's what it is. I can't reconcile what it means for my life to end because I truly do not believe in an afterlife or an intelligence or anything higher or more purposeful than our natural world. I admit that the universe may be far more exotic than we imagined, but much like we understand that 16th century Europeans had a skewed, uninformed and fanciful imagination of the New World, I feel that imagining a divine, purposeful intelligence to be the primary cause of all this is a bit of a fairy tale.

It doesn't matter to me anymore. All that matters to me now is that I am here, now, for some reason. I was suddenly pulled from the void. That's what unbirth is to me. It's the void, the 14 billion year sleep we slept before our compulsory duty of birth. I can't understand this. I can't understand conscience. It baffles me. How is it that I am kept constant, alive, perceiving, when my whole world is this unliving matter? It is truly something amazing to exist.

Falling asleep symbolizes many of these fears to me. I sometimes panic when I feel myself dozing off, when I see increasingly vivid geometric pulsing behind my eyelids. Going to sleep is a lot like dying. I once thought that would be a great title for an art piece, but I've yet to find an appropriate one. But the transition from consciousness to sleep is unperceived. It's the only way we can put death into perspective. The only way I can rationalize it is "a sleep from which we never wake".

I feel hollow. I feel like an empty body just walking around, waiting for something. My apathy worries me so much sometimes. I don't know why I write. I must stop, it's nearly 3:00 AM and I have class at 8:00AM.

Going to sleep is a lot like dying.

P.S. - I think I like to smoke weed because it clouds my head up and makes it harder to dwell on bad thoughts. I also think it's made my thought process overall a bit cloudier than it should be. I don't like that part about weed.

Things are getting problematic. I feel like I've been, overall, just losing my lust for life or something. Well, no, not being alive. I've just not felt very motivated to do artwork lately. To go to school. To do my work. I'm having a hard time right now. I'm stoned, I had to scrape the black gunk that is leftover from smoking weed, resin. It tastes bad, and it looks bad, but I'm completely blazed and that is a good thing. See, getting high isn't like getting drunk. I'm not hampered by it. It makes me more optimistic. I find it to hard to be depressed while I'm stoned, and easy to be happy.

But what I need is mushrooms. The magic variety. Say what you will to me, go on, but they changed my life once and I believe they can do it again. I believe they will wake my heart from this slow sleep it feels like it's going in to. Break to hit the resin again, I need to get to sleep.

Fuck, it's all gone. You see? This is what I resort to because I have to call up some weird people I don't even know to get this harmless plant, often times jumping through ridiculous hoops that could be potentially dangerous (like the time one of my dealers got robbed by dudes with guns). Meanwhile, any dipshit who knows an adult who will circumvent the law can become a childhood alcoholic thanks to the wide commercial availability. I mean, if I am ever to have children, I would actively encourage marijuana over alcohol. Strictly in terms of health risks, marijuana is a house cat by comparison. I don't think that phrase is even real, I just made it up. I'm so high. Sort of.

I should stop smoking weed for a week or two to let my tolerance fall. Weed fasting. They should give a name to a designated two week no-smoking period in order to enhance the high. Ramadank. That's what it should be, it should be Ramadank. Your friend is like, "Hey, wanna smoke a bowl at my house?" You're all, "No thanks man, I started Ramadank on Tuesday." He would immediately understand that you are in a very important stage of your overall marijuana consumption and would know not to encourage the pleasure of the dank.

Or you could just not do any of that and fuck it. Formalities are lame. Why can I never sleep? What the fuck. I type into this little notepad like somehow my thoughts can be heard now. I think shit all the time. You know what I mean? I am constantly thinking in streams like this all the time. Why does it matter to write it down on the internet so other organisms can see it?

Fuck, my apartment is making some creepy as shit noises. It's 3:20AM and I can't sleep.

To exist is strange. I think about what it means pretty much every moment of my life. It's the only thing that bothers me. What the fuck is all of this? Why is this weird structured world here? For some reason, for 14 billion years this universe developed without me. Then, without my consent, I appeared inside of it. Or as my brother would say, "We didn't ask to be born."

That's so fucking true. I never asked to be born. I just was. I just got what I got. I am who I am. My face looks this way and I never had a choice about it. Nobody did. I'm this weird tiny link of a giant history of a single organism. The human organism. I'm a cell. We're all cells. We talk to each other and imagine that we're individuals, and we are right in a sense, but I feel like our individual lives are meaningless. Our contribution to the betterment of the human organism is what makes our lives meaningful. That must be it. That must be the "purpose" in life without a god.

I mean to say, lots of religious folks tell me, "If you don't believe in God, then life has no purpose." That's an obviously retarded thing to say, first of all. But I think that the purpose of our individual lives is to do and create things which advance us all. Ultimately this will have to be the assumed philosophy of the future. If the world is actually nearing the brink of catastrophe, we could see a massive wipeout of humans on the scale of the black plague. I'm talking about global warming. If it ends up being a major problem and turns this depression into a cataclysmic dustbowl with worldwide hunger, riots, wars, blah, blah, blah, then the only way humanity will be able to carry on is with a massive paradigm shift. This isn't impossible and it isn't unrealistic. I really do believe that the modern paradigm has distinctly changed from its former self. Rationality and hope for betterment is becoming the social norm. I believe that in the next 25 years, a lot of superstition will be driven from the world by unspeakably profound experiments. The Large Hadron Collider is like the holy grail of physics, people. We're living on the brink of a new era in human civilization. And it's FUCKING TEETERING.

Man, we could get set back a couple decades if this depression gets really bad. A lot of people say it will. There's a lot of bad shit going on in the world right now, too. Riots, the Mexican drug war, a lot of stuff that could spill over into America and really fuck this all up. Sometimes it doesn't matter to me. Sometimes I realize how much suffering there is on this planet and feel that none of this matters. Just like skin cells die and are replaced, so are we. There are many organisms outside of our own. Each one is comprised of individuals but they are really one animal that grows and shrinks. And our planet is an organism, we are its organelles. Or perhaps parasites. Who knows? This is all speculative bullshit, like religion. It's so fun to think of crazy stuff like this, but at the end of the day, it's nonsense. It's all nonsense. I have no idea what this is. I have no idea why I'm here. I have no idea about anything, but I also realize that nobody else does, either. Science is awesome and scientists are awesome. But I'm afraid sometimes that our physical universe is just way fucking crazier than we can think, crazier than string theory, multiple dimensions, and even that petty, fairytale god shit. It's way bigger than god. It's unthinkable natural enigma way beyond the human mind. It's like nature on earth, that faceless force that guides everything without presence, intelligence, or purpose, but always around you. But times a million. It's like, remember how old movies look like shitty, bad ideas when compared to new movies? Now take your idea of the craziest thing that could be true about our existence and imagine that the actual behind-the-curtains of our lives would make it look like an old, old, old, shitty idea that is definitely not right.

That's how it is. Humans are badass at explaining the natural universe, but I think mathematics will show us that reality is way beyond fiction like god. It's something much more elegant and beautiful.

Sorry, I watched a documentary on parallel universes that really struck me. I finally understand multiple dimensions and shit. I will talk about this later. I need sleep.

Bye.

http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=56682

I would highly recommend reading that person's experience with the drug called DMT or 'Dimitri.' It's a psychoactive tryptamine that is naturally produced in a number of plants and the human brain. There's good evidence to suggest that DMT is produced at birth and at death, so glimpses into its effects are extremely profound - it's almost like these are accounts of what death feels like.

The craziest and most fucking awesome thing about DMT? You see aliens. Elves. Higher beings. I've read them described in a number of extremely awesome ways: color-pulsating cat aliens, elves formed entirely of colorful language, or even existing outside of visuals and purely in a psychological sense (people feel a presence trying to find its way into their minds). There's many accounts, including the one above, that talks about a distinctive "woosh" sound that often time signals a massive, intense peak in the trip. Most of what I read has people feeling like they've either died in real life (extreme cases of out of body experiences) or that they've taken a lethal dose of DMT and fried their brains for good.

The stories are outrageously fascinating. They come off way too frightening for me to ever be interested in taking it, but it's still a wild read.

Ponder on this:

We never lived to see the 13.6 billion years before our births, yet we are never disconcerted over this fact. We simply didn't exist to see that time pass, and when we finally die, we'll simply not exist to see the rest of it pass. We'll just rest forever in non-existence.

Doesn't life suddenly feel so much brighter?

P.S. - I really hope that somewhere along the line we might pop into existence again. I'd really love to play with my own tits on an alien planet deep in outerspace.

I got a root canal.

Livejournal is dead.

I am sick. Damn it all to hell.

I got this message on youtube:And I responded


I'm sorry, but if you believe the Bible to be true, you're an extremely gullible and scientifically ignorant person. If you can't find the logical fallacies in the Bible's version of the truth, you are not reading it hard enough.

The Bible is wrong. It was written thousands of years ago by people who had no understanding of the scientific reality that comprises our universe. This is a truth that we need to own up to in the modern era - for hundreds of years we've found a spectrum of evidence that has given us reason to at least doubt God's existence. With science progressing at an unfathomably quicker pace in these days, I am 100% sure we will never find a single shred of evidence that gives any credit to the Judeo-Christian God.

FUCK RELIGION. READ SCIENCE.

It is so bitterly ironic to watch diehard conservatives rant about Barack Obama, saying he's taking away our rights, he's going to be a dictator, he's sending our country straight to hell.

Well, in case you've been asleep for the last 8 years, that kind of already happened. The worst part about this all is that people will elect a fool into office and regret it deeply but they'll go down kicking and screaming when someone half decent comes in to replace them.

America is fucking crazy town, USA. I have no idea how a country so full of dipshits can sometimes manage to do something good.

Last night was great.