I began this blog in 2010, SEVEN YEARS AGO. That's like a million in blog years.
I started this blog seven years ago because I was drowning, hanging on by a thread. I needed something to grasp onto. Anything. It was this blog. For better or, let's be honest, worse.
Margaret Cho once answered, when asked why she'd been out of the spotlight the previous (10?) years, "I've been sulking." Christ, I loved this. We're constantly being told - when having a bad day, for instance - to chipper up! Things will get better! Like that's the goal. Why do I want to be chipper? What's so good about chipper? Every chipper person is annoying. Every. one.
I hate the It Gets Better Project, because it will not get better for everyone. Sure, it'll get better for Dan Savage and his husband, for god's sake, these guys are ridiculously gorgeous. The only time it's tough to be gorgeous is if you are the First Lady-elect, 2017 - and then only when you try to give public speeches. Good looking people are doing fine, is all. Sure, bad days. Tough moments. They don't have to suffer the worst while someone is simultaneously chipping away at their existence.
No, I am not a good looking man, nor by my actions have I ever earned the love of another. While I do have a few acquaintances I remain without friends or close confidantes. I will die that way. Hopefully soonish. Not soon, I've a few more things to do, but soon enough. Reasonably soon. And even if I keel over RIGHT NOW: OK, then. Close enough.
What I did the last seven years, during the tenure of this blog, is I came to terms with it. All of it. (Most of it.) I've learned to live with reality and not my expectation borne of my privileges and entitlements. It turns out I was loaded with both of those, and still daily need to check myself when I start getting uppity about what's not fair! Because it turns out nothing is fair. There is no fair. Life's not fair. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people. The sun goes up, the sun goes down, the rest just is. Boo-fucking-hoo.
The rest we've invented, imposed, decided, to help us get our entirely unnecessary asses out of bed every morning. PURPOSE! Get up and go do that, then. Intrinsically I have no purpose. I am a biological result. My parents had sex one night, yaddayaddayadda, me. Animals fuck, babies are born. We've turned it into the biggest production number ever. Yoga, Instagram, Kardashians, Superbowl, pour-over coffee. I walk through a mall, any mall, and look at all the ugly crap we amass, and think: once we were cavemen; how did it end up being this? (Oh, hey, that lamp is really nice.)
I have a customer, only a few years younger than I. He sits here and drones ONANDON about his female problems. His TWO female problems. He's lying to both, he's playing them both, both should RUN FOR THEIR LIVES but he's a customer so I probably won't say that. What I did finally realize one day was, this guy is a smart guy and probably too smart for most and he has too much time and he's bored and he needs to fill his day and this is what we really do to fill our day this is the purpose we invent to get out of bed every day, all this minutiae BS that keeps us going for going's sake. None if it matters. Or is real. It's the real we make to fill the days, pass the time, and finally make ourselves matter.
...I realized one night, a Tuesday night, after getting up for my second job at 4:30 a.m. to get the bus two hours to work, doing labor for eight, two hours home, walking a mile to the laundromat, two more hours...still having to shower and eat dinner. I could not get Tuesdays done before 10 p.m. And I would walk home from the laundromat so many times, exhausted beyond comprehension, thinking: there is no response to this, it just is what it is no matter how I feel about it. While I was working the two jobs, I twice worked a span of 7 weeks with zero days off. In 2016 I had maybe, mmm, half a dozen days off?
I am so grateful for it. It taught me everything. It taught me privilege, my own. It showed me the fallacy of what I thought I deserved. It showed my how I'd grown up thinking life was meant to go a certain way. Or that I'd earned a certain pardon or that I was entitled to a better station in life. Or that I mattered. At least I got to go home, have a very much less bit of vodka, and exist in silence. There are parents, single moms, every where doing this who have to go home and still cook dinner for their family. I got off lucky. And on nights I wanted maybe just a teensy bit more vodka because I work so hard, after all, I deserve it: I came to learn to say back to myself, Too bad, you big cry baby, you don't get to.
Listening to my horrible customer drone on, thinking - this is what privilege is, the indulgence of droning and wallowing the minutiae of our lives of our own making. And making people who don't give a rat's ass, and never will, suffer it.
And that is what my blog was. It in real time. It in the flesh.
(Some of it was good and funny.)
OK, but bigger than this, here's what happened: It got better. I know. I'm sorry.
The initial bit of this blog, the onset, I'd been struggling with an emotional breakdown, health, alcohol, fear, loss, upheaval. It was real, they really happened. I was in an environment that treated me poorly, where I both lived and worked, after too many years this way I was trapped - in it and my own dirty diaper about it. And I was too poor to have options. Money - I don't know if it buys happiness, but it does buy you options, and that is A LOT towards happiness. Is all. Stuck between too many rocks and too many hard places, the second job saved me, freed me, allowed for options, and I could finally breathe.
Also, I had last year a weirdly successful art show and sold 25 paintings. Mostly small buggers, a few large ones. One week I got two checks from the gallery, a pay check, another paycheck from the other job, and a tax return. Crazy week.
I applied to live at a new, low-income artists residence. With the second job, the one thing I no longer did was make new art. (Too bad, you big cry baby, not every one gets to do what they love.) Because it was subsidized housing, it was a lottery process, and I hit that lottery. I moved into it. It is more than what I paid previously, (previously I got a discounted rent because I worked for the owners), but mush less than market value and also about four times the space as the previous place. Like, a ridiculous amount of space. It's embarrassing, really. There was a smaller one I preferred, but I made too much money this year for it. Next year, when I make not enough money for it, I'll get kicked out, I think, but I got it a year and here's the perk: when you walk into the office, people say hello and they smile. WOW!
The second job finished, I now get to live in the new palatial apartment with all the very nice people, and paint. I'm good for a year, at least. So: woe is me after that? No. So then I'll do something else. That's all. It turns out that's what you do when shit happens. Something else.
2016 was a crap year for a lot of people. It was a crap year for the world. But 2016 was a very good year for me. 2016 was the year Little Bored Fauntleroy finally grew up.
The End.
chapter 3.
