Confessions of a Starving Artist

You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.  ~ Mic Jager

I’ve been anything but grounded lately.  Work has had me more directed and focused as anything else, and what’s more, I feel like it is becoming all consuming; though I know full well that it is not.  My home is going through a massive facelift, the resulting trials and tribulations of which are nothing short of a brain aneurism on a daily basis upon returning home from the previously stated work place.  To touch it all off, my personal life has me soaring above the clouds in such a way that I do believe that I’ve started leaving my common sense up there, sometimes for hours and hours at a time.  And while none of these are bad things in the least, on the contrary, I can’t say that I could wish for anything better in my life right now; I can say that the combination of all three is tearing the days off the calendar at an alarming rate.  Which, again, is not a bad thing.  Not at all.

Funnier still is the fact that there remains a ‘to do’ list.  As usual, I’m behind where I wanted to be in respect to accomplishing my personal goals, often time while accomplishing goals that I didn’t realize that I wanted (or needed) to accomplish in the first place though very much did.  Obviously I’m not angry that I have a wonderful and simply amazing girlfriend and not a gas grill for the back yard – that’s a no brainer.  Nonetheless, I did eat a prime rib at a local chain restaurant last night despite having a freezer full of steak.  Life’s full of little contradictions like that, I guess.

My job is one of calendars and planning as much as it is gun play and rock climbing.  I fill in the white spaces and try and keep everything balanced; down time with late nights, long weekends with working Saturdays.  More than that, I try to see the three-dimensionality of my plans, that is to say, the fair assumptions or anticipations of factors not yet decided upon or the things that might not even exist between the lines.  I’m living in the here and now just as much as I am living in tomorrow.  Regardless of your opinion of a man who conducts his life in this manner, it’s where I seem to do the best and it’s where I feel the closest to alive.  To be honest, I haven’t really felt like this too terribly consistently since I graduated college; a sad and noviced shadow of my current mind, though an advanced and mentoring version of my current spirit.     

But enough of that.  I’m accepting of living in days like these.  They are fast and they are young and they end in a return to the mundane all too soon.  Those days gone always seem to burn brighter than those we live in, which seems logical, but I’d venture to say this may be faulty logic by perception.  Perhaps the fire isn’t as bright when you are by it because it lights up everything else, and thus those burning in the distance past seem so brilliant because of the deep darkness that surrounds and contrasts them.  Who can be sure?  All I can say for sure is that the fire does dance and burn, and that which burns nearer always warmer than the memory of the heat of that which can only be seen in the rearview. 

I sat last night to write, but nothing came.  It has been like that for a few weeks.  At least, it has on the night that I have had a chance to actually sit.  Someone said that a writer must be troubled to allow the ink to flow.  I am stressed, but certainly not troubled, so perhaps this is the crux of the case.  More likely it is because my troubles just moved to a new area of my mind and are sitting like a cancer, working at me and waiting to be discovered and diagnosed.  Or maybe it’s an old area.

LL (my girlfriend as far as this blog is concerned) was having a bit of a bad day today.  As we text each other back and forth throughout the day, she asked me, “Name 5 things you want to accomplish in life.”  This was a hard question for me.  Or was it.  I could have answered this question like a rifle shot five years ago as I would have mused on it and those like it for hours with friends as we stared blankly into long evenings.  Today, I could only think of two things that I wanted to accomplish, and I openly conceded that the first was less than necessary to my overall happiness:

1.  Get promoted to the rank of O-6.

2.  Become a published author of note.  

So I thought about it some more.  There was more to life than this.  Three more accomplishments such as these would either leave a man strung out or weaken the overall punctuation attached to each benchmark.  Besides, a man is more than the sum of his parts or some such way of thinking, isn’t he?  What then is an accomplishment for?  I don’t have the answer for this, but it is the crux of all things around me now.  At least I think so.  Regardless, here are the other three that I came up with.

3.  I want to be asked to give a lecture to a room full of experts… and have them be blown away.

4.  I want to be invited to a Hollywood black tie affair and have at least two different celebrities recognize me for my work.

5.  I want to own a home so grand and so timeless that my family will live in it for decades to come.

News is what someone somewhere wants to suppress.  The rest is advertising.  ~ Lord Northcliffe

I think that it is remarkable how contemporary sketch comedy can become such a compass directing us towards the bitch of a society.  In other Occidental countries, international flavor has kept Americans en vogue as the butt of most jokes, but with the arrival of President Obama and his celestial popularity among the ABCs (Australians, British, and Canadians), these countries have had to look inward to find a somewhat more easy target than loud, seemingly brazen Yanks with their ineloquent ex-leader.  We too have had a radical shift within the focus of what is funny and what is not, mostly for the same reasons.  So if Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are any sort of gauge (and I whole-heartedly believe that they are) it would seem that a new target is within their pseudo pundit cross-hairs: The Media.

And really, thank God, because these fuck-rods have been getting off light.  For those of you just tuning in, I have been actively lambasting the main stream media and 24-hour news networks for at least as long as I have been writing this blog… which will be four years this September.  The fear and loathing and general degradation to journalistic integrity that these so-called reporters have brought into this profession over the past decade is enough to make Walter Cronkite claw himself out of his grave and punch Sean Hannity in the dick.  And while President Bush conducted himself in a controversial manner thorough his presidency, if measured only on The Hill, the vote was always somewhat even.  If measured in the polls, it was not.  What was important to note, however, what that this was more or less a constant variable through his eight-year administration, in other words, not terribly newsworthy.  It was the media who created the veritable ‘shock and awe’ surrounding every little minutiae, throwing Liberals into frenzies and slamming Conservatives ever so much further into the right-wing corner to defend themselves with ostensible American Values from the onslaughts of theoretical common sense. 

It would seem that this media divide would be out of work.  Ironically, a black President isn’t so controversial after all.  But remember, this isn’t your daddy’s evening news, this is a mindset closer to Perry White of the Daily Planet.  So reportedly, President Obama’s shift in politics is more than enough to insight the same fever-pitch of hullabaloo that President Bush did, but new networks have become unable to produce anything more than noteworthy considerations for dinner conversations as, for the most part, a general feeling of ‘wait and see’ presides over these amber waves of grain.  I’m not calling it a calm, but rather a patience, certainly more so than the past eight years of near revolt. 

What’s changed?  Perhaps it’s the fact that one half of this absurd argument among the masses has declaredly had its chance and now are respectfully silent… Ha!  If that were only the case.  The conservative right has done nothing since November except show its witless and hypocritical ass splashed all across the media in a way that would make The National Enquirer blush.  Like a closed circle of high schoolers, they come off with mis-facts again and again, and by the course of mass proliferation, attempt to make it true… even if it means changing history.  Most recently, a wave of conservative ‘experts’ claimed all over FOXNews that the New Deal under FDR didn’t work at all, something which even my basic political science education knows in false.  It was successful every year except for one when unemployment spiked (in his second term, I think) when President Roosevelt cut back on government spending.  Another bungle that happened a month ago was Dick Cheney going on a series of interviews attempting to lambast the current administration’s stance on security policies.  To be fair, I listened to most of what the ex-Vice President had to say… until he admitted that he didn’t have access or read the intelligence reports anymore.  By that respect, I should have more input on the news networks than he does because at least I get to read a handful of those reports!

With News Week recently calling Rush Limbaugh, “…what Jessie Jackson was to Democrats in the 80s,” it is obvious to me that the Republican party is just losing it as they are continue a man who can’t even keep his sound bites from contradicting as their media mascot.  And apparently, out of utter fear of America’s current tsunami of believed Liberal undermining, FOXNews and some of its more right-wing pundits have completely lost their damn minds as well.  However, nothing tops the lunacy, which I was privileged to watch at work the other day.  Glenn Beck seems to have taken a queue from his Rushness and added to the red-neckery of everything by beginning to rewrite present-day history within minoritized right-wing audience through the institution of his new “9-12 Project”.  While the intentions of this project I only somewhat understand, what confuses me  most is why it is necessary in this day and age where our country is been more unified politically than ever in the past eight years do we need a unification project?  Still, if you’re not convinced, YouTube Glenn’s performance as he introduces the project to his fan base with, and I can’t make this up, Chuck Norris.  By the way, his acting is about as good as Chuck’s… oh and if you fast forward through the part where Glenn attempts to cry because of his professed “love for this country”, then you’re missing the best part.

And while you’re on the internet, check this out.  It’s Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer.  He’s the insanely caffeinated gentleman who hosts CNBC’s Mad Money.  Lately, Jon Stewart took an entire episode of The Daily Show, which by the by is supposed to be half-hour of comedy, and took this masquerading economic journalist down a peg in what I thought was one of the most brutalizing interviews that I had seen since Murphy Brown went off the air.  Do yourself a favor and be sure that you make it completely through the interview, because what I find the most funny of all is that it takes a guy who plays a fake journalist for a living to point out the complete lack of journalistic integrity now alive and well in the business today.  I for one applaud Jon Stewart and Stephen Cobert for taking the info-tainment industry head on.  Bless you, boys, you do God’s work!

However, they could still screw this up for me.  In a take-no-prisoners war (something that is more akin to Stephen than Jon) I fear for my only network news darling, Robin Mead.  She is what we refer in to in my line of work as ‘deployment porn’.  I can’t have Comedy Central roasting Ms. Mead for she is all that is good and pure in morning news.  …but feel free to hang the rest of those mindless bastards!

VIVA LA GONZO!