Love Your Lunacy

The greatest thing about the creative arts is that I have the permission to be wildly insane.It is altogether a different thing to know I am stark raving sane and I must avoid that delusion at all costs. As was pointed out in Catch 22, if you know you are insane, you aren't. This artist thinks he has to pretend he is sane and doesn't know he is insane. All the while the rest of the world goes completely baboon pretending to be the opposite. It is one thing to get all nihilistic about the insanity of it but is is another thing to try to create some kind of sense out of the inherent confusion of the world around me. Look, I've already jumped off the bridge as far as the rest of the world is concerned and that gives me more than enough liberty to make my own rules as I go along. I am aware, however, that this attitude only contributes more fuel to the fire and that is where my pretense kicks in. It is an art more than it it a science but some sense has to be made of it.

     Here I am at my desk on Sunday morning while these words come tumbling out from the depths of my heart. I have this need to write, paint, sculpt and so on, because I am compelled to be completely honest about myself and the world as I see it. Furthermore, I am inflicted with an ego big enough to fill all fifty States and beyond and have always believed that I have something worthwhile to contribute to the babble of the internet. Ya'll can thank God I don't use Twitter!

      I was once told that I ought to get sober in order to become a "contributing member of society". That suggestion kept me drunk for years. Why would I want to contribute to the meat-grinder that is Twenty-First Century society? I might as well sit on my couch and attempt to keep up with the Kardashians. NO, NO,NO,NO, NO, NO, NO, NONONONONONO! I belong to another age... the age of oil paint and canvas, when turpentine still smelled like turpentine, photographs on silver solutions, of pay-phone booths, of TV antennae on every house, when there were no laws against not wearing seat-belts, when you could still smoke in a bar, and the Cadillac was the car of status... a two ton hunk of steel with with 500 cubic inches (not meters) under the hood from Detroit!

     How many civil liberties did we give up today for the common welfare of the peeps?

     I have skittered around clinging to every cause and misadventure imaginable. In my life, at one time or another, I have been a liberal Democrat; a civil rights activist; a Bakunin style Anarchist; a conservative Republican;  a radical leftist; a libertarian atheist agnostic; a Christian Pentecostal Holy Rolling Bible Thumper; damn near a Buddhist monk; and a plain ole drunk. There are several other tributaries of all these I've canoed up over the years and I'm not done yet. I'm sure that I don't impress, or try to impress, anyone with the mention of these but I do so to make my point: that I am a nut case and I know IT! That is why I consider myself an artist and why I sit down at this desk damned near every morning and pound these epistles out just in case there is someone else out there as insane as I am and knows the sanity of it. I.e., I love my lunacy.

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