Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP Plastic Bullets and Butterfly Knives

“am I hard enough? am I tough enough? 

am I rich enough? am I just too blind to see?” 

– Rolling Stones  

An evening at Levi and Karla’s’ was always a night of drunkenness and chaos. A poor white trash version of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe.’ Aaron mostly smoked weed and took the occasional psychedelic. But of the multitude of chemically reliant classes that he have met to date, he is most at ease in the company of the drunks.

There has never been a time in his life that he have not had at least one best friend who was a high functioning alcoholic. Some people have a huge number of friends that they have rather shallow relationships with; others have a few friends that they know intimately. He obviously is of the later of the two tribes. And although he generally preferred to hang out with a quieter more cerebral group of people, when he determined that he must venture out of his sheetrock cave he did enjoy people who take their vices to extremes more than the company of the lukewarm more conservative type of personality.

Aaron supposed that the bearded pontiffs of the church of Freud would blame this on his father, and that may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that he occasionally had to get out of his own head, go out into the world and let himself go just a little bit crazy some times. Perma-fried stoners can get real boring real fast in the same way that the truly insane can get on your nerves instantly.

Speed freaks, coke heads and steroid users always wind up getting too paranoid and belligerent before the drug induced psychosis finally causes them to snap and they in a homicidal rage kill either you or kill themselves or the drugs destroy them, usually heart failure or some other major organ shuts down. Either way those drugs have no spiritual value and therefore have a very limited use for the psychic explorer.

Psychedelics can help a high-strung artist to see through the illusion of limited possibilities and help to open the mental door across whose threshold lies a previously unobserved horizon. And mild hallucinogens such as the ganja can help one to relieve tensions and relax enough to enter the state of mind proper for any number of artistic disciplines.

None of these substances is however a substitute for years of study, disciplined hard work and an ever present supply of talent. Being an artist is not a substitute for hard work. As a matter of fact it is easier to work hard for a regular pay check and live well growing fat happy and middle class in the suburbs than it is to cut away ones ties to a secure and comfortable future in your old age and risk everything on your talent and intelligence.

Anyone considering becoming any sort of an artist is in error if they believe that it is somehow an easy life. If you want an easy ride I suggest you get into government work the standards are minimal, you get every holiday off and you retire with a half ways decent pension.  

Otherwise, you have to be prepared to fight the long war against obscurity and obsolescence. You have to be able to endure the pain of the unattended rotting tooth, the taste of beans and rice more than meat, lots of cheap black coffee and kool aid because the tap water is disgusting without the boiling, the artificial flavoring and sugar to disguise its viscous taste.

You have to know just how little you can live on and still have the strength to create. I tell you these things so that you will not be caught unawares when you are greeted as most of us are indifferently by soul crushing poverty and the gagging silence of anonymity. The desire, not the frail ego driven want, but the junkie’s insatiable omnivorous primordial need to create must command your entire being.

You are your creation. This is not an amusement. You are no dilettante. If the work is good, then you are good. If the work is poor then you are poor. if the work is strong then you are strong. if the work is nothing then you are nothing. if the work is genius. Nothing can have dominion over the instinct to create. Family is an inconvenience, friendships an indulgence and love ridiculous.

If you ask my second wife why we got divorced she will probably give you a laundry list of reasons from money to love but the truth is this once I told her that I would rather paint than fuck she knew she no longer had any way to control me and her ego would not allow her to play the mistress to that demanding cunt who is still my mistress some call a Muse.

And don’t fool yourself in to thinking that any beautiful woman will fall in love with your talent and want to be with you until the empty end just like in the movies because that is a beautiful lie created in the Hollywood dream machine factories. A beautiful woman is well aware of the fact that her beauty is a commodity that she can parlay into a life of relative luxury and ease but that it has a very limited shelf life.

Forget the romantic dogma that you have been brain washed into believing by love songs and romantic comedies. In the real world love does not conquer all obstacles. I would even go so far as saying that love crumbles to dust beneath the most insignificant of stresses. But who would want to listen to a song that told you the truth about life and love such as that.

Bergman has already made all of the definitive films about the subject of love in the existentialist dilemma. And who watches those when there’s porn and video games. True love and everlasting beauty are the two greatest illusions ever created by artist. Truly, to live this life this is a socially acceptable form of insanity. But it is not insanity that would be a form of escape and to escape is to defy the actual significance of this sort of endeavor.

Insanity is an illusion, an escape from reality that goes against the core of what we are trying to archive. And what we want to do is eat the flesh off of the skeleton of our existence until we are left to gnaw on the bones of the real and suck the sweet marrow out of life.