The Enema Of Art

Every mental excitement giving an exceptional value, a superior quality to the concerns which are attached to it, there is no taste however spicey which doesn’t compose around itself a society which it unites and where the consideration of others is the one virtue everyone seeks in life. Consider the Hell’s Angels, if you will, or The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Everything turns pink and sage and deviates from the normal subterfuge, all the conventions and lies designed to keep feelings at bay. Not all feelings. The wrong feelings. Which are the right feelings. The right feelings are wrong. The wrong feelings are right. And between the two is the unsettling quaintness of motel art, how it denudes the world, and leaves you feeling naked. All those sailboats & sunsets & grotesque abstractions. The smell of clean sheets and carpet fiber obscured by the steam of an insanely hot shower. Ikebana, and the exhilaration of elsewhere.

Breakfast acts as an offering, a preparation for the assaults and shootouts and temptations of the day. I tend to see life as a western. I start out like Henry Fonda and end up as Stan Laurel in a Stetson. I don’t care where it goes, really. I’m going to find a hole in the wall and crawl inside and die. Sang the Marshal Tucker Band one day in a hot July in an office building in downtown San José. I was a factotum then. I’m a factotum now. Sometimes I get what’s coming to me but most of the time I have to make shit up. So many friends are gone I have to wonder where everyone goes when the curtain comes down. And what needs to be said when the curtain goes up. Like that day in San Francisco where the sunlight didn’t seem to fit anybody’s mood and I went on a long walk and told my life to wait outside while I went into a restaurant for some Buddha Jumps Over The Wall and a stranger warned me I was wandering into the Tenderloin.

We can drift from pruning to percolation, I've seen it happen, a certain accentuation in a used car lot sells a 2016 Silverado, or a writer for an Amazon Prime series gets arrested for too many unpaid parking tickets and the ensuing events provide a provocative twist to a plot hung up in development. Art imitates life, but the reverse is also true: the example of Marcel Duchamp can inspire a person full of piss and vinegar to start a new line of urinals, or gather enough dust to create an orgasmic cloud of insatiable volatility, and feed it Los Angeles. Or the singular performance of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, which was based on you-know-who, and here we are again, humming “We’ll Meet Again.” And since I lack the power to prevent a nuclear war, I must resort to unguents, and offer my opposition to tedium, which is the enema of art.

Travel is one of life’s happy necessities. No two voyages are alike. There are journeys that involve flight and drawbridges and hotel reservations, and journeys whose drowsy miles take us to places we’ve never contemplated visiting before. One thing all journeys have in common is counterpoint, interwoven fates & lush contradictions. It’s hard getting a lay of the land without a hypersensitive divining rod or a digital astral plane theodolite, but if you plan on feeding yourself some of the local resources, I recommend picking blackberries. Eat something that calms the mind. Take note of the surroundings. We’re all passengers here, ghostly embodiments of ourselves passing through the terrain of the living, where it rains, and is intermittently beautiful.