The Importance of Satisfaction
My story isn’t really a story. I’m a grown adult that has had a lot of opportunities to redeem myself for past digressions, disappointments, or otherwise just failures from my own spiritual core. I already digress. But also not really because there is inherently a point in this or that; stylistic devices aside, there is a significant weight anyone has to carry regarding their own ownership of/on life, like a ripple effect of consequences that all get jumbled together, and you don’t always have the resources to separate any of it. For me now and maybe perhaps the past few months, years, etc., I’ve always had an itch to see whether I can prove myself worthy of myself by creating art, taking up some kind of creative path, photography, writing, music, etc., etc. Since I am already so deeply interwoven with these aspirations, sometimes I need to be hard on myself in order to take responsibility for the type of content I produce.
I think with that said, there is this illusion of wanting to start from scratch sometimes, when all else has failed. Recently I took to making some fun, stupid, goofy rap music; curious to see, again, whether I had anything in me with potential to create something actually good. I did eight recordings in about two months, each ranging in quality (but with the intention of trying my best anyway). Whenever I get into one of these creative moods it tends to occupy my mind greatly, almost like a distraction from other things bothering me or potentially bothering me. This poses the problem of getting satisfaction from it, to put it bluntly. I’d imagine this is common to artists in general; that you delude yourself into thinking you have this talent to produce unique, original… stuff. I will give myself a little credit, enough to say I have a few songs that are kind of interesting (in an eccentric way, which is actually not such a good thing). Out of the eight songs, maybe one or three of them are somewhat okayish? Nah. This leaves me feeling empty, I guess. I know the whole approach and mindset was this halfway serious thing, but I guess I was hoping to deliver something better. And now that it’s said and done, I mean, I still can go back and try to fix some stuff about it. Except I don’t think I should at this point. Since most of the musical content is pretty base lyrically, and tonally… corny-sounding, even though it was fun at the time, it’s lingering affect on me personally defaults back to me being serious. So it’s like, I don’t know. I’d like to be taken more seriously, and at the same time I can’t stand myself being serious.
It’s hard to explain, as they say. A similar thing happened with this blog, naturally. I kept up one post of something with a very questionable style and approach. That wasn’t realistically me as I think of myself. In reality, I try not to think too much of myself, or about myself, even. I’ve been told I have a dark aura. I usually don’t like to give it any more power than it has or had on me. With this one post I kept up, as much as I hate to admit it, it hit the nail on the coffin, on the head, so to speak. Every now and then, which I would rationalize as a perfectly human characteristic, I do have grandiose conceits of myself. I might think I’m a secretly gifted writer, or musician, or… I don’t know. Seems to be mostly a divide between those two creative outlets. Despite everything I’ve been expressing in this, I think the most genuine aspect of my creativity is that I don’t have a clue what to call it, or what to name it, or what to identify it with, or anything. I believe that is sui generis, which is something I’ve alluded to before somewhere else, to be perfectly vague.
Where I stand, though, is what I’m really trying to narrow down to. The thought keeps occurring to me that I’m not receptive to the idea of being more active in any kind of community, or promoting my craft or anything. I don’t like the idea of other people judging me, when I judge myself enough. I can already imagine the outcome with my sixth sense, intuitively. In comparison to other songs, artists, writers, books; that kind of perspective, I believe, is necessary to have. The other people who are judging you will have their own tastes, preferences, and yeah. I don’t see me being relevant to any of that, even though I sometimes cultivate odd tastes and preferences in books or music, and yeah. Lately I like abstract rap, Memphis rap, oddball, outsider rap, MF Doom, NYC type rap, rap from different music scenes, maybe even Alaskan rap. It’s interesting to me that horrorcore rap has so many emcees claiming to be the originator of it. Little itches of curiosity like that keep me going. I guess… I don’t think I have a problem keeping attention on things, although it can feel that way.
I have a fear of losing meaning in myself, in my life. This is always a threat that I think creates its own problems around the problems I already have. I will say this. I don’t actually care to ever be an icon of something. I don’t have the inner strength to raise myself up to that level where I’d have to withstand public scrutiny. Being famous is something that keeps the herd going, as if everyone is all secretly wishing they’d be famous or so outstanding in some way to deserve worldwide recognition and approval.
Even if that were the case, let me make clear here that being fam0us has a really strange problem in it. (Look at me, I’m over here always finding problems in shit; I don’t want to be that guy, but fuck it.) Look. When you are that popular, you are under constant surveillance; any mistake or imperfection is that much more amplified, because you have the gaze of millions of viewers, ready to cover your body like ants on a decomposing corpse. I have a theory that when you’re famous, you’re already dead. This is where my schizophrenia resurfaces.
I mean, that’s hyperbole. Sometimes I get these creative notions about life and death. I imagine that when you die, you get celebrated as a celebrity in some alternate universe where it doesn’t even matter how gifted or talented you are/were, but in that alternate universe you do everything right, and only the most flattering things of yourself and about yourself get brought to attention. Now this is a pretty dumb theory, if I do say so myself. It can serve more as a rhetorical device, to say that there is an abundance of celebrity-ism (celebrityism?) in our current state of events, with certain advances and emphasis on futuristic technology augmenting our lives, and yeah. Here’s the thing with that. If you want to know how worthy you are of being famous, just make a social media profile and see how many other people will like you. I swear, it’s like we are just some weird social experiment to an undercover alien race, which is not something I’d wish to speculate on any further, seeing as I failed the assignment already by figuring out I am not worthy of millions of viewers. I would hate just a few people trying to start shit with me and talking shit in some way. I already have that a little bit at my current job, actually.
As much of a smartypants I can be, when I see that same likeness of it in me in someone else, it just fucking kind of pisses me off. I’m already rereading sentences as I write them in my head, mocking words and shit, like “smartypants” I hear someone say in a mocking tone. I mean, sometimes at work it’s just adapting to it that I talk shit to them back right in front of them, but it’s never in too serious of a way. So even though sometimes it bothers me, I just do the same thing to them back and forget about it. I’d imagine some people who are more sensitive would be shy around people like that. In a way this does translate over to how I imagine my music or writing in relation to other people. There is definitely someone out there who’s going to have some smartypants thing to say, some way to mock me, and I’d rather be private with my creative endeavors instead. Not that I am necessarily shy. What it comes down to is that I’m so irrelevant anyway that I should be grateful I haven’t caught on or gained any larger attention.
This piece of writing here isn’t supposed to be anything really good. Overall, I just want to apologize to anyone I’ve ever disappointed or disturbed with my lame preconceived notion of being someone important. I am particularly sorry to one of my old soulmates, who I had to scare away with such nonsense. I am also sorry to myself for being an ironic try-hard of sorts. I haven’t looked back to read altogether the sum of the parts of what I wrote here now. (Okay I just did, and it is what it is.) I need to just leave whatever is left on the table alone, and move away from this secret pet project of music and writing.
Maybe one day perhaps I’ll finally figure out a new name for myself. I said that before, tried again, and failed. That will probably happen again, too. You never know until you do, and then you know, you know? I don’t know.
Signed,
Anonymous to anonymous.
