Coloring Outside the LInes

I have been making Art my entire life. My Mother put a crayon in my hand as soon as I could hold one and I never stopped. I cared little for "the lines" in coloring books and saw then only as the vaguest of guides. The same was true of natural colors. If I wanted to make a tree purple, I would, much to the horror of many adults and lots of other kids in my classes.
"That thing you're drawing (painting, coloring, whatever) doesn't look anything like THAT!"
They point in abject astonishment at the drawing, then at the subject of my drawing.
"Who cares?"
It looked like that to ME. Maybe a more accurate phrasing would be that is always felt like that to me.
ME.
If I wanted to express someone else’s view I would ghostwrite someone else’s Autobiography, cutting out all the embarrassing parts, highlighting and over aggrandizing many dubious "achievements" of the most mediocre and average sorts in a quest to mislead and misappropriate in a quest for a fragile acceptance.

I tried to be someone else for a while, in adopted attitudes and behaviors that always felt alien to me. It felt a lot like wearing someone else's tailored, but ill fitting clothes. Tacky pattern, wrong color, too tight on the balls, saggy about the ass, choking my neck, long in the sleeves and constricting my shoulders.

For this guy, creating and making art involves a sort of Seppuku. I open up my stomach and let my guts spill out where they will. I don't stop and ask why, I just watch them spill out in the direction they wish to go. I may try to guide them, or even attempt to push them back in, but ultimately they choose their own way to go.

Bruce Lee said, in describing his philosophy, "Be like water". Know as much as you can about everything, be extremely flexible and turn with the tides or against them as advantage sees fit, and know your world so well you can act without thinking and know the result will probably be good and flow easily to the next path. Study, contemplate, know. Be aware that anything is subject to change. Find the elements of what you avoid because of difficulty and attack those. If your weakness is what you do not enjoy you may be ill prepared, much like knowing one's enemy.

Often I vomit on the page. It's blank, unknown and I just want that over with. So I make a mark. As long as you start you are most of the way home on your trip. I have always used Art the way people use a vice. I throw myself into it to purge the detritus out of my ping ponging mind. Uncomfortable thoughts persist, enter at will, ping around like a ricochet. Smack, smack, smack all around the inside of my skull. The brush moves and it moves on the fuck out of me. The guest that wouldn’t leave, left.
For a few minutes at least.

Gotta Start Somewhere or The First Day

It first became an issue I couldn’t ignore around May 2001. I was walking down the hill outside my building in the Bronx in early afternoon when the Sun is at it's brightest. I had begun taking to sunglasses within the previous couple of years because the sun seemed so much brighter. I figured I was 32 and was just getting older, but that day, as I walked down the hill, I realized I had forgotten my shades and the sun appeared as if a nuclear explosion was smearing across the sky. The landscape appeared awash in tiny black insects like gnats that appeared to follow me wherever I turned my gaze. Thousands upon thousands of dots almost obliterating my view. I had to squint my eyelids as far as they would close and still be able to see to try and minimize the searing burn from the overactive light. I somehow made it down the hill, bought my butts, and traveled up the hill again, facing the light. It was excruciating. I knew I was in serious trouble.

This problem had been accelerating in magnitude over the previous couple of years and wouldn’t just go away on its own, like I had hoped. However I didn’t have any kind of medical insurance or any knowledge whatsoever about obtaining any kind of treatment. My eyesight had become so bad I stopped getting "asked back" to the freelance gigs I had due to my ever mounting fuckups that I couldn’t even see. I was becoming broke quick so out of pocket was a major impediment. It was another seven months before I finally went to see a Doctor and another nine years before I saw a competent one. In those years through to the present I have spent a lot of time in the dark, literally and metaphorically.