Wired

Wired Anxiety (Wikimedia Commons)

For years I've trucked through many different kinds of creative crowds, ones that are particularly acute, emotional, and open by nature, as we're taught and so inclined. Through the years, we've openly discussed just about any facet of the human experience fit for talk, and some things not so carefully done. Artists creatively problem-solve in many different types of ways, so obsessive chatter from neurotics tend to grate on our collective nerves after awhile, like watching a dog run around in circles without benefit of a funny video online, and you are that dysfunctional unfunny human to us. Where exactly are is this going? Brainstorming is fun, if it produces something eventually.

Like many artistic people, I've struggled in the past with blowhard college boyfriends who spent a lot of time tanked on talk, high on way more than actual learning. My first real boyfriend was the first person to openly admit to me that he vastly preferred natural biochemistry to artificially-induced ones, expensive as drugs tend to be, because of the vulnerable compulsiveness that actively marks addiction. He seemed to think that higher learning meant you could ramble on about any crazy idea that you had out loud to anyone in the room, rather than internalizing concepts or, even better, writing them down cohesively, but that's why he's an entertainment lawyer who guards artistic paychecks that he's dependent on for a living, and you read me instead of listening to him talk, not that he didn't try every trick in the book to knock me down as many pegs above him as I was.

My father and every one of my brothers hated him for being the all-boys prep-school quarterback he bragged about endlessly, along with his pretensions towards greatness for being a blue-eyed French Canadian/Irish guy living in our world on the east coast. Yeah, dubious at best. It was until years later that I saw him accurately depicted in the awesome comedy "Wedding Crashers" (he finally realized his media dreams of fame!), through Bradley Cooper's dead-on impression of a back-stabbing bitch of a boyfriend with serious homoerotic issues that I realized how many of my friends, family, and acquaintances despised him, which happily brings us together, here on my site today: a place where we can all get along, and group grievances are finally aired out in the open...not that he did any of that.

He plays a lot of "head games" that go nowhere and do nothing, which I often found to be more common among non-creatives, because they have to wait while we make the work the world uses, as a set of people that I sometimes feel sorry for, because they're relegated to the sidelines of life while the big hitters take the risks that earn the big glory. He can't do that because of his disorders (among them addiction, compulsiveness, Lupus, and a big case of "asshole"), but that doesn't stop him from trying hard to impress. I've always hated his egotism based on being a "serious scholar", which often means he spends a lot of time trying to marginalize the star power on center stage ineffectively (ironic as his job must be for him), and that's what I remember most about him now, besides his chemical addictions; an insecurity so violent, he loses way more ground than he gains.

He tried hard to convince me that I was dumb (because I'm an artist, so "genius=stupid", I guess), and often "crazy" over serious family problems that I didn't control as a working class teenage girl, and that my "partying" was motivated from the same interesting, glamorous manic ennui as his that he would only obliquely refer to in "nonversations" that didn't matter, with people too stoned or drunk to care about his points, because directly addressing his issues would make him lose precious leverage in society, even though as a spoiled white boy from a poncy private school, he had all the power then.

It was desperate and striving, character flaws that I finally couldn't forgive or put up with anymore, along with the many unsolicited hours of boredom he would bring to the card table, when all we really wanted to do back then was play drinking games and have fun during our precious off-hours from work, or school, or both. I have never forgotten his immature pillow-talk about his chemical addictions that I thought were just puppy love ravings over my sexual prowess, and the desire for me that he channeled into his "highs" that he could yank me around with, though given the difference in our looks and status, it was highly unlikely to ever pan out. It was okay if he was moodily and maudlin, but if I had an actual serious illness, I was "weak" and I'd never be "virile" like him (see also: "Gaston"), though in reality, he's the one with the in vitro triplets and I'm the one with the long-lived fertility.

If I spent a lazy summer drowsing and dreaming, I was a bad housewife hurting my chances at a favorable marriage with him in the future, because I didn't get twitchy or itchy from seeing dishes in the sink. If I had a hard time managing my very sick and very large extended family as a working young woman in school, it was obviously because I was too stupid to do so; I couldn't read books like he could as a history major (because I'd already spent my youth reading as many books as I could find), and that must be sad. All I could do was get into a school for brilliant Leonardo da Vinci-types :( Poor me!

He'd drone on for hours, interesting only to him and his particular biochemistry, like the badly staged scenes he directed with a drama queen's tenseness, in these diva-like displays that had absolutely no talent behind them at all, and that was the crux of it: he earns off of talent, because he's drawn to us as much as he hates us for it, in a classic up-and-down, love/hate cycle that became the biggest bore I'd ever met. His passions for some brand of iced tea were rave-worthy and "smile-rific" which you HAD TO try or he'd just die, whereas my charcoal drawings were lame for an untrained teenage girl, and "EW!" Nudes! Who would do something like that?!

For the record, Bart, the productive people who run the world do "gay" stuff like that. That's who. By the way, you're welcome for the nice house in Brooklyn, the wife (with those unfortunate brown eyes that you told me hurt my chances for a good match in college...oops!) and 3.5 kids you forced your poor wife to bio-engineer for you with rounds and rounds of expensively-provided fertility treatments (because you're sterile) with long hospital stays that required her total bed rest for months; the same very family you step out on and/or check out from physically and mentally periodically, because your work is so important as a contracts guy for your union that you have to hit the road whenever things get bad, seeking the rush you need from other people's more exciting lives (like the actors who provide for you and your family, you know, "gay") that you watch from the set in the shadows, picky as ever, and fussily looking for problems that will cause a pay-out for violations from your plush union. You can thank this "dumb artist" for your life, whenever you get the chance. Bro.

 

Hey, O-towners! This one's for you today. I felt your pain. Thanks for hanging with me back in the day anyway, arrogantly over-bearing boyfriends notwithstanding. I really needed the support, just like you did. 

Chameleon

http://wiki.waveborn.com/becoming-so-good-they-can-t-ignore-you

Competitive media companies tend to be bitchy hot-spots for gossip, as employees fight it out among themselves for the most coveted positions within a house according to their appropriate levels, or not, as the case may be. You think some of the books you read are freaky? You should meet some of the people who make them....shudder. Bookish types tend to be somewhat anti-social: think of a mad scientist who just HAS TO clean every beaker in the the lab twice or thrice to guard against invisible alien...er, germs, and you're there.

Many well-read people are simply addicts with a bent for technical and highly repetitive labor clothed in sheep's garb, but take away their main "jones", and they're like any other addict; snarling nasty vicious beasts. I love reading as much as the next professional publisher, but take it away from me and I know I won't freak out, miss it as I may, because I'm in such a phase right now when it's more important for me to produce work through writing than being your passive audience.

It's the same thing for most well-trained artists who go through different phases of productivity based on many factors that include time, money, inclination, location; same as any other field, with the exception that there is no one to pass the buck to, which makes for much more difficult productive periods than the average "joe", but such is life. Because we create content long before the public has access to it, our companies (and lives) are filled with intrigue and possibility which, in the wrong hands, makes for a potent cocktail that people not born to the work can't handle.

I see bound galleys at garage sales all the time, but it's one of the most unethical acts a publishing professional can do, because leaking a book early to the public deprives everyone in the work queue the right to earn off it as a property, the way that buying bootleg DVD's is serious intellectual theft, but catch any drunk at the bar on Friday night, and you've got a thief looking to score, hot to brag about his "already seen it" status to other junkies who use it as leverage, too. Why not just wait? I always liked waiting to see something, like being pleasantly surprised on Christmas morning, not that I need to have the element of mystery to enjoy anything. I'm happy with "spoilers" that deprive media junkies of their high, because I'm a mature adult who understands that there's tons of available content for just about any person out there in the world, and as such, I accept that I probably won't be able to get to all of it, so why try? Just relax, and enjoy it.

But, some people need dirty nasty secrets to hold over one another as bribes, just like assholes in a typical office do. We all know them: they're that shifty-eyed kid who sneaks onto your email behind your back, so he can develop some "strategy" to foil your genius without you knowing it, even though he (and every other person on the payroll) is utterly dependent on you for income, thus breeding the hatred that envy inspires. I dated a typical ad guru who knew all the tricks of the trade: hire brilliant but vulnerable people like, say, a single woman living paycheck-to-paycheck in the city, just one small check away from bankruptcy but famous anyway, even though you should, like, NEVER say it to her face or she'll, like, know it and stuff, and there goes secrecy as a strategy!

So, I know all the big personality types who peddle our wares, grudgingly as "no-talents" tend to be as a group, but also utterly dependent on us, and isn't that why they turn on us? It's a pretty easy formula to suss out, much like the reason the retarded bully in the playground hates everyone: simply because you're there, and because his father's a mean drunk, so they're set up to be that way. Anyway, during our brief time dating (most of which the ad guy spent in competition with the other man I was dating), he asked me a lot of leading questions about the "other man" disguised as "support" from the modern guy looking to "score" with a beautiful woman. After a quick while, it actually became a pseudo-gay relationship between the two of them through me. He also thought it was bitchy fun to "out" a well-known and highly respected actor to me, simply because I knew his work well and the women he's collaborated with creatively, like, say an infamous Broadway actress with very curly hair (thanks for not selling out "soul sister") who can pass for my doppelganger at times.

I was nonplussed because lots of people are gay, to which he became a little twitchy about it, "Oh, oh sorry...did you have  a 'crush' on him?" Uh, no...never really thought about it before. "Because if you did, I'm so sorry!" Yeah, no sweat, dude. Actually, we were in downtown Brooklyn on a warm day, and I was thinking about pizza at a "famous" place that's always crowded with tourists, and as a native New Yorker, I never fucking wait on lines for our food, like some gimmicky tourist trap meant to gouge the unsuspecting. I cook better than most people anyway! He seemed curiously let-down that I couldn't give a fuck about some artist's sex life, and why would I? What does it have to do with me? It's the same thing at work: why would I give a fuck about who sleeps with who, and when? I make the work, they sell it and give me the profits I earn through my own labor. It's a pretty effective formula for craftspeople that's worked since we thought of it many moons ago.

It did give me a lot insight into why people like him sell-out so quickly; it's the fear that the money will dry up, once we figure out who they really are, which isn't true for experts like myself. Like my mentors told me, do your job well and that's your security. You don't need all the bullshit. If you work hard, you'll succeed, and that's always been the case with me, because nothing beats hard work. Anyway, after he and I necessarily drifted apart because he couldn't figure out how to work with an open honest person like myself, I noticed that he drifted out west, after his ex-wife moved there with his one child, the same woman he loved/hated by alternately craving her sex and then cheating on her to get her attention, like a ten year-old in crafts class off of his Ritalin. Really? Skirt-cashing the very woman he despises? Oy....strange are the ways of the disordered classes.

Anyway, I'm counting on him cyber-stalking me today without telling me how much he loves my work (and that happens every day, too), so let me take this time to ease his mind: back in the day, we "the knowing public" also knew that Liberace was gay, as we did about Richard Chamberlain, George Michael, and the fabulously feminine Boy George, and you know what? We love their music and their art anyway, because as Steve Martin once famously said, all you have to do to be a master artist is work harder than anyone you know, and "be so good that they can't ignore you". Ain't that the truth? There...now it's out there. The truth is out there! See you on the flip side of life, kids, and all the other "minors" in my audience. I see you!

http://bit.ly/1SBWvgb

http://bit.ly/1SBWvgb 

Borderline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_dog

Being an international drug dealer is nerve-wracking work, not that I had great credentials. My asshole boyfriend from Oneonta forced me into it as a student, like the babbling controlling douchebag he really is. One of his older brothers was taller and more handsome than he was, attending school at the same time. His boho musician lifestyle (he was dating John Cryer's half-sister at the time) fascinated his younger brother, without my boyfriend having any genuine talents besides smoking pot and talking on and on and on about it. He works in entertainment as a lawyer now. Being a "bullshit artist" is his true gift, which made him hate the arts (and people in the arts) even more. 
I knew I had to jettison him later on down the line, because of his obvious distaste for skill sets that he could never possess, but that didn't stop him from trying to use and abuse me while he could. 

When I told him I would be attending art school in some way in the near-future, he decided to act like I was a cruel deceiver to him that he could thwart by transferring to McGill University as a SUNY student first, like my life existed only in relation to him and his ego. Along with his weird baby-style head games came a huge host of other insecurities he had a very long list to, that he found extremely exciting to bore you with in overwrought detail, like how his musician bro could lure women to him, because he was a lover. It seemed to him to be this pretend magnet that other people had, as a greater superpower he couldn't deconstruct for himself, no matter how hard he tried.
I basically gave in to him and his whining, if he carried on long enough (he's the youngest of six children), like a harried exhausted mom with toddlers would. Yeah, fine, let's move on from this, will ya? 

And that's exactly how his hare-brained scheme involving pot came to be. Once he found out that I was willing to take a train from Grand Central Station all the way to Montreal, he thought he had a real "live" one on the line. He seized onto this idea that his classmates would be driven wild with fan appreciation over his securing real weed for them, because all they had in Canada was hash, and I knew by the way he drove me to it, that he had a real hidden agenda, which was this: getting me arrested and derailing my college career by getting me thrown into jail, because I got into a great Ivy League school, which proved that I'm smarter and more talented than him, despite all the tall tales he'd been feeding to his friends up there, where he thought he could lie his way to success, and that's exactly how it went down. 
He thought he got "the jump" on me by using his superior mental powers to browbeat me into buying a quarter bag of pot that I carefully hid among my stuff. 

Sure, it was a tense half an hour or so of waiting, when the train stopped at the borderline between the states and Canada, but, of course, he'd actually schooled me in their exact time frames (because actual criminals are not as smart as the cops who catch them, in real life), because luckily for me, he couldn't resist the urge to prove to me how brilliant he was in his plan, by actually talking me all the way through it. Sure enough, Border Patrol came through with bomb/drug-snuffing German Shepherds and everything, but because my suitcase was stowed high above my head on the racks above me (and out of reach of anyone else), the cops took one look at my angelic little face, read my passport and paperwork, and then moved on down the line. 
It took awhile for them to go down the entire length of the train, but scour it they did, until the final lurch of the car that signaled we were moving on. Whew! I made it! 

He'd also done the same strange contest with me about pot in Amsterdam during a summertime trip to Europe, hoping that I would get caught and he wouldn't, but all that happened was that he smoked pot over the rest of his summer at his family's home in Bay Ridge, while I rode it out empty-pocketed in New City, because my pot portion was nabbed by a stoner mail carrier, and his was not. That was it. Once I got to his school in Montreal, all that happened as a result of my pot stash was that we got high with his friends while drinking Canadian beer, instead of smoking hash in Oneonta while drinking New York beer. Like, wow, dude. It was kind of like driving across the border to buy beer with a higher alcohol content in Canada, and then driving it back to O-town: all we did with it was have a party. That was it. 

He tried his hand at a few other petty con games, like saying that his rather ugly (but, like, wayyy smarter) Canadian friends had given him the bad news that I was incredibly beautiful but, like, unfortunately for me, not as smart as him, like they were some college board I hoped to "ace", but that the good news was that they could totally see why he was attracted to me, which he delivered in a rather sour, downcast way, like a doctor giving his patient bad news. Awwww, that's too bad, Bart....<insert frown face here> In another unfortunate coincidence for him, I was already accepted into the best art and design school in the world with the lowest admission rates on Planet Earth (as well as every other high-ranking art school I applied to), while his "brilliant" friend Jean-Paul was relegated to a small-time Nova Scotian art school for his next college degree, in this highly ironic Acadian twist that's all me and my true grit, done for you in this century, y'all. You in my country now, boy! And that's exactly how it all goes down in this girls' real life "Game of Thrones": game, set, match. Done! See you on the beach 'round the bonfire, mes amis. This mama's coming home.