subject: Mud In The Shower Drain of Toiling in Obscurity [print this page] Mud In The Shower Drain of Toiling in Obscurity
Recently, there's been a whispered rebellion against "toiling in obscurity." That exhausted but applicable clich is the rational fear of those navigating a tsunami sea of mediocrity and half-baked sensationalization. This one wants his biographer present and this one titles everything sexually. This one with his bourgeois Whole Foodsy interpretations of revolutionary thought. All of it made-for-web and as weary of itself as it is of any inflammatory truthful harmony. You'll be a blip on history's radar, spineless twats that you are. You've spent so much time mutually masturbating with your collegiate confederates that you've forgotten to decently write. You'll be remembered as armchair observers so disgusting your only rival was Noam Chomsky.
How many of you whores swear you're living? I watched a woman dig through a heap of garbage for fabric yesterday. She grinned each time she found someone's refuse. Her creations will end up on the backs of children. You're the resourceful ones in this world, though, aren't you? So deftly in love with yourselves that you don't see the havoc you're wreaking. It's in the air you breatheinjustice is invisible until it's granted a name. The dust that came out of my lungs last night was mud in the shower drain and my hair was dirty white. It's curious that some of us can be here and others can be where you sit, basking in opportunity, sipping coffee brewed in your carpeted middle-class kitchens. Five of the men I work with grew up without mothers, others came from orphanages. Most of us knew poverty early on.
You'll keep your delusions of equality and democracy, I'll keep my head on straight.
The phrases echoing in my head are those of people who think that toiling in obscurity is not a deserved toil. There are not many ways to look at this. This idea that you shouldn't ever struggle, that struggle is the enemy, that you haven't any need to know rejection, that there is really a place for everyone in the arts, that you shouldn't have to force your foot in the door, that you don't need your own ideas (a mid-list author's are good enough), that somehow it's okay to be anemic, half-hearted, and cloned in your every movementthat somehow the same rules of pop music should apply to letters and the same benefits should be reaped as a resultthese notions are lost on me. I don't think I'm proposing a new philosophy but instead a cheerful return to honesty.
I'd much rather toil in obscurity my whole life and remain so after death than be held in high regard undeservedly. Fame and fortune are far removed from the creative process. The means are the ends, you bastards! If your means involve the creative energy of another, then so should your ends! All this hero worship and love of those in castles far from here with their perfect families and inherited wealth; premature production and backbone desecration. It's all murder of something necessarythe reality that bred the very best of what makes our historical footing so precarious and precious.
I'm not reacting to anything specific, but to many things specific; to you who do not love what you do but love what it does for you. I'm reacting to those of you so dishonest as to delude yourselves into thinking your story is any more important than anyone's. To these abortive sons of bitches writing from the sadist gray area that is the inability to decide what is acceptable and what is not on whose watch anything goes and shades of brown result. A painter would never get away with it.
I'm generalizing. I haven't given up.
What I see is a generation forming without me. This may be a personal indictment of those excluding me by the tertiary method of neglect. Those who couldn't get near the cool kids in grade school and thus here build their own clubs (first names everywhere I turn). And what, where is the end? My stomach spins empty circles. I want to know right now. I want to smoke a week of cigarettes awaiting your answer. What are your ambitions, really? A week to write a book you think I ought to spend two hours' pay on? Please! Go do something of which your prosperous parents approve. Stop using this community. Now.
This generation has little or possibly no time to waste. We're going to lose this one if we're not careful. We'll have another army of conglomerate vassals who won't consider thinking beyond their prescriptions. Another decade of poor disguises, misguided economics.
