perhaps
dear reader,
i want to talk about the duality of things. i have been balancing across multiple stories for weeks, trying to slot each thing into another place that makes more sense than the last place. all of this i grapple with as the outside world beats against my window with its insistence that i pay attention to all the bad it’s doing. but sometimes i don’t want to.
most times i don’t want to. i want to write my stories and make my art and put it out into the world without interference, promotion, sales tactics, capitalism getting in the way. can i not just be, can i not just reflect what is and what could be, and change a reader’s day?
it’s such a simplistic desire, to be in the world but not of it. or maybe it’s just naive, i don’t know. i feel so sloshed around by this industry, like i’ve been paddling my way back to shore for five years and it’s just not getting any closer. but i have a note in my pocket that tells me if i keep going, if i just persevere, there will be joy and reward on the other side. my efforts will not have been in vain, even if my arms are tired and my lips are cracked from dehydration and i have begun to see my bones because it has been so long since there was food.
my metaphor is excessive and angry because children are being starved right now in the real world and aren’t we all just watching with our hands carelessly behind our backs, saying what can we do what can we do?
it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with us. my complaints about wading through the publishing industry are born from the same capitalist disaster that is our current world. capitalism kills, murders, exterminates and explains it away with circumstance, law, and the self-importance it has given itself.
it is the thing that eats itself.
it has become difficult to shut that out, all of it, in order to create the thing that often saves me, saves us. art. books. stories. possibility secured and fastened to something we can hold in our hands, see with our eyes, ingest into our minds.
capitalism hates ideas that do not push its agenda forward. it knows only how to shut down ideology.
and when i say it, know that i mean men. know that i mean the groups of people in charge that we have inherited, chosen, mistakenly looked upon for refuge.
our art should do that. it should be a refuge.
it could be.
perhaps it still is.