11012005

Warning: this is shaping up to be exceptionally long, but it's going to be here for a while so you can come back to it if you get tired and/or bored. This is going to be another pulling stuff out that I never really wanted to write about (much like what was going down here over the summer), but not prompted by any major outside calamity like that was. And, again, this is about my brain, and how it works, and why I do the things I do and act the way I act. For a lot of my life, I have been very afraid of my imagination. My brain always feels like it's running a million miles an hour and whenever I try to get anything out of it it comes out wrong and bad and makes me uncomfortable and that's why I write about things that are real and true, because they're there and solid already and I can't do anything to them. So for most of my "artistic career" I have been doing either long autobiographical narratives (like the one you're reading now) or short, meaningless fluff pieces. And you know, that's easy and comfortable and I could probably do it forever and it wouldn't be a big deal. But it's starting to freak me out a little bit. One thing that's not really well communicated with all this is how much of my life I spend in a slightly detached fantasy world. The inside of my head is always percolating with imagined future conversations, tendrils of thoughts and concepts running every which way - what if I could pick up that tree? What if I could go back in time right now? What if I had said this instead of that, or had the chance to talk to this person or that person again, right now? What if I was in the body of that squirrel? What if my head exploded? Constantly. And that's why it's hard for me to talk to people sometimes, or explain things right, because the inside of my brain is this constant tornado of thoughts and ideas. And whenever I try to tell somebody about any of these, the natural response is to treat me like I'm crazy, which God knows I might just be. But if I'm crazy, then that's what I am. And I'm not sure if "getting help" would actually help. I've never been to a therapist or mental health professional who could really understand or relate to the suite of conditions up in this piece. I occupy a pretty unique position in the world - teetering on this precipice of public life and private, fame and failure. I never wanted to be an "internet celebrity," I didn't start doing this to accomplish anything. All I wanted was to teach myself HTML so I could get a job. And then, once HTML couldn't get you jobs anymore, I don't know why I kept going. Obviously, taking my life and polishing it into a fiction satisfied something in me - by writing this stuff out, reducing it to pith and vinegar, I take the messy unknown variables of life and smooth them into the comfort zone of fiction. Writing about my life saved me from having to think about my life. But the life I write about is not necessarily the life I live. I grew up existing primarily on an internal level, and as I became an adult, I have always had problems reconciling that with living externally and communicating what I'm feeling. So it's like there's two of me - the intensely emotional and imaginative public me (represented by a large cloud with sound effects coming out of it) and the external, facile, surface level me (represented by a book with the insides hollowed out). And I don't know if I can live with keeping these two things separate for a lot longer. And one leaks into another all the time - my relationships with people collapse because I'm too afraid to let them into the in-life and my art suffers because there's too much of the out-life in it. When I was on the subway last night, I had a hallucination like the ghosts one from a few days ago, only in this there were thousands of tendrils of light escaping from me, but they weren't taking anything from me, they were more like a cat's whiskers or an insect's feelers. I want to make art and live a life that expresses these feelings, and I can't do that the way I'm doing it now. As I get closer to finishing Red Eye, Black Eye, I'm starting to panic a little bit that I'm trapped in this pair of ruts forever. So, this: my New Year's resolution for 2005 is to not talk about myself anymore. If you want to know what I'm up to, feel free to ask. All current autobiographical projects (Red Eye, Black Eye, the dreams thing (sort of qualifies), the thing I'm doing for You Ain't No Dancer) will be finished). And then? I'm going to let the inside of my brain come out for a while. So that's the end of this, at least for a year. It'll still hang around, like all of the other skins I've sloughed off, and who knows? Maybe I'll climb back in again. But for now, it's time to move another way. I'll catch you later.

DECEMBER
all content (c) 2004 k. thor jensen