Why Being a Tortured Artist is Fucking Pointless

On not living in a fantasy world of unjustified self-importance.

I was living in a fantasy. Holy. Beautiful. Full of laughter. But masked by sadness and a prescription of antidepressants. It’s funny how sad you can be and keep the mentality of “I’ll be happy…then.” I thought a woman — a possible muse, however momentary, a love, a life with her — would do it. But being happy isn’t something you can count on. It’s a state of mind not all that farfetched, but it is fleeting.

Working at dead-end jobs because so-and-so did is a modern fallacy. Bukowski was a postman in the 1980s, but that doesn’t mean you should try out for USPS today. Van Gogh lived with his parents, jobless and angry. That doesn’t mean you should live in supported squalor too. Your art can and will most likely fail — as the majority of mine did in that bed bug infested house in SoCal—and the failures will press on the boundaries of your work ethic and your addictions like a a curious elephant that trunk-fucks his zoo pal, eating it’s cartoonish peanut-shits like an hors d’ oeuvre.

You can’t blame your current shit heap on previous periods of demented disdain. You are both the bearer of light and darkness, and no one else is accountable.

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Some of the shit jobs I acquired over the years included bussing tables/serving food at a “hot” Mexican joint on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. I’m not going to name names, but it was Pink Taco. My dad called me after finding out that I was working there and asked if I was a dancer at a Strip Club. I told him not to worry, the strip club was across the street where I parked my car.

Reasons why PT blew major chunkage. The lead manager was a bipolar prick who’d tell you he was there to help (that he “cared”), but really just smoked a fuck ton of cigarettes and took advantage of the bussers, myself included. Like, I’m sorry — you want me to clean the bathrooms and prepare a busy-ass list of orders? Talk about unsanitary and, oh, right — not in my job title, but sure, I’ll do it. My nails aren’t going to get chipped. You want me to do the job of a server, but get tipped significantly less and treated worse, sweating my literal dick off whilst smelling and covered in salsa, chip oil, and frijoles. Okay, I’ll do it.

The LA traffic grind was four hours a day on average, because I lived in an house full of other tortured artists all the way in Pomona. On the worst day we’re talkin’ six, seven hours. But you keep at it because “everyone else is struggling.” And some days are actually comedic because you remember that you’re a busser…getting paid about ten smacks an hour, and you’re being spoken down to as if you’re working at a law firm or a Charles Schwab. Ya know, something actually important and detrimental.

Sure there were silly perks, like listening to the servers gawk over pseudo-celebrities like RuPaul and the Mayhem guy from the insurance commercials, Josh Peck (an absolute clown ass who refused to eat the children’s quesadilla he ordered), and my personal favorite porn star Julie Cash. But the cons outweighed the “pros,” so quitting was inevitable. I drove to Hollywood on my day off, handed over a typed letter that simply said, “Thanks and good luck,” and left to never see it again.

If I had been more creative, I’d have done something like: Grab one of the twenty pound buckets of hot tortilla chips from the third story kitchen, drop it off the balcony and watch it explode all over the homeless-pee smelling parking lot beside my manager’s cube car and mass of cigarette butts. Repeat the same maneuver with the ten pound containers of fresh salsa. However, I didn’t do this because I was living in a movie.

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I was also a part timer at Target, where as a cashier you had to sell credit cards to idiots who think they’re right. First off — the customer is not always right. That is absolute crap instilled in the mind of the rude American. In any case, the motivation to freely grind out projects sometimes suffers, especially when you remind yourself you’re getting paid dick to stand there doing nothing for eight hours a day. That’s just how it goes sometimes, and yet, it’s all material to reflect on later.

Or so you tell yourself. It’s romantic, certainly, but Jesus, George ‘n Mary — living with romantic “struggling artist” thoughts is gross after awhile. It makes the poems come out like crappy ooze and makes the music sound desperate, when all you want is to be originally yourself. You don’t actually have to be the lowlife who spends his remaining $25 on crap; $10 on XJ-13 (which makes Werner Herzog’s nature docu’s sound like Chopin), $5 on Miller High Life tall boy cans from the Circle K, $7 on the cigs, and the leftover change on crap from Jack in the Box to await a troublesome stay in the rusty bathroom where a pile of your roommates pubes is touching your bare foot.

Romantic is the illusion you keep telling yourself because again, “you have to start somewhere.” Certainly, money is a necessity. It shouldn’t be the goal, but money is a tool to assist the goal. There are days that suck and there are days that rock , it’s all perspective. However, when that perspective is being murdered daily the challenge is getting passed the “what’s the point?” You’re already without friends post-college, so the doubts creep in. The lethargic personalities of self surface and overall unhappiness is achieved.

It took getting out of the haze, moving to Phoenix, AZ, to realize that I am in control. Looking to someone else for an ounce of happiness is crap and it’ll only lead to unfortunate dissatisfaction. I had to stop smoking weed, and I had to start taking myself seriously. There are endless bits n bobs out there to sidetrack us from what we want, but again, if you don’t even have love for yourself, you might as well kill yourself.

I contemplated that for a while, the notion of winding up in the 27 club a “cool/romantic” ending — but that’s just not ME me. That’s not the kind of freedom I was looking for because ultimately I’d have lost to all the bullshit that was bogging me down in the first place. That would have been giving up in the easiest way possible.

There’s also distraction by dreams of love. I had lost myself in the fantasy of being with that gorgeous Londoner. The idea took control of my then present reality, thus altering and contradicting what I knew personal independence to really be and to really mean. It may sound silly, but when you’re inspired by great artists, they all have that (some)one they write for, while still very much being themselves. I had forgotten how to live for me…which just makes no sense.

To do well outside you gotta be well inside. That’s how beautiful, non-contradictory dichotomies come into existence. And if you bog down your spare time wallowing in the negative emotions from work, your art suffers. If you spend every fucking hour outside of work with a significant other, or dreaming of one — your art will suffer. Maybe they are that lover or muse or something, but if you’re not doing the work, the art, then you’ll continue having blue balls. Seriously…who wants to live in a perpetual state of blue balls?

Kurt Vile has a lyric that goes, "You gotta be alone to figure things out sometimes; be alone, when even in a crowd of friends…” Another way to look at it is Bukowski, “You get so alone at times that it just makes sense.” Ultimately, you have to live for you. Not for someone else. Not for the 9–5. Not for the shit boss that takes advantage. If you aren’t good inside, how can you expect to be good out?

Good news. You’re in control over this threshold. Now I work at a Phoenix call center. I have a backyard. And after a long day on the sales floor, it’s nice to sit with a cig and a beer looking out over the backyard envisioning a third chimenea, the sun burning it’s last before an evening snooze.

(Thanks to Isaac Simpson)

by Timothy Barnett