Remember when I was obsessed with moral purity because I was actually hiding the most sinister possible secret? Remember telling other kids that I think it’s immoral to gossip? What a fucking narc! And telling the truth even when a white lie would have been far more effective and emotionally competent––I mean, I offended people a lot when I was a little kid. If it’s true, how can it hurt? When I was in the UCLA psych hospital and we were doing art, I painted a face on a piece of paper. Once it started becoming semi-semi-realistic, people started to take notice, and basically started to crowd around me in an uncomfortable way and tell me THAT’S SO GOOD! Which is nice except in my own troubled mind I’d just released a demon or whathaveyou out into the open, and a little bit of my cold troubled raw meat soul was just chilling there on the page, in full view of all these other suicidal miscreants, and basically everyone was raw dogging my essence and telling me “YES GOOD” it is GOOD you are GOOD. And I couldn’t fucking handle being judged to my absolute most central point––like here I am having exorcised this vile selfness out of me, and now there’s not only a label on it, there’s a fat stamp of APPROVAL on it? Are you kidding me? It’s one of the reasons why I prefer poetry to visual art. Everyone thinks they’re hot shit when they see a painting and can tell themselves GOOD or BAD or whatever. In a poem at least you have to spend a moment with the soul shred––you have to at least sit there and read it once or twice. Even then, a poem doesn’t lend itself to a judgement as quickly as most pieces of visual art. Except to poets, but I don’t expect most people who look at my work to even like poetry. Poetry is an easy thing to absolutely despise. I remember living in Santa Rosalia also and kids crowding around me wanting to touch my hair, and I was this little 8 year-old thing trying to understand the loud noises and feeling horribly anxious and so on. But the thing is: none of these people meant to disturb me––in fact quite the opposite––which is one of the reasons it’s almost guilt-inducing to bring these kinds of things up. Like oh no somebody liked your painting, boohoo, but actually in my little brain newly pumped with a special brand new antipsychotic fresh on the market, it was judgement day, for my idiot ass, and so on and so forth. At least I’m writing––honestly, I can’t describe how relieving it is to write after such a long hiatus of fear and depression. I can’t even tell myself I’m writing because I fear I’ll stop––
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