Showing posts with label you can't fake real. Show all posts
Showing posts with label you can't fake real. Show all posts
Four months ago, I met a girl who I knew was out of my league. The type of girl your insides just know is smarter than you, better educated, a better lay (they often are), has more fashionable clothes and cooler friends and could probably even beat you in a foot race if she had the chance. Telling you she’s beautiful would be redundant, and like any beautiful girl, she had a secret: fourteen months prior, she gave birth to her first child: a son. This story is about him.
I don’t think most of us wake up in the morning thinking about the miserable shit we’d like to befall our former neighbors, friends, or lovers. I'll go even further and suggest that no one plans on hating what we know another person loves -- but sometimes it turns out that way. Thus, I can’t shake the idea that sometimes we just aren’t supposed to like a motherfucker. Sometimes you just look down at 14 months of bouncing baby boy and think, “I wouldn’t mind if you fell down some stairs.”
I didn’t go into this blind. I play dumb sometimes -- better safe than sorry I figure -- but this time I knew full well what the stakes were. I knew what he meant to his mother: she adores him. We fast became friends, and she told me in a moment of heartbreaking vulnerability that he literally saved her from suicide. She didn’t know her purpose before him. Because of that knowledge, I never smile at him. I don’t want him feeling comfortable around me. The one time we made a connection, he giggled and wanted me to pick him up. A few minutes later he came back and hugged my leg. “He’s never done that to my guy friends before.” That would have been a good omen to a more honorable man, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it so positively. I only saw a liability: if the kid likes you, then she’ll like you, and then you’ll have to get “serious.” Never that. Serious men are miserable, and I didn’t want to be a long-term serious man. Not this soon.
I don't know exactly when it started, but I think it was inevitable for my mood toward him to change from indifference to enmity. The straw could have been the day he paused from spinning around the living room to audibly shit his pants: something he found hilarious. Maybe it was the 7am Baby Einstein wake up calls (we both hated being alone, so I slept over sometimes); maybe their lie reflected my own. We were both faking it: those tapes wouldn’t make him any smarter, not even marginally, and no matter how tight I held her at night, I couldn’t convince myself that I was not, in fact, making a dangerous mistake. “Friend, my ass. This is how women get hurt,” I thought. “This is how bad relationships start.” Maybe I was jealous that he could be with the woman who loved him; the one who loves me is half a country away.
So here I am (or was, as it’s finally over), it’s morning again; I'm waiting for the bathroom. I’m looking at her drooling, slack-jawed, $10,000 paperweight, and can’t help but picture gently placing an index finger between his big, vacant eyes and pushing backward. I wonder if he’ll topple like a stack of alphabet bricks. He waddles over, carrying a little green cylinder. He was tired of sucking on it and wanted to roll it across the room. He looks up at me, and holds it out for me to play with, but his grip isn’t strong enough and it falls to the floor. He tries to pick it up, but my foot beats him to it: a little kick sends the thing clattering across the den. He looks hurt. I feel very satisfied.
I don’t think most of us wake up in the morning thinking about the miserable shit we’d like to befall our former neighbors, friends, or lovers. I'll go even further and suggest that no one plans on hating what we know another person loves -- but sometimes it turns out that way. Thus, I can’t shake the idea that sometimes we just aren’t supposed to like a motherfucker. Sometimes you just look down at 14 months of bouncing baby boy and think, “I wouldn’t mind if you fell down some stairs.”
I didn’t go into this blind. I play dumb sometimes -- better safe than sorry I figure -- but this time I knew full well what the stakes were. I knew what he meant to his mother: she adores him. We fast became friends, and she told me in a moment of heartbreaking vulnerability that he literally saved her from suicide. She didn’t know her purpose before him. Because of that knowledge, I never smile at him. I don’t want him feeling comfortable around me. The one time we made a connection, he giggled and wanted me to pick him up. A few minutes later he came back and hugged my leg. “He’s never done that to my guy friends before.” That would have been a good omen to a more honorable man, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it so positively. I only saw a liability: if the kid likes you, then she’ll like you, and then you’ll have to get “serious.” Never that. Serious men are miserable, and I didn’t want to be a long-term serious man. Not this soon.
I don't know exactly when it started, but I think it was inevitable for my mood toward him to change from indifference to enmity. The straw could have been the day he paused from spinning around the living room to audibly shit his pants: something he found hilarious. Maybe it was the 7am Baby Einstein wake up calls (we both hated being alone, so I slept over sometimes); maybe their lie reflected my own. We were both faking it: those tapes wouldn’t make him any smarter, not even marginally, and no matter how tight I held her at night, I couldn’t convince myself that I was not, in fact, making a dangerous mistake. “Friend, my ass. This is how women get hurt,” I thought. “This is how bad relationships start.” Maybe I was jealous that he could be with the woman who loved him; the one who loves me is half a country away.
So here I am (or was, as it’s finally over), it’s morning again; I'm waiting for the bathroom. I’m looking at her drooling, slack-jawed, $10,000 paperweight, and can’t help but picture gently placing an index finger between his big, vacant eyes and pushing backward. I wonder if he’ll topple like a stack of alphabet bricks. He waddles over, carrying a little green cylinder. He was tired of sucking on it and wanted to roll it across the room. He looks up at me, and holds it out for me to play with, but his grip isn’t strong enough and it falls to the floor. He tries to pick it up, but my foot beats him to it: a little kick sends the thing clattering across the den. He looks hurt. I feel very satisfied.
Foreword by Darryl Ratcliff:
We live in a society that has rejected the idea of "black"and "white", right and wrong, good and evil. Most people don't even agree that such old-fashioned notions like "the truth" even exists. Perception is what rules our world, and not just any perception, but your perception. However, even though we believe we live in a world of technicolored gray - very rarely do we actually explore those real life experiences from which we draw these conclusions. In these series of stories we will explore what it is that makes our world grey, what inspires our moral relativism. Often we encounter moments in our lives that do not make sense - where our actions clash with our values - where what we thought we believed starts to crumble. Many times these moments are traumatic, sometimes they are funny, often they are surprising, but they are always moments where we are at our most human. Many of these stories will contain anti-heroes, will have no clear morals, and may very well be disturbing. Good.
The purpose of the Boundary series is to cause the reader to question, to empathize with another persons experience, and perhaps even be comforted by how deeply flawed we can be - how even really good people can do bad things - how we sometimes give in to our animal urges - how we are most often fully alive right at that point where we are in the greatest danger of losing our humanity.
We encourage all of our readers to dig deep within themselves and write down their own boundary experience(s) - at the very least comment on the experiences of others. If you do write a story you can send it to artstarblog@gmail.com.
Thanks for supporting Art Star and always remember "you can't fake real".
-smartblackboy
We live in a society that has rejected the idea of "black"and "white", right and wrong, good and evil. Most people don't even agree that such old-fashioned notions like "the truth" even exists. Perception is what rules our world, and not just any perception, but your perception. However, even though we believe we live in a world of technicolored gray - very rarely do we actually explore those real life experiences from which we draw these conclusions. In these series of stories we will explore what it is that makes our world grey, what inspires our moral relativism. Often we encounter moments in our lives that do not make sense - where our actions clash with our values - where what we thought we believed starts to crumble. Many times these moments are traumatic, sometimes they are funny, often they are surprising, but they are always moments where we are at our most human. Many of these stories will contain anti-heroes, will have no clear morals, and may very well be disturbing. Good.
The purpose of the Boundary series is to cause the reader to question, to empathize with another persons experience, and perhaps even be comforted by how deeply flawed we can be - how even really good people can do bad things - how we sometimes give in to our animal urges - how we are most often fully alive right at that point where we are in the greatest danger of losing our humanity.
We encourage all of our readers to dig deep within themselves and write down their own boundary experience(s) - at the very least comment on the experiences of others. If you do write a story you can send it to artstarblog@gmail.com.
Thanks for supporting Art Star and always remember "you can't fake real".
-smartblackboy
Long time, Art Starrers! Click to view at original size. It's a smidge smudgy -- I'm still cutting my teeth on artwork -> PDF conversion -- but you get the idea.
Smartblackboy hisself dropped this catchy nugget ("You can't fake real!") in a cell phone conversation some time back, and I was inspired to slap it onto one of my extensively back-catalogued I Am Art b-side photographs to bring y'all a spankin' new flyer. This confirms my suspicion that I Am Art is not simply a sextacular installation art piece whose physical manifestation crescendoed nearly two years ago, but a lifestyle. To our model, SL, wherever you are, I give you props for being patient and beautiful in spite of my near-total lack of photo-know-how.
For the curious, the flash player embedded below contains Andrew Bird's witty and whimsical "Lull" from his album Weather Systems, which soundtracked this flyer's creation. It makes a wonderful soundtrack for viewing the flyer as well.
