I have a terrible confession to make. I feel like just by saying this I’m betraying years of stone-walled Free Speech defense. The argument that artistic hate, or bad messages, are a bad influence on the childrens. The poor, helpless childrens. The crying and wailing, the great gnashing of teeth, that says we can’t expose our childrens to bad things or they will become bad people. They may do things. Horrible things. Oh the many things. Oh the many horrible things. The concern being that an idea may not exist in a hapless youngin’s head until it is put there, by a horrible rockstar who enjoys leading young folk astray and ruining all that is good and clean, and probably doesn’t even brush his teeth three-times a day. Oh the horror.
This has always been counter-argued by the fact, the idea, the suggestion, that these people are merely people themselves. The evil & terrible metal band who coats themselves in fresh chunked spewing blood every night on the closing ditty of their little good-time shows – these are men with families. They have bills to pay. They play catch with their son. They’re just normal. Just Like You. The movie maker who depicts awful & repulsive acts of drug abuse on film, and the inevitable karmic destruction on the lead protagonist because he didn’t say his Grace prayers every day, did not hail-the-mary-full-of-grace before every gangland execution…a normal man. Walks to the post office everyday. Just Like You.
That is a weak truth. There is a deeper truth. In fact, a higher truth here that you must know. These people are not normal. Quite certainly, in fact, never were. And they are quite definitely looking to ruin your life, just as theirs was ruined for them. They are artists. It’s what they do. It’s what was done to them. And the cycle must be fed. They must pay forward the affliction.
I only mention all this, because the impetus for this little thing you happen to be reading now was one of those Bad Influences. It was merely a comic book. About a bald little man. In the future. And he brought down the presidency. Mostly through doing this thing that I am doing – merely writing, moving around long enough to get the next story, be left along long enough to write it, and then do it all over again – but it’s a comic book. It is a purely fictional – untrue – piece of whatnot. It didn’t happen. Most likely will never happen. And if someone does it, it most likely will not be me. In the great cacophonous & infected ocean that is the internet, the very odds that you will intentionally stumble upon this work, perceive something worth remembering, AND THEN come back again in a week? Staggering beyond even being considered possible.
But I am sick. And it’s too late for me. I have been duly infected by one man that was once infected himself. And in turn each artist before him who conferred the contagion upon this man was also likewise afflicted. And it reaches back beyond everything ever. The need to reach into someone and do what was done unto you. To be reborn again in art. Broken down to its basic components, you have these facts:
1. Art affects you.
2. Artists have been affected by art themselves.
3. Artists want to affect you.
Their only goal in life is the shake you from being normal, just as they had been shaken. Artists look forward to leaving you changed. They want to do everything in their power so you’re never the same again. And thank god for that. There are so few encouragers of bad decisions these days. For every kid that takes a chair to his friend’s dome because of a wrestling show, there’s three that started writing, painting, and acting because someone – a total stranger – masturbated their View of How the World Is onto a page, a canvas, or celluloid. Self-indulgence breeds self-indulgence. Bad decisions engender learning.
In 8th grade, I was waiting for the bus outside the back of my school. There was another school nearby – younger kids, a K-5th grade building – and we had built a rapport over the last few weeks. The conversation one day turned to professional wrestling, and I – being easily influenced – decided to power bomb a child onto the grass. He lived. And I had made a horrible mistake. I hurt someone. I’d seen pain that I had caused. I had broken the rules. Gloriously so. The rule to not hurt people had been tested, and now I knew why you don’t do it. Because it hurts.
“Don’t hurt people.”
“Why?”
“Because it hurts.”
“How do you know?”
The point of this story is that you don’t know what you think you know until you do something you don’t know how to do. And the only way you’re going to want to do something you don’t want to do is by seeing somebody else do it flawlessly – make it look easy – so that you couldn’t possibly imagine anything could go wrong with it. And then it does. And then you meet it halfway: You ran off the deep end with this fantastic thing that you saw somebody big and huge and courageous and unstoppable do – some artist – and you burned your face off in the wind shear. And you decide to scale it back. Learn the basics. The baby steps. But you kept going. Or you fucked off and quit entirely. That’d be fine too. But what you absolutely could not do is get yourself back to the way you were. Back to Pristina. Back to Before the Lesson. The garden is gone.
That is my ultimate goal here. To destroy your lives. To go into things, and talk about feelings and ideas, bad decisions, wrong turns and such that you would not take, and I have not taken yet, that will get you hurt. I’m going down, and you’re coming with me. Hopefully I will get good enough at it to convince some of you go off and do it yourself, to streamline the process. YES! Yes! That’s it: Artistic expression is a pyramid scheme of misery. We have pushed you out of what you knew. Welcome to the Badlands.
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