painting until four-thirty in the morning is good and i am grateful for it and i am grateful for all that i am incapable of seeing and all that i am incapable of seeming to be, to myself, to my life, in and of myself. i am grateful for the things that come when they come, that i cannot force them, that writing is all about sitting down to type. which must mean that painting is all about sitting down to paint, that living is all about starting to live and loving is all about feeling love - it comes when it comes and comes freely when it must and if you think too hard it will stick, frozen in your skull, itching you and never freeing itself. it is so irritating to be an artist, to make art, to be crazy. we are incapable of ever being satiated - we are tantalus, the mouth of the river, ourselves, and it is not coming out properly, we are never reaching that which we desire though we see it perfectly. and all that is clear to us is nearly invisible to the world and all that the world might worship in us, or might see and appreciate in us, is invisible to us. we cannot simultaneously be objective and creative. when it comes to ourselves, we can never be objective, and art that we make is merely an extension of us, another limb that we carry around; it pokes and prods and itches and aches, like love and of love and sometimes the definition of love itself. it is about being narcissistic and wanting to reconcile the differences between the artist and the audience. we want to reconcile that which is intended with that which comes out; that which is painted or written, or scrawled in fits on walls with that which is permanent and fixed in our brains; that goal - to achieve the impossible and reconcile that which is real with that which is not. the emotional with the logical. the structured with the chaotic. the perfect with the ugly. the world with ourselves, ourselves with each other, ourselves with ourselves. all that is reconciled with all that can never be. it is about being self-absorbed and thus owning and manipulating the coatings of our insides - expressing more perfectly the conditions of being, yet never being capable of expressing it perfectly. the work we do to satiate the thirst makes the thirst grow stronger, and you find yourself ending things with phrases like this: i cannot think to think.