sometimes i live life. sometimes i can feel life coursing through me. most of the time, however, i'm too scared to do it. to take risks, to prove myself or whatever. i think it's kind of funny i'm supposed to be an artist and yet i'm sitting, cowering away from life like the weight of it will crush me. or maybe life is just the mundane punctuated by the spectacular and i'm in it, but afraid that it won't always be the spectacular because it isn't. afraid, perhaps, that it could be and that i should be capable of seeing it through 'til it's all fascinating, but i most likely won't, or can't. perhaps there is a way to see what we need - to dedicate ourselves to experience and then the art of experience, the regurgitation of experience through art. perhaps there are places in the world that don't resemble hippy communes where people make art all day and live it and eat and drink and are merry etc. perhaps it is up to me to create that experience within the confines of this mall-america, within the confines of my own humble existence, within the confines of this life. perhaps life is not defined by achievements, but by the mundane, by the washing and the caring. i cannot look back and tell you the texture of my life without creating anecdotes, telling the stories as stories, or ending them with punchlines. i try very hard to convey the feeling, the texture of my life as the thing that it is, but i cannot define it with language, so i cannot tell you whether or not i have really lived or whether or not i have been merely racing toward the end of this like a rocket shot from the eternal pocket of dust, of memory, of obscure similies in emails. what i do know is that i want very often to reach the end, or to cut life short. perhaps that is an egotism, and perhaps i already knew that. it's because the sadness is everywhere, all around, and i am trying everyday to write it right, so i get all caught up in myself, and the parts of me that are not myself. but there's an alternate egotism that stops me. that makes me think that i've got something better to do than to weep every day, each night, all over.

*thank you to just for letting me reproduce this email i wrote to him.*