Living In A Van Down By The River
I am now living in a van down by the river (to steal a classic line from the late, great and overweight Chris Farley).
To be more precise, I live in an RV down by the creek.
And to some people, I suppose my life must seem pretty dismal. But—possibly predictibly—I see things a bit differently.
The way I see it: I’m now living in an Evil Robot-proof Self Contained Modular Environment. I am surrounded by various electronic and mechanical devices capable of helping me produce an eclectic collection of artistic endeavors. Because of the close-confines of my “van down by the river” my work is all around me, asses to elbow, so-to-speak…a constant flow of works in progress, with finished projects, notes and barely-legible semiscrawl…diagrams of thoughts and ideas…and all of it blowing across the pages of a hundred notebooks like the Titan’s brains that birthed gods…or just wads of used tissue after a brutal Summer dose of the flu.
In other, less drama-choked words: the good, the bad, the ugly surround me 24/7…encouraging me, keeping me well-grounded, keeping me sane. And keeping me WORKING. Which is key.
I confess, moving into the new digs was not planned for productivity…but I takes whats I can gets. Rooms and studios are not good for artists who question their own work as harshly as I do my own. There’s too much space to hide things from yourself, to bury your bones under greener grass…forgetting that the bad and good, ugly and sexy…well, it’s all just a matter of perspective, ain’t it?
I have adopted a 3 year-old Boston Terrier named Bustah. He’s on medication and likes to chew pieces of dead, dried skin and growls at hippies. He also talks—though not to the aforementioned patchouli-stinking douchebags.
Bustah is something of a masochist. He is allergic to pretty much everything (mostly patchouli hippie-stink), and loves to scratch himself into a semimasturbatory frenzy of agony. He’ll scratch his poor ears (which may explain his apparent deafness to the phrase“Stop it, Bustah!”) any time he thinks I’m not paying attention, getting into the groove until his hind leg is a blur of canine OCD. He scratches, readjusts, scratches some more, then whines in pain. But he only stops for more than a brief period if I tell him to (“Stop it, Bustah!”) two or three times, with appropriate volume increases along with each repetition.
Suddenly it becomes painfully obvious: Bustah and I are very much alike; we are both practitioners of the philosophy of Hedonistic Calculus. It’s a kool way to explain our attraction to all the things that are supposed to be “bad” for us…you know, stuff like butter, salt, self-love, tequila for breakfast, truck stop prostitution, Vicodin and Hannah Montana. The idea is pretty simple, unlike REAL calculus: if the amount of pain caused by acquiring a particular pleasurable act or product (or the amount of pain resulting from its use) is greater than the pleasure itself, then it’s a good idea to step off not get off. The pain Bustah causes himself when he scratches his poor, aggrieved ears is obviously less than the pleasure he gets from the process.
Or maybe he just needs a Benadryl.
EVIL ROBOTS 