Editor’s Note

This week we’re starting a brand new three part series aimed at our friends…the Artists!

If you are a:

• Writer…
• Penciller…
• Inkers…
• Painter…
• Actor…
• Poet…
• Musician…
• Or just love all these things…

Then this series is for you!

This series will cover three deadly monsters that prey upon the souls of artists today…

What is the first one?

Read and find out!

The Song That

Makes Your Ears

Bleed

If you were born between 1995 and 2004, chances are you’ve played this track in your mind:

“Life is a Big Joke…not the funny kind of joke, but the insult kind of joke. That means that everybody and everything in life is a meaningless loser…even me.

“Because it’s a joke, I can’t take anything seriously, it’s all meaningless. Because everybody is a meaningless loser, even me…I have to laugh about it, or I’ll blow my brains out.

“I hate myself.”

How did we get here? How did we get to the point where we started poisoning our minds and degrading ourselves better than anybody else could dream up degrading their worst enemy?

Frankenstein’s Monster

We’ve gotten here because of a monster named Irony.

Irony was originally a way for people to put down their enemies. “You’re think you’re so great? You are a meaningless loser…it’s pathetic you can’t see it.”

But Irony became something you do to yourself and the things you love in order to be considered “cool”, in order to be “with it.”

In order to be an Artist.

“I think I am such a big deal? I am a meaningless loser. It’s pathetic I have have ever thought otherwise.”

You say these things to beat the other guy to the punch. You degrade yourself before anybody else can. Christy Wampole calls it “a pre-emptive surrender…pre-emptive shame…resignation and defeat.” And none of it is done to you by somebody else.

It’s all done to you…by yourself!

To be an artist, you degrade yourself before anybody else can.

You beat them to the punch…by punching yourself.

“Die, Frankenstein…Die!”

But the truth is, you and your life are not big meaningless insult joke.

Your life is serious. It’s the real-deal.

When somebody hurts you, it hurts like heck. When somebody betrays you, the pain feels like a knife. When you screw up, you feel like we should be banished from the world.

When you love somebody, the passion is as as powerful as a tsunami. When you help out people, the feel like your soul’s sitting by a warm fire. When somebody has your back, you feel like you got the cover to take on the world!

When you love something…an activity, a job, an action…you feel alive, alive like nothing ever before!

Chances are, that’s why you got into Art in the first place.

Now you know the first biggest monster killing artists’ souls.

What are the other two?

Find out next week in our latest installment:

“Spirit of the Times!”

Sources Cited

Wampole, Christy. “How to Live Without Irony.” www.nyt.com. The New York Times, 17, Nov. 2012. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/