Art Worth Dying For

Content Warning: mental health discussed regularly. Autistic, bipolar. Pan/bi. Genderqueer. All pronouns welcome, none preferred. Ex opendiary. vroenis [at] gmail [dot] com

[vroenis]

Empathy is not enough.

[vroenis]

Online // Offline

I wrote two pieces and have kept them offline.

I watched a particularly inspiring video by The Cinema Cartography titled Everything Is Dying and while watching it, had some great ideas so I just came to the PC and wrote them.

While Lewis (The Cinema Cartography) talks about doing things that aren't content which I wholeheartedly agree on, I don't believe all social media dynamics are evil. While it's easy for cynicism to spring from the environmental landscape of social media, many good things have been born from it, too.

I've always known I don't have an audience so I've often written about and around the idea of "hiding in plain sight" and so I want to continue to do that. These are personal journals. No reblogs, not cut and pastes - not to say any of that is bad - just that I don't do it, which limits my reach in this particular space. Perhaps that's one of the best things I like about it.

Anyway from now on most of my creative writing will stay offline while I'll try to write even more weirder shit here. Afterall, what better place is there for weird shit than here.

[vroenis]

How do we eat, share, make art, and live?

[vroenis]

When In Doubt, Write

It’s way past my bedtime I love yogurt - the texture, the sensation in the mouth Eating can be a challenge, mostly I hate it I don’t know if other people or other autistics eat for the same reasons

Like photography Light Colour Shape Texture

Taste, temperature, texture

A fistful of drugs are keeping me eating Keeping me alive I wish they tasted better, it’s a clinical action to put them in the mouth

I hate the sounds inside the mouth Sometimes talking I hate it I love to talk I hate the sound of talking

A fistful of drugs and the buoyancy of cinema Bad cinema Mediocre cinema Films are food and they have it all Light Colour Shape Texture Taste Temperature I am greedy, ravenously hungry A hunger that is poetry and stadium screaming alike

One day I’ll talk about music but today is not that day

What of people What of them Tread carefully I want to be humble I want to be inviting The Words as I’ve always said them

An invitation, a provocation

Autism has other things to say in other ways, but I don’t blame it It’s interwoven, has been all this time Like sex and gender and fucking and art

Even here the anger lingers I’m at least at my senses enough to brush it aside

And of me? Am I invited? Am I provoked? Allow yourself to be etcetera But it’s not always food, is it And you apparently can’t always be eating, can you Not everything is art And people aren’t always inviting And I can’t go inviting everyone else the place will get crowded and the riff-raff will get in

I like clean spaces Empty spaces Transitory spaces Richly textured spaces

How long until a starve myself to death I claw with my fingernails in search of food I lie in the dirt under the sun, in the cold, half in the sea Asking myself whether people are food to be devoured Whether people are art When they are art When I am art and when I am not

I live in a darkened city of flashing lights Screens on, off, cables and batteries Transducers for translating the food of sound My psychiatrist liked the food analogy and so it makes me like it more

In the dark I wait for sleep to happen I don’t understand sleep as a verb There’s so little time and there are so many thoughts Fantasies Romances Revenges And now when my thoughts wonder to the point of bordering on non sequitur I let them flow It is surreal and divine I don’t want to order my thoughts, I want them disorderly It is the only opportunity they have to be so As if water weren’t to obey the laws of physics and meander via some unknown random magic

I scoop up all the words and save as I go because I’d hate for them to go For all my bullshit about the temporary now blah I still want to keep the Words So many words over so many years This has to be a habit I want it to be unhealthy and unwieldly Stumbling and crashing thru the mess that is my life The people who wronged me and whom I have wronged What a fucking mess

This is the most I’ve written in perhaps years so here is a good place to stop

[vroenis]

Trajectory

-- Are you intentionally destroying the mood. - Hm? Yes. Pause -- OK what does that prove. - I don't know yet.

Listless and empty -- Not exactly. Directionless. Also exhausted. Definitely exhausted. Nothing is great in magnitude & I think that's worse. To bend yourself to something - to build it, see it run. If there's such a thing as good exhaustion, that may be it.

- I had a conversation with {redacted}, several times now it's come up. What does life look like when it's good? Good, capital G. -- Instead of bad and less bad. - And stasis.

I don't know if I'd call it retraumatising, reviewing the past, getting angry about it. Maybe it is and I don't know. I have to remember to bring it up altho I suspect I'm talking circles. I feel like I've been brought to this place and now I don't know what to do and I was supposed to break out of it but its prisons were so pervasive. -- Prisons. There’s such a long and terrible spiral beginning from my birth. My behaviours. Behaviours are a difficult one for me to let go of. I want to blame myself. I blame myself. No matter how young, I know I felt something, the whole time. That it wasn’t right. Any of it. - I feel like it’s too late. -- I don’t know what to say. How do I move myself from this place? With nothing. No support. Knowing now the cost of everything. From where should I find the funds to pay?

-- This is making me distressed. (movement) -- I don’t know if I understand all of it and I’m not sure I want to understand. - I don’t understand all of it. -- I’m not sure what the point of fully understanding would be at this point. - Is what I’m thinking. (inhale) - Trying to discard everything that doesn’t help me move now. The past is so useless. I have nothing there I care to bring forward. People tell such tales about friends and events and happenings thru time. I have nothing but wrong things. -- A lot of people would say write it down, without any aim or purpose. So I write it down.

[vroenis]

Everything about the new tumblr editor is bad

[vroenis]

I have an anger

So great it is silent

Beyond the violence of rage

Of raised voices

Of shouting

I have this history of what you did

How it has hurt, year after year

How it brought me so close, so often, to death who is as familiar as a friend

The anger has eyes

Ears and shape

No mouth yet and I don't know how it works

Who can know

Anger like a ghost

We are ghosts, the three of us

Anger, death, and me

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An elongated "no", not desperate, but exhausted.

[vroenis]

what do you do when art stops coming out

like forgetting a language, unlearning it

fuck eloquence, I'm fucked

[vroenis]

Stop being a thief & buy this fucken music.

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pushing thru anxiety & emptiness not because on the other side there's something positive but because I'm addicted to trauma & fuck this shit if I'm going to catch fire I'll do it myself

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I hate food because it doesn't mean anything

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all the good things are not enough

and it hurts so much

[vroenis]

shit that gets me at galleries.

Anyway WHGI, ACO forever - always was, always will.

There is no rest.

There is no peace.