Carpe Diem
“The day is short, the task is great, and I am idle…” — Toad the Wet Sprocket, Enough
I’ve seized a lot of days in my time. Yesterday I was looking through a bunch of old photos documenting days seized in the past. Stages stormed, pens put to paper, flesh pressed, keys clicked in fervent hyperproductivity. It all looks like a lot of work. And it was.
It’s curious, then, that in recent years I have sometimes found motivation lacking. Because for all of that seizing, at 49 I still reach the end of the week holding my wallet tightly, hoping nothing unexpected appears to blow out the meager remainder of my budget. While profit has not been the primary motive for my creative endeavors, it cannot help but be an integral piece, so long as there is rent to pay. And when it doesn’t pay sufficiently to survive, I find myself back in the cubicle, the one place where activity equals a living wage.
#FirstWorldProblems, yes. But as a person who is geared to value creativity above practicality, it is nonetheless depressing. I am ill fit to function optimally in this environment, and always will be. Every minute spent hacking away at the inbox is a minute where I can’t create anything that I perceive as having value.
So when some free time does come my way, one might think I would jump on it. But there is a reservoir of bitterness that builds throughout the mundane hours spent in the cube mines, and sometimes it takes a while to drain before the clean spring of creativity can flow. Sometimes it takes all day, and then the time is gone, never to return.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when the struggles of dayjoberry felt like they were part of a larger plan, to pay my way into the ranks of the professional creative class. Alas, I find that the missing ingredient these days is often hope. Math was always my weakest subject, but over the years, the power of statistics has become clear to me. And the odds do not favor hope.
In 2012, I attended the Folk Alliance festival in Memphis. An entire hotel teeming with wannabe full-time musicians. It was an absolute meat market, the halls cramped with guitar-wielding younglings, fresh-faced and brimming with potential. I was 38 at the time, and as I gazed upon the overwhelming crush of youthful hope all around me, the only thing I could think was: Most of these people aren’t gonna make it. And if these sparkly pretty things can’t break through, what chance do I have?
Do it for its own sake, I know. And I do. For if I don’t have writing or music to lean on, then all that’s left is the humdrum of daily life, which on its own is no life at all, in my estimation. But it can’t help but hurt one’s pride when a day’s worth of key-punching brings more financial reward than a year’s worth of painstakingly baring the deepest secrets of one’s heart. The world shrugs, and I head back to the cube.
This is not the sort of thing an artist is supposed to say out loud. It’s terrible marketing, the poor pitiful me bit, and I react badly to it myself when I see people post this stuff on the Facespace. But I think it’s important for someone to say it, on the off chance that another sad bastard reading this also feels the same way, and thinks that they are horrible and freakish. Maybe you are. But you’re hardly alone.
One thing I’ve learned about the universe: It’s not personal. Running afoul of the odds is as ordinary as a sandwich for lunch. You have not been singled out for existential torture. You share it with all the misfit souls howling away in their garrets, sorting inventory asset numbers for some suit or another and trying to care, because the moment you can’t get up the gumption to click the little buttons and earn your rations, you’re out on the street. Satan does not laugh at your pain. If he existed, he certainly couldn’t be bothered with something so unimportant. I increasingly feel like a Lovecraft protagonist, shocked and horrified at how very tiny and inconsequential a human life truly is.
Why did I ever believe otherwise? Hope, of course. That desperate clinging to the ass end of the odds, pleading with fate to be granted entrance into the kingdom of the exceptional. It makes no sense. But in this system, art never does.
“Each one’s waiting on the chance
To be lifted off the ground, but then
To discover that we’ll all be dust again…”
-Jukebox the Ghost, Adulthood
Siddhartha knew all of this ages ago, of course. The secret to happiness is low expectations. I understand why people lash out at celebrities who proffer bon mots on the good life. Dammit, can’t you see we’re all slogging through the grind down here? Don’t remind me that there are those who beat the odds, it just makes things harder for the rest of us. Crabs in a bucket, yes, but what asshole put the bucket there in the first place?
It can be tempting to just shut off the world of successful creative types altogether. It opens the scab, reminds me of the summit unclimbed. Far better to watch videos on cooking, home repair, and any number of things I can actually succeed at. Combing through those old photos is worse, a hoard of participation trophies worth precisely bupkis.
Seize the day, by all means. But not all days are created equal. Each of us gets a different one, and some are a bit more sickly than others. Most are ordinary, though. And when I look at a picture of an orphaned refugee child, perhaps even I can learn gratitude for that ordinary day.