Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 99: Joe

Prompt: "A song about heart beating faster or heart issues or something about the heart doing something that's noticeable to the narrator of the song"

Selected by Joe

"Modern Art"

Art Brut

Bang Bang Rock & Roll, 2005

I took an art class in college, probably junior or senior year. I don't even remember the year so there are obviously a lot of other details I don't remember. I can't remember the professor's name or what she looked like specifically; I wouldn't recognize her on the street. But what I do remember is a feeling of: I can do this. Not that I did, but that I could. Know art. That there was a version of me who could see a painting and know it, or at least have the tools to make an attempt. That felt good.

People who appreciate art will tell you that it's not elitist, but there are some aspect of it that are. It costs money to see art. It costs time too, time traveling away from your home to see it. I like music because it's portable. I like movies because I believe they are portable too, even though there is an elitist aspect to that art as well, that I don't really know movies because I don't have the time or money to go to the theater. Which is all fine and good. I don't really mind all that. I don't mind any of this. So I don't get to see paintings and I don't get to attempt to know paintings. Okay, so what? That's partially my fault anyway, for choosing the life I've chosen, the career I've chosen, one that doesn't pay much, the pay cut supposedly symbolizing the choice I've made to try to be helpful instead of harmful in this fucked up world, I don't know.

What I think I'd like to do is go to the art museum at some point. It's been years. Decades. I want to know if I can look at a piece of art in a museum and feel something, just like I do with music and movies and books. I don't know if I can. I certainly haven't kept the tools sharp since college. But I'd like to think that I'm at the point in my life when I can look at a piece of art and see something below the surface, at least search for something meaningful down there, you know? I'd like to think that through listening and watching and reading and discussing and writing writing writing, I've honed a curious mind. It would be cool to see if that mind would function in the presence of that kind of art.

The key to having a curious mind is to understand that there are no answers, but to look for them anyway. The more you see, the less you know, and the questions and the process and the thoughts expressed out loud or on digital paper are all more of a journey toward the self than a path toward knowing anything outside of the self. Maybe let's say you do find an answer in there, but then maybe also stop and consider that the answer you find is yours alone, and that the answer that someone else finds within their own selves could be completely different.

The fact that two people could see the same thing and feel that they know that thing completely differently is fucking magic, man. It's pure fucking magic. I'm not saying that there are no indisputable truths in this world at large; there are, but that's what makes the world boring. Within this world, that of art and extending out toward entertainment, the idea of no truth, or all truth being disputable, is what makes me want to live here... or at least spend as much time here as I can.

I'm starting to get to the point where maybe truth can even be split within the self, that we can feel a certain way and try to know that feeling to be true, but stepping back or stepping sideways can reveal a hidden truth, one tucked underneath that previous one, an alternate interpretation of how we feel, even if that emotion remains ours and our alone, still—two truths.

I'm typing this out now because I need to, I don't know, vent, I guess. I'm typing this last Friday night, while the cut is fresh. I have been submerged under water for around six hours now, ever since I heard the outcome of a court hearing that didn't go my way, and we were heading up to bed and I grabbed my computer and told Pam I needed to type it out and she knew what I meant. I'm sorry that this means that I'm writing this blog post before I wrote the one published yesterday, since that is breaking my own rules of writing each day's YSC write-up in order, but I didn't know where else to turn.

I am upset. That is clear. That's the emotion that I am feeling right now, feeling it physically as it sits like a boulder in my empty stomach. If you were to ask me to verbalize why the rock is there, I would say (and have said) this:

I have chosen a career path that best suits the city that I live in. I make less money than I could be making at a job that is better for me personally, and that is a choice that I've made and I've stuck with for almost a decade now and have generally planned to keep making for another 27 to 28 years. I tell myself that I choose this because I want to be more helpful to my community than harmful. This is what I tell myself, and on most days, I believe it. I think I do good work, despite the circumstances. My work is completed in such a way that I can tell myself at the end of the day that I was more helpful than harmful to the society that surrounds me and its members.

And I feel like the ruling today, and the general decisions from the uppermost management that led to a court case being called for in the first place, have made it harder for me to keep making that decision. I tell myself that I'm trying my best for the people around me, known people or strangers, and I don't fucking understand why there are leaders who want to make that harder for me, for us. I don't understand it. It's so fucking backwards. It feels like injustice, or at lest unfairness, and that fucking hurts. It feels like a slap in the face. It hurts. I don't get it. I don't get why these decisions were necessary. It seems to antithetical to what I try to do in my life. I'm so fucking hurt right now, man. Something was stolen from me today.

I feel so heavy in the current moment, and so I find it difficult to make that step to the side and view the situation from any other perspective. It's nearly impossible. There has to be another way of looking at it, because this shit is too bleak.

If I'm being truly honest with my deepest, darkest self, and see the id hiding there, I wonder when I look at it whether this isn't just me being lazy.

I understand that this is me internalizing what internet trolls and my despicably asshole uncles have been telling me for weeks now, that workers of my kind are lazy and that we are worthless and that we deserve this punishment. Okay, fine, so what? Maybe it's true, I say, in my darkest hour. Maybe it's true. Maybe I just don't want to commute to work and waste another eight hours of my life per week sitting on a train or waiting for a train. There's a part of me that thinks that I'm being lazy for wanting that, and the "that's eight hours more that I won't see my kids" is just some front I'm putting up because I want to be lazy and work in my pajamas. That my plans to pack a lunch every day for the rest of my life until I'm dead and to tell my supervisor that she can fuck right off with the pizza party and to be miserable while I'm sitting in that cubicle and not make the best of it because fuck. them., that maybe that's just being petulant, and that I need to grow the fuck up and go to work in the exact manner that the chain of command commands me to and get the paycheck and shut the fuck up.

I don't want to believe there is that side of me because that's even worse, I think. To be that person would mean the fire within me is extinguished. It would look like and feel like I was fucking dead inside. And yet still, sure, we need to consider it. Because there are two sides, two POVs on these emotions now. No wrong answers. The magic captured with a net and stuffed inside, the magic of no real truth, all interpretation, everything a question, nothing an answer. It can be and it is both. I fucking despise with every inch of my being the cowardly, nonsensical, fucking evil decisions by those who run this municipality, and I also fucking despise myself for getting all haughty about it. For feeling the need to run to the computer and type my feelings, boo hoo, etc. It's probably both.

I think the issue, maybe, is that the person on whom this evil decision rests doesn't have the same mind, doesn't work it the same way, isn't curious about the other side of the self and what another perspective might look like. That you would be so stubborn that you would disregard everything that everyone else is saying and instead hide behind a judge. The fact that you won in court proves nothing except that you're stubborn and that you lack the curious mind. Nothing else.

There might be a reason the winners in this world are people exactly like this, the uncurious type, and the losers question everything.

I am typing this in the heat of the moment because I want to carve my feelings now into stone. There's a good chance I'll start to gradually feel less awful in the six days between these words being typed and this blog post's publishing. I'm rereading these words after publishing, most likely at my desk, in a cubicle, on a Thursday for the first time in a long time, and I'm assuming now that I'll be okay then and my world will have not exploded into a pile of rubble and ash. And that will be another new perspective. But that won't make my current feelings of uncontrollable anger and frustrating and guilt and shame any less valid. It's both. It's everything. It's all real because it's a question, how can it be both, and yet it is.

"Sweet Jesus, my heart

Is beating faster and faster

I'm palpitating

I'm sweating

I just can't help myself

I just can't help myself!"

I see myself like a I see a painting. I stare for a long time. I wonder what there is to know. I wonder if there's anything to know at all, or if it's just a painting, if I'm just an object, if any of this means anything, or if it doesn't, whether we can extract meaning from it anyway. I don't know. Seems like it's worth the try.