Lately all I want to do is jog. I want to run more often than I want to go to the studio and drum. I want to run more often than I want to see other people play music. I’d rather run than write. I fantasize about running when I’m at work. I fantasize about becoming one of those vagabonds you hear about on 3am Instagram, who run across the earth. I’d rather run than spend time with my child, but I don’t say that to shock anyone. If anything it’s the opposite. It will feel obvious to a parent (and I’d venture to guess, more straight dads), that they’d rather be put through grueling physical feats like an 80 mile run, than spend time with a second grader at bedtime. And as an Asian parent, sometimes I just hate having a seven year old who doesn’t show up ready made with kumon levels of intelligence and understand that sleep and filial piety are paramount. On the best of days, everything my seven year old does feels harder after 8pm.
I’ve been feeling sorry for myself all week, watching people congratulate themselves online for taking minor risks in pursuit of an equilibrium they can only find in the same things that bring me equilibrium: playing music, writing novels, making art. It’s the fact that these friends really and truly cannot do anything else that makes me sad because I, on the other hand, can do other things. I can find equilibrium in a full-time job supporting other people who make music, write novels, make art. I can find it doing nothing but peruse dresses online. I am willingly taking medication for this equilibrium.
It will annoy the fuck out of them to hear this but I want what my friends in dire straits have. Dancing 7/8ths naked for wet dollars in their ass cracks while patrons gingerly peel back their gloves and then sleeves, baring soft baby animals by the nape before sending them to slaughter the cavities of art formation lost behind the wrong medication, the wrong diet, the wrong partners, the wrong job, the wrong life.
My child refused to go to bed tonight until he drew the perfect grid of 32 squares but in attempting to do this without a ruler, every fourth, fifth, sixth, and (in one impressive streak) ninth square was compromised, uneven, too messy, imperfect, and he would flip out. Scream at the top of his lungs:
I am the worst artist in the world! I want to be perfect! This is not perfect! I am the worst! I don’t want to be an artist. I want to be a baby again and start over!
I start sobbing with him because it sounds exactly like the voice in my head. I know it’s god telling me to shut up and stop feeling sorry for myself. Dario is saying out loud every feeling inside my heart I had successfully sublimated through jogging. It’s not only the words but the pitch and timbre and sequencing that tell us we’ve completely and utterly failed as artists.
I tell my child, “it’s ok if you’re not perfect. To me, it’s perfect.” He does not care. I do NOT care! He’s having a meltdown and it’s a quarter to 10. I’m close to giving him a benadryl (I won’t). Instead, I give in and find a protractor and a ruler; hurriedly snatch paper out of my printer. I decide I’m just going to teach him how to draw even lines and a grid at 10pm. He drafts the grid and enumerates it to 32. It takes five minutes, and honestly? It’s perfect.
He is so happy, so proud of himself. He proclaims himself an artist again. I am so good at art! He stares at this grid until he starts to nod off to sleep.
I learn from this that I can’t afford to feel this bad about myself or the missing “art thing” I thought I was doing in my life, because self-hatred telepaths its way straight into Dario’s psyche and comes back at me in the voice of a terrible tweven year old. I do not want to hear that song again.
So I am sorry I have failed as an artist, I say to myself. Sure I was good, but I failed. I am great, but I am failing. I will be incredible; I will keep failing. This craft inside me stays in the grip of the muscles no one can see, and the gloved hand is just my own inside. And whether to think of it as labor or coitus, the grip is all I will have left in me when the art stops fighting to eject, ejaculate. How fantastic would it be if instead of the craft getting caught in my grip, my yen for the art, the breath in my jog that runs in a polyrhythm, an arrhythmia because it’s me alive but on a bias, it’s a cosine, it’s a wave because that’s what all sound is…imagine that this art, the drum, the grid of numbers we have to get right lest we die…imagine everything dying to get out of me were perfect just the way it is.
