To: The Global Artistic Community. RE: You.

Please stop. Please. You are killing me with your art and your self expression and your plumbing of feelings and your search for meaning and truth. Please stop it.

It hurts. I am an artist too, and what you do- it attracts me. I cannot help myself, I cannot turn away, I have to look and gaze and experience what you have done. And it hurts me. On the inside I am blind, confused, sore, raw, and I cannot confront what is there without flinching.

Please stop. If you are really the loving, feeling community you are..you will heal me. Or give me time to heal. You will put down your pens and your pencils and keyboards, your cameras and your paintbrushes. You will let me scab, and heal, and grow a new self. And then I shall be ready for your introspection and your feelings and your pretensions and your elegant language, and I will be able to approach it and join in and be able to wring meaning out of it, and we shall all be the greater for it.

But.

You will not stop.

The world is a machine, a corporate process that consumes, changes, recycles, spits out. everything. nothing left untouched. And you, you artists, you feelers, you introspective thinkers; you are part of this machine. No individual can make a change on you, unless it is a streamlining of the industrial process by which you operate. And, above all else, no individual can make you stop. It is as if I had opened up my window, stuck my head outside, and yelled, "Please World! Stop your orbit of the sun! Stop your rotation! Slow down, be still, if only for a few moments that I may catch my breath!"

That will not happen. It can not happen. But it is what I need.

But, it must be confronted, just because you need something to happen is no guarantee or reason for its happening. Or even the possibility of its happening.

"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.."
- I Cannot Remember Who Wrote This

"Everything I make is trite, and cheap, and a waste of paint, of tape, of time."
- Bright Eyes, Waste Of Paint

"If I were to write something that truly captured all that I think and feel about the world, it would probably be in all capitals, one word, probably not one you'd find in dictionaries, something along the lines of, EEEEEEEEEEERRRRYYYAAAAAAFEABHCDAKBJNAEAEGOGAEHUAGOHU!!!"
- Walter Mongin, To: The Global Artistic Community. RE: You.