If this is what it means to be an artist, then I beg the universe or God or whoever or whatever to release me. This excerpt was written a couple of weeks ago and yet reading it aloud for the video made me cry, again. If anyone else relates to this, please speak up, I’m writhing in my miserable, pitiful loneliness about it.

Please, God, let me stop being an “artist”

I wake and it's itching me in between my toes. Sometimes on a specific spot on the bottom of my foot, the right one. If it's the toes spot, it's the left. I'm laying halfway on my stomach, pillow curled up into my waist, arms outstretched backwards and face gasping for air from the huddle of the comforter when the alarm rings and - it's itching me.

I squirm around angrily. Fine, I'm awake, but seriously? Immediately? Leave me alone.

It stops for a second. Then it starts again, giggling. I get up and get my ass to work.

--

The drive there paints its pictures. The shapes of the tint of my coup's sunlight frame the shapes of the clouds. My oatmeal bananas and raspberries seem purposely organized into a symbolic message.  Three of the same white sedan drive by at agonizingly synchronous paces right as I cross the bridge - I can see the drone shots now...

I slam on the breaks for the red light I almost ran.

--

I'm more interested in the way the bolts and nuts fall into each other - precisely in the manner of love - in the recycled yogurt and coffee grounds containers than I am in the bench we're building.

The spin of the forklift's steering wheel, my feet on the pedals - I'm dancing! And I turn gracefully to watch as I reverse the beast I've tamed. I feel the clicks down my neck, through my spine, electrify my already sore glutes and press through the heel in one, toes in the other. The movement greets the sunlight behind me briefly before I turn forward again.

The rhythm of my hammered punches into the bronze prompt a tune for the lyrics of my father's anecdotes for learning to eat with chopsticks - "my Japanese surrogate aunt set in front of me a plate of oiled peanuts and said, 'Call me when you're done.'"

I hammer my hand, a guitar string snaps.

--

My poop breaks are no different. Count the tiles, the stacks of rolls of toilet paper, the polka dot design and the grain in each imprint. I swear I can hear the cogs of my irises dilating and contracting as the flesh computer in the top tower runs the input procedures and then vomits conglomerated outputs on a conveyor belt; each product is then stamped with a massive spray painted stencil in all caps: "A-R-T." Stands for Another Random Thing, I'm sure.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I'm pooping.

--

Silence begins the swell in my stomach. We're sitting around the lunch table, everyone's on their phones or in a book, hunched over and munch closer to their plate.

I'm eating, of course, but it's gurgling anyway. It feels like a burp but like I've been pressing it down and swallowing instead of releasing it. I'm not holding it back, I promise! It's stubborn, is what it is. Oh, you fucker. You were itching me this morning now you're clawing up my throat?

My eyes dart side to side at everyone, wondering if they can hear the song I'm singing in my head to try to soothe it. Sometimes I do covers - two of my go-to's are Drops of Jupiter and Put Your Records On but really I have hundreds of sounds and tics - but what really makes it satisfied is the stuff it hasn't heard before.

Original songs by yours truly only do the trick for so long. Once it's written, top-to-bottom and with all its ups-and-downs, I've recorded it a couple of times and maybe even shared it with a friend, it loses its quench-capabilities. 

It starts ice-climbing up my esophagus again.

--

I've had the days of nausea where I roll from bed to couch to floor. It pounds at my temples from within and blurs my vision like my eyelids are windshields and the windshield wiper fluid is, I don't know, the thing's mucus. I crave black out curtains, then, and chicken broth.

But the worst days are, well you know what they are. Hangover dry-heaving. I didn't drink at all, that's just what it's like. Flashbacks to mom screaming at me in the airport - "NÃO vomita, nem pensar Andrea, não no avião, pelo menos espera até chegar no banheiro," but it doesn't matter, I don't control it.

All of a sudden it's a torrent of my insides. My nose bleeds - sometimes before, sometimes after - I'm sobbing, obviously, and every meal from the last three days jets out of me. I'd call it a projectile if it were singular but no, it barely stops in between each wave.

I puke through my nose, too, ever had that happen? Everything I tasted now sour, but through my nasal cavities. Oh and the smell... rancid.

Imagine wilted spinach, hollow corn kernels, still-oddly cubed chunks of tomato now pale pink previously red. Slivers of white, probably mushroom. And an orangey brown... frothy... creamy and yet gritty. Lumped asymmetrically for no reason. Bubbling, seemingly. Moving on its own accord...

I can see its hand wiggling its fingers and with a devious smile, its camouflage fails and I see it eye-to-eye. I snarl at it weakly. It dives into its own filth.

--

And instead of tossing all that? I keep the scraps. Papers of all sizes, misshapen papers, crumbled papers, dirty papers, stuffed into cardboard folders. Canvases white and half painted, corners probably ripping and frame bending pressed against one another rudely in storage bins. Stacks of wood "primed" and blue-taped... they're primed, alright. Primed to sit and rot and get dust on under a desk for months, years before I pick a single one up, have my vomit moment with old drying thin water based paint of random sets of complimentary colors, and then eventually toss it all or give them away because they deserve better.

Boxes and plastic Tupperware of half-foot sprigs of wire, found keys, broken jewelry, styrofoam lemons, bookmark-shaped cardboard I swear I'll make Mango a cat scratcher with; t-shirts folded oddly with paper towels stuffed behind white chalk designs for bleaching; dead insects, pieces of skeleton, and endless origami stars.

And my computer? Folders upon folders of images, video clips, of staff dancing and backpacking trips. My passwords notebook includes, like, twenty gmail accounts for all the social media accounts I swear one day I'll turn into a brand. Poems from the seventh grade. Screenshots of facebook arguments from tenth grade. My voice memo app is like five gigs and it's thirty 30-second recordings of the same line in a song for which I've written... one line.

This? I'm writing in my Notes App. Perfectly organized into the folder, "Blogs/Podcast," and this is its twenty-ninth draft. By it, I mean it - the thing that keeps scream-whispering "ANOTHER RANDOM THING, ANOTHER RANDOM THING" so constantly and so close to my ear drums, I think I have tinnitus.

--

I'd get on my knees at the edge of the bed every night to beg the universe to release me of this compulsion if the very act didn't feel like an expression of the creative, there unto validating and condoning the execution of the compulsion. And the universe laughs.

Please, God, let me stop being an "artist."

Art is A Compulsion

Does anyone else feel this way? When I looked it up on YouTube, the only video that seemed to resonate with me was this one.

I have not had the motivation to present anything truly artful, lately, so here’s the mess that I’ve been in the past few weeks. TMI – I’ve had five weeks of being sick-period-yeast infection-sick-period. Based on the pattern, I almost expect to have another yeast infection coming up soon. Ha.

Anyway. If you even read this far, I’m sorry for you! But thanks anyway. Merry Happy and New Year and all that.