He Thinks...

I am sitting at a computer, near a phone, at a desk, in a puffy rolling chair, in an office. I work from 8am to 5pm. Four years ago, in New York City, I was doing the same thing (ostensibly, anyway), but after one year and a half of it, I left it for greener pastures. Little did I know that the pastures were much barer outside of the office, but I don't honestly think it would have mattered. I just could not stomach the whole 'office job' mystique. It was lost on me. I was there to perform and be beatnicky and creative, to do odd jobs and 'just get by', to live the starving artist lifestyle. I succeeded in all of the latter, but fell in shallow waters performance-wise. That is to say, I didn't 'make it'. The reason? I didn't try. Having moved away from NYC, whose mystique I could no longer stomach, I have learned that the artist is terribly susceptible to being overwhelmed and discouraged, particularly in an environment which is so saturated, so competitive, and so diminishing to the artist as a being with a soul. There is an entire culture of discouragement that people live in there daily for weeks, months, years at a time. You may say it comes with the territory. I would have to agree. It comes through an obsessive and unrealistic reliance upon image by the media. It comes from an equally bizarre and co-dependent relationship with the media and the consumer, the 'viewing public' as it were, where we want what almost none of us can give--perfection, the Aristotelian form of man and woman, an unmarred, unchangeable, unaffected image of pure 'cool'.
Anyway, I like Atlanta. Smaller pond. Friendlier fish. Fewer hooks. Slowly, steadily, I'm regaining my health, in every aspect. I feel the same excitement that the Duke boys must have felt, cruising in the General, leaping over gulleys, evading the ever watchful Roscoe. It appears, for now at least, that the Southpaw has landed.