What the hell is wrong with me?

What the hell is wrong with me?

“What is wrong with you?” is a phrase that I heard come from my father on many occasions, not only in reference to myself but also in reference to my brothers, of whom I am the eldest of four. I’m probably the meanest of the four. This is what my brothers would tell you. It is probably what all brothers would say about their oldest brother. I was the one who asked unpopular questions in church meetings, like, “Why was Jesus a hippie?” When I was 7 or 8, I asked a Sunday school teacher why couldn’t I just live happily ever after with my buddies, Scott, Lee, and Mick (since all us boys “hated” “stinky” girls, who all have “cooties,” ya know). I used to wonder why everybody in Jesus’ time, except for the evil Roman soldiers, ran around in pajamas and bath robes all the time. I wondered why a creepy old man would want to know if a 16 year old boy was masturbating (so I had heard through the grapevine) and promptly withdrew my candidacy from the interview pool for the advancement to the class of Priest in the Aaronic order of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was also the one who would verbally stand up to my dad. I;m not proud of it, but, I would even bald-faced lie to him when he asked me questions that I decided the answers to where none of his business. Undeniably, I was the proverbial “Black Sheep” of my nuclear birth coincidence.

What the hell is wrong with me and where did I learn that?

When I was 13, I wanted to take a guitar class at school. I had a friend named Robert Sorensen. We had a common fascination and satiric glee in association with the weekly showing of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It aired every Monday night around 10pm or so. We had also been listening to music like Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, and stuff like that. We had also discovered Marijuana and had become regular consumers of this fine product of the earth sent to reveal and destroy….ooops, sorry, wrong meeting……. Robert and I had decided that we would learn to play the guitar so we could get all the chicks, since we weren’t on the football team and it seemed like the reasonable thing to do, under the circumstances. We were intelligent young lads… Freethinkers.

I had been awakened to my destiny a few years earlier. I used to think, when I was very young, that I wanted to grow up to be a cowboy, a national park ranger, and later maybe even a truck driver. This all changed for me one evening when I accidentally stayed awake all the way through Nightmare Theater on a local Salt Lake TV station, long enough to catch KISS on The Midnight Special with Wolfman Jack!!! This single event was the turning point toward the Kthuhluh’s call that was sounding in the distant future of my then young 10 year old life. There was fire. There was blood. There was power and death in the explosive delivery I was witnessing in this strange, brave new world that had suddenly sprung before my eyes!

“That’s what I want to do!” I shouted for the entire universe to hear, waving and pointing to the television screen to the astonishment of my bleary-eyed brothers, who were startled and awakened by my most visceral reaction to what I was witnessing for the very first time!!!

I knew at that instant that I was destined to play the guitar (for better or worse)! This was, it turns out, the determining factor in everything else that I have become. I took the class and got an “A.” But I had discovered so much more about myself that I am even now unraveling, at the age of 47.

My father, to his credit, bought me my first guitar. It was a Spanish nylon-string (or “classical”) guitar worth about $100. That is about where his encouragement and support began and ended with regard to my vocation as a guitarist. He did show up at a gig once to take some pictures of the band I was in and never ever went back to another gig again. He said his ears were ringing for a week after that. He also made it very clear to me from the beginning that I had better plan on doing something else for a living, have some kind of “back-up plan.” While this may seem like very sound advice to most of us, it was the seed of doubt that, at that time in my life, was the last thing I needed. His unbelief in my ability to be who and what I want to be was and is a severe emotional handicap, an injury. I took offense and vowed to make him wrong.

The problem with being an artist is that the artist no longer lives in the same world as everybody else. He is not among “the living” in the same collective sense anymore. The artist is driven by the pain and utter boredom, and stupidly retarded futility of “this world” and creates anew a world of his own making. What people sometimes don’t understand is that this is not something that one does by choice. I did not choose to be more talented than I am at anything else at a worthless skill that wasn’t appreciated by the people closest to me. This guitar “thing,” this “phase” is not either a “thing” or a “phase.” It is who I am. This is something that I must do in order to survive.

I did not choose it.

It chose me.

The other thing that we sometimes forget, that I have come to realize, is that this is something that everyone does according to individual temperament and idiom. If we knew, in the starkest and most un-colored way, the true nature of our existence, it would surely make us mad with awe and despair. That is, everyone has their own particular and specific “positive illusion” that makes it possible to continue living in at least what appears to be a functional capacity for the everyday. You could call it a functional though illusory art of living that amounts to a sort of collective “Occupational Psychosis” that necessarily ‘blinds’ us to the possible alternatives. Without positive though concocted ideas/fantasies about the future, at the end of which surely and unavoidably death itself awaits all of us (except for Vampires, Christians, and Mormons) we would just collapse under the sheer weight of the overwhelming futility we confront, and then probably die on the spot!

...We would also never have gotten out of the cave to take a shit or build a fire upon our return to sit and tell stories about the possibilities of our existence around. Stories, fantasies, religions, musical performances, pictures, images, all representations of possibilities, are all the stuff that the world is made of before we go out and make that world we have been talking about imagining…..

…See?

I am an artist. My vision is my own and nobody else’s. I may be able to find those who will help me acquire the worldly fruition of my visions, but I cannot ever fool myself into thinking that there is anyone who shares the exact, particular, and specifically-‘mine’ version of the same vision that I possess. Yet, we are all driven by the same motive. The motive for all of us is merely and only…… simply….. Freedom. I had already consciously recognized this fact by the time I saw KISS on TV when I was 10: Art is the only possible road to Freedom from all this... profound hysteria. Art is the only place where on can say and do what one wants to do without appeal to a higher “authority.”

To paraphrase Krishnamurti, it is no great accomplishment to be “well-adjusted” to a profoundly sick society. All of my difficulties stem from the fact that I am tainted by the knowledge that this thing we call “reality” is something that is artificial, manmade, and thus imperfect and a work in progress. While this is a positive in that it opens the future to progressive humanity, it is a curse to me in that I cannot “un-know” it. I cannot un-know that all this is based on the fact that someone, or group of some-ones, made this all up in order to benefit a particular class of “owners.”

The ultimate warrant to authority is either that it is biased toward whatever is good and fair for everybody (in the true humane spirit of democracy) or it is biased toward what is better for some more than it is for others. Materially, culturally, socially, economically, spiritually, and empirically whether we know/admit it or not, what we now live in is clearly the latter.

I don’t like it and I can tell you exactly why...

It is wrong.

You, America, do not want to know this because it is more fun to just keep shopping around for more and more personal illusion of comfort… more and more positive illusion on the road to slaughter.

My version of the positive illusion is that people can actually live democratically without privileging certain personal private interests over others and that the elimination of this one key feature in our incomplete progress toward democracy can and will happen, or not. Democracy, a word that is thrown around in the vernacular arena to mean very many things that are not democratic, is nothing if it is not explicitly socialistic. We, “the people,” have lost this notion of democracy in favor of one that favors capitalist dictatorship.

Democracy, if it means anything, must therefore progress as a collective social good rather than as a regressive private privilege of the very wealthy.

This will never happen until “the people” reclaim their right to participate in their own democracy without being shoved aside by particular private material, social, economic, and cultural interests that elevate some while shit-canning other lives.

That’s exactly what is wrong with me.