When Daily Life Intrudes

            If you have an artist’s mentality then you know how tough it can be administering to the commercial exigencies of daily life. Paying the bills, fighting bureaucratic red tape or even scheduling an appointment for a car inspection is looked at with virulent indifference by the artist each task designed to smash the spirit and reduce the recipient to the level of an easily replaced cog. 

            Artists are skewed emotionally to the creative side of existence and every waking moment is another opportunity to reinterpret the hell that is daily life. A great paradox to be sure, but a necessary one lest the commercial treacle ooze over reality like a warm baker’s glaze. This is a very difficult position to be in because financial remuneration is not commensurate to the power of the impulse. The culture does not venerate the artist’s insight, but would rather see it sublimated into something that furthers the goals of the culture namely individuated assimilation.

            Daily Life is the Jones Crusher, the great equalizer, the matrix, the wool, the hypnotic eye, and the grand illusion. Daily life controls “the vertical and horizontal.” It is the mob boss: “Don’t you get it you prick? You got a home, car, businesses, family and I own the paper on your whole fuckin’ life!”  It is an over the top haymaker out of nowhere that stops its victims cold in their tracks...and that is almost everybody you run into once you leave the house in the morning.

            Daily life is the errand that can never be run.

            Yet somehow through all of its grinding machinations we convince ourselves of its inherent heroic nature. By doing what a man is has to do, we have symbolically hedged our bet and now live a life through culturally sanctioned fiat that is recognizable to everyone in our constituency.

            Sounds pretty awful to me, but what do I know, I’m a chronic dyspeptic of the highest order. I can’t think of anything worse than following that map. The map knows where you are at all times even if you are a piece of shit. (“You are here” declares the map of the human digestive system.) I know it seems defeatist my claim that anyone who participates as a good citizen in the culture could not possibly have a fulfilled life, but I assure you that it is true otherwise there wouldn’t be such a thing as a comic con.

           

            It is the narrowing down, the fetishization, the cutting off from experience that bolsters this assertion. Living life as a one trick pony eventually becomes rote and predictable. Life is like a well-rounded relationship, a little throw down, a little romance and everything in between. I mean if you can’t describe your lover to a police sketch artist, you’re probably doing it doggy style way too much.

          This is why the artist in a commercial culture is so important. When daily life intrudes the artist becomes the weather vane revealing the true direction of the wind. Without the artist the prevailing winds never change course. They do what they always do…they blow!

When Daily Life Intrudes
Jeff Schneider 1998