cheeruphoney

I really need to start writing here more. I mean, I love the site and I love writing and I need to be here more so I can get more friends and feel cooler around here.

So, here we go...

I really love "artsy" people. You know the type - people that can take something so ordinary, such as other people's garbage, and turn it into something beautiful and sell it in an art show for a few hundred dollars and get this - people will pay it because what they threw out last week was made into "art" and sold back to them this week. There is one type of art I have been fascinated with for years, have taken my hand at it, as well as appreciated the fineness of other individual's imagination; and that is writing. I have been writing since two-thousand and one roughly, and I always felt so "at home", I suppose I can say, around other people interested in the same form of expression.

I live in a small wannabe city crowded with money-hungry business people too lazy to actually do something with their fortune to fix this wreck of a hell hole up and make it into something people would want to see, alcoholics, junkies, stoners, broke teenagers with clouded minds, welfare-ridden mothers, deadbeat fathers (or even the other way around), children born into poverty and of course, the homeless begging for their next drunken stupor. In this city of caveman mentality, there are few people who live for self expression, so when I found a place that actually benefited people such as myself and what seemed like so many others, I felt that things would look up for the art scene in this city.

Test Pattern was born one year ago from a man who does not necessarily have to work to keep his "business" open; who shops at thrift stores because it's "trendy" and don't we all wish we could look like an early form of Bob Dylan? Test Pattern offers a variety of artistic intellect, which includes art shows every month - put up on the first Friday of the month and taken down the first day of the next month, one man plays, disco dancing balls, and my favorite, obviously - poetry readings on the last Friday of every month. However, much like it sounds - it sounds too good to be perfect, and nothing is perfect, is it?

I am not sure if it is because I'm paranoid or this is really how it is, but I feel like I am looked down upon as an individual as well as a writer when I walk into this place. Sure, the man is nice; his girlfriend who is at every attraction and permanently attached to his hip assures everyone that they are welcome because she happens to host every month's readings and has even published a paper thin book of poetry and journal ramblings through a non-profit publishing company, which just happens to be the love child of two poets running one of the city's writing journals and poetry organizations. Love how everything comes full circle, right? But character flaws or lack thereof don't bother me because everyone has them and I'm a little anal retentive and happen to notice everyone else's character flaws and not my own - but not realizing that, in itself, is a character flaw of my own. But this is not why I have chosen this topic nor is it a tangent I would like to continue.

People everywhere are attention whores. They like to be in the spotlight and they like to be told that they're great and wonderful and that no one could ever possibly do what they have done because they're original or unique; and that is what the Test Pattern poetry readings have turned into - no matter the age or "maturity" level. The spacious capacity gets filled with chairs to the point where you can barely walk around the space to get to the bathroom in the back and on the last Friday of the month every seat is taken and there are people standing on the sides and in the back - everything is filled to the brim and everyone is full of smiles and anticipation because thirteen of those people will be reading and leaving after they're done and the others are there to support whichever reader and will be following them out of the door once they're through with their five to ten minutes or three poems and they can all feel like a celebrity for the rest of the night, their face glowing; because of course, they just had to have made an impact on at least someone that night with their broken stanzas of equally broken homes and pity me language backed by I Lost My Significant Other Woes. And sure, I can mock my own writing by saying the aforementioned sentence because that's what poetry has been molded into - through individuals like Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath; but it is still so much more. Sure, there have been the slow nights where I have sat in a folding chair staring into nothingness as reader after reader went up and shared their latest bit of juicy gossip in so-called artistic form and when it was my turn, was forced to break out of my daze and go up to read and after I was done, walked out the door; but that was only because a few people have actually asked me to read when I was not going to so they can hear something new or something old that they wanted to hear again - so really, it was for them and then I was off the hook and could leave and go on with my life outside of Attention Whore Land.

I used to take comfort in the fact that all great artists were somehow fucked up, as I have been told I am on several occasions, but the truth is that anyone can say that they are a poet and that is exactly the problem. I am not saying that I am in no way better than anyone else, per se, but when someone can get up on the little stage that is the entire frontal lobe of Test Pattern and spew out six or seven words all being adjectives of sexual innuendo and call it a poem about their one true love that got lost out in the rain when you've seen the same person in the back woods of abandoned parks and rivers hanging all over a steroid-ridden jock in a drunken stupor. I'm sorry, but I cannot take that seriously. I suppose that is why I could never sympathize with the cheerleader whores of high school who walk through the halls of the school telling whoever will listen about who they had sex with last weekend and how they're "in love" with some new jersey number this week - different from the last and the one before that and so on.

Sometimes you just feel like art is hopeless. That no one is going to understand why you're in the poetry reading scene - because by now, it has turned into a scene and that repulses me.