The Remix of Loss

Social media is a curated algorithm of numbers, accolades, and highlights from your acquaintances and friends alike -- possibly even your nemeses. It's easy to get lost in everyone's seemingly fortuitive lives without realizing what's at stake. Part of me suspects it might be in our little mistakes and our very real humanity. The people who spill coffee on themselves and break the toaster. The ones who survive the teacher observation by the skin of their teeth, and the ones who dare to even push back on their supervisor's assessment. I'm looking for the tastemakers, not the ones who just want to say what they think everyone wants to hear. I'm not looking for people-pleasing, overly cheery, technicolor posts anymore: this is from someone so very guilty of that in the past. I find myself, currently, in a re-imagining of everything I know to be true. It is tempting to frame everything as loss, but I'd like to instead frame it as a re-mix. If it is a loss at all, it is the shedding, gradually, of trauma.

Modern-day art seems ubiquitous with the title of "creator." I find the term pompous and overused. I prefer the term maker because that's what I do. I keep making things, and I keep making myself...more myself. Creator carries with it an unintended (or perhaps intended) god complex that feeds off western individualism...respectfully. It's not for me, and maybe it's not for you either. Maybe what we truly need and desire for our occupations is to make meaning or for us to make sense in this world. Perhaps your calling is to make humanity better. I hope so. This planet is an entity we all share, and we owe it to her and ourselves to treat her right as quickly as possible.

In this "unprecedented time" as we were so fond of saying during COVID that still holds to be true, I'm aware of our world a little differently. I step more gingerly out the door and to my respective third places. When your govenment makes your body political, it is difficult to emerge as anything but a war zone. It is difficult to speak out when you are called names before you even open your mouth. I've found in this state and city, it is difficult to even exist without feeling the overwhelming sense of feeling like the Other. It is a prison sentence: you are too everything, but never enough. And, I'd like to push back on that. Like I said, a remix.

Just like poetry and art are meant for everyone, this message is for you too: for some of us, the greatest resistance is to thrive. To look fear in the eye, all the critics who tell us we can't and shouldn't and wouldn't dare, and say to them, "I have already yesterday. I will again. Today, tomorrow, and forever more besides." Then, you watch the castle walls crumble down, the moat dry up, and the dragon was just a lizard puffed up with pride. You walk out the prison of your mind because it instead became your trail. Your way. Your path.

Depicted in the photograph above is a snippet of a vintage canvas I salvaged from Goodwill. It used to be a depressingly average fishing canvas print that someone may have loved, but I certainly didn't. I found some clients who were down for funky art, and I painted in Haku from Spirited Away, chilling in the pond. Will he devour the fisherman? Is the fisherman pulling up his lunch? Who knows, but the best part of art is that you don't have to know. You get to wonder and wander. So here's to everyone remixing out there: your life, your music, your future. May you remember what Uncle Aaron said to Miles Morales in his most desperate moment, "Keep going." Keep remixing and reimagining. The world needs it, yes, but the world inside you needs you more.