Introduction
Introduction
I was young, Goth by head, Emo by heart, average Joe by threads with a face that seemed to remind strangers of someone they knew. Drawn to the melodramatics of ‘woe is me,’ I ventured out to start a band in high school, a standard endeavor in the 90’s when every kid was grouping into trios or quartets in their garages as strummers, pluckers, drummers, or screamers. Except I didn’t have a knack for strumming, plucking, or drumming worth a damn. I mean, I could, but it was to the detriment and dismay of all who could hear. I was severely tone-deaf and arhythmic, too impatient to learn or train—as a teen, I craved instant success, fame, excesses, and access to hot babes but ended up with a big fat zero on that front. However, I discovered that I could write lyrics channeling the depths of my loneliness, societal critiques, and unrequited love. Transcribing my thoughts and feelings into chicken-scratched verses on paper. Apparently, doing so explicitly through a hyperbolic lens of sorrow and suffering.
Looking back, I think art results from an exaggerated translation of one’s feelings, blow-horned onto a medium, essentially distilling our experiences into a caricature of the world around us. A notion that gains validity with our tendency to paint the world in stark, lurid terms through poetic liberties. Hemingway famously said writing is easy: you just sit there and bleed, or something to that effect. Even in this simple yet dramatic statement, he encapsulated the essence of what makes art so visceral and necessary. I believe art must jolt us, either by empathically plucking our heartstrings or, shockingly, by jarring our perspectives to truly earn its name. It should provoke us to reflect to find our meanings within the piece we observe, listen to, or interact with. Using instruments that resonate simultaneously on emotional and cerebral levels. Invoking instinctual and thoughtful reactions. Punching us in the gut, head, and heart all at once.
Not to delve too deep into the nature of art, but it takes two to tango. The necessity to express ourselves so that someone else may stumble upon and connect with what we’re trying to communicate is fundamental. And, in doing so, we must allow room for their life experiences to complete the art’s puzzle. This balancing act finds us blurring the line between the figurative and literal, drifting between the vague and concrete, existing in the liminal spaces of the familiar and unfamiliar. Opening our work to interpretation is like opening a vein, letting the seer tell our fate from the pattern of our splilt blood.
Considering this dark, creepy collection, I’m forced to ponder, why couldn’t I just sit down and bleed love songs and feel-good jams? Perhaps it ties back to my ‘woe is me’ outlook and a host of other reasons reserved for my therapist. I’ve always felt that artists, writers, etc, are not the actual person but a highly concentrated fraction of that person’s reflections on life. Truth refracted through the prism of their soup of chemistry, experiences, and knowledge. Extracting art from life is like a chef reducing a sauce to its most potent flavor; the artist distills their essence into something more intense and more flavorful. But this is what I love about art: it’s both a mirror and distortion, revealing truths while warping reality, like a funhouse mirror, showing you a distorted version of yourself while also showing you a truth that reality can be distorted, all within the safe space of an amusement park.
As I compiled this book, my wife, eyeing over my shoulder, remarked that I was a weirdo, “but in a good way.” I’m happy with that assessment. I can own my quirky, odd, weirdoness because I know who I am through exploring and self-analyzing my feelings, thoughts, and identity. Am I a fully realized human being? No, of course not, but I realized these pieces express my viewpoint only in an extreme way at certain times in my life. If only they weren’t coming from such a raw and unsophisticated place, I’d love to say they’re part satire, part absurdity, part commentary. I’m just human, and the truth is simple: they felt cool to write at the time.
A note on the book’s graphics: This book features AI-generated illustrations, which, to me, illustrate the current unfolding relationship between humans and machines in art. However, once you know of their artificial origin, the images’ seemingly candid, rough, and personal style may be suddenly rendered soulless and mechanical. However, I want to argue that by merely combining and juxtaposing them within the context of my very human-written text, I am breathing life into them. Transposing meaning onto them that helps tell the story, in addition to finding them interesting to look at. I confess I’m currently ambiguous about how I feel regarding AI-generated art or AI as a whole. Yet, history has shown that all new technology is first seen as world-destroyers until it becomes indispensable to daily life when the world would fall apart without it. Will this be the case with AI? I felt it was something to consider with the emergence of this new technology.
This collection contains writings I’ve composed over the past 20 years. While crude at times, I have an affection for their raw, youthful spirit. As an older person, I can’t help but cringe somewhat at their overwrought doom and gloom, perhaps a hallmark of adolescence, when we feel like we have so much to lose. My aim was not confessional accuracy but a general mood with a dramatic punch—conveying isolation, disillusion, sorrow, and existential dread through stark metaphor, with a few lighter subjects I tossed in for free.
I offer this collection of lyrics to songs of a band that never was so that a few kindred spirits will discover this relic of my youth and relate, reflect, or just be amused while needing something to read while on the toilet. Whatever the case, I appreciate you accompanying me into the vaults of my self-indulgent misery and giving these lyrics/poems new life. I’m happy to be dead as long as I’m a ghost in your head.
