A Call for American Artists

To be really fucking sick

We, as a society are too in our heads and not enough in our hearts and bodies. We are perpetually performing for each other in real time, and everyone is worried about being right and getting famous instead of the peace of mind and safeties of their families and neighbors.

Over the wknd, I got a tattoo while doing a reading of my essay “Love Letter from an American Girl.” in my head this is an “event” haha. You all can do stuff like this too, it’s fun

In The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut describes the purpose of life:

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

With the past 20 or so years of consumer tech, we’ve allowed our minds to be globalized and angered and we’ve been convinced that we’re always supposed to be in a room of people like us with similar interests, instead of the people literally, physically inhabiting the space around us.

What if you don’t fit in in that room because you were always supposed to change it?

What if you’re so deeply feeling so that you can help the asshole next door tip the waitress across the street a little more?

Artists don’t fit in.

We are not supposed to.

Cobain called us alien babies. Someone on Tumblr Imagined us through the eyes of Tesla as Earth Angels. I think of you all as “internet angels,” because this place is the Wild West and it’s currently controlling the entire world’s perception of one another.

To which I say:

Make your art. Exhume your feelings of the angry stuff to get it out, in a collage, in a painting, with a pen, but once you have cleared your mind of the vitriol, begin to imagine.

We are in an imagination deficit, as my brilliant mentor Ingrid Norton taught me. We need “better narratives of the future” as she always says.

Tell me what you love about America. What you’d do if the internet didn’t exist? If money didn’t exist?

Tell me the last time you lost track of time or when you cried out of joy.

And the internet is there. It’s powerful. But people are so distracted. We should be using it to re-encourage local embodied community.

Host readings, galleries, book clubs. Invite people irl who don’t seem like the type to be interested. Everyone is waiting for connection. Without a phone getting in the way.

Do your art in public. It’s scary, but it’s why we’re here.

Myself for example. I’m about to start querying for an agent for a food memoir exploring my time as Miss Teen USA and my journey to healing my relationship with food through cooking, dining, and dating.

I used to be so afraid of rejection that I always wanted to build my own thing.

But “sometimes you wake up and you’re different and it’s ok and sometimes even good.”

(I keep hearing this in my head. I may put it in a piece or on something like a collage. I have this hunger to do big scale stuff)

And

“I am an American Girl in a catalogue in your blue light river,”

(This is a quote from my essay “Love Letter from an American Girl.” I don’t consider my essays to be art. I think art requires imagination and hope. My essays are processing.)

but I know that God put me here to make the world a better place and we need to use the online world to get people back in love with the real one.

And three things my fried Kiah taught me are:

1. Anything is possible

2. Art can start a revolution

3. Everyone just wants to have more fun

It is not only your right to be the weird artsy one, the “sparkle girl” as

roxanne wrote, the Star Girl as Spinelli did, the Esoteric girl as the internet first called me years ago, or a “fairy,” as I was called at a casting yesterday.

Your job is to make the world more beautiful and true and fun. Fuck the KPIs, Money isn’t real, walk around, talk to people, and live a viscerally beautiful, artistic life.

Starting right where you’re at, especially if you’re in America.