Dead Write I’m Painting Polluting

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Steve Reich Ensemble “Music for 18 Musicians” 2023. Oil on canvas, 64 x 64"

Infinite life isn’t good enough for people while we participate in an ongoing plastic revolution. We are not humans being as our DNA used to read, in the Dark Ages, when night was invisible and rarely lit up like day doings. Children and most relations are off the hook, though they might connect to what they think could be a present and future after reading my word ark built to tug human lives out to sea with the rest of the garbage growing Continental Shelf Island. It is the act of raising children that filled me with a neighborly rage. It comes and goes like howling wind. Loving kids. It can’t be done well by a sensitive person today without waves of madness and rage. It should have happened to you soon after you made life and died. It could have happened to you exiting the light at night like any proper functioning solar system.

While I live among us I carefully keep abreast of key mortal danger changes in the landscape. I write in the present, though will be read safer posthumously by strangers smirking behind locked doors.

Humans have become “abstractionists”. There is no materialism among us. To be materialists we would revere material, treasure our objects—not throw them aside at every plastic opportunity, invading nations for an idea (abstraction), decimating their material treasures while stealing oil to make and take more cars and shampoo bottles to the altar.

I think that not long before the onset of the plastic age, most moderns were materialists. Think grandparents darning socks over light bulbs. Or my great grandfather who had to build a box out of locally milled wood to keep his genealogical records stored tight and dry.

Ecologically, I believe there is a way out of abstractionist doom. Our DNA remembers how to cope in a world without cars, bars and plastic jars. The big question now is how to reset the not-so-distant past to include antibiotics and school primers on the material and spiritual benefits of anti-abstractionism.

Sure, our grandkids won’t be able to reap the strip mining benefits of a 401K, but maybe the continuity of a race doesn’t need to rely on one of those. Let’s ask the chickadee, or interview any sampling of the million-billion species gratefully ignorant of Taylor Swift and laundry detergent. They might know!

I worked yesterday to become a great artist tomorrow, which I believe means giving up on art and dying right. I have always thought making pictures to be a symptom of an ego disease like any other, adding more needless junk (with mined cadmium cherries on top) to a wonderful, flowing natural world. “Look at me! Look at me! I should just be, but spend my time creatively.” It’s a selfish oneupmanship, no different in the long run from ladder climbing at evil institutions like Lockheed-Martin® or Dunkin’ Donuts®. Status-chasing is the driving force of global warming. And it’s happening everywhere! Even in Bangladesh with its carbon footprint pressing to shallow depths 1/125th of the United States. I believe re-becoming a nobody will be the greatest art leap of this century. Less is soooo much more. I’ll keep my eyes on that prize, hair-shirting my way a little bit better each day. Meanwhile I paint and write hoping to build a tiny income to relieve my wife of working for too much money. At least then she will have the choice to wrestle with her conscience, or not. Sure, I’ll still cook these gluttonous feasts like every other addict on earth jonesin’ for its decimation. But it won’t make be happy—no, it will never make me happy. Hence the painting and writing.

This is what I think (to the chagrin of everyone I love):

We are living inside heavy bubbles. Strong ones. Translucent polypropylene balls, interpreting the universe from inside the bubble inside the head, behind the eyes like programmed robots limited in paychecks and plastic wrap. We are mind and word creatures forming maniacal opinions out of thin air with bottled water educations and dead religions fit, not only for disobeying mother and father nature, but committing the most lazy, eyes-closed, yawning acts of parricide imaginable by ourselves—the most consummate TV viewers of all species, acting out our one-and-only nature-fearing murder spree fantasies of mostly tolerable dullness.

This is my solution:

Do it better and better. Get more bored and therefore liberal with our waste. Pile it up higher and higher, float it out to sea, put a rise in the recyclables to make an opinionated child cry. Eat that big ass sandwich with relish. We’ve earned it. We work hard, very, very hard, rolling around all day downhill. We’re close, but not quite there. Arrival is inevitable. Many more acts of want, gluttony, binge eating, drinking, greeding in fatigue and ennui. Higher and higher salaries, repeated, repetitive repetition, extra toilet paper, double A batteries, Chick-fil-A® and health care®. Take a whole box of latex gloves to finger paint your masterpiece with lead and cobalt smears. Think about people, talk about them ceaselessly, dream, gossip and adore/abhor more people, people people!

Then pick a warm, still spring day to roll onto the grass, settle down and begin counting from one, using your brain, keeping the mouth shut but the lips ready to “pup-pup” like a fish. Pretend you’re not there. You don’t exist. Really try to imagine there is no YOU among squirrels, trees, blue sky, fluffy clouds, and dandelions.

Keep counting.

After 31,000 years you will have reached a trillion.

Stop counting.

Roll home for another CAFO insprired pot roast dinner of Pennsylvania mushrooms, Oregon onions, and dark French wine for the bland unappreciativeness of glorious life with its ceaseless cooking and drinking to death.

And take another night off drooling on your pillow, dreaming happy achievement dreams like any safe baby of the universe.

Old and New Testaments can stop being printed immediately. Just turn on the Internet to view a painting process that visually instructs on old beginnings and the last straw.