Why does everything taste better when you're hungry?
I'm talking about art here
The garbage truck approaches, its melody is growing clearer in the sky’s fading light. It will stop at this corner, where everybody else is also waiting.
They asked me why I make it. You’re talking about art here
I ask how you responded.
I said, ‘Just like when you get hungry and need to eat, no?’ I really hate being asked that question.
The bootstraps you wore have been unknowingly passed down to me. While you were busy working, I stole a pair from your closet for myself. They’re a little big and a bit worn, but they’re comfortable, and I think I would like to die lying in their insoles someday.
“Help!”
When I was in elementary school, my parents signed my sister and I up for Tae Kwon Do classes. They wanted us to be able to defend ourselves: I didn’t realize that this meant we would be on our own one day. Our instructor was a forty-some year old cop with leathery, freckled skin and military-grade buzzed, red hair. He was a tough guy with a nice heart.
One of the first lessons Master Eric taught us was to not to cry for help, because it might not be taken seriously. He said instead, to let out a scream, a guttural one that will empty your lungs and chill the air. So, every class, we would fill the room with our screams.
“Aiiiiiii!”
We stopped taking classes once we reached high school, but to this day, I still don’t like asking for help. I don’t think Master Eric had anything to do with this though, because crying and asking are considered two separate things. I found out last year he passed away suddenly—it was something to do with his heart.
You’re talking about art here. I didn’t ask why you make it, but you tell me why I shouldn’t.
Don’t be an artist, you won’t make any money.
In other words, you’ll starve.
Booringgg.
Great, cause I don’t like overeating anyways. I think stuffing myself behind somebody else’s desk would kill me. Not immediately, of course, but over time. Suitable for some. I, myself, lack the discipline for it. On someone else’s dollar, I would gorge myself everyday on free lunch until my legs have grown swollen and my ankles have grown weak. The skin on my stomach will be taut and the hair follicles on my scalp will have been pushed out to make space for storing fat. By then I’ll be ready to be shipped away to a sterile facility where I’ll be drained of blood and plucked of the little hair I have left. After a nice salt-cure and dry-age, slow roasting to a medium-rare will be the method of choice. Perhaps a nice jus will accompany me. I’ll be carved at the table, however, a single look will be enough to decide that I’m much too fatty to be considered edible. The plates shall be cleared and the rest of my body discarded.
An unlikely scenario. I would never be able to get an interview somewhere that provides free lunch.
I don’t ask for help because I would rather try and fail first, and I’m afraid that is how I will die: by my own hands. Is it a kind of suicide, then? From working myself until cartilage has been ground away between bones. From the dust and the grime that settles at the floor of my lungs. The starving artist, what a cliche. To starve by choice is a fast; to starve without choice is a disorder—this does not feel voluntary. I’m talking about art here.
I prefer to be gaunt, in my face, at least. I think because my features looks more menacing with caves and hollows, and I was told growing up that masculinity does not wear such a yellow face, so maybe I felt I should compensate everywhere else. Maybe if my veins were to pop and fibers of muscle to ripple underneath shear skin, that would make me more of a man. Even if vascularity is a sign of dehydration, and discolored skin a sign of malnutrition, if you can see my anatomy, doesn’t that make me more real?
Is it you who made me this way? When you pulled us up by the bootstraps, did you expect me to want to keep on wearing them? I know I was supposed to dispose of them for something shinier, but I find high fashion gaudy.
What do you do it for? Maybe I’ll know the reason why one day. The starving artists would know best. Maybe they taste something we don’t. After all, food does taste better when you’re hungry. I’m talking about art here.