"The darkness is my birthright."
Nico

I might as well warn you up front, you may very well have no business here.  Not reading this blog, not listening to my music, never stopping to wonder how the world never seems to improve in spite of a compulsive faith in the human race that resembles a gambling addict pouring coins into a machine that never hits the jackpot.  No business at all.  It's entirely possible your time will be better served arguing with your enemies in a comment section somewhere, or doing your hair.  Sit there like a pillow, chosen sedative in hand, pulling the casino lever on humanity until the endless train of pain and skulls converts itself into a marvelous future that has finally deigned to enter the present tense (thanks to our compulsive, unwarranted beliefs), and which is comprised entirely of celebratory mechanical beeping, flashing Triple Red 7s, and piles of money abundantly distributed to everyone's perfectly-contented satisfaction.  I'm not being snide.  I'm telling you to do it.  Withdraw your conditional, self-important approval any time you like, stay glued to the floor of the human casino of lies, and feed your quarters into the machine until the puke-smog chokes you out to your heart's eternal discontent; all I ask is that, before you go, you realize that your faith-based worldview of infinite human progress and everything you feed it is completely self-absorbed, self-obsessed, and self-congratulatory.  It's so self-important, that it will take an actual, visceral affront to the idea that it isn't true.  The narcissism of human self-belief is so pure, so undiluted and uncut, that it will prove itself wrong in the most violent fashion possible to defend its demonstrably-ridiculous, sacrosanct position.  

Adherents to the faith will paint antifreeze smiles on their faces, install a kiddie pool in the twisted trenches of their souls, pretend such narcissistic denialism is "positive," and dismiss the "heresy" of human realism as "negative."  Whatever the case, if you're a humanist fundamentalist believer, you'll say it's my lack of faith in you that prevents you and/or everybody from achieving liftoff, and you will be tempted by the very thing that chains your soul to the bottom of the sea to burn me at the stake to punish my infidelity.  I'm not making a political statement with this article (like feminism and rap music, politics are obsolete), but who said it?  "Socialism is always one genocide away from utopia."  Something like that.

But I'm being redundant.  I wrote that song a long time ago.

I'm telling you this because this article is going to be self-absorbed and self-obsessed, and I want the hairtrigger hordes to know that anything in them that takes offense to the narcissism that is likely to creep into this article is in and of itself completely self-important and absorbed.  So spare me.

I'm aware of my own sins.  Like most people, my sins are mostly obvious, but since you're nobody's priest (including your own), they're none of your business.  I cop to them all the time.

Do you?

Just be sure you point that finger at yourself, before you point it at anybody else.  It isn't negative to hold yourself to the same standard you hold others.  It will isolate you from the hairtrigger hordes, but it isn't negative.

"You are beautiful, and you are alone."
Nico

So, is this my Nico year?

I wrote an article a couple years ago titled My Kerouac & Garland Year because I was the same age Jack Kerouac and Judy Garland were when they died, and I was wondering when I was going to be so lucky myself.  I didn't say that in the article, but it's what I was thinking when I wrote it.  47, fine.  It isn't ancient, but I can see why they were tired.  Oscar Wilde, 46.  Frida Kahlo, 47.  Timothy Treadwell, 46.  Christopher McCandless, 24.  Van Gogh, 36 or 37 I think.  Shot by muggers.  Not a suicide, like everybody thinks.  Who shoots themselves twice in the chest if they're trying to die?  I have a feeling he was okay with it, with dying, and made peace with his family and with God before he went away.  He only sold one painting in his lifetime.  Everybody now, pretends to care.  And they probably even do (I know I do), but do we, really?  How are we treating the Van Goghs of today?  Are we screaming at them about politics?  Are we maligning them as bums?  How are you, how are we, treating the Van Goghs of today?  Are we telling them to learn to live in a room w/o air, as we suck the air out of the room?  Do we force them to bow and worship at the altar of community compliance, and deny them the basic human right to be an individual, an idiosyncratic lunatic who might be weird, but who may or may not actually scare the cows.  And if he doesn't scare the cows, who cares?

What drove Timothy Treadwell "crazy" like that?  What makes his rage "incandescent-artistic" as Werner Herzog states in the clip above?  Wasn't it a broken heart, rejection and disenfranchisement with society at large?  He felt more comfortable around animals, and in my opinion longed to return to the innocence of childhood, the sinless, idyllic condition that animals never outgrow.  The animals accepted him, even if the last bear only accepted him as a meal.  It was more validation than he felt from humanity.

Is it because humanity is always pretending and presuming to improve the world and itself, even as it slides deeper toward oblivion?  While animals are "happy" in the blank existential sense, and innocent, if not harmless, people kill and slander and rob and malign each other to show their virtue.  Not merely their strength.  Their virtue.  No animal ever presumed to improve the world by destroying his enemy.  I love the scene at the end of Grizzly Man, which shows Treadwell walking up a stream, away from the camera, followed closely by 2 giant grizzly bears.  It's like watching a guy walking his dogs, or strolling through the fields of Heaven itself in a state of unadulterated innocence.  The last shot of Grizzly Man is one of my all-time favorite scenes in film.  If he can't share his soul and spirit with humanity, he will share it with the bears.

“Happiness is only real when shared.”
Christopher McCandless

There are 2 basic schools of thought regarding Christopher McCandless.  I subscribe to the sympathetic one that doesn't dismiss or invalidate his anger or his pain.  Into The Wild is genuinely inspiring to me.  If there is hope in humanity, which there isn't without Christ (which means forgiveness and a miraculous return to innocence), it's in the individual.  The free-range wanderer living free and harming no one.  Groups of people always coagulate under flags and into shared identities, outlined by some foreign ideology that is at least partially defined by the existence of human brother enemies.  Individuals are free.  Or would be, if they could be left alone.

The sound of air leaving the world is like the sound of applause, or 2 planets colliding in slow motion.  The formation of a black hole.  A nuclear blast.  Families wrapped in plastic.  A vacuum cleaner weeping.

"I do not feel connected enough to throw stones at a policeman.
I want to throw stones at the whole world."
Nico

Working in a vacuum is exhausting, and nobody cares about adulation or attention after they're gone.  Narcissists care about adulation; artists only care about the work.  Adulation might be a side-effect of being able to make a living in a visible trade, but if adulation and praise is the goal, you neither understand nor deserve it.  Regardless of the opinions of people who worship it, the work itself can only sustain you so long.

"I thought of my friends who had died of exposure
And I remembered other ones who had died
from the lack of it"
Nick Cave

The vacuum can kill you.  It can also be a tractor beam, and suck you in even if you're trying to escape.  Young, old, and everything in between.  Like Christopher McCandless, John Keats was very young, and didn't want to go.  He wasn't ready.  Only 25, I think.  Tuberculosis?  He went to Rome, to either die or be cured.  It only half worked.  He's buried there.  I'd love to see his grave.

Nico was 49 when she died from a head injury caused by falling off her bike.  She was on a weed run on the island of Ibiza, had a heart attack, fell down, and cracked her head.  How many people am I going to have to outlive, before I am paroled?

Will this, my Nico year, finally be the one?  Will the muggers reconcile me to my nonexistent family with a double-tap to the chest?  Will the community of individuality-eschewing humanist fundamentalists finally pretend to care, and call it suicide?  Will the real people, my actual friends, who are actually cool, spark up a joint and put on a show in my honor?  Will they sing, and dance, and drink?  Will they perform a rememberative dance in the bowling alley?  Will they cover my songs for the amusement of the king, like they covered my ass when I needed it?

It's a very nice thought, it really is, but...  Who cares.

Really.

Who cares.

Just make sure you treat your Van Goghs well while they're here.  They're tired of living on tips and waiting for you to hear them.  I know, because they tell me all the time.  Not directly.  It isn't necessary.  They don't even really bitch.  I'm the bitchy one.  Like I tried to explain at the beginning of this article, in so many words.  But if this does turn out to be my lucky Nico year, buy the real people a Cadillac, a hamburger, and 1000 months' rent every time they cover one of my songs at the thrift store.  Which is where I will hopefully be buried.  In the pocket of a coat from the 70s, hanging in the thrift store.  My ashes, Revelation 21:4, and a guitar pick.

Who knows, if you buy a coat, you may find me in your pocket.  Stranger things have happened.

Or if they haven't, they're about to.

Thanks for listening.

p.s.  Let's observe a moment of silence for all the souls who have stumbled on the trip-wire of legalistic clamoring, who have fallen into the bear pit of disconsolate fury, fingers wagging up at us as they writhe in misery, impaled on the giant flames of blame that will torment them for eternity.  The film was made in the late 1950s by a Ukrainian-born filmmaker who got into Haitian Voodoo; the music is by me.

Rest in peace, if you can.

Sincerely,

Nico