Some things i have learned on my trip

First, something about art. Art is pretty cool. I've enjoyed it, to my memory, since my second-ever memory, in which I read a book for the first time. (Sam sat on Mat in the book. It's thd central plot point. I've felt an enmity with Mats, Matts, and Matthews my whole life, and I suspect the reaction is Pavlovian. We've been at war since my first story. Mattys are okay, for some reason.) As I've grown a brain in odd, non-linear stages and jumps, I've come to think that art is the best thing there is. A shorthand for comprehending the inexpressible; it's someone else's best shot at marking down a corner of the universe. Making art is, on the face of it, a very selfless thing to do. Many people, when confronted with great beauty or sadness or terror or anger, deal with it in some odd private way and go on with their lives. The artist comes out with a synthesized reaction, a gift for anyone else who has ever been awestruck, depressed, terrified, or absolutely bloody furious.

But what I'm learning, as I enter my fourth year of trying to make good art, is that if you're doing it right, making art is the most selfish thing you could do. Good art is an excision of the self, ripping out bits of you that you'd rather have on the outside. Thoughts, ideas, and things more homologous and inscrutable than thoughts and ideas. In many cases, the finished work that the public adulates is just the receipt from a session of self-administered therapy. This makes it all the more beautiful and miraculous when something you've made speaks to other people; you learn that you, in your weird, long-since-illogical mental stews and labyrinths, are not as unique as you feared. The best art unifies people in surprising ways.

This means that complaint, in itself, does not make for good art. I'm talking about the stuff of first poems and bubble-gum pop music: weary lists of doldrums and miseries, complicated and not complex. The artless stuff of bad conversation. (For years I made terrible, complaining-type art. There's a reason I didn't show you, @my family.) Here we see a paradox form, because a lot of the best art is complainy. It's sad, angry, and/or has a bone to pick with society. See, good art digs beyond "I'm sad/angry/belligerent and I want you to know" into the very nature of sadness, anger, and rebellion. Good sad art has things to say about emotions we all feel, sourcing from the specific experiences of the artist/s. They tell you their story, but in such a way that you end up hearing yours much better than usual.

Good art builds from shared blueprints to make something unique. To make good art, I have to be brutal, dig into my saddest, most inglorious memories, rip entire chunks of my life into Microsoft Word and spin a story out of the ooze. Good art is incredibly difficult to make, and I think I might be starting to pull it off.

That's something I learned about art.

Here's another thing: almost every day on this trip, I've been confronted by something of unfathomable beauty. The Cuillin range was the first, pluming up around my suddenly tiny bus on the sunset ride into the highland world of rock and water. The University of Glasgow's bell tower was another;  I saw it from a city park, just as the city evening was gathering its skirts to leave, bats flitting above my head while the Velvet Underground told me what Stephanie said. City metros, for some reason, also command my attention as things of beauty. I've been trying to empty my head when I see things that are so much more interesting; I tried to let the world fill me. This, I think, speaks to a lack of self-esteem, that I would think a mental void better equipped to take in sights of wonder than whatever I'm working with. I'm happy to say I figured out a better way just now.

As I ascended the stairs up out of the metro at Trocadéro, a brace of identical golden-stoned buildings lowered into view, facing each other across an open marble pavilion. I, the buildings, a few hundred tourists, four food trucks, and peddlers of ghastly Francoiserie trinkets, we were all on a rise, elevated from the city center, green trees in the gold light surrounding us. The pavilion opened out to look down at the natural amphitheatre spread before us, and looming in the middle of everything, huge and ghostly, was the Eiffel Tower.

It makes me very happy that something as big, as impractical and improbable and beautiful as the Eiffel Tower exists. It doesn't fit in its surroundings at all. The way cars dart under it and each leg takes up half a city block, you'd think it was an alien ship that landed as the dawn mists rose, and the cacophony of horns and voices is the city's panicked reaction. The Eiffel Tower, like all the monuments I care about, is special to me because of a story. This one is a steampunk trilogy by Kenneth Oppel that I went through three or four times in middle school and which I loved. I haven't been able to find it in any bookstores here, and I don't know if I will find it again, but the stories were some of my favorites, with elements of Jules Verne's surreal animalia, Victorian swashbuckling, and the heartbleed coming of age style that I've always been partial to. As I recall, the stories were set in a 1910s in which airships were the prime mode of transport, islands were still their own secrets, and giant squid kept aloft by helium lived in the stratosphere. Something as audacious and loud and steampunk as the Eiffel Tower fitted quite naturally into the stories, and it's those stories I think of when I look at the highlight of whatever World's Fair that was and enjoy the knowledge that the world is a deeply weird place.

That ^ there is what I'm now thinking when I look at amazing things. Instead of trying to vacuously absorb the views without sullying them with my imperfect language, I'm sullying the Dickens out of them and getting much better at it. It's better, and less cowardly, than assuming I can't. That's something else I've learned.

I've learned how to be happy with myself in all my strangeness and contradiction. I no longer feel the need for anyone's approval; I know what kind of person I like being. I can be a writer and comic and man of charity and feminist and caretaker and salesman and friend and brother and son and someone who likes rude jokes and music aficionado and role model and cusser and child and adult all at the same time without an authority figure giving me the OK. That's very wonderful.

I've learned how to spend time that nobody wants to buy. I've learned how to keep everything in mind so I don't forget anything important. I've learned how to treat people who are sober and people who are off their heads. I've learned that everyone is a Me.

I've learned that some people are born with knives in their chests, and that writing is an act of pulling those knives out. It's hard and scary and completely counterintuitive, but it's the best thing I can do. I'll heal in the long term, and the stuff that comes out when I free myself is the best thing I can give to the world.

I've learned how to write awfully long blog posts on a cell phone.

Thank you for reading, everybody who's reading. I've decided to keep this blog going when I get back to America, because I want to. I'll write about the things that day wants me to write about. Hope you stick along.