otw to you

people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.

"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."

the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.

the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.

at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.

"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.

you walk into the clothing store and see a very nice sweater and you've been wanting to stay warm so you pick up the sweater. it turns immediately into a horrible fizzing froth, rushing over your skin, faintly acidic. it's tacky, it leaves behind a residue. horrified and a little ashamed - did you do it wrong? - you reach out blindly and your hands find a shirt. that one dissolves too. you think of the phrase you break it, you bought it. how much money did you just accidentally spend on that shirt and that sweater, both things that you'll never be able to wear.

more confused than anything, you turn to the first person you see, but she's experiencing the same thing, her brows furrowed. "i've been here since i was 13," she says. "one of these days i'll actually get to try on something."

you were raised with horror movies, so you look for an escape instead of trying to stay. you go to the front desk and wait in the front line and when you finally get to the front, a very angry man is sitting there, scowling at you. "i think your store is broken," you say to him. "i can't pick up any of your clothes. they don't work."

it is as if you have said something vile. every person within earshot takes a step back from you. the man gives you a cool look. "these clothes are good for you," he says.

"no, i know that," you've read about them, "but i can't seem to actually hold them."

again, everyone seems to think you've said the wrong thing. some of them are holding shirts, so obviously some clothes work. those are the people you hear whispering first. lazy. someone murmurs. i managed fine, you hear. i just had to keep trying.

the man taps a sign next to him. in big bold print: not everyone can have this.

"okay, um. if you're not going to be helpful, i'm just going to... not buy this," you manage, feeling yourself flush with heat. why are you so embarrassed? their clothes are the thing that aren't working.

"i don't have time for people who don't dress themselves well," he says. "it's disgusting."

you don't know what else to say because actually you dress fine, you're pretty sure, you're just not in their clothes. you leave the store.

but your hands are still tacky from before. you find yourself weirdly sensitive about your clothes. maybe you should go back in, try again? there were people who were able to make the clothes stay present, you might have just been doing something weird.

plus there's the rest of the world. how people look at you in airports. how shame rushes over your cheeks during job interviews, worried you don't look "professional" enough. the people across you are all wearing those clothes, and you're not. in the doctor's office, the nurse's eyebrows skyrocket. are you sure you actually went into the store and tried on the clothes? you're staring at her - i'm here to see about my cough, not about my wardrobe.

but of course it fucking matters. when you google it, you find out that most people can only hold onto the clothes for about two years or so, and then they fizzle out too. that the clothes only "stick" for 5% of customers. it just means that any person in those clothes matters more. it's a scarcity. at first, you're horrified by the idea of something that almost never works. but you learn it soon enough: being in the 5% means you have taste, class, are exceptionally pretty.

you try to ask why exactly it's these clothes, but you usually are answered with an eye roll. you ask why the prices are so high. why nobody seems to care about the way their clothes leave that weird strange residue for years later. there's a sizing chart online you find, hoping it might explain your weird inability to lift anything. most of the news articles all read the same thing - this chart was made by someone cruel and definitely isn't accurate, but for some reason it is still used as our golden rule.

so you go again. you fall too. it's worth it to try. even kind of ironically. even kind of privately, shamefully. this time you go and manage to hold onto socks, but it means you sometimes get that strange residue on your floors. you get used to the tackiness after a while, but when you manage to hold onto pants, you discover the tackiness spreads. sure, it's irritating - this sense there's a barrier between everything you touch, even you and your friends - but it's worth it, because people notice you're in those pants. and you don't want to be one of the 95% who lose them after all this fucking work you put in, so you let the tack get all over everything until it dries down into a fine powder that coats your floor in a brick red flurry. when you walk, your footprints look bloody, so you just learn to step gently.

and since it worked for you once, like gambling - you will come back. you will teach others how to get into the store. you will tell your own children - oh, you just have to keep trying at the clothing store. you will let others treat you badly when you are not wearing the right things. you will spend all that money over and over and over again and you will feel ugly if you are not wearing their brand. you are simply treated better if you dress like this. you feel better if you dress like this, secretly winning over your friends who are between sizes. it doesn't matter how much time you spend at the store, missing birthday cakes and parties because you're trying to make a dress look nice before dissolving. what matters is that when it works, all that relief and joy and peace rushes in. when it works, people finally love you again.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

I said, "That's just not true. Sometimes what doesn't kill you leaves you brittle and injured or traumatized."

He stopped and thought about that for a while. He came back later, and said, "It's like wood glue."

He pointed to my bookshelf, which he helped me salvage a while ago. He said, "Do you remember how I explained that, once we used the wood glue on them, the shelves would actually be stronger than they were before they broke?"

I did.

"But before we used the wood glue, those shelves were broken. They couldn't hold up shit. If you had put books on them, they would have collapsed. And that wood glue had to set awhile. If we put anything on them too early, they would have collapsed just the same as if we'd never fixed them at all. You've got to give these things time to set."

It sounded like a pretty good metaphor to me, but one thing I did pick up on was that whatever broke those shelves, that's not the thing that made them stronger. That just broke them. It was being fixed that made them stronger. It was the glue.