Growing up submerged beneath the oily surface of a slurry birthed of intrinsic self-loathing, depression, and self-sabotage marks me as a child of the 90s. Nirvana's I Hate Myself and Want to Die made complete sense within the context of its time, and mine. Kurt Cobain was screeching and grinding his way through my internal dialog. He got it, he understood, here was someone making music that made sense! Unfortunately, he couldn't withstand his internal onslaught for long, and we all know how that story ended.
I was 16 when Kurt Cobain ceased to be, joining a cadre of personal musical heroes and heroines that had either purposefully, or accidentally, killed themselves during their 27th year. Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin - something dark in those J's - all rock-n-roll legends, all martyrs to drugs, depression, and in my mind, the creative process.
As a high school Junior, I had ample talents and opportunities. Sports had always come naturally to me, but a tragically misguided sense of intellectual superiority combined with a crushing fear of public failure made me incapable of heeding friends' advice to join them on the basketball and football teams. I had been drawing since childhood, and had experimented with painting, sculpture, and even dabbled a bit in the then brave new world of digital design. A life as an illustrator or author seemed to be in the cards. What no one knew, what no one could be allowed to know, was that inside the polite, intelligent, well behaved boy was a putrid, despicable, impossibly worthless wretch unworthy of success, or love, or kindness, or sympathy, or help.
They were too simple to see, too ignorant to ever understand. I was horrific, physically and psychologically hideous, but they were somehow blind to this most obvious truth. There well meaning encouragements, optimistic dissertations, sincere advice - all of it nothing more than intellectual smegma deposited by hapless, pathetic insects. There caring words were nothing more than cigarette ash easily swept aside by the persistent, ceaseless whispering in my mind, incessantly reminding me that their kindnesses were inspired by pity, fueled by their blindness, weakness and stupidity. Anyone suggesting I had ability and potential needed to be politely, but earnestly dissuaded that this was not the case. All their talk of setting goals, of plotting a course for the future and pursuing dreams - that was the stuff of fools and simpletons. I hated myself, I wanted to die. It was only my complete lack of faith that saved me. I am convinced that, had I believed in a Heaven or an after life of any sort, I too would have ceased to exist.
Naturally, my artistic heroes were dark practitioners of the creative process - Caravaggio, Dickinson, Poe, Bosch, Morrison, Cobain, Maynard Keenan, the list went on and on and on. I would later add characters like Francis Bacon, Van Gogh and Orwell to my long list of ebony-eyed idols. Almost without exception, these were men saturated in the viscous sludge of chronic depression, crushing narcissism, and in some cases, even homicidal psychopathy. These were my people, my cohorts, my crew and their darkness provided me great comfort.
