“When I was a painter” is a Breeders song, and it is also the title of this, though this is less about when I was a painter than “how I became a writer,” quoted because just saying it aloud inside my muggy mouth makes me somewhat nauseous and sorry for this readership, whose patience towards personal essays is confounding. See? I just used a big word.

When I was a painter I painted scenes across the street, a kind of pedestrian voyeurism without any boners; just simple things like a street lamp’s effect on a wall; the inadvertent faint line of a curb; or how shadows are never dark, just comprised of shapes of darker light. I had paint splotches all over my jeans like Basquiat, though only he got laid.

When I was a painter I looked at Pierre Bonnard, Edouord Vuillard, and Giorgio Morandi. They were all sensitive men, perhaps “fags” in today’s world — fags with wives, OCD tendencies, and a slow silent life somewhere in Europe. I went to Europe once. The food was okay, the weather was bad. Painting is beautiful because there is no talking, only looking, and looking again.

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First the room was black, and it had been black for a while. You and your date were busy with an app, or lowering approximate jumbled tiers of popcorn with five buttered tips and a kernel up in your molar’s business. Then there is light, a green neon swamp light, a swamp from which we crawled a long time ago. And it’s not me getting biblical on your ass, which might have been at the movies today. There were stories, bad stories to be told, told, told, told, told — keep looking at told until it looks told; it’s not a word really. Told. I told you you and your date are twenty dollars and two hours down. And this is all we were able to come up with for one another, t-telling b-bad s-stories like some s-studdering re: tard. Regarding tards, it’s spelt turds.

You and your date I know what you d-do. You watch a “Cannes” movie and grab a fallafel or burrito, some aluminum bomb ’bout to pregnate your belly with someone else’s economically collapsed culture. I know what y-you g-guys do. You g-go back to your mutual or respective apartment(s) — depending on who said or didn’t say I love you first or last — and you two act out this life in front of you. There’s the fridge, go grab a beer to wash down the sodium and sole eyelash. There’s the cat comin’ round getting all slutty with the edge of the chair leg, preferring it over yours. You love something that shits in a box with an asshole that is always saying hello. Now someone please slip on a three-week old issue of The Economist and break their ankle. No ER for you you freelancing fuck. Fall asleep tonight the dreams behind the black behind your eyes is a green screen holding its breath for the CGI of a better life, once the executive producer says okay.

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