City lights

not finished

 

 

1/31/09

Here I am again thinking way to much every inch of the corner of my eye is filled with morons and creeps. Every second I feel as though I could explode from the anxious pressure but then I stop myself and realize I’m the lunatic and that they are just normal people living normal lives. Therefore they could never know any better. I need to get away I really do, I need to be in a place where I’m not going to think every soul around me is an insect maybe New York or f**k even the next town over would seem better than this.

 

 Hello my names Anthony Bentley. I am writing this email to you from a local library where they have free internet access, so perverts like the one next to me can look at bikini models or what ever else they do in this place. I would rather be anywhere else but I have to send you this email it’s of most importance that you retrieve this. I have done something very bad and you are the only one I can trust. I understand that this will be very strange for you being that you don’t know me. So before I tell you the horrible thing I did, I’ll tell you about myself. I’m sixteen but by time you get this I will most likely be seventeen, because my birthdays tomorrow. I’m a painter the best way I could describe my art is that if you closed your eyes and took a very very long piece of string and kept tying it into knot after knot so that it created an ocean of lines that have no end or beginning, then open your eyes and try your best to control that never ending stream of lines and turn it into its own world, But still giving it a sense of structure. I guess .well once you have this landscape dig deep in your imagination and memory to combine every face you have ever seen or every machine and tree. Now that you have your characters and pieces of scenery throw them on to that sea of knots. Give them rolls to act out! Now this is much more than an image it’s a fully living functional play! Hers an example ill take the man next to me you know the one with his hard on for cyber babes. He has this terrific comb over with big iron rimmed glasses that make his eyes ten times bigger than his head. He has on a sky blue polo with pens in his front pocket perfect huh? Okay so basically he’s drooling over his computer screen. Well across the room there’s a synthetic tree I really can’t stand those why would we create a fake tree just to put it inside? Any way ill combine the tree and computer with the lady working at the front desk she has nice eyes, she really does. Well now we have a computer screen body with the image of a bikini models body all tan and oily. The arms and legs are the plastic synthetic tree branches. The pervert wants to dance with it so bad but the plastic branches will cause him to have an allergic reaction if he touches it so he just continues drooling his f*****g guts out with his magnified eyes practically bulging from his skull. God what a moron. Okay well his shirt the sky blue one, it really is a nice color so his shirt now is an image of the sky clouds and all. Well one problem this computer screen with images of tan oiled bodies and plastic limbs has the head of the front desk lady you know the one with nice eyes well she’s asking him to leave and that the library computers are for professional and important work. Now the pervert gets embarrassed his face I swear turns the color of the red stripes on the American flag which by the way is my mouse pad. So now the pervert.... lets call him Ernie. So Ernie’s apologizing his head off.

Well this was all really going on she really was telling him to "politely" leave and he really was turning red with shame and saying sorry like a goddamn machine gun. I really couldn’t listen any more so I turned up the volume on my computer I was listening to "Hospital Beds" by Ben Kweller. Man this song always cheers me up like the line where he says “in the morning I’m out of my head, I wish I was sleeping in your hospital bed” always gets me! Well the libraries closing so I’m not going to send this just yet I guess I dragged on quite a bit and lost track of what I was saying. I do that alot, I really do. So by time you get this I guess I’ll be seventeen.

2/1/09

I’m seventeen! Finally maybe I can be taken a little more serious. Well I hope to finish this today but even if I don’t I’ll still send it because I feel like it just can’t wait. Of course I’m back in the library again go figure. Today has been kind of a drag. Can you believe that I got kicked out of a coffee shop? So its raining right and I walk out to this little coffee shop because I was getting all claustrophobic and s**t being inside my house all day. Anyway, so I go inside and sit down I start to read “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. If you haven't heard of it you must live in a goddamn cave.

I’m on page 120. Not long after three lines the woman working there said “do you need anything” I said “no thank you I’m just going to read my book”.she responds "no you must buy something or get out". Well apparently she runs the only coffee house where you have to be a paying customer to sit and read a book. I told her I only had a dollar which was true and said “what’s your cheapest item?” Cookies are a $1.09. I said “sorry I don’t have the nine scents.” She responded as fallows “I need to pay the bills, if I let every person just come in here and read a book I’d have to close the store.” Well being that I have no motivation to argue with these idiots. I just thought to myself what I wanted to say, as fallows "well miss if you didn’t turn away every kid wanting to just read a book on a rainy day which may I mention now is storming then maybe people would come in your crumby little shop!" Well naturally I didn’t say any of this. The truth is I’m actually just really shy. So after I was “politely” asked to leave. I put on my headphones selected the song “Grapevine Fires” by Death Cab for Cutie. And ventured into the storm it never let up.

Now I’m here at the library finishing my email to you. The reason I picked you is because you’re the kind of person that will look at some bullshit work of “art” like a canvas with a red circle and an extensive non-relative title like “Judas’s betraying kiss on Christ”. And say this is not art! That’s why I have picked you to tell you the terrible thing I have done. I’m sure you want to know how I found you first though. So here it goes two weeks and one day before today at the big art opening inside Michaela Frays new gallery. The “artist” John Bell had his work up on every five walls of the pentagon shaped building. You know pieces like “Judas’s betraying kiss on Christ”.  Well all five walls were covered with these “paintings”.  The same walls where I asked Michaela Fray if I could hang up my "paintings" well she said, as fallows “I just don’t think people will get them, I mean they are good.”         Of course people totally understand John Bells “painting” of a black canvas and with two parallel white lines titled “The great Architecture of Rome”. John Bells fuckingbrilliant, he really is.

So while I’m in the gallery making myself sick with all the phony people acting like they know art because they have money or something. Thats What really gets me is when some rich snob thinks they understand art just because they can pay $2,000. For a canvas with two parallel stripes! So I’m surrounded with all these phonies thinking why isn’t my art up here on these five walls?

 

 

Author's Note

not complete