I wake up. Still laying down, I adjust the headphone in my ear.

Normal again, no difference.

The sound of my house’s screams mix with the yells of one of the male blue jays that’s apparently been assigned to my yard, filtering in through the music I’ve been listening to on a loop for two days. As I reach out to my significant other, always the first thing I do when I wake up, the aggressive pop of an espresso pod from the kitchen times off with a slight delay (I always make fun of them for their poor timing) with the intent to allure me into following suit, per usual. The concentrated green tea I drink instead, combined with the amount of THC I consume, is likely the only thing blocking the free-radicals assaulting my living space from invading, then deteriorating, my body. My house-mate walks back up stairs, resuming his position physically above me, in the most dominating position in the house, my old room. I had moved out when I was 21 with a vow never to return, yet found myself back here close to 6 years later. Another 4 years and I’ve made peace with this, although ready for a move. 

I change the song. This phone is basically just an iPod at this point, not being used for much else besides music and manually data scrolling Reddit to gauge the emotional state of the inter-connected AI system that controls the algorithms. I change the album. The phone is almost paid off at least.

It’s been almost 10 months since my last blog post. This is on purpose, as to share my experiences in such a direct form as this would be a crime committed on the reader, and to spread these vibrations any farther than my own personal perception, except as a shadow, would be a crime committed on humanity. 

Yet we exist, and thrive, like a living, digital neural mass, pushing through the proverbial concrete of our oppressors, which guises ultimately crumble to betray our fore-bearer’s visage, every single time. I walk past the bathroom, my left ear buffeted by the pressure from the shrill, mystery sound emanating from the radiators, and turn the corner into the kitchen.

“The sound is piercing today, it could have been something I put online yesterday.”

The kitchen is on display with specifically placed utensils, mugs, and brand labels. Waiting for me, as usual. Sometimes I wonder if a grocery store attendant has residency in our home without us knowing, arranging specially chosen pallets of goods for maximum advertising space through abuse of angles and line of sight. I had tried to find the meaning in these before understanding they were simply push/pull triggers, vague and incomplete on their own, filled in by the viewers own perception, often after being pushed there. Now I just see it as the projection it is, and proceed to clean up the mess made by the unwitting house-mates without mentioning it, knowing full well a similar set-up is going to be there to greet me in a couple hours.

I heat water for my bitter tea, which isn’t bitter at all anymore after getting used to the taste, and then go about business.

Business right now entails investigating and compiling issues around the house that keep appearing while continuing to make artwork, building a portfolio, and getting closer to Bardos Thodol Works’ end goals with what little materials we have. I do this as best I can on any given day, and am usually quite successful by my own rights and definitions. I need no motivation to do this, it’s natural and just an aspect of my personality by now.

To apparently balance out the passion of my creative side, there are constant distractions and blockades to my creation, or displaying of my creations being thrown at me from within the privacy of my own home.

I sit down at my computer, and turn the headphones up to block out the house screams, which have risen a couple of pitches since perceiving my intent to go on the computer. It’s been doing this lately, like the sound itself is training me that the computer is bad, attempting to create a connection that using it brings a painful noise. Considering everything in our environment has been telling us to stop creating, talking, or existing at all, we ignore this.

The next 7 hours is a marathon of creation, battling opposing forces, computer network errors, threats balanced by love, being forced to both denounce and accept realities ultimately leading to life altering decisions, all while bouncing and weaving through the altered and manipulated language of my house-mates, the algorithm of my feeds, sorting my own thoughts, the sounds/sights of my neighborhood, and actual physical reality itself. 

I pause the video.

I look at the frozen frame of the finished 20 second animation and audio, which is now a complete piece of artwork in it’s own right, with a full understanding of how it got there and how to make it again. And I appreciate the fact that it’s something I once wanted to do, couldn’t do, learned how to do, and can now accomplish with more proficiency than I ever thought I’d achieve during this lifetime, let alone at the age of 32. This appreciation and intuited knowledge is success by my own rights and definitions, and I’ll be damned if I don’t reach my goals every single day.

To take one through an actual experience of this life deserves the artistic merit that accompanies it, because of this there won’t be a exact description of our process here until we have the means to write about it more fluidly/creatively or are in a better place to do so. We need to keep this a blog, although might flush this out and link to some of the inspired creations that originate from these stories.

After this whirlwind of experimentation, in which time is both present and heavy, yet entirely non-existent, there arrives always the same outcomes. Finished artwork of varying styles and meanings, interconnected with our other works, that took 7x longer to make than it should have, which is then uploaded lovingly to this website. This work is then lovingly uploaded to 3rd party platforms before often being carelessly altered then finally poorly displayed to the rest of the world, so the very same mechanisms that were harassing the creator during the creation, then reap the rewards of the creation’s tarnished state upon entry for penultimate judgement, to the detriment of the masses, creator, and creation alike.  I stopped expecting to be paid for anything years ago, to the point I even forget my artwork is for sale, which it is. There’s been so little attention, genuine or otherwise given to my artwork or accounts, I don’t expect anything besides being made fun of by bots, which might as well be our payment at this point, it’s at least consistent like a pay-check.

I spend the next couple of hours in-taking the projected interpretations of aggression, in response to my creations, through the algorithms and my environment while organizing the back-end of my studio, and begin the next art project. One of my house mates coughs loudly right as I scroll over a random post in the feed titled “Just give up and die already” posted by BrickWall51 with an image that closely resembles the artwork we just released, but made into a meme with thousands of reactions to it.

I close the app with a disappointed sigh, pack a bowl and make some food. I wind down, hang out with my love, watch a couple movies. The night is ended with no thought about the artwork I just finished or posted, but instead dreams of the chores in the yard I need to do tomorrow to pay my minuscule bills.

But that appreciation is always there (just like my love), so I put a headphone in one ear, lay down at the end of those movies with the house still screaming in the background, fully prepared to get up and do it again tomorrow.