Travesty

5000 people are having their art shows next year.

DIV tags are dear to me. They’re a line in the sand: you should get a merit badge for understanding div tags. It’s as if you learned how to train dogs. And I love them like dogs. I like changing their widths and margins, hairlining their border. Or playing frisbee and feeding Ol Roy to them…

And I had to tear myself away from this kennel of pixelbeasts, slathering and whining (both myself and the divs, you’re confused with the grammatical structure) for and art meeting about terms and regulations. And the sheet I grasped in my div-loving fingertips pertained to my now three-prong art show which will premier on Halloween.

Focus changed, div-love melting away into the shadows, my still human mind made a conscious decision to despise this travesty. Explanation: usually grad students have a solo show: they choose a theme, they fill the hall with their pieces, they usher in the New Kingdom, all this important stuff. And now I had to ration out my glory and genius in this already inadequately short revelation between Isaac and Christopher.

Now keep in mind, I’m a brutal genius. I have this knack for making things out of dirt and water. I put this mud into an oven and ignorantly blast it with heat (or have others do it) until I have pieces that I don’t really like most of the time. And the consummation of this would have been my, dare I say, through-the-veil art show, in which people would scratch their heads and say “I could never make pottery” and then decide between forfeiting a future dinner at Texas Roadhouse or buying one of my mugs.

And upon pocketing the money, my face and body would transfigure and my faux-Sunday dress would incinerate I would grow a magnificent set of wings and live among pious wing-people for the rest of my days, discussing pious wing-people junk. And we’d eat pious wing-people breadfruit and never watch TV.

So, after this meeting, I complain cinematic-style to my friend, shots panning, troupe of cargo-pant clad demons rejoicing and shaking their beautiful fists alongside.

Blasphemous absurdity? Yes. It is, every bit of it.

Beyond the fact that pottery is not the most urgent enterprise on the face of the earth.

Beyond people without the opportunities I’ve been given, or the constant, almost overbearing barrage of encouragement I receive from all points.

Beyond eating raw oats and milk right now, not because I’m broke, but because I was able to choose my meal this evening.

Beyond the pure love and prayer and concern that people pour out in my behalf…

The responsibilities, talents, and relationships that we have are God-ordained. But inflating them from a human standpoint darkens and spoils them. We must go through God before we can enjoy what He’s given us. Yet our deceptive minds grab onto them as “our own”, even under the guise of nobility, and they suffocate and rot right there until God takes them up again. I’ve done it again, and again, and again and the end result has never been prettier than the irreverent trash from the first part of this entry.

I took communion tonight, and broke the bread in my mouth, and fully realized that it was not the actual flesh of Jesus I was tearing apart. This proper ordinance is given by God. The transubstantial perversion of it, no matter how dramatic and tear jerking it may be, is as jacked up as my pottery show being the ends to my fulfillment as a human being or inanimate DIV tags being my loyal companions.

It’s a travesty.