Life After Death

In the solitary confinement that the industry has imposed on me these last seven years, I often think of my old friend, an artist who committed suicide. I think he made the right decision. He was depressed over a failed romance, but he was also quite miserable over having to go back to work in landscaping to make the money for his rent. For some reason we just can't treat artists like artists in this world. It's an age old problem. And every artist or poet who committed suicide was fully entitled to do so. Do you want to know why I thought it acceptable to drive a forklift for Nasco? Read my employment history: A Canadian Artist's Professional Background. The work conditions at Nasco were actually lighter than a lot of the jobs I've had to do in my life. Here I am, an artist who draws and sings and writes songs and poems and scripts and the only way I can make money is to go out and push a wheelbarrow around. The night before my friend died, he encouraged me to kill myself. He thought that the humiliation that artists receive in this world justified their suicide. I was still quite shocked to find him hanging from a hook in the ceiling the next evening. And since then I've often been tempted to take his advice. If I died they would jump all over my story and my work and make a zillion dollars out of it for themselves, just as Van Gogh's paintings, for which he hardly received a cent all his life, now sell for billions. I might not care about this, with the urgent need to escape my misery, except that the business already cashed in my works as though I were dead when I was still alive. We can't treat artists like artists but we treat anyone the business supports as an artist, no matter how untalented they are. Do they know how to draw? Can they play a musical instrument? Do they create their own work? How original is their work? None of this matters. All that matters is that the industry supports them. It's an ongoing insult to talent.
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