Pataphysical Fable

This is my latest piece, a little diorama called "Pataphysical Fable". It has it's impetus in a very unhappy stretch of my life around 15 years ago. I was miserable, absolutely miserable. If my life had not already been horrific at the time, my drug habit would have surely been enough to push me over the edge. If I did not already have a terrible drug habit at the time, my life would have been repulsive enough on it's own.

 Added together, these two factors made a perfect shitstorm of awful. One day, I wheeled my nasty, hemiplegic, terminally ill mother to her favourite restaurant in silverlake and cut up her breakfast for her and poured her a cup of coffee. I wandered outside to get a newspaper (remember those? Newspapers, awkward noisy things that krinkled and stained your fingers?)
I got this newspaper and continued the train of thought that had come to obsess me all the time at that point in my life:
That life was horrible and nothing surprising, good or bad, ever happened anymore. It was all just a repetive sequence of grotesque events and humiliations, and that my life had become an obligation that I no longer wanted to be a part of. I was slowly working out the logistics of suicide, how I would do it, what chain of events would have to be set into motion, how to go about shutting it all down cleanly and logically. My affairs would have to be put in order, but what did that even mean? Where would I start, and what was the checklist I had to tick off?

I got back to my mom at her jentacular table. She regarded me hatefully and I just kind of gave a little nod that acknowleged "Yeah, I hate you too." I breezily tuned out whatever crazy, stupid, cancer-patient blather she was dribbling from her mouth.
I opened up the paper and saw a story about a mama cat in the netherlands who had a litter and one of the kittens was born green, and nobody could explain why. And that shocked me, pleasantly shocked. Suddenly my whole world fractured right down the middle and revealed a bizarre, unpredictable universe that still held surprises, if only I could stick around long enough to witness these anomalies.

The placemats in the restaurant had little drawings of pies on them, and I imagined one of them bursting open and a little green kitten jumping out. I had a vision of sick, diseased, evil old birds sitting around, drooling over this pie they were going to eat, and then this vital, life-affirming green kitty jumped out and sabotaged their meal.

I decided that morning not to kill myself. Simple as that.

Months later, the same newspaper revealed that the kitten had faded to normal gray cat colours as it grew, that the whole thing was explained because the mama cat drank from a stream polluted with chemicals and dyes from a factory.

By that time, my mother had slipped into a coma from which she would never awake. I had made up my mind to get sober and develop some kind of strategy to get on with the rest of my life.

In the fifteen or so years that followed, I have wanted, again, to kill myself. And I have even tried and failed a couple of times. And I am sure that in the future, I will want to again, and eventually succeed at some big, irreversable adventure of self-destruction, and then no more blogs, no more art, and no more complaining.

But I have seen a few other things since that green kitten that were absurd and beautiful and alien and unexpected, and I was glad I stuck around to see them.

(this is me at the gallery, pretending I am the kitty jumping out of the pie)