god, david, and goliath

in 1991, eric clapton wrote an insanely beautiful music that made billions of people cry.

i sit here in the dark room, staring at the wall,
wondering if eric clapton could've written out those notes without his kid falling from the 53rd floor, dead, splattered on the pavement.

without loss, could such raw catharsis exist?
NO
pain cracks open the soul, birthing art that mirrors the human condition’s kaleidoscope

Certain depths of perception, creativity, and competence simply do not open without being forced open by suffering. When life breaks you in ways that cannot be undone, it removes the option of remaining shallow. You are pushed into contact with reality at full resolution. That contact changes how you see, decide, and create.

What pain does is expand internal range. A person who has only known comfort has a narrow emotional bandwidth and therefore a narrow expressive and strategic bandwidth. Someone who has lived through fear, loss, humiliation, and despair can operate across more states without collapsing. That range is what allows great art to feel alive, great fighters to stay calm in chaos, and great thinkers to hold contradictions without flinching.

This is why the origins of exceptional people so often look ugly. The gutter, the slums, prison, war, exile, grief. These environments compress time. They accelerate maturity. They strip away fantasies early and replace them with hard constraints. When you survive them, you don’t just gain resilience, you gain realism. And realism is the backbone of anything great.

Thats why you have to be careful on shielding your loved ones from pain and suffering. Because if you do, you rob them of the opportunity to learn and grow. You must act only as a guardrail, stepping in only if circumstances are truly severe

i was sitting in a bar on sanpedro
three wines in,
watching a fly circle the rim of my glass
like it had nowhere better to be,
and this kid, maybe 21, maybe younger,
with a stupid scarf he didn't need and glasses
with no prescription
slides onto the stool next to me and says,

"sir duhbid, what is art?"

and i wanted to tell him to go fuck himself,
to go back to his liberal arts degree
and his parents' money
and his little apartment with the
tyler durden poster on the wall,
but instead i drank,
and i thought about it.

art.

art is when you take all the shit
swirling inside you.
the incarceration and the hard ons,
the women who left at 3 am
with their shoes in their hands,
police banging at your door,
the jobs that ate your soul, a cancer
eats a lung
and you put it down.

you put it the hell down
on paper,
or canvas,
on a barroom napkin
stained with beer and mustard,
and you slide it across to some stranger
and say,
here.
here's what it looks like inside me.
here's the whole stupid beautiful mess.

fucking ugly,
it's not supposed to be pretty.

pretty is for greeting cards and
department store mannequins
and the fake orgasms of women
who just want you to finish
so they can go to sleep.

art is the other thing.
art is the real moan,
the one that comes from the gut,
the one you can't fake
no matter how many workshops you attend,
no matter how many books you read
about craft and structure and
the fallible hero's journey.

i've seen men write perfect sonnets
that said absolutely nothing,
fourteen lines of polished bullshit,
every syllable in place
a furniture in a model home
where nobody lives,
where nobody has ever fucked on the kitchen floor
or cried in the bathroom
or thrown a plate against the wall
and watched it explode into something
that almost looked like meaning.

and i've seen a drunk at this very bar
scribble four lines on a cocktail napkin
misspelled, crooked, stained,
that made me want to
put my head down on the wood
and weep
because he'd done it,
the bastard had done it,
he'd cracked his chest open
and let the whole stinking universe
pour out
right there between the ashtray
and the bowl of v cut and piattos

thats what art is, kid.

your intestines on the floor.
its your dick in your hand
and your heart in your throat.
it's every woman you loved wrong,
every morning you woke up
and wanted to kill yourself,
and still never gave up, you did it anyway
and somehow, somehow,
in the crawling out of bed,
in the pouring of the coffee,
in the staring out the window
at the ordinary ordinary ordinary street,
something moved inside you
like a fist unclenching,
and you had to get it down
before it disappeared.

because it always disappears.
the moment is a whore
who doesn't stay for breakfast.

and the kid looked at me
and nodded
like he understood,
but he didn't.
he wouldn't.
not until life had beaten the shit out of him
a few hundred more times.

not until he'd lost something
he couldn't get back.

i ordered another wine and a cigar,
the fly was still circling.

"buy me a drink," I told him
"and stop asking stupid questions"

he bought me the drink.

it was the most honest thing
he'd done all year.

the chair's got a spring poking up my arse,
but I don't move. I type.
typewriter's been here since the war,
keys stick like old whores

i don't feel like writing.
i feel like dying.
but dying's too easy
one swallow, one jump, done.

no. i choose the harder death,
living, and turning it into sentences.
thats what the greats did
bukowski have poems, van gogh starry night
and me. pen and paper

suffering? its the ink
without it, what're you left with?
pretty lines? hallmark card shit?
you need the bile and the spit and the rot

last night I fought with the mirror
she won, told me I'm nothing
so I sit here, prove the glass wrong
with spite and raw fucking anger

words come out crooked, drunk,
like my the priest who fucks whores.
they stumble, fall, get up.
thats art.

i don't want to heal the world.
i want to stab it,
then hand it the knife,
say, look what you made me do.

and if one soul reads this
some kid in a basement,
knife to his wrist, ready to kill himself
and thinks, shit, i'm not alone...

then the blood was worth it
not because I saved him
because i showed him
the scar is beautiful.

i showed him that you can go through hell
and come out on the
other
side carrying water for the tribe

that monsters are real
but you can kill them
if you
don’t give up

now fuck off.
let me type.