So I am veering dangerously into burnout cuz whoops you actually can’t live two opposing lives for years on end. And I am furious. I’m furious that I’ve been playing this game for so long and still haven’t won. Furious that the system will tell me to sacrifice the life I actually love for work. Furious that my student loans are so enormous I can’t really afford to burn out. Furious that I don’t really have time to see a therapist since going to a therapist will take me away from my precious art-making time. Furious at whomever is going to tell me stop buying expensive eye makeup from Sephora because I could be saving more. Goddamit, people, how hard is it to understand that you have to spend more on makeup because that’s the only way you are going to get the exact shade and pigmentation you want? I am furious that I try so hard to make artwork and I simply just don’t have the time and energy to make it my best.

And now I have to sit and listen to my boss tell me how much I suck at a job that I guess I’m supposed to be grateful for. Fucking perverse man.

I need a little tenderness.

Dear Needing a Little Tenderness,

Well, you came to the right place for a little tenderness mixed with rage at your tormenters because I am just back from leading writing workshops at the Sun Magazine “Into the Fire” conference at Esalen and still flush in the spirit of acclaiming and applauding all creative endeavors and all people who — and here comes the convoluted rest of the sentence  — endeavor them in whatever hell of nonprofit, politically correct, ego-manipulating, do-goody church-disguised-as-public-service to which they more-or-less willingly donate the marrow of their souls all to service their enormous college debt!

Debt! This debt! This massive debt of a generation! How was this fraud perpetrated upon an entire generation? This generation did not deserve to be saddled with debt. This generation deserved to be given horses to ride and blankets to sleep under.

(Beneath the stars of America the beautiful.)

But look what happened! And look at the crass and hectoring sadism of hecklers hurling rocks and bottles from the safe shadows of Internet anonymity at anyone who dares to speak honestly about his or her own true nature. Of course we know it’s projection for protection; we know that each person harbors his own artist/child who would speak up and proclaim its messy incompleteness of self and its own strange longing for expression if it hadn’t been wounded and filled with fear by family ridicule and school regimentation. We know that. So we try to be generous. Still, there are limits. We don’t have to smile and tolerate it. We can hit delete.

But look what happened! We should have been protesting all the time! We should have protested when we saw it coming! But we were too busy cultivating whatever semi-safe niche of cultural compromise we could find that offered a livable wage and health insurance! We were too busy surviving! Like you are!

And thus, surviving, are we sucked dry. Thus are we drained of our vitality. Thus are we lulled to sleep.

It is heartening to see the protests erupting around the country and around the world. These things are connected: The discontent of artists, the gloom of student debt, the crushing burden of housing costs, the rage at our nation’s foreign policy, the stupidification of our schools, the increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few cunning philistines, the whole thing. The whole mess. It’s all connected. It is a Zeitgeist of obvious unfairness and wrongness that fairly screams out, This shit is just wrong! And thus it is perceived easily by any human.

So yeah.

How did it happen that a whole generation now lives in servitude to private lenders through the subterfuge of a supposed generosity? How the hell did that happen? It is mind-boggling. I can barely contain …

Anyway, I’m for you and I’m all for us artists. We are making it however we can. We are making it in whatever strange niche we have burrowed into. We are making it in whatever gallery to which we donate our hands and hours because we only feel completely alive when hanging something on a wall for others to look at or putting some handmade vision of torment and loveliness in just the right slant of skylight sun.

I’m all for us. I’m all for those of us who are only completely alive when alone in a room putting words together in ways that have never been done that way before.

I’m all for those of us who are courageously fulfilling a whispered instruction to go forth and create.

I’m all for those of us who are different, those of us who believe things that might sound crazy, things we can’t explain yet believe to be true and which we continue to see in our dreams. I’m all for those of us who will no longer apologize for being beautiful and true. I’m all on the side of the strangely deranged, the misguided and quietly stubborn defenders of obscure happiness.

I’ve made my compromises too. I worked at Chevron for five years to pay the rent. It wasn’t anybody forcing me to do that. It was my big idea to make peace with The Man, my big idea to try to do everything, have a marriage, have dogs, have a job, have a house, make prose and poems, live at the beach, all this of which I complain bitterly from time to time, this was all my idea. So I make my angry peace with it. I make my peace but I salute those who protest, and I will be joining them as soon as I am able.

So how long can you go at this pace before you break something? In my experience, when you start asking how long can you go it’s time to pull over for a nap so you can keep your eyes open and don’t run into the back of a truck.

Artistic ambition should come in a bottle with a warning label: Do not exceed recommended dosage. Side effects include distorted perception, melancholia, sudden rage and smudged eye shadow.

Or, in the immortal words of Pete Seeger, “Take it easy. But take it.”