semi-social / isolation

I'm the sort of asshole who can't do parties.  Generally speaking.  Work has a party, I can't.  Everyone insists they want me to attend, I can't.  The whole crew makes a point of it, I can't.  The person it's for, my boss, she's having a baby shower--  but I just can't.  I leave an envelope offering to do a baby portrait and vanish in a puff of Can't.

And when I disappear down to the beach, to sit in my favourite tree & finish reading about the contemporary history of the theory of postmodernism--  I still can't.  People notice me and remark on how cute I look sitting there, how perfect a place to sit that is, etcetera:  I just can't.  Do I speak to anyone?  Do I interact?  The hell I can.

Eventually the book's done & I descend quiet as a raccoon to fuck off home, to contemplate dinner and whether or not I have anything else in me.  Can I finish art?  Do I want to?  The visualizing comes easy.  The wherewithall, maybe it's the trade war, maybe there's shortages.  In the main, though, it's the people all around.  I want to be social:

But the actuality of interaction, all these voices, all this clamour over fuckall--  it's people.  People make it impossible.  If it were only animals, only insects, only plants swaying in the wind...  But I crave to be able to "relate" to others, to talk, to bridge the surrounding emptiness.  And I can't.  I only want my husband.  I don't want the rest of the world.

executive decisions for artfags in poverty (part of an ongoing infinite series)

Yeah, no.  I'm not going to thanksgiving dinner in some pricy condo with a bunch of antique queer-peers.  They're nice people.  But I have absolutely nothing in common with them.  All they do is talk about real estate holdings, buying & selling, blah blah blah.  I've spent a handful of days out of the past year making the attempt to get to know them & their friends, all the while feeling like a class-conscious misfit, being politely bored-but-attentive.  To be nice.  But... There's zero benefit.  They care not a whit about my art, they never ask, they never say a word.

I might as well be a couch cushion for all the interest my presence incites.  Point of fact, I'm a mis-placed couch cushion.  I belong on my couch, not theirs.

Self-centered?  Congratulations, you're reading a blog.

It's not an excuse, because it's true:  I've been sick a damned week.  Sit in a room with a bunch of older people and play Typhoid Larry?  Sha'n't.  I mask at work.  Masking at a holiday dinner?  It would feel both like a forced error + a faux pas.  So my ruined digestive tract & phlegmy lungs and I will stay here, at home, where it's comfortable and I'm not surrounded by people who make me feel like a class traitor.

Here's a thing:  All I care about, besides my husband, IS ART.  Why should I waste my time on interactions with people who know this about me, and they don't make any effort to engage?  I mean, notgonnalie, it would be marvelous to have some rich queen commission something from me.  But they're not going to.  I've known a couple of these people a year, and it's never come up.  At this point I'm fairly certain it won't.  So IS there a point, besides being nice?

Being nice for the sake of, dunno, entertaining the meaninglessness of relative strangers?  Is exhausting.

With any luck I'll cut a swath through some more of 'In Thrall' by Jane DeLynn.  Suits my mood.