Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 16: August, 2025

This blog post was originally published in my August monthly newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

(Get ready for some disorganized things I jotted down in my hotel room, sleepless and delirious, during San Diego Comic-Con!!!!)

I recently listened to the song “Red Guitar” by Waterparks, which is basically the lead singer talking to the child version of himself like the ghost of Christmas future. The chorus is about getting a new guitar and becoming a star, and then the child self asks hey, so what’s it like in the future? And the adult singer replies, “Well, your life is a circus that makes you feel worthless / The ones you love most are the ones who get hurt.” The child self says wait, is it worth it? And the adult self retorts: “It’s our purpose.”

I feel this way sometimes. Not that my life specifically is a circus, but that the way we consume art is also something that I find generally defeating compared to the joy of actually making the art. Plus, an artistic and/or creative calling does typically involve an industry that will try at various points to exploit you in some way—though some of that is probably vestigial capitalism, but I digress.

The treatment of art as content is, in particular, the element of the circus that is unacceptable to me, both as a reader and a writer. What I mean by that distinction is that a content creator is usually selling something: a lifestyle, a brand. I’m not saying it’s not a skill—it definitely is, and I don't have it—but the purpose of content is to be consumed. The content is either good or it’s bad; the consumer is either satisfied or they’re not.

But while the artist must sell their art in order to live, the artist’s job is something different. The point of art is not to produce something that is either good or bad. The purpose of the art is the communion between the artist and the audience—it’s what lives in the space where more complex questions are asked. To me, to read in a way that engages authentically with the art is not to cast judgment of good or bad by objective measures, but to ask why the author made the choices they did; to interrogate whether those choices achieved their desired end; to become, in the best cases, a different person after reading; and to consider things and perspectives you hadn’t before.

In “Red Guitar,” the singer describes the “delusion” that he could write a song that would put him somewhere “where none of y’all could ever hurt me,” which is exactly where the disillusionment of a creative career lives, in my opinion. Funnily enough, this is the same mindset I use to write about dark academia—that on some level, to be chosen by the institution would mean finally being safe. The goal, especially as a marginalized person, is to get somewhere and finally be untouchable, which is what tokenization by the academy, for example, can sometimes represent. I often write about power and what we compromise to achieve it—in “Red Guitar,” power and safety are represented by fame.

But, of course, fame cannot exist without people, and people may not necessarily love the art. Art, in almost any form, is an intimacy; it has intrinsic vulnerability, just for the act of making it at all. And people reject it all the time. Hence the worthlessness. Or maybe that’s just me.

I always tell people how desperate I am for my son to be an artist—far too desperate, probably. I'm not sure there's such a thing as a parent being chill about what they want their kid to be. But I swear, I don’t even care what medium, it doesn't matter the outlet, I just want him to know what it is to love art. I want him to understand that everything wonderful about being alive comes not from venture capital or, fucking, I don’t know, insurance adjusting, but from something he can make. Right now, he is learning to bake and cook with me, which despite making the entire process messier, more dangerous, and unfathomably less timely, I am all too thrilled to encourage. He seems to be equally interested in playing guitar and piano, leading me to plot in secret about how to introduce both without making it seem like I’m too thirsty (very “Mastermind” by Taylor Swift-coded, as they say). I am probably too exuberant over his artwork, so I’m trying to learn to draw alongside him in the hopes that it keeps his love and curiosity alive.

Other parents I know in creative industries have told me they don’t want their kids to follow in their footsteps because the industries take advantage of people—which can absolutely, definitely be true. An artistic career is a thousand tiny heartbreaks in the making. And sure, when it’s your purpose, how can you choose anything else? So it's probably wise to hope your children have a different purpose; that they can make a choice that hurts less, because it's a safer, steadier love.

(Wrong answer sound) But not me, bitches! When times get to be the way they are now—when cruelty in the world unfolds thusly, with power concentrated in the hands of megalomaniacal man-children and their hypocritical handmaids—how can I want to do anything but make art? To tell the truth as best I can—to try to reach someone through the noise of fatigue, apathy, and propaganda? My heart may break in the process, but at least I stood for something. I think that’s the thing I want for my son, perhaps more so than art itself: conviction. Believe in something. Make something. In dark times, when you are asked repeatedly to compromise and destroy, choose instead to heal something, to fix something, to create something.

Whatever he chooses to make with his life, I hope it’s honest. And for better or worse, there is no higher truth-telling than art.