For James

I’ve spent years demonizing the uselessness and popularity of the serif, yet every i and h and n of this sentence has been given the superfluous means of visual support.

It’s like a makeover. Every letter now looks to their extremities with the bile of false modesty and replies “Oh, these? Why, yes, they’re new. I just thought they really said to the world: I’m changing my appearance in a futile effort to change whatever part of my personality has been stopping me from ever finding lasting satisfaction in my accomplishments without constant praise from others. And they were on sale.”

But it doesn’t matter. My choice of fonts, like my choice of vintage clothes and lost sobriety, does nothing to change who I am. I am not an artist at heart. Neither is my brother. He was accepted to the finest art school in the country and is astonishingly talented, but he is not an artist. And neither am I.

There is, within myself, a deficiency. I lack that which gives a person the ability to truly create. I feel like a dentist, perpetually in a midlife crisis, dreaming of being lauded for his artistic creations, but knowing that his only true worth comes from the benevolent torture of others.

It is one of my deepest fears that everything creative I do, or have done, is simply a mix of replication and an oddly good memory. That every doodle I draw, photo I develop, film I make and every sentence made of strings of lovely trochees is nothing but a veiled piece of artistic plagiarism.

That being so, I’ve given up trying to change this. I’ve embraced my deficiency. Rather than fighting it, it has now become my goal to simply do things I find worth doing and hope that the veil is thick enough (and the stolen art beneath it great enough) that I can feel the transient, addictive glow of praise. This has yet to produce results, but I figure this objective is worth at least a few decades of my life.

I wish never to be Salieri to someone’s Mozart. The thought of it creates a deplorable reaction in me, a physical manifestation of jealousy that I can’t suppress. The idea is only worsened if it is undeniably true that the other party deserves the title more than I. My quick acceptance into the role of second best has always been preceded by a slew of defense mechanisms which enable me to speak without screaming.

But I’m not Salieri. I’m a dentist with a paintbrush.

And so I will paint my way into death, into obscurity, always clinging to the dim hope that the praise I might one day receive will push back a few more years the inevitable day when my short-lived existence will cease to have any significance upon the world I once inhabited.

Maybe if I try to put all these emotions into my next painting…