A letter from the artist as a young man
Dear Mom and Dad:
I’m trying to figure something out. See, I think I am an artist. I draw pictures in notebooks and people say I am talented. “So talented,” they say. I have this feeling they think I’m great, but I’m pretty sure I’m not that good. I’m just better than most of them, which doesn’t mean I am really talented, I don’t think.
The other problem is, I don’t want to be a poser, but it’s hard. I find myself wanting to walk around carrying a guitar case or with drumsticks in my back pocket so people know me better just by looking. I’m not real good on either instrument, yet, but I want to be that guy who makes music. The one everyone knows about.
The thing is, I’m not there yet. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be one of those guys who grows up wishing he had stuck with music, but I’m afraid it could happen. I’m more afraid of that than anything in the world, to tell you the truth.
I know what you are going to say. You’re going to tell me to work hard, take lessons and practice. Take art lessons if I want it bad enough, you’ll say. (Like you always do.) But I don’t know if I have it in me. Seriously. Let me try to explain it this way:
Sometimes, I listen to music at night in bed on my iPod. The stuff I hear breaks my heart. I really do want to be able to play like Hendrix, not like some of my friends who learn a few lines to metal songs and think they can play. I’m talking about really playing, like those amazing acoustic guys I see on You Tube. I also want to be able to write epic songs. I want to so bad, it brings me to tears sometimes. I hear this stuff and there’s this ache and then I’m sure that when I wake up the next day, I’m going to sign up for guitar lessons or really commit to my drawing and start painting and stuff.
But then it shuts off, somehow. I don’t know how. If I could keep it burning, I know I could do these things. It’s weird, though. I wake up and everything just looks so lame when I’m standing waiting for the school bus. The feeling is just gone, almost like a dream you can’t remember all the way.
It’s kind of like the day after you sit in the dark and watch a horror movie. The night before, when you’re into it, you believe there really are ghosts and you shiver because you are sure you really see them snaeking around in the shadows in the corners, but in the morning it’s completely different. You know ghosts can’t possibly exist in a world that has sunlight.
It’s like that with the music that makes me cry at night: in the morning, when I’m waiting for the bus, everything changes. Then there’s no way that the magic I heard the night before could possibly exist in a world alongside homework and with sloppy Joes on light green, plastic cafeteria trays. Even if I have that same great music playing in my ear buds, it’s like it turns, right away, from the most powerful thing, ever, into noise to block out everything outside my head. Then I wind up thinking through it instead of listening to it like I do in bed at night.
Just . . . could you please stop telling me I’m lazy — that, if I wanted it bad enough, I would work hard and study music and art? I do want to be an artist. I do really want it. I swear. I’d rather die than ever give it up.
It’s just so hard. Maybe it’s too hard for me. But I’m really not lazy. I swear to God, I am not lazy, so please stop saying it. It just feels like the job’s way too big.
Love,
Your Son
Chris Matarazzo’s ARTISTIC UNKNOWNS appears every Tuesday
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Dear Chris,
It’s not that we’re calling you lazy, you agnst-ridden teenage slacker. We’re just doing our job. Would you rather we get off your back entirely, leave you completely to your own devises, and shrug off what is arguably our most important duty? Of course not. We love when you show enthusiasm for something and as parents we want to foster that and see if it blossoms. If we left it to you altogether, that inkling of talent may never be realized.
Besides, that yearning and drive for the creative that you feel while lying in bed at night actually started with us, so stop with the “I’m not lazy…really” stuff and recognize that our hearts are in the right place. We were teens once too. We see in you greatness, but we also see our own flaws. Trying to quell one while feeding the other is a slippery slope, but were trying.
We love you,
Mom and Dad
Dear Mom and Dad:
That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard and it shows a surprising lack of understanding of the subtext of my letter. What you see as laziness is not a flaw. It is a reaction to the banal world you keep trying to shoehorn me into. Your oversimplified view of my apparent lack of motivation is not excusable. If you truly cared, you would not try to motivate me with insult. You would put in the work to think beyond black-and-white parameters of the ancient definitions of parenting and try to be a partner to me who works to add to foster my motivation instead of calling me “lazy” and then sitting back on the couch with a beer to watch the game, convinced that with an easy and condescending word, you have done your duty.
Maybe you should break the emotional bank and try to realize my heart is in the right place, too.
And it is “devices,” not “devises.”
Love,
Not Chris, but a hypothetical, artistic teen.
Dear Not Chris,
Get your head out of your ass and LISTEN to what we’re saying here- Success is 90% hard work and 10% genius. If you don’t master the former, you’ll lose the latter, and then you will be that fat lump on the couch, swilling cheap beer, berating your kids for their laziness while you put the best years of your life into a meaningless 9-5 job (assuming the economy has one for you, which it likely won’t). The subtext of your letter wasn’t missed; it sucked. We all know that story and have been in your shoes, now quit whining. If you don’t REFINE that aetherial gift of inspiration, that fickle muse of creativity, you will only find yourself frustrated in all your endeavors because you will not have learned to make it your own. Been there, and done that. If you don’t nurture that sense of wonder, not only it will get lost in the gray banality of the world, but if you don’t DO SOMETHING with it, you won’t have deserved it in the first place because it’s YOU that will have let it slip through your fingers, and that is more tragic than all of those who don’t hear the call of creation put together.
I know your heart is in the right place, but if you don’t follow it, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
Sincerely,
Your older brother with the meaningless corporate job.
Dear Bro:
It must be hard for you to hear what I was really asking for with your head so far up MY ass. You and mom and dad immediately jumped to the typical perceptions I have come to expect: that I wanted to be excused for not working hard. I never asked for that. All I asked was not to be called “lazy.” It’s more complex than laziness, but like everyone else in the world, you want things to be simple: “Not Chris” is just lazy. That’s all there is to it. I was just saying there is more going on. I was just saying I need help and not derision. And, typically, both you and mom and dad came right back with “your subtext sucked” and with calling me a “teeneaged slacker.” I rest my case.
I’m not just lazy. At least I won’t be until you and mom and dad convince me I am. Which you will, because it is easier for you to pidgeon hole me than to listen to my open-hearted call for help.
And we wonder why kids and adults don’t get along. No one wants to listen or think. Everyone wants to judge based on preconceptions against the other generation.
No matter what I say, you hold up “teenaged slacker”and “lazy kid” up like a shield that my words bounce off of like ping-ping balls. No wonder kids feel like there is no hope for the future.
Love,
Not Chris
P.S. I wore your Italian dress shoes to soccer practice the other day and it rained.
Dear Not Chris,
Guess this makes it clear that we adults are just not as eloquent as we need to be. The first line of my letter was meant as a joke. Thought it was over the top enough that it would be clear. Sorry that it wasn’t.
As for the rest…I actually agree with you. But you need to try to see this from both perspectives. That’s really all I’m saying. Take as much time as you need or want. Explore anything you want, or don’t. It’s your world. We are just trying to see that you stay afloat in it until you are truly ready to spread your wings.
Love,
Mom and Dad
PS. If you ever mouth of to us like that again, we’re going to take away your iPod! It’s probably only filled with that long haired music anyway.
Dear Mom and Dad:
Whatever.
Not Chris