"Potential" is such a troublesome thing. If you're still hearing friends or co-workers talking about your potential well into your 26th year, there's a good chance you never had all that much potential - you just gave off just the right mixture of perception, ambition, perspicacity, and guile that tricked people into thinking beyond whatever you are capable of -- not maliciously, exactly, just...
This is what I'm realizing now, that all that positive reinforcement I got in late adolescence calcified and poisoned me. All that praise heaped upon my "humor columns" the Sunset Scroll (my high school newspaper of record) does not make me a writer any more than your driver's license makes you Paul Newman. I don't get to act like a Method actor as seriously intense as Daniel Day Lewis just because I did an okay job in my 8th grade drama club rehearsal of the Dumb Waiter. At an International School in the Netherlands. As the only native English speaker.
To assess your personhood forthrightly, you have to contextualize all the things your supportive family members and faculty advisers and cognitive therapists have taught you to believe about yourself. They aren't wrong, exactly, but they aren't privy to the abject horror your brain is capable of summoning up when left to its own devices. Listen closely to those internal monologues drone like Metal Machine Music when you enter that twilight between sleep and confusion. Embrace it - not always, but accept it.
There's rough honesty in that brutal self flagellation. You are telling yourself important things. There was never a greatness struggling against your worst, most mediocre tendencies and habits. You are merely the aggregate of the experiences you've accrued so far in your life -- something value neutral, essentially. Value, greatness, moral turpitude, merit -- these are legacy concerns, and while one might find the allure of veneration throughout history tempting... sometimes you have to spend a summer recording a concept album about The Bio Force Ape.
Sometimes you have to have an idea so profoundly stupid it excites you. Everyone can be dumb; it takes a little more je ne se quoi than that to make a The Bio Force Ape thing. These are the important things: be dumb; get excited at how dumb you are; spend dozens of hours painstakingly crafting a monument to that dumbness; and share that monument to the world.
So "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape," is an answer to a question no one ever wanted answered: What if someone took Emerson Lake & Palmer's "Tarkus" - the concept album about a tank that happens to also be an armadillo... an armadillo that hates nuclear war - as some sort of challenge to make an even more ludicrous concept record? What if the Protomen wrote rock operas not about one of the most iconic videogame creations in the nascent medium's history, but about the star of a never finished, unreleased NES game? Hell, these aren't the questions no one wanted answered -- these are the questions NO ONE EVER ASKED.
Here is "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape," presented to you free of charge.
You see why no one should have ever encouraged me to pursue any aspect of the creative arts. Or you will see. (Or maybe you won't. I'm not making you. But I'll be super jazzed if you did!)
Look. Not every magazine profile can be "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Not every short story can be "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Not every opera can be "Parsifal."And not every transcendentally foolish idea can blossom into "The Life & Death of the Bio Force Ape".
[Self-evaluations always bring out the worst in me.]
