Editor's Note: Eric Little, a Native Son of Tiny Town now wandering in the desert, introduce's Himself and His False Start to Lionization via imitation of the 12-Steps: This species being The 12-Steps of Artist's Anonymous, which is a joke of course. No artist by nature of the disease can long remain anonymous. But here in one of his earliest posts on his own blog My Filthy Mind, he gives it a good shot. Thanks, Eric.
Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of lechery, inspired this blog. My Filthy Mind MFM is a farm team for future literature, an incubator of incendiary prose, a compost of culture. As we have seen, in our brief sojourn so far, life springs from moisture, friction, and obscenity. We are conceived in filth, we are born in shit, and we live our lives covered in chthonic creatures who devour our carcasses when we die. So too with anything worth reading: it is conceived in the creative crucible of conflict; charged with foul utterances, ineptitude, and inappropriateness; and, after a meteoric rise, deconstructed by slimy critics.
This is a place for conception, for stinking, filthy creation. Everything that goes on here is fodder for something bigger, better, more intellectually fecund than any of us imagine. Best of all, you can be as dirty as you want. (Just keep it legal, okay?) Bear in mind, however, that whatever you say here may end up elsewhere on a page, stage or screen without attribution. But so what? This is the shop floor for material. Where’s that devil-may-care attitude? Enjoy My Filthy Mind!
Be also mindful that MFM is a continuously open meeting of Artists Anonymous, founded in 2011 by your blogger in chief as an answer to those self-helpers who seem to help themselves to too many Smugness Brownies and Take Yourself Seriously Cookies while sipping their Gravitas Coffee. The tenets of Artists Anonymous are set forth below, and should be considered a code of conduct here:
The 12 Steps of Artist’s Anonymous
1. We admitted we were total freaks who speak our own, unique language that no one else can possibly understand.
2. Came to believe that, despite the fact that no one seemed to understand our crazy ideas and projects, nonetheless they come from a power greater than ourselves, hold intrinsic value, and must be spawned into this crazy world, because they are the only half-baked honesty around, and at least they don’t pretend to have “all the answers” or adhere to some “all encompassing” truth, but only show “how wondrously fucked up we/you/things are or can be”.
3. Made a decision to never let any punk, no matter how “important” or “popular”, get us down on ourselves, through quizzical looks, judgmental comments, or bull-session lectures about how their belief-system is superior to our own (all belief systems being the product of spaghetti between the ears).
4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of everyone who had ridiculed our “irrational” or “stupid” ideas and thoughts, and shit-canned those people from our “Who’s Who of Cool” list.
5. Admitted to Stephen Colbert, to ourselves, and to a random stray animal the exact peculiarity of our particular, dysfunctional mode of expression, and then said, “Fuck off if you can’t handle the awesomeness of the shit (i.e., Art) I come up with.”
6. Were entirely ready to have society worship our shit because it’s original, or at least mildly interesting.
7. Arrogantly decided that we should promote our shit (i.e., Art) and that it should live on and on and on.
8. Made a list of everyone who ever discouraged Us from becoming our true selves as artists, and burned that list in a ritual that we made up on the spur of the moment.
9. Made obscene gestures toward such persons wherever possible, except when to do so would invite them to engage in unwanted sexual activity with us.
10. Continued to make an inventory of our nay-sayers, and when we let assholes nay-say us, promptly admitted that we were wrong, and made obscene gestures toward such persons, even if they had left the room long ago.
11. Sought, through community with other “fuck-ups” and “hopeless dreamers,” a connection with the wider world of unseen geniuses like ourselves, so we could improve our music, sarcastic writings, subversive activities, and other “profane” art forms, hoping only that it would gain enough recognition for us to live like rock stars, and, maybe, achieve the tired, drug-addled wisdom of rock gods.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening through repeating the mantra “Fuck It” over and over again, we tried to carry this message to other freaks, in order to tell them “You’ll never top my shit, Punk!”
Eric Little is a native of Ithaca who, like Odysseus, is currently held captive in a cyclops’ cave in Texas. A Cornell graduate, he is also an alumnus of Ithaca’s late Apple Blossom Café, Class of 1991. While his body may be in the Southwest, his heart belongs to Ithaca. He supports the tinytowntimes.com as a correspondent at large, reporting back with observations germane to, or of interest to, Tiny Town types.
Homeless Depot Dispatch and Bushwa
