Portrait of an Obsessive Artist

Working on this last Zebra Girl book is hard.  It’s taken a lot of my  focus, I haven’t had the motivation to simply make art for months.  It’s  depressing, but my muse finally perked up when I got the strange urge  to do like I never do and draw serious.

I’m going to bare my soul  here.  Okay?  I want to be honest.  That’s me up there.  Notice the  baggy jeans, hanging from my belt because I lost weight years ago and I  tend to wear old pants that are too big for me now.  I’m fairly slender  at this point, but I’ve still got a slight spare tire I have yet to  shed.  See?  Well, I may have taken liberties with the ears and such.

More  to the point, you may know that my brand is “Obsessive Thoughts”.  I  chose that term as a label because it’s not just a name, it’s a  lifestyle.  I suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, the tendency  to… well, to compulsively obsess.  And not about important things,  usually, but in response to a universe full of gremlins.  You feel like  you have to do certain things, like it’s necessary to do them, like  you’re holding the world together, and dropping the ball will have  urgent existential consequences.  It’s a persistent source of stress.

So  I’m going to describe my perspective, and bear in mind that on a  conscious level I’m well aware of the inherent nonsense.  But I want to  get this out into the open.  This is what some part of my psyche tells  me is happening, if not all the time, then for most of my waking hours:

I  move through the world surrounded by contaminants.  I must constantly  be on guard against spiritual infection.  I dodge, react, and clear  myself through tiny rituals performed hundreds of times a day.  Nearly  every part of my body is involved in a clumsy dance.  Repetition of  movements is cleansing.  I move haltingly as my extremities catch on  contact points which demand my instinctive tactile attention.  My  fingers mostly lead, forced to twitch and touch and straighten and flex,  casting towards acceptable directions (I observe the spasms as I type  this very sentence, words punctuated by stops and starts as a fingertip  lightly taps an extra key, or jerks to the side, or briefly hovers in  place, or just wriggles a bit towards empty space, all obeying some  ritual I can no longer decipher).  Like guns, pointing them in the wrong  direction at the wrong moment risks compromising myself since they  relay the sickness.  They are primary soldiers but also prime targets,  and they must hide themselves whenever deviant sights or sounds threaten  my purity.

Objectionable surfaces must also be avoided, such as  pictures of people I don’t like.  I have to touch some things.  I have  to avoid touching others.  My feet do their part too, tapping the front  boards of stairs as I climb them one by one or intentionally bumping a  crevice or some panel around my desk in order to banish the bad mojo  running through my system.  I scuff the bottoms of my shoes as I walk to  insure that the ends of my being make appropriate contact with separate  boards of wood or concrete panels, whatever I happen to be walking on  at the time.

Meanwhile, up top, my head is kept on constant  alert, my eyes a busy terminal of positive and negative input and  output.  Abstract moving imagery tends to be a threat, for if a  subversive pattern appears before me I must vibrate my sight by  summoning pressure through my skull, defeating its hypnotic effect (and a  diminutive voice in me frets even now that I am spilling my secrets to  the tired old conspiracy running its tendrils through all electronic  devices).

Meals are more of the same.  If dirty energy ever  infects my food with stray data (for instance, if an offending name is  uttered while I’m looking at what I’m about to eat) then I must negate  the pollution by holding the offending morsel up to my eye and matching  its transparent double image against an acceptable surface to banish the  corruption before I allow it in my mouth (a technique which also  applies to my fingers, and which happens often when I watch the news  during meal times, horrid politicians constantly threatening to invade  my essence with their ugly souls).  Whenever a contaminant aura does  slip inside of me then I must cough it lightly out, willing it from my  guts and off the tip of my tongue.  Noises issued from my throat  contribute to regular maintenance, further warding against evil  spirits.  My nostrils serve a likewise function now and then.

Similar  duties are assigned to my knees, my toes, my elbows, or whatever piece  of skin is ever exposed to undesirable elements and conscripted in my  never-ending war with the invisible forces.  Beside my shuffling feet,  my shadow must also avoid contact with any and all acknowledged threats,  including my own dialogue.  Any word uttered risks assigning its  deleterious quality to any part of me caught in my sight at the time of  its mention (spoken or otherwise).  This includes the insides of my eyelids, which often disrupts my  efforts to sleep at night as I must force them open to expunge toxic  names that cross my mind.

The campaign extends to  inanimate objects, which constantly suffer the touch of my overworked  fingers “wiping off” phantom sediment, or which serve as conduits for  various energies, or as goal posts which must sometimes be met before an  arbitrary time limit has expired (for example, a turning point in a  song).  This was worse when I was a child, and had to race onto a carpet  or couch whenever a toilet began to flush.  I thankfully managed to  shed some of the more overt habits over time.

But it should go  without saying that the very inner monologue running through my brain  must abide by its own arcane set of rules, because words and names  cannot be used carelessly, even in my thoughts.  As for that, two  particular words have special functions in my mental arsenal:  “Not” and  “Narf.”  “Not” is a mantra, since it is a pure expression of expulsion,  and I throw it constantly at negative influences, especially bad  imagery or text that gets out of hand.  Conversely, “Narf”, a noise  coined by a cartoon lab mouse named Pinky, is a safety mechanism, since  it means nothing, thereby safely absorbing any malign concept and  allowing me to make idle unspoken noise without risk.  Both words are  subject to distortion as the situation requires, ghosting through the  roof of my mouth in various ways, shapes, and forms, a single altered  syllable sometimes called into play, expressed through the smallest push  of saliva hitting my teeth.  “Nt, nt, nt.  Tt.  Unt.”

I could go on.

Looking  at this stuff, it’s hard to believe that I’ve lived with it my entire  life.  Typing it out really makes it sound crazy.  I don’t want to be  insensitive to other people with issues like this, but it’s hard not to  have that reaction when I put it into writing and recognize that this is  what I’m actually doing all the time.  I always knew it was odd, but I  always figured that I would grow out of it, and when I didn’t I just  tried to mitigate it.  And I thought I was doing alright, because it  used to seem worse!  I beat it back when I was younger, and my ego  encouraged me to accept what was left as part of my genius, or  something.  But looking at all this, I find myself wondering if I didn’t  just make it more subtle through complexity.  Or maybe it’s only gotten  worse with the stress of the past few years.  I don’t know.

But I  want people to know about this.  Now I’m not sure why I always tried to  keep it to myself.  I feel like bringing it out into the open might  help, might serve as a spark to finally burn away the web and let it all  go.  There are definitely people out there who have it worse than I  do.  Maybe you’re one of them!  We all have our crosses to bear.  And  like I said, I’ve managed to cut some of it off.  But now I think it’s  time I started fighting it again.  God only knows how much of my time I  could get back if I wasn’t twiddling my fingers.

Hey.  Thanks for listening.

-Joe