Why Artists Should Never Be Allowed to Procreate

I got an email yesterday telling me they were sorry but hahaha Barkey, you can't have the production grant money that was supposed to kick off funding for your first feature film as a director. 

The day before, it was an email telling me they were sorry but I couldn't have that month-long, all-expenses-paid artist retreat thing in Finland. 

And a week before that, it was a producer guy saying that while he loved me for the gig (that woulda paid for the next two years of my decadent, ramen-fueled artist's lifestyle), the dude with the bags of money wanted someone local to LA because who knows tough luck goodbye.

I got yesterday's email when I was on the job, renovating a basement. 

Or, to be more accurate, assisting the ex-mechanical-engineer-on-nuclear-submarines Polish guy who keeps me around because he's getting older and his left hand doesn't work so well anymore, and because I'm not entirely useless on a construction site so long as he speaks slowly and repeats himself a lot.

Home renovation is one in an endless succession of jobs I've taken so that in the time left over I can do the really hard work of "not going insane," which is what I call making stuff or, if you wanna get all technical about it, "being an artist." 

One of the most comes-with-the-territory things about being an artist is that people tell you, "No."

A lot. 

But one thing they don't say "no" to you about, weirdly enough, is "making more humans." They just glance at your lost-in-thought, glazed-over eyes and your impractical life choices and they say, "Kids? Sure! Go for it!" 

Which is nuts!

For a guy who does random jobs like reno houses with a Polish guy, and teach high school English, and stand in on a TV show, and cetera, the ultimate result of this procreative nuttiness (tee hee) is even less time for art making and even less money for potentially someday (ha ha) affording to actually get a place of our own that isn't just a converted cinderblock garage on my parents' acreage, covered with ivy and falling down around us a little bit more each day.

The Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America says that my employment and my life choices mean that I am what they call "poor."

This doesn't bother me.

As an artist, I am legally required to be at odds with the United States Government (and all governments, and institutions, and 7Elevens). So they can call me "poor" in complete disregard of all my cool knick-knacks and art-objects and freedom, and I will just bite my thumb at them and keep on making stuff.

Poverty has never been the point, though, and it's not always a total laugh.

To be honest, its attending anxiety can sometimes be a bit of a creative buzzkill.

As Charles Bukowski put it, 

"Starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax."

Now, don't get me wrong. 

We're not starving, and we never have been. 

But I've watched as friends and family have made more practical, more lucrative life choices and been rewarded with all the blings. One dude owns a glove factory. Another, a large sailboat. One chap even bought himself a small island and a classic sports car. 

I own... less. 

This is not a complaint. 

I am forty-six years old and my future, financial and otherwise, is uncertain. But this only puts me in the same boat as a little over eight billion other people.

Still, there's something a bit more anxious about trying to be an artist with kids than without. 

If I didn't have kids, it'd be a heckuva lot easier to afford the inspiration of the occasional porterhouse steak, and also to avoid feeling anxious every day of my life about their futures as artists living in the world.

Because here's a sad little secret about me:

I secretly believe we should ALL be artists of one kind or another.

I believe we should all be exploring the world creatively. I think we're built for it. I think that every single one of us goes insane if we're not making art in the world, and that most of us DO make art in the world, and that the degree to which we remain sane is in direct proportion to the degree to which we say "Nuts!" to the accumulation of money and power, and focus, instead, on gifting the world with something that we've shaped out of the raw material of our lives. 

Which, when you think about it, is kind of what parenting is.

I dunno... 

Maybe all my art-making hasn't worked and I've gone insane, and this bit I've been leading up to about how making kids is like making art... maybe that's just the desperate argument of a guy who's sad that he hasn't (yet) figured out how to get the world of art-buyers to open their wallets enough to allow him to move out of his parents' cinderblock garage.

Maybe I'm lying to myself when I say that Art is, at best, an act of hope and service, and that parenting is kind of the same thing... or can be.

Maybe it's INSANE that they allow artists - especially ones who didn't inherit a trust fund and a house in Lake Tahoe - to breed. 

And yet...