Life As Performance Art 181

When you are like me, poor, living in social housing, single without any family at all, and of a certain age, you are going to feel simultaneously invisible and naked. Not really a bad combination when you think of some of the alternatives. If you happen to be gifted, with above average intelligence and sufficiently articulate and knowledgeable to be able to hold your own in a room full of pHd's and graduate degrees, if you have flawless good manners and lack for none of the social graces, no one is going to notice. Not even if you spend your early mornings crafting and putting out flawlessly composed blogposts. You are unconnected. You don't exist. You don't know the right people, and they are never going to know or want to know you. For me, the conditions couldn't be more perfect. Except for when I would like enough publicity for my art and my writing to be able to just break through enough in the marketplace in order to earn a decent second income for my creative efforts. Everyone seems to love how I paint and the way I write. Or they could be simply buying themselves off with polite lies, and really don't think much or anything at all of what I am able to do. I haven't heard from any agents, publishers or galleries lately, and no one is beating a path to my door. But this is the destiny of the poor, the unknown, the unloved and the invisible. Which is really okay. We live in such a culture of narcissism, that its really only the assholes that really succeed, and since I don't want to be an asshole, then I am not likely to get noticed very much, nor my art, or my writing. Unless someone decides to actually do something for me, but everyone is too caught up in their own selfish pursuits, or at least struggling to survive in this climate of uber-capitalism in order to have much or any spare time or energy at all for helping the invisible emerge into visibility. There is always social media, which I participate in very sparingly. Here is my latest offering to Quora, when I was asked to explain why I believe in something I cannot see: "I believe in God, even though I cannot see them, for one simple reason. Believing in God is totally different from believing that an apple exists, or the tree it grew on, because this is a matter of faith, which does not really occupy the realm of science. God cannot be scientifically tested or validated, and their existence has nothing to do with our faculties of perception. If you wish to remain confined within the dictates of scientific rationalism, then you are not going to be able to answer or field matters of faith, because they are very different matters that touch upon very different realms of experience. If you don’t have faith, then you are not likely to believe. If you do, then you will be more open to exploring that possibility. Just please don’t use this as a platform for justifying atheism, because that is also a belief, if a default belief. Agnostic, sure, because then you are at least generous enough to offer the benefit of the doubt, even if it might happen to be the benefit of YOUR doubt."