the map of obscurity, draft#1

so i have decided that i need to think more visually on the topic of obscurity, and have subsequently forced myself to render my first 'visual aid'. based loosely on a children's painting which hung briefly at a bookstore/cafe in Guelph, Ontario and which haunted my dreams for a good fifteen years since i encountered it, it attempts to simplify and describe the state of divine or productive obscurity. i will try not to sully it's power with unnecessary explaination. please take a moment to consider it, perhaps leave me a comment, ammendment, or subsequent visual aid.

obscurity will not begin nor end in castration

So, my story begins about ten days, immediately after having received some photographs taken of myself and my band at a january gig here in Hamilton. The photos are excellent, but also contain indisputable evidence of several large bulges eminating from my pants. Not good, healthy, rock-induced bulges, but rather large, mundane bulges causes by my obese wallet, nine dollars in pocket change, and a ring holding every key ever entrusted to me since high school. I essentially carry the same volume of personal affects in my pockets as the average woman does in her purse. Looking back over other photos throughout my life, I realize I have always been this way. The bulges have been with me since the beginning. This is who I am. I am a man who barricades his crotch with personal ephemera and debris.

I have subsequently concluded that the reason I unconciously befuddle my middle region has to do with some kind of self-hatred: hatred of my own arrogant, penile energy. This is the energy that would cause me to do angry, horny things in this world: make a fool of myself fighting to fill my own ambitions. I have always striven to be a proper, sensitive, pro-feminist, civilized sort of lad, but I am wondering if my bulges are not some kind of symbollic castration. I wonder if in the quest to become a likeable metrosexual, I have neutralized my own phallic power source. Maybe superimposing on my crotch all of the trinkets of my civilized identity--money, wallet, keys--has muted my primal drive.

I am now worried that my quest for sublime obscurity might somehow be compromised. After all, I am trying to acheive the kind of obscurity attained by those who plunge down the darkest tunnel because an urge keeps pushing them. I am not trying to acheive the other kind of obscurity that comes from hiding, from compromising one's own purpose.

Therefore, I have begun trying to keep my wallet and keys in other safe places on my person. My wallet goes in the top pocket of my jacket, over my heart. Somehow that seems right. Keys in my back pocket, or maybe my satchel. I am just spending the change as it accrues. My hope in the coming days is that my hips will swing a little more brazenly as I walk, maybe my general direction will shift a degree or so. We'll see what happens to my little pecker now that he has a little swingin' room.

DECLARATION #2: THE SMALL CIRCUMSTANCE IS AN ANGEL KISSING YOUR FOREHEAD

march 1, 2005

Something occurred to me a few weeks ago. It was in the middle of going through the rigor of packing up the band, its gear, and my dwindling supply of OBSCURITY IS THE NEW FAME buttons, and heading to North Bay in the dead of winter in order to play a single show for a small crowd in a boxy public gallery space. To put it simply, I remembered that there is a great, undiscussed, unnamed energy which infuses shows given for only a few dozen people in a quiet space. You no longer feel as if you are on a stage, you no longer feel you are performing in front of strangers, and, best of all, you no longer feel the presence of the SPECTRE OF IMMINENT CELEBRITY breathing down your backside, telling you lies in order to make you into some kind of bellowing rock and roll asshole, performing to people as if they are all somehow getting ready to become your future biographer.
Small rooms and under-capacity crowds always behave as if they have something to feel sad about, and yet, I have come to realize that those circumstances are the ones where you can perform perfectly. The performer relaxes enough to be given the chance to PURSUE JOY IN ORDER TO RADIATE JOY.

DECLARATION #1: OBSCURITY IS A FAITH WITH WHICH TO GRAPPLE

feb 16, 2005:
I am fundamentally an obscure human being. I've made my music independently and sporadically for over a decade now, and never once bothered to try and figure out how the MUSIC SYSTEM works, how to succeed within that system, how to connect with like minded people within that system, how to make any significant life for myself from that system. Instead I make my weird little songs, sing them for the people who are closest to me, occassionally bully up the nerve to get into a festival or do a big show, but never with any real regularity. And yet I spend lots of time by myself thinking obsessively about what I do.I have recently been flouting the word OBSCURITY as a bit of a proud pretense, I have been trying to send out a message that my OBSCURITY is nothing more than an ingenious scheme to preserve and protect my art. But it dawned on me today that OBSCURITY easily conceals FUNDAMENTAL SHYNESS, a characteristic, which if left untreated, can be a danger to THE ARTISTIC PATH. FUNDAMENTAL SHYNESS can prevent one from taking risks, reaching out, even dreaming.I must therefore be careful to clarify my devotion to OBSCURITY. I must be able to overcome the OBSCURITY which is cultivated through FUNDAMENTAL SHYNESS, in order to achieve OBSCURITY which results from one's committment to THE ARTISTIC PATH.