JP Karliak
KALEB, early 20s to mid-30s
At a vegan kosher Jewish/Buddhist deli in Harlem, KALEB meets up with his very best friend from college, Tom. Wait, no, it’s Bill. Let’s just settle on Marcus. So Marcus has just shared that he’s popped the question to his longtime girlfriend Cynthia. But KALEB is more interested in his personal creative blockage. And the freedom that it brings.
KALEB Wow. Getting married. I think that’s incredible, man. No, seriously, you and Cynthia have been a long time coming. Wow. You guys at my concert, back when I was testing my acoustic work, not the overproduced wagon of crap of old. And the connection you guys had, I could see it from the stage—it had a ripeness, an aroma almost. I’m glad I could bring you together. . . . Well, maybe you’d been dating, but your relationship leveled up from my music. I wish it wasn’t so effective at relationship building—I’d feel less burdened. Shit, that was such a dark period. For me. You know, the album failure, cranking out creativity like it’s ground chuck.
But we all pass through darkness. Big, unexpected carwashes of feces. They follow me. I feel like a massive drain of creative nothingness awaits me in every random Laundromat and gastropub. Case in point, I was shopping for juice cleanses the other day . . . because let’s speak truth, if you buy just any squeezed fruit, you might as well start an IV drip of Sunny D into your veins. So much phony dreck out there. And I’m doing my research at this new place in the Flatiron District. Juice is good, but proximity to Shake Shack makes me die a little inside . . . that thing became corporate like a cancer, man, like a fucking wildfire. And, lo, one of my songs comes on in the store. That one that the Decemberists swear they wrote, but was really mine? And I had to flee. Ran home. Which is forty blocks, and not easy in my slip-ons, let me notate that, but I ran the whole way because I felt in my gut how fleeting creativity can be.
Everyone preaches “What you create is yours, it’s your art, nobody can ever take away from you what you give birth to,” which is such bullshit, as you well know as an artist. . . . Well, when you used to draw whatever that propaganda was back in college. . . . “Graphic design,” sure, label as you will. But the thing is, anybody can drain whatever they want out of you. I mean, fuck, we ask for it, practically falling all over ourselves to get our dick sucked or a Groupon for a colon cleanse, right? I know, who uses Groupon anymore? It’s such a scam. I just think that the only thing we can really keep is the stuff that we don’t put out there. Prolificness is a joke that a capitalist society makes you believe is so vital, if for nothing else but to have a new title on Kindle or in Costco, but look at Harper fucking Lee! You think anything beyond To Kill a Mockingbird would have been as good? Hypothetically, she writes To Maim a Red-Breasted Robin, gets a fat check, gets ripped apart by critics, and a little more of her soul dies. Fuck that! And even writing that first book probably ruined her. And the movie? I’d have more respect for her if I had no idea who the hell she was. There is a second book? Oh God, she should have Sylvia Plath’d herself.
I say internalize your work. It’s not creative constipation—it’s holding down your food and not vomiting on cue like some trained bulimic monkey. The creative energy within is what makes me, me, and you, you, right? It’s what allows us to sit here as friends and just commiserate. I don’t have to tell you, but you know if I really put myself out there, I could be on the Billboard Top 10 or the New York Times Best Sellers list. It’s not hard—it’s just feeding into whatever fast-food flavor of the week the masses want, right? But who would I be after it’s done? Would I be compassionate? Would I have the best in mind for humanity? And I don’t mean spokesmodeling for some overhyped charity that does nothing for the starving kids in Africa, parading them around like puppets. Besides, their hunger, my hunger, your hunger, it’s all equal in way. And not to be iconoclastic here, but I think I feel that hunger more than those kids, which is maybe why I feel this concept so acutely. I can’t keep enough creative energy in my bowels to keep myself fed. Every interaction, every sentence I speak is giving up a little of me. I was at Mount Sinai last week for exhaustion, did you know that? It’s a wonder I don’t collapse every fucking day. But you know what it’s like, you’ve put yourself out there, you gave your heart to this girl and now you’re getting a divorce. . . . Right, married. . . . Okay, really, is there a difference? Each a big three-ring circus of how much or how little you care for somebody? It sounds exhausting. Trust me, emote as little as possible, hold it in like oxygen and you’ll be the last who needs to come up for air. Just last week, my therapist said that I had too much empathy at my job at CVS, so I quit.
Vaguely related tangent—you can grab the check, right?