To live on the edge

Artists are a notoriously edgy bunch. We are drifters, addicts, eccentrics. We can never quite keep ourselves in the light, in the place where others set up house and have families and babies and jobs and a four-door and retirement plans.

We have a hard time with the banal because, I think, it is so outside of our experience. We feel everything not only in our bodies but deep in our brains and most often we think entirely too much. We get bogged down in the recesses of the darkest deep wells of our minds and then we block out the sun with a stone and stay down there. And then we create.

All too often we forget how to live normal lives, if we ever knew how. We can't climb back out of the well and we have to live with all the messy, dark, and truthful things that live inside us. It's enough to make one mad. It's enough to make one cope any way one can.

I'm thinking of this all because a dear friend and amazing writer Sue Williams posted a link on her blog, Wet Ink to Life Magazine's photo essay "Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts". My first thought was of exploitation and my second thought was of sadness and the lengths that artists go to to cope with this crazy lifestyle.

Check it out for yourself and see what you think.