Art. Cynicism.

Travis comes to visit me, but I’m blue, and I’m lousy company.  I shrug, and apologize for being in the doldrums.

“My body is broken and so is my heart.  That’s all I’ve got going on right now, and I don’t want to bore anyone with it.”

He tells me that people aren’t bored by me, and that everything has just happened, and is still happening, and really though, it’s ok.  I breathe out a sigh and let all my feelings of inherent failure out with it.

“I never knew what to expect for the future, you know?  I wasn’t a kid with a plan, ‘I’ll be a teacher, or a social worker, or an engineer.’  I never wanted kids, but I thought eventually, I’d love someone, they’d love me back, and we’d stick together.  Or I’d have a successful job that I truly loved.  I just figured by the time I was this old, I’d know at least one thing.”

“People are assholes.  That’s a thing.”

God bless Travis.  He can always make me smile.

Travis hates museums.  Just absolutely hates them.  But because I can’t sit down, hang gliding is too expensive, the zoo is forty minutes away, and the universe seems to hate him, I manage to convince Travis that we should go to MOCA, and check out contemporary art.

I love contemporary art because it can be horrible.  I love it because I neither feel the need to enjoy it or respect it.  I can love it, hate it, be completely transfixed, or call it a piece of dogshit (which it might literally be) and go on with my day.  I enjoy wielding this power.  There is an hour long video of someone chainsawing a post.  There’s a room full of sinister clowns weeping in terror over a dead naked body.  My favorite, however, is a disco ball sitting on top of a cheap orange wig in the middle of the floor.  That’s it.  That’s the entire fucking installation.  I’m feeling bad for the saps who volunteer to spend their days guarding these abominations for fear we might touch them.

In one room we enter, it’s dark, full of couches and sledgehammers.  There are headphones for us to listen in and a video projecting on the wall.  We listen.  Teenage girls’ faces turn blue, then pink, screaming, cracking mirrors, looking vapid, talking about denim and makeup and boys in high pitched autotuned, sped up voices.  I yank the headphones off and turn to Travis.

“Ugh,” I say, “It’s like…. dating.”

The guard at the door loses it.  Just loses it.  Doubles over and grabs his knees, laughing out loud.

“You need to stop dating in Los Angeles,” says Travis.

He’s right, and we both know it.  So we do what any reasonable, single people pushing thirty in the city would do.

We leave immediately, and go get beer.