Personal Statement
Word audition. Ok. Stop using two spaces between sentences. Ugh, you aren’t going to do some ironic self-aware, meta-nonfiction, bullshit personal statement, are you? Too late. God you’re such an asshole sometimes. What else? It’s a performance-based program. So, what does that mean? Are you writing to create art – to express the art within you - or to satisfy an audience you have never met? I see what you did there. You’re trying to casually ask some philosophical aesthetic question to show you think deeply about the process. You are such a clever bastard. There’s no way to win with you - if I write a straight essay, you’ll make retching sounds and say it’s boring. Oh jeeeesus, did you just use “straight” as an adjective to convey normalcy? Are you trying to cancel yourself before you even get into this program? There’s that self-destructive impulse again. Ohhh, shut uuup. How many words does this have to be? Wow, that is some stamina. What did you write – like three sentences before you started thinking word count? No wonder you haven’t finished your novel or another book of poetry yet. That’s not it, I don’t know if there is a limit one way or another, and that’s not exactly fair - teaching is time-destroying and my poetry gets complicated:
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That’s three parts of the same poem describing three different women with the same words. Yeah, I bet they got that from the “manholes” and “corpses” all over the place. You must be really proud of this one - you already included it in your poetry page. And whatever, that’s not an essay. This is always how it goes – you start working on writing and start wishing you were painting – you start painting and wish you were playing guitar – you start playing guitar and wish you were playing Sweeney Todd howling “Epiphany” on a stage somewhere, and let’s not even mention your weird costumes and puppets – you go off like an aimless shotgun. You should really try to find a way to synthesize yourself. Can we not make it sound like the puppets and costumes are a creepy fetish thing on the personal statement, please? Now I have to put in pictures, so people don’t get the wrong idea.
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Wrong idea? - you think putting pictures of a grown-ass man dressing as a Muppet helps your argument? You’re going to wind up on some FBI list. You’re going to be one of the first against the wall in President Ron DeSantis’s America. Don’t say that - there’s no way he wins. Didn’t you think that about Trump? This is pointless. I’m getting tired of all of this relentless, distracting and undermining. [stabs brain with fondue fork] skkkkrink!
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Before his unfortunate accident, what Tony Chiarella was really trying to do through this program was to find some like minded souls to create a world or worlds, the creatures that inhabit it, and the music, stories and poetry of that place. You know - nothing too ambitious. His hope was to hone his craft(s) in this process and develop a better sense for how to use technology in his art. He always loved to collaborate with and learn from other people and, let’s face it, he is much more productive when he has deadlines to meet. He is healing up nicely and you can hardly see the scars, so please say yes, he gets way too odd when left to his own devices.
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