a book a might write in another life

the artist who fell in love with his art

it’s messy, but beautiful - what if our lives are art for a future reality? A set of skills, mile stones, personality traits, delicately carved into precise lifelines.

People, who watch our lives through galleries and museums, contests and awards, reveling in the destruction and beauty and chaos.

One artist, the greatest artist, who does what no one has done, and creates a human that knows the world around her is not real - yes others have done this before, but not as he did. The other humans have ended up in asylums, or witch trials, or drowning in their self-made chaos. But not his human. See, he creates a human who knows, but does not care, who revels in the art along with the viewer. Who sees the majesty in the destruction, the comedic effects carefully sown in the seems, who laughs and shakes her head at the outlandish events (that are the defining style of the era’s movement right now).

Who knows just enough, but is still just art, trapped in the frame.

It’s a masterpiece. His greatest work yet.

Simon had always wished he lived in a different time. He wasn’t very picky about which time, just different. Sometimes he imagined himself with the very beginnings of humanity, surviving against all odds in a world against them. Sometimes it was the 1800s in Britain, where he would . The early 2000s were also some of his favorites, where the earth was just starting to develop the technology that would change the universe forever.

This is probably why he became an artist. He was able to live little bits of these lives through his art, build lives that he would have wanted to live (which was really anything other than where he was right now).

Most people, artists especially, thought realism was the worst form of art. “Just do a history simulation”, they would say, “and then you could live it yourself.” But Simon liked to imagine how dramatically things would change if there was just a slight, minuscule change in events. This was his specialty, and because he spent so much of his time wishing he were somewhere, anywhere, anyone, else, he’d become quite good at it.

Simon was currently in the library double checking a fact on the bubonic plague for his current work in progress when he saw the red transparent bubble pop up in his right corner field of vision, indicating that he had just received a top priority notification.

Simon was in the library researching the bubonic plague for a piece he was currently creating on a mad doctor when an alert came in from the UAA (Universal Artist Awards)

Time diffusion - not time travel, but brain works at hyper speed to experience something, like an entire lifetime, within minutes.