living with artists.

This is it.  The life.  Editing the Doctor's work, listening to The Lately's music, film festival this afternoon with an eccentric painter we used to know, writing again.  Writing like mad.  Writing the life of artists.  This is Anais; this is where she was.  This artists' life.  The only way to do it.   Live on band time.  Groupies move into my living room.  Whiskey-sour at lunch, at breakfast for the Doctor.  Smoking, various things, depending on who's around.  No money in savings, but beer in the fridge.  Sex-bruised knees, hot tub at 5am, a picture of early Beatles looking at me from the wall and what we'll someday call "early Little Plaything" clipped to refrigerator door.  The life of artists.  Living with artists, loving artists.  Making art, making life.  Beautiful.

sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

...It sounds so dirty at first; gritty and dark and kind of dangerous.  And maybe the phrase was coined to give that impression, and maybe to most it still gives that impression.  Not to me, though.  It's not dirty at all; it is perfect.  The perfect life, the perfect way to be.  It is this artists' life we live.  We writers and painters and musicians and groupies who follow those around.

It's not just SEX, but also love and community and sensuality and the relationships and friendships made in the life.  And it's also sex, and lust, beautiful women and sexy pictures and late naked nights in a hot tub.

DRUGS...means drugs.  Except that that word has a bad reputation in the world today; it sounds like something that will hunt you down, consume you, and kill you.  It sounds like heroin and crack and pills you buy on the street.  For me, it's alcohol, mostly, and pot and caffeine and a very slight smattering of anything else, in the life in Wisconsin.

ROCK N ROLL is art.  To me, and maybe only to me, all artists are rockstars.  Writers and painters and sculptors and poets and pianists and singers and electric-guitarists-- all live the life and all rock the world.

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll is living in a studio apartment with bean bags and a hammock; it's living in a foreign country to get a new experience out of life; it's gathering with whoever will come and making music in a fifty-year-old basement; it's bouncing from dishwasher job to dishwasher job as they fit around touring and recording obligations; it's taking pictures of sexy women drinking wine and whiskey; it's living and painting in Italy for a semester; it's stealing bar glasses from Wisconsin taverns; it's stealing vegetables from gardens to eat on tour; it's following a band to a hot tub at 4am, body shots and threesomes in your neighbors' bathroom, short skirts, psychedelic sombreros, knowing exactly how to take apart and put together an electric guitar, silently sketching the scene in words or pictures as beautiful music is made all around you, living on coffee flavored with Honey Whiskey, sleeping in your friends' hammock; singing, living, loving life, loving people, fucking, fighting, making up, and making love, making magic and giving it to the world without a care.

It's having a story to tell and being fucking proud of it.  This is our life, this artists' life we are living; we are telling our stories in our own ways, sharing our own brands of beauty and magic with the world.  There is no better way to be, no better way to connect to the world.