The BLVD

A few years back, while waiting for my morning chai at the coffee spot down the street from my place, I saw a woman with a plethora of buttons on her denim jacket. From a VW Beetle to a pink lizard flipping any passerby the bird, there had to be at least twenty buttons adorning the back – far too many for me to analyze while waiting for my name to be yelled out. But there was enough time for me to read the black block letters the buttons encircled. “Everything is Art” it said, bold and in all caps like a commanded statement.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that since. 

From the obvious: sculptures, paintings, etchings, scribbles in the corner of my notebooks and small flowers drawn on my calendar, to the not so obvious: the rug in my living room, the clothing hamper in the corner of the bedroom, the toilet I’m sitting on as I write this. It’s all art – in the sense that it was created, for a purpose to emote some feeling or for some use that was necessary, essential even, at the time. It was created, by someone’s hands, or maybe a machine…but that machine was programmed by someone’s hands! So that makes it art. It is art. All of it. Everything we see. Once I accepted that, everything felt amazing and beautiful and my bathroom felt all the more vibrant! 

I told my coworker, Lydia, about the jacket and the subsequent existential crisis that followed, sans the toilet. She thought it was cool, because it was. And of course, of course Ben, the eavesdropper that he was and the coworker I just couldn’t seem to turn Jessica Alba invisible woman around, wanted to give his unsolicited opinion. “That’s a gross overstatement. Not EvErYtHiNg is art,” he said, so smug and satisfied that we actually stopped conversing for him to get a word in. I took what he said personally. So personal that I decided to dust off the old Tumblr fingers and create this blog. Tumblr died some ten years ago when I left, obviously. But WordPress is still here and I’m going to start up again circa 2011. Nostalgia is sweet, having taste is sweeter though. So enjoy my random posts about things I think are cool, cute, and randomly insightful (maybe?)…because yes, everything is art, including this here blog! So suck it Ben!