I have received a small grant for the inability to let things go

There are many things that I should have studied during my tenure at art college. Architecture, color theory, the imbibing of smoke, grant-writing, rationalizing the decision to attend art college to my parents and not least of all myself, contemporary photography history, how to lance a clotted bruise under the skin of my left thigh, how to make and eat pho from any of my many new vietnamese friends. Altogether, the detritus of these things, or of the things learned accumulated into the corners of my bedroom (the Norton Anthology of Aesthetics vol.s 1 and 2 of the Third Edition that I cannot, for the life of me, resell; packaging materials that before the advent of my near-constant drinking of red wine that ensued post-graduation may have been valuable, if not for creation then at least for the increasing rarity of brown corrugated paper). And I can recall a time before John said that he could never imagine having sex with me in the bed in my bedroom (which he eventually did with the selfsame truncated aplomb with which he did all things; sex, acting); in those days I imagined a small public arts organization that focused on marginalized populations and targeted arts-advocacy to verite difficulties in the lives of people, and then I realized that this would not actually be an arts organization but a non-governmental organization and that art was a wholly secondary means to the end of embetterment and that it would balm the wounds, maybe, of discrimination or distract poor black people. And then I realized that neither art nor poor black people were very important to me at all.