artofaboythatoncewas

[artofaboythatoncewas]

wake up in bed fall out drag myself slowly to the door feels like it's miles away what's the point? i'll just fuck up again i think i'll stay here piss myself and eat filth don't come looking for me not this time i deserve to rot on the floor trust me it's better this way

[artofaboythatoncewas]

i squint through blinding white to see the cracks on your surface so i can tread softly without fear of falling into your frigid death but i'll slip like i always do your icy claws will welcome me to an end so cold that it burns like hellfire

[artofaboythatoncewas]

Portraits made in MS Paint trying out a new cell-shading technique.

[artofaboythatoncewas]

tear away tear this away from me this world this flesh this reality is not me not my own rip it out tear me out take me out of here away from here this is not where i am where i’ll be remove me replace me just take me i’m not me i can’t be me until i’m far away from me

[artofaboythatoncewas]

all i am is an incomplete and distorted reflection of a foolish entity’s pathetic attempts to recognize the image of its own form in a broken mirror that was never designed for it in the first place.

[artofaboythatoncewas]

time will lie to you it will conceal itself you must look deeper to see the truth the reality is time is not real we made it up to measure our travel around our mother star we do not pass through time it passes through our minds we make it real what i feel in this moment is no different than when i felt this way years ago or years from now we always exist even after we do not time is fake life is limitless

[artofaboythatoncewas]

this is not home it’s just a place where i exist and take up space my chest is empty when i’m here because my heart is with you, dear

[artofaboythatoncewas]

Book: Breakfast

Aries: You know, breakfast doesn't always have to be the first meal of the day. There's nothing wrong with defying the societal expectation and having some of it at midnight. If anyone questions you, tell them "you're escaping" and don't elaborate.

Taurus: What we eat varies greatly depending on where and who you are, and I don't think you'd typically have idlis for breakfast; that's more of a thing in the south. Tea is definitely universal though regardless of how your breakfast is scheduled.

Gemini: How unfortunate that the people of your culture had to persist in finding new ways to talk during the artificial rush imposed upon morning meals. Instead of family and siblings, the anchorman is your guardian and the radio is your coach.

Leo: It's truly sad: By attempting to give fair distribution and love to everything on the breakfast menu, you end up getting nothing. You'll be stuck in the drive-thru trying to narrow down your options while everyone just wants you to move on with it.

Cancer: There's far more that occupies your stomach than a hearty meal, and it leaves you longing to do more with your food than simply digest it. You fiddle with it like you're a lost scientist experimenting with tools he has no grasp of. Just put it up already.

Libra: Should a breakfast really be balanced? We're instilled to believe that every food product we see should be part of a balanced breakfast, but why is there such an insistence? Make it unbalanced: Put a gratuitous amount of sodium in it.

Virgo: It's long been understood that no breakfast can exist in absence of its constituent foods and their supporting structures such as plates and bowls, utensils, and toasters. A breakfast must self-evidently be “of” something to be considered a breakfast at all.

Scorpio: Hide what you eat from those with prying eyes at the cafeteria. After using as many covert tactics as you could to conceal your coffee and bagels, you'll find that those watching you didn't give a damn about what you were eating, as evidenced by your dead friend.

Sagittarius: It's disturbing how much destiny you attach to your breakfast. It isn't merely the most important meal of the day; it's the most important meal of *your life.* The amount of blood you'll spill over a sausage & egg biscuit cannot be justified.

Capricorn: Much like how language is the scaffolding of our minds, breakfast is the scaffolding of our diet. Can you imagine how we'd ever conceive of nutrition without our morning meals? Well, you're used to having missing language making up your mindscape.

Aquarius: Breakfast is wonderful because it gives you the time to collect the pieces of yourself that have fallen off your body in your quest from getting out of bed to sitting in the kitchen. The bacon replaces the muscle and the scrambled eggs replace the brain.

Pisces: You seem like the type to overindulge in the complexities of good breakfast planning and turn it from a one-and-done deal into a corrosive passion. Entire notebooks dedicated to the study of good breakfast surround you and create a throne of illusion.

[artofaboythatoncewas]

Book: Motion-Pictures

Aries: It's the introduction, and what's usually granted here is a scene of innocent daily life. Sure, it wouldn't make an interesting movie if this wasn't used as an immersive factor, but have you ever thought of something that retains this? More than a slice of life, yes.

Taurus: There is a long, panoramic shot of an isolated village defined not by what it has built to conquer nature but what nature has built to complement it. It's quite boring for there are no objects of focus that are immediately relatable. Better become a pebble!

Gemini: The sun is setting on a an island ubiquitously hinted as "tropical." The view we're offered is from the perspective of a ground-dweller looking up to the sky. There are large creatures that rattle the trees. Hunting? I think it's for sport.

Leo: Our protagonist ascends floor after floor of the giant tower that looms over the mountainside city. Each level grants them a new batch of ever-dangerous foes to combat. What lies at the top? Stick around and keep your head up high.

Cancer: It's a long drive home from your relative's place. Currently, you're on a bridge that goes over a considerable lake. It's pitch black aside from the glow of your headlights and the faint appearance of powerplants. For the moment, you are protected here.

Libra: The atmosphere is made a sandy yellow by the lazy decisions of the director. Your character is depicted as the outcasted and oppressed one, lurking in the crevices of society under cloak. At least here, you have the opportunity to feel integral.

Virgo: The landscape here is just a giant steppe, meant for nothing but focusing on what individuals are here to accomplish. The names of the people you'll meet here will stretch across your mental scape for literal miles. You're about to be murdered if it wasn't obvious.

Scorpio: The postmodern city illuminates with the iconography of man, each inviting a new agent to contribute something to the beast that is the economy. Our titular character moves through it as if they're wandering through a forest. They might as well!

Sagittarius: It's the archetypical state towards the end of the film, but this director's intentions are spiteful to your consumption. All of the symbols and messages you've neglected to take into account are laid out for you, depriving you of the opportunity of rewatching.

Capricorn: Ships arrive in a port of an arctic town freighting all kinds of goods. A mobster arrives to the scene carrying some cash and a worn blade. Despite what you think, they're here to meet their daughter who came back from a trip to Europe.

Aquarius: The apple of our eye resides in an area where, if you lived on it, you'd never be aware of the world outside of it. Why? For every step you take towards escaping it, you end up warping back to where you started. Is there a trial, perhaps?

Pisces: All that we can see in this world is an esoteric scape, giving brief pause for moments of humanity and familiarity that are washed away to keep the gaze consistent. Here is where we find that reality is completely in the hands of that who spawns it.

[artofaboythatoncewas]

the eyes that bind they lurk behind your back their gaze so cold the ones that hold you there hide in the trees and stare until you freeze and they attack

[artofaboythatoncewas]

Decided to color in some line art busts.

[artofaboythatoncewas]

Analysis of Ween’s ‘Ocean Man’

Ocean Man is a song that Ween has described as something that formed together like magic falling into place. But like all magic, there are hidden mechanisms behind it that necessitate going being the scientific method. For a long time, this song has remained pleasurable but incomprehensible, yet I plan to decode it. The first life of “Ocean man, take me by the hand, lead me to the land that you understand”, while also being a reference to Echoes by Pink Floyd, is also an invitation to be taken to a world of wonder and whimsy. The world being referred to is what I call the ‘village under the sea.’ It was a term coined by Jacques Cousteau to describe his endeavors to build underwater habitats for humanity to experimentally live in, but it also applies as a general ontology of the ocean in respect to humanity’s place as a lifeform on Earth. It asks of us to view the sea in the ways that Indigenous Polynesians have, in that there is no separation of place by terrain: The sea is just as much habitable land as any continent or island.

In asking us to understand the land, we’re also being asked to understand the sea for ultimately there is no difference between land and sea other than that which comes from trying to objectify the oceans. “The voyage to the corner of the globe is a real trip” is contradictory because there are no corners to the ocean: It’s an entity with no boundaries except constructed ones. The trip you’ll go on is one that’ll take you into a worldview where you’ll be able to understand that you cannot objectify something as mighty and powerful as the ocean. Given the psychedelic context of this album, you will indeed ‘trip.’

“The crust of a tan man imbibed by the sand, soaking up the first of the land.” This is an indirect description of humanity, especially a man in the Western world in 1997. The human is imbibed by the sand, meaning the hot, dry sand is absorbing him, leading to him having crusty skin like someone who has tanned for too long. He’s soaking up the thirst of the land because man has become so familiarized with the essentialism of dry land that he forgets that life has managed to live successfully outside of it. It all reverts back to the desire to deconstruct these destructive Western terrain classifications that stopped us from appreciating the impossibly complex ecological harmony of the life that exists just below the surface of the ocean. The surface of the ocean has historically acted, to Westerners, as just inhospitable land that needed to be crossed. Cousteau radically challenged this view by using popular science as a medium to explore and document the ancient world that was right beneath us, introducing the technology of scuba to better aid the cause of inciting civilian interest in the oceans and thus a sentimental value to their preservation beyond the unforeseen economic ones. 

“Can you see through the wonder of amazement at the overman?” This references the concept by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche of the Übermensch originally described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which simply defined is a man who rises above the dogmatic moralism of conventional Christianity to create his own values that, out of resistance, refuses to impose it upon others. In the context of this song, it can have two meanings: One, the ‘ocean man’ as a figure is fascinated by seeing this external overman figure and is being questioned as to whether not he can overcome their own illusionment for what they really are, positioning the ‘ocean man’ as a symbol of native marine life and the overman as the Western man who has historically not cared for or acknowledged them. The transcendence of Christian morality could, in this case, be an acceptance of a worldview that objectifies the ocean and marginalizes ocean life and leads to the indirect destruction of Cousteau’s ‘village under the sea.’

Two, the ‘ocean man’ is also the overman, and that seeing through the wonder of amazement is recognizing that, as a human being, the ocean man sees the overman as a picture of what he can become if he sheds his Western ontology of the ocean and embraces it as a sacred element to his existence. Literally, this is transcending centuries of what Christian moralism has made of the oceans as mere barriers in the path of evangelization: To become the overman, the ocean man must embrace a journey to transcend this dogmatism and find a new morality constructed on his terms and his relationship with the ocean.

“The crust is elusive when it casts forth to the childlike man.” We’ve established before that the crust refers to the residue of life adjusting to living entirely on land, and it becoming elusive means it's hard to find. Reference to the ‘childlike man’ could be referring to a man who has shed these imposed ideas of how they should interact with the world, and thus become once again like a child with unbridled curiosity and earnestness about the world. The child doesn’t objectify the sea and obtains an ontology akin to Indigenous Polynesians, albeit in a much more microcosmic environment.

The childlike man is equivalent to a Western scientist, like Cousteau, who takes up a sudden and profound interest in the ocean and specifically the village that lies at the bottom of it. The crust is no longer there because the childlike man isn’t limiting his idea of home to just dry land, thereby minimizing the crust. It’s not a stretch to believe that, in some way, the character of SpongeBob functions as a cultural icon functions in this way: He’s extremely curious and earnest about the world in a way that differentiated him from most protagonists of ‘90s cartoons loaded with postmodern cynicism. SpongeBob is also the highly relatable protagonist in which we’re exposed to the world of Bikini Bottom, another representation of the village under the sea.

“The sequence of a life form braised in the sand, soaking up the thirst of the land” Braising is a method of cooking which involves lightly frying something and then slowly stewing it in a closed container. The light frying is the intermediate period of moving away from that Western, landlocked crust and preparing to enter into the village under the sea. While the slow stewing is, like a sponge, absorbing the ecological order of everything around you. The goal of this is to reorganize your idea of ecosophy (philosophy of ecological order) away from what Western ways of life have traditionally concerned themselves with.

The thirst of the land you’re soaking up takes on a double meaning here, in that you’re now soaking up the subconscious desire man has to understand the world it has moved away from. It desires to understand the ocean as a simultaneously new and old frontier: One more mysterious than even our own star systems. The thirst of the land is now being quenched by the childlike man who sheds the crust of Western natural ontologies and pursues intimacy with that it has evolved out of so many eons ago.

The last part of the song I want to touch on is every verse beginning with directly addressing this figure known as the ‘ocean man.’ I’ve heard some analyses before say that he’s a mythological hydrophile who symbolizes liberty at sea away from the laws and restrictions imposed upon land, but I think it's more specific than that. The 'ocean man' just refers to anyone who teaches you to rethink the oceans, whether that be Ween with the entire album, Jacques Cousteau and his series of pop science documentaries, or Stephen Hillenburg and his titanic cartoon series. All of these make the effort to try and change how Western society has historically thought of the ocean through some form of inquiry

 In Ween’s case, I think it was some psychic force that influenced them on that night in Jersey Shore to write an album that pushed culture not only sonically but also subliminally like in the ways I’ve expressed in this analysis. All of it was made to make you understand that there's a village under the sea as much as there are villages above the land, and it’s ironic how recognizing this is considered ‘alien’ when this worldview is far more ancient than what we’re used to.

With this understanding, it makes a lot of sense why this song was chosen to be the ending of the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, as the show was a culmination of influences that stretched from Cousteau to Ween on Hillenburg’s life. And what does SpongeBob attempt to do at the end of the day but teach us to become overmen to the ontologies imposed upon us? To children, SpongeBob is a character who first fills his heart with love and then tries to be himself as a departure from media that previously told children to be themselves blindly. What if your self is corrupted? What if it’s crusted from being so used to something as great and magnificent as the ocean being objectified and desanctified? When you take the ocean man’s hand (Stephen Hillenburg’s), you become SpongeBob, and your heart fills with a familiar sense of earnestness that he felt when he studied marine biology.

[artofaboythatoncewas]

this mask is too tight it is suffocating me

but if i take it off to breathe

i will reveal my true face

and the consequences could be worse

[artofaboythatoncewas]

you are the most beautiful sunflower in the field

some might think you’re just like the others but she knows better

she shines her moonlight like a spotlight on you and only you

because she wants to see you clearly

and she wants everyone else to see you too

[artofaboythatoncewas]

if i didn’t hold your heart tightly enough

and it slipped from my hands

fell to the floor

and shattered into a million tiny pieces

would you give me the time to glue it back together?

would you ever let me hold it again?

[artofaboythatoncewas]

i know that to you i am nothing but a smudge

always in the corner of your vision

an ugly spot at the edge of the lens

how many times will you try and fail to wipe me away

before i finally give up and leave your sight?

[artofaboythatoncewas]

if every step i took every battle i fought every struggle i endured was necessary to get me to this point where i finally found my purpose my place in your arms

then all the hurt and pain was worth it and i would relive every moment all over again if it meant we would never be apart