Full text

He was walking down the strip and saw neon signs sort of combining with the car headlights. He saw it with a painter's vision, but he wondered if the paints would mix on the canvas and become smudgy. He sighed. Some things just weren't replicable.

The businesses were lively this time of night, the restaurants and bars, some with neon lights or something like neon lights glowing from inside, with people bustling in and out, forming into lines outside the clubs, with big doormen allowing access one by one. Party busses were traveling down the roads, and he remembered that he used to think they were full of people trapped by their own drunkeness, balls of energy, filling club after club or bar after bar with their zombie-like fear and delinquency, an urban nightmare of sorts where, he used to imagine, people got picked up and taken away never to be seen again, forgotten by their friends, and killed in the most sarcastic of ways by the rulers of the strip. But he realized now that that fantasy wasn't real, and these people were there by choice, and most would go home safely. That is if they weren't arrested, in which instance his fantasy still kind of made sense.

He saw two people that with all fairness weren't homeless but looked homeless anyway, more delinquents, sitting next to each other in heavy coats, a picture of renaissance poverty, and he wondered if he could capture the weight of their demeanor in a painting. Maybe if it were daytime. A night scene would suggest they were hiding something fun, and he thought there wasn't much they could hide sitting on the sidewalk like that, chainsmoking like little demons. They were talking to each other in a certain city-trash dialect that honestly scared him with its suggestion of ignorance and infantility.

He turned to enter the parking lot where his roommate was waiting for him in his slick black car; with working air conditioning and a cd changer system, leather seats and tinted windows, utterly clean and polished.

They didn't speak, his roommate just quietly zoomed onto the street, those lights and headlights still combining in his vision but from behind the tint of the windshield, and he thought that the scene might be easier to paint from behind the tint.

"I have to stop," his roommate said.

He didn't really need to reply but he said. "Do you think green goes well with dark shades of blue?"

"What shade of green?"

"Apple."

"Are you designing a dinner plate?" His roommate was all but disinterested.

"Yes. I'm going to eat these people I saw for dinner. I'm designing a new ceramic for it." It was sarcasm. His roommate always made him sarcastic.

"Why do you even try to paint? It's not your thing."

That was true. But he loved sitting down and working with color, choosing a palette. He learned composition from photography, which wasn't his thing either, and could form shapes into beautiful depictions of faces or trees. It was a messy art though, and he alway had to change clothes before starting. He actually had framed two of his paintings and put them in the kitchen of their apartment, a wine glass and the back of someone's head, two things he saw a lot of at his job in the restaurant.

"Look, we're different from these people. We have talent. We have vision. If we didn't focus our time on improving the things we're best at, we'll never become virtuosos." His roommate talked about virtuosos a lot. They were still downtown so the streets really were full of people. "Do you see those two?" It was a middle aged couple on the passenger side. "They spent their lives in the doldrums. Inspiration for them is having the idea to take a shit. Do you know how little they've seen in their lives? How little they have learned? They look like they went to college. They look like they have nice jobs. But think of where they begin and where they end. It's two distinctly average points."

He said, "I hope you're joking about becoming a virtuoso," and they pulled into the downtown convenience store.

"No. I have to get cigarettes."

"That's distinctly average." But he smoked too.