Reading harold_maude's journal

Everytime I get a job it closes quickly. It's been a source of frustration.
Every door seems to be so shut tight that the fear of ending up living on the streets again has been a constant.
Through all of this there has been one constant thing that is the best thing, and that's doing art.
I love it. I've been doing art all my life. For the last 5 years I've been studing watercolor and from all the people who have seen it who have been intimidated by the medium they tell me that I'm doing things with it that are unique.
I had one person tell me that watercolor shouldn't look like that.
When I paint everything else goes away, all the crazy thoughts, the wild over flow that sends me to writing in several journals stop. Everything becomes this wonderful flow that I can and do loose hours in.
The only problem is with all of this is that even though everyone who has seen my work and even with thoes who have bought peices and paid me more than I was asking because they said I wasn't asking enough, the income from it is so far and few between that I've had to take other jobs just to keep from homeless. Not that that's a bad thing. Artists before me have done it and ones who are up and comming will do the same thing.
The trouble is that I don't want to do anything but art.
I don't want to have to deal with doing the monkey dance anymore. It's a pathetic ritual that makes me crazy and makes me want to strangle something, anything close at hand. And the other thing that keeps happening is every door that I keep trying to walk through so that I have a roof over my head keeps shutting with in a few weeks. It's been making me nuts.
Sometimes I feel like I should just stop and if I die outside doing art, then so be it.
But if I did that then there are people out there who would kill me a second time just because I did the stupid thing.
But their not living in these shoes!
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that art is the thing that flows through my veins. I guess part of the art life is being tortured in someway. There is no escape if the art in you is what you do to survive. Survival here has nothing to do with money. It's the blood that flows through me, and what makes me sane. I can't help that the doors keep shutting and that no windows are open. But to not do art is a sin against my soul, and I can't not create. That will kill me faster than living out on the streets or eating out of dumpsters.
Funny thing about all of this is that I really don't care if my work sells or not...that doesn't matter. It's nice when it does and it always shocks the crap out of me because it's just something I do. But the point is that I have to do, I don't have a choice. I think I had a choice a long time ago. At one point in my life I was willing to completely walk away from it for my faith, but it got handed back to me, and my destiny was sealed. I was created to create art. I'm done arguing.
No matter what happens now, art is the road I'm on even if it means I die doing it.

It only looks that way because your standing on your head.