you must think my life is pretty bleak
because I find my greatest joy
in made-up things,
in these imagined scenes…
it must seem pretty lame
that my favorite people to talk to
are made of words —
characters convening in conflicts
in fabricated locations…
you must consider it totally stupid
to pour so much love
into paper people —
ghosts of thought
who cannot be touched,
can’t be punched,
and can’t be fucked…
but I tell you this:
the world itself
is made of billions of things
first brought to life
in the fragile minds
of lonely people…
all that you do,
all that you dream,
and all that you see
rises to its pinnacle
in the electric brains
of lazy bums
who spend all their time
with paper people
Garbage Notes:
It’s all about imagination. Everything around you—all the tv shows, movies, theme parks—every goddamn thing in the bookstores, all the colorful and fashionable clothing hanging on racks in expensive department stores. It was all in someone’s mind first. It all comes from ideas. It’s all the best science and medicine. It’s all the breakthroughs in therapy and all the mind-blowing theologies. The best ideas come from the minds of the unique, the solitary, the divisive, and the original.
Sometimes people think that the hardest thing about being a creative person is that you have to sit down and do the work, by yourself, alone, on some secluded island somewhere. But it’s not the isolation that’s the hard part. If anything, that’s one of the best parts. The hard part is getting in your little boat, leaving the island, rowing back to the mainland, and then gathering enough courage to then present your visions to the rest of the world.
And if your lucky (and not many of us are)—if you’re lucky, the rest of society accepts your ideas—they say, yes, we will take what you’ve done, what you have lovingly crafted, and we will accept it into THE REAL. So then your made up thing—the paper people, the blueprint, the design, the song, the whatever—that’s when the ideas become part of the fabric, part of the culture.
But what happens to the crazy, lazy bums? The ones who don’t know how to be productive outside of the chaos storm of their own heads? Well, they go back to their islands and they make up more amazing shit. Because the world out there isn’t for them, anyway.
They make up their own worlds, brand new, every day.
Franco Amati 2023
The voice behind the talent. It's powerful tool!
I absolutely love this, Franco. This is very relatable to me.