Outlets of Artistic By-products

I'm often haunted by the question "What is your artistic outlet?" I have no idea what to answer to this. The best that I've come up with is to say, the expression of my ideas, that is, the articulation of my inner thoughts. This answer gives me about as much satisfaction as answering "I'm a hiker" (i.e. I walk) to my uncle's questions about which sports I play (something which is, apparently, very important). A certain anarchistic side of me toyed with the idea of answering, to the artistic outlet question, "my shit" (literally). There is a wonderful sub-story in "The Naked Lunch" about a man who teaches his arsehole to speak. Eventually the arsehole takes over saying, "It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat AND shit". I imagine Freud would say I'm stuck in the anal phase of Psychosexual Development. I think it's interesting that people will refer to bad art as "shit". I imagine myself at the opening of my own exhibition listening to some fop (with too many artistic outlets to count) saying about my art "Well, I think it's shit!", to which I'd excitedly respond "Yes! You get it!". I think farts are funny as well. I've developed this habit of proudly mimicking my own fart noises, whenever I have a nice fat audible one. Jodi, forever the psychologist, says this is technically known as echolalia, i.e., meaningless repetition of another person's spoken words as a symptom of psychiatric disorder (again, stuck in the anal phase).

When I was 13, I was involved with an amateur theatre group (Ok, Ok, it was a Scout Gangshow). During the initial get-to-know-each-other phase we had a introductory exercise, you know the one where you go around the circle and introduce yourself by saying your name and something about yourself. I hate these games, as I imagine everybody does. It was the usual mundane stuff "Hello, my name is blah, I like Scouts", "Hello, my name is also blah, I really, really like horses" or "'Ello, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die". Even though that Inigo guy was a hard act to follow, when it came to my turn I thought I might spice it up, and said "My name is Owen, my balls have dropped and I've had my first wet dream". My God, the fall out! Shock waves were felt across the city. The next day, in the totally unrelated arena of school, I had people come up and ask if it was true. Had I uttered these words which must surely amount to social suicide? Unfortunately for me this type of weirdness wasn't to be considered cool for another couple of years (when everybody would presume that I was continuously on drugs, which, apparently, is cool when you're 15 years old). As it was, I didn't make many friends at the time, and the ones I already had started to avoid me.

Nowadays, with all this virtual blogging, people can observe me without any direct interaction (just to be safe). Yes, I know that you're there. So, at the risk of making a fool out of myself when nobody does, I'll ask you to please leave a comment. If only to say hello and how you think my blog is shit (to which I'll respond "Yes! You get it!") and, if applicable, leave a link, so that I may tie you in to my page and start stalking you on your own virtual space.