Grey.

Overt schmaltz perhaps, a story of hope, or love or hate or consumerism or communism or all of the aforementioned woven intricately into the autobiographical recapitulation of the life of old-lady-with-three-cats Mrs. Pinto and her objectophillic obsession with a particularly pretty digital clock. Imagination fails me. The clear dichotomy between yesterday and tomorrow. Between The Before and The After. Today, right now is the thin white line that separates the two.The exact second when the dark tresses of night break into dawn. That grey area inspires.

The Lady of Shalott will tell you that for a writer, reality must be divorced from life. That to be able to imagine, he must shut himself off in an ivory tower and avoid the transgression from the mind to the mundane, that the political and the aesthetic must be kept separate. We all construct ivory towers. Mine's bricked with The Shins, steaming black tea, torrential rain and William Blake as of now and that's precisely where the paradox emerges. My dilapidated ivory tower finds reality's cement. It transports, isolates and engages, as it lies corrupt. My psyche, it languishes in the greyness. "Four grey walls and four grey towers."

Another conundrum I struggle to unfold is the poetry of everyday life. The luscious mix of conversation, nicotine and walks around North Campus. That's art right there, not divorced, not independent but snugly knitted into the fabric of platitudes that constitute my 19th year.

The assessment leaves me restive. The mind remains shackled within the confines of Life and its bromides. Unsettling, disturbing, consuming. To produce a work of literature from the viscous, brown mass of inexperience, immaturity and a chained imagination.

Or if your glass is half full? To produce art from dried paint.