Wanted: Muse

Portland-based creative type seeks muse for inspiration and failed, passive-aggressive attempts at sex.

YOU ARE: dishearteningly talented; either a painter or one of those people who builds installations that astound and beguile viewers, yet cause them to wonder if you can actually earn a living making stuff like that.

You are also well read and incisive with your criticism. The latter quality will add a soupçon of authenticity to your praise. If hired, you will advise me to never, ever write the word “soupçon” again.

It goes without saying that you are female. In fact, you’re sexually desirable in the extreme, a quality that you flaunt, but the obvious purpose of which you withhold. At least, from me. If selected, you will live in the apartment directly above mine and I will take note of the comings and goings of your parade of carnies and chefs, along with the ruckus of late-night sex that continues until your smoke detector goes off.

You will borrow kitchenware from me and fail to return it. Or, when it does come back to me, the Teflon will have been scraped away. When you ask me to drive you around on run errands, it will somehow seem as if you’re doing me a favor. Afterward, you will promise to make me dinner. I will not see you for weeks.

We will stay up until dawn, talking about art and Schopenhauer and we will compare notes on our private rituals: my masturbation, your bingeing and purging.

I will compare unfavorably to your friends, who are all more talented and better-connected than me. You will not often invite me to mix with them, leaving me with the impression that I am a sort of dirty secret for you or, perhaps, a charity case.

Alternating between panegyrics and shame, you will seduce me into jumping headlong into an abyss of ecstatic creational grace. Without hesitation, I will leap.

I AM: as mentioned, a creative type. Writer, mixed media artist, Facebook epigrammatist, drummer. While I do good work under professional conditions, I work best when in the presence of someone whom I suspect to be more ingenious than I—or who, on the other hand, is possibly a nutter. I will never really know, and this confusion will reorder my outlook, adding to my work a certain ambivalence about the nature of the human condition.

When you are around, I will smoke more than I ought to, but I will drink less. I will write witty, rapid-fire dialogue, but I will also write bad checks. I will probably age faster than my peers.

I will encourage your creative endeavors and critique them from time to time, but we will tacitly understand that what I have to say is of little value to you.

The success of our muse/artist relationship will be measured according to a set of pre-arranged criteria to which we’ve both agreed. I’m thinking that I should reasonably be motivated to produce one solid piece of work each week and something ingenious once every four to six weeks. Of course, this is just to get the conversation started. You may have some better ideas. Because I’m fresh out.