Thanks for this. I'll admit I'd never heard of this guy, but it's quite a tale. I also thought of the parallels to Chris-chan about halfway through, once the illustrations came up, and I was curious if you were headed in the same direction. It's also interesting how Chris-chan's one overriding, tragic (in the classical Greek sense) fault is oversharing, while this guy never shared anything at all. Either way, I could see CC being the subject of academic historians, but his work in galleries? At least I sure hope not. :P I've also seen people claim CC is the most documented individual in history, which is either hilarious or really, really disturbing if true. I can never decide which.
And yes, thought-provoking points on the idea of all those thousands and millions of people making stuff for themselves in their rooms that no one will ever see. I think you're right that every artist should ideally create for him- or herself first, which is another argument for having other sources of income. Or doing what some high-profile actors do by alternating between commercial and passion work, I suppose.
"There’s an honesty to it that can’t be replicated by the Design-By-Committee media made to be consumed by a mass audience churned out by big entertainment conglomerates. And, again - that honesty may not be beautiful. But it is always interesting."
Eh, I don't know. Sometimes, sure. But I also feel these works are often as boring as the committee-designed ones, since they also tend be built 100% out of cliches and pop culture and fandom tropes. So it often boils down to the same thing, just with worse craftsmanship.
Kind of a random note, but it also struck me of Catholicism pops up as a common thread here, all through Darger's life. Every important institution in his life was seemingly part of that church. I guess that makes sense when they were a major denomination in the US at the time, but still. And while we're at it, how does someone attend Mass several times a day? I'll admit I don't know much about the fine details of Catholicism, but I thought it was a daily thing, or even weekly, kind of like Protestant services? Did he just turn up at different churches who had it scheduled at different times throughout the day to go through the same ceremony over and over?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who drew that parallel - I genuinely expected to be the only one. I don't see Chris-Chan's works ever being in galleries either, but I definitely think he'll end up becoming some sort of case study on what the internet can do to someone. Also, for what it's worth, I would absolutely make the argument he's the most well-documented individual in history; his entire life, down to absurdly minute details, has been documented, archived, and catalogued. In recent years he's dialed back some of his tendency to overshare but, back during the "Golden Age" of his content, he gave enough of his history to fill textbooks. Frankly, the only reason I think he's not doing the same now is because he's so clearly over-medicated and his mental faculties so severely deteriorated he can barely make a coherent sentence. Watching his recent livestreams is somewhat depressing because it's clear he's become deeply unwell in a different way than before; he was always out of whack, to a degree, but he could at least speak and articulate his thoughts, even if it was poorly. These days it's apparent that he's just... not all there.
I'd come down on the "disturbing" side of that, as funny as much of the documentation of him is. It is, at the end of the day, still the result of quite possibly the most intense and thorough and arguably invasive e-stalking campaign ever waged. I have mixed feelings on it because, for as obsequious as Chris-chan is, and as funny as his story may be, the guy was also quite literally gangstalked for over a decade to the point that I think it played no small part in his ultimate unraveling. Like you said, it's tragic in a very classically Greek way.
Also, I understand what you mean - not all "amateur" art is created equal, I will admit. I will say that I would still take a 100,000 word Star Wars fanfiction that's insanely strange and unorthodox over one of the new movies, but it doesn't change the fact that 90% of amateur fanworks are... well, simply put, not good.
Also, to answer your question about Mass, Catholic churches offer mass daily at least once, and depending on the size of the congregation, I believe some do offer it multiple times a day. I know on Sundays the larger Catholic churches around me can have five or six services a day. In Chicago, where there were a large amount of churches and a large Catholic population, I wouldn't be surprised if he was attending the same church offering multiple masses a day, or just going to churches that had daily mass at different times. Parts of the mass are the same every service, but other parts of it differ based on the Liturgical calendar, but for the most part (in my own experience going to mass), if you go multiple times a day, you would be getting the same experience each time. There's also high mass and low mass that have (respectively) more and less ceremony to them, and I do believe those are held in every church at least on Sunday. Again, I could be wrong, but that's what my own experience would lead me to believe. Point is - it definitely is excessive to attend mass multiple times a day, but I also personally know people who've done it for one reason or another.
He is certainly one of the most well documented but you can look up some journal writers and can find some really wacky stuff. For example there is Robert Shields who wrote absolutely everything to the minute detail of his life for 25 years. It is not public until 2057 but for an example:
July 25, 1993
7 am: "I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin."
7.05 am: "Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used five sheets of paper."
I didn't necessarily meant that they were not otherwise well adjusted, but there's certainly something with writing down every detail of your life for that long. That's the really wacky part, because let's be honest...we would all leave some of our stuff out.
(Actually it must have taken an ungodly amount of discipline to do that. That's actually amazing.)
To be honest, I'm surprised the mainstream still hasn't discovered CC, unless he's gained some notoriety now after the latest...well, let's just call it "development". When I first discovered him back in like 2009 or so, I remember thinking that his case would make a good feature article for a Saturday newspaper or in-depth magazine, especially since internet culture would have been slightly novel to a Boomer and older Gen X readership back then.
Maybe I'm jumping the gun here if we'll have a whole thread about him later, but I watched some of that super comprehensive documentary recently, even if I only got up to around where I stopped following his antics back in the early 2010s. I absolutely agree he was largely ruined by his stalkers, and for what it's worth I'd count myself as one of those who thinks he could have been semi-okay if he'd gotten off the internet and sought help back then (ie. followed the advice of that lady at his church). While I know the broad strokes, I haven't had the stomach to actually watch what his current videos and streams are like.
And thanks for the elaboration on the Catholic Mass. While Abrahamic monotheism isn't for me, Catholicism is my clear favorite flavor of it. Both because it's so much closer to polytheism with the saint veneration and because it seems less prone to the kind of po-faced, intense fanaticism Protestantism depressingly often falls into, even if it's obviously not immune.
There's many a different breed of creative, some would even scoff at bding called creative, being of a workman-like make, constructing a book or comic as a man might a chair he cares little for. What matters is not what he or the audience feels, but the chair, the book serve its purpose.
Some in a different sense are barely creatives.
Theirs is a tortured scream in words and colours, only God and themselves their audience.
Occasionally something beautiful rather than grotesque is born from these tortured souls, but some like Van Gogh are less a story of a tortured soul as a wounded man given care and love.
Van Gogh's brother kept him well.
A pity that the man of this post was not kept better.
Alas, who will help you when all your cries for help are colours in the dark?
Of course, since you bring up the Infamous Chris.
Sometimes there's a torturer beyond humankind.
Sometimes what would be cries of pain become dark curses.
Sometimes there's more than one voice in an argument people have with themselves.
The fate of many who tortured Chris, should inspire many a pausing thought, but this teller shall give no more spoilers.
Very beautifully and appropriately melancholically put. Is that a word? I'm going to assume it is. Depending on how the article(s) about Chris-chan go, I'd like to look into the figures that surrounded him. Dark and rich is an understatement.
We have(had?) those bear honey bottles too. The design was clearly different, but I clearly remember them.
Now to the main subject.
I didn't know him before, but it's a fascinating story nevertheless. It got me thinking...would I want my ramblings to be publicised? We had Kafka, who wanted his works to be burned, but our culture would be certainly poorer without them. (And there were also that bureocratic/judicial hell about the ownership of the original scripts...you could say it was quite kafkaesque.) Knowing this, it might be much harder to write what you really think. I'm a romanticist myself so the thought feels nice that even after I'm gone, someone would see something genius in my writings.
Obviously there is also the problem of the person. It's clear that his childhood remained unfinished and he tried to keep it together by building his own world. Isn't there something very childlike in his beef with God? As many likened the old sumerian religions to an abusive parent-child relationship, I see something like this here too.
This will be little bit on a tangent but I remember reading about the Elsie Paroubek case. There's a good deal of anti gypsy sentiment to it, and as they were also from Eastern(I know...Central) Europe their immediate target were the gypsies. But I still can't shake off this creeping thought, that while we don't know what happened with Elsie, I know what abuse is going on even today among the gypsies. Just a few months ago I heard that one of the little girls from my former elemantary became mentally incapacitated because she was...assaulted by her father. I don't deny my disdain for them but there's always this feeling that those guys don't even have a chance. But I digress.
To be honest, at the really first, I thought you are hinting on Terry A. Davis. Probably because most of the time I'm a programmer too, I'm still somewhat fascinated with that guy. But then it dawned on me.
If you really going down that path...good luck. I hope you're up to it. I don't want to shoot all my bullets here but for a too long time I was also morbidly fascinated with Chris-chan.
It's just too all encompassing. I was blessed with a much more functional social life than those who generally know about him and I'm always in trouble when he comes up...because he comes up much more frequently than one would think. I mostly direct them to the Comprehensive History video series and that's enough to turn them off mostly. But then you have the heroic ones who brave the heights/depths and the insanity ensues. For every horrifying discovery they make I can only go on like Billy Mays("But wait...there's more!").
I don't know how will you handle him, but I know that despite it's absurdity, it raised big questions in me.
Authenticity...peak Chris-chan was absolutely real. But what do you do if you are a monster. It's almost like he is the single best refutal to Rousseu's noble wildmen.
Is all our civility against our nature...is it all just a thin veneer on the animal?
Also you mentioned here that he somewhat fell off and I agree. But he's not the only one. I believe people when they say that medication helps, but it's always like they were robbed to soms layers to them and I'm with Joey Diaz with this(" I like people with a little bit of edge to'em"). Like I promised to comment(maybe sometime in the future) on the Scott Pilgrim article and that girl is...alright...but she is nothing more than the husk of the original person I fell for (yes...it is mostly the dudes who deny medication). It is good to suppress some excess but also I believe in free will. Arghhh...I'm already getting too far and basically said nothing about the man himself(herself?...who knows at this point).
Still, when I saw that Sonichu picture I couldn't help but grin for a while. Good luck. It might be the post I can turn the people interested in him to.
Darger's one-sided fight with the divine is, in my opinion, quite childish, and the funniest thing about it is you see flavors of that in Chris-chan as well. Just as Darger quarreled with God, so did Chris, and when Chris's demands remained unmet, he took out his wrath upon his fictional city of CWCville. It's funny how the two align in such a way. Very much a result of arrested development, I think.
About the gyspies, there's a large population of them where I come from - one of the largest in America, believe it or not. I worked in a restaurant downtown and I got to meet people from every race represented in the city (which is a big one of almost a million people), and they all said the same thing - "Fuck those guys". They were like the only group that it was tolerable to be prejudiced against, if only because everyone of every race seemed to have an issue with them for one reason or another. Didn't help that they were, for a week, the talk of the town because of a mass catalytic-converter theft operation that got busted. All in all, I've never interacted with them myself, so I remain agnostic on the topic, but I do find it quite telling that seemingly everyone, everywhere has a distaste for them, both in America and Europe.
I can definitely see the parallels between Darger (and Chris) with Davis, but Davis... well, one day, I'd like to get to him, too. One day. He's still alive, btw. I think he faked his own death.
For what it's worth, I don't think Chris was born a monster. I don't even think he was a particularly terrible person before - well, you know. That moment marked the demarcation point in that transition, where he was forever turned from an eccentric but mostly harmless idiot to an actual deluded lunatic. I know the flavors of "deluded lunatic" manifested long before the final nail in his metaphorical coffin, but it never became more clear just how insane he was driven by the constant gang-stalking and internet presence until that point. I genuinely do think that Chris... well, he was never a good person. He was constantly making threats, constantly needlessly belligerent and, at times, petty and mean to those who caught his ire, but he wasn't evil. He was bad in the way, as we were saying, a child is - they're more immature than they are genuinely bad. Though, as we both seem to agree, that's definitely changed.
Davis is alive? Do you have any source on that? I would be happy if he really does.
For Chris-chan it was only after the "incident" that I'm saying that he's a monster. Before that, he was mostly harmless. But still can't shake down that he did most of that to himself, with support from the harassers of course. I can't blame any of his real life acquintances for leaving him.
And that's where his realness comes from. He was never accomodating, he never changed his behaviour. He was never thinking that maybe that's too much. The oversharing connects with this. He was doing what he felt right at the very first moment.
Maybe to connect back to Darger it resembles me on the ancient greek tries to find the "original". Like putting kids among mute people and the like. The uncannyness and originality for both him and Chris-chan might come from this. For much of their lives they lived quite isolated from the rest of the world and lived in their own creations. Still, the already imprinted memories couldn't be erased. For Darger it was the catholic upbringing. For Chris-chan...there was a few
Chris-chan ironically Chris-chan was isolated from the rest of the society by the constant harassment and his own belligerence and that's how he went of the tracks. In a way he is one of the most all-encompassing human experiment ever.
I think might explain how he went off the tracks, while Darger still had his faith and the Church, that while not caring for him too much, but still provided guidance for him.
Chris-chan had nothing. He had CWCville and the harassers. But fhe worst thing the harassers did was continously validating his own delusions, while he for further and further away from the surface.
And this is where one of my thoughts came in. Humans are truly social beings. Is this what isolation does, is this where the path leads to us without guidance? Well, these are just theoratisations of course. Still, the Chris-chan phenomenom did became over encompassing during the years.
In a way he is the avatar of the internet. Always somewhat degenerate, sometimes truly fine, other times absolutely vile...and still ending in depression and thinking about where we strayed from the wae.
Know too much about him, but I'm glad that I left that a few years ago, although I always go back to see how things are. And boy...it's not great.
Outside of some Patterson-Gimlin-esque photos of him in passing there is no concrete evidence. There was one very convincing video of a man in Yellowstone National Park that, if it wasn't Davis, it sounded and looked exactly like him (albeit he was a lot more coherent than Terry A. Davis ever was). I just choose to believe he's still out there, somewhere. It makes the world more interesting.
I think that, on the note of isolation, it's truly the most destructive force to the human mind, second only to chronic stress, which even then is highly debatable. I've had my severe issues with both so I've done a not-insignificant amount of research on both and, based on my own issues stemming from both, I think it can be separated thusly: stress will kill you physically (I was once hospitalized and incapacitated from a stress-induced condition that resulted in permanent nerve damage), while isolation will cause your mind to literally fray at the seams (fortunately I never went fully off my rocker but during my most isolated times, I certainly came close and started to believe some incredibly strange things that, thankfully, once I began to reintegrate with normal, functional people, fell away... well, most of it). They'll destroy you in different ways, but, to the issue at hand - isolation - it's amazing how quickly someone will unravel when left untethered to the wider world and the people in it, and Chris is a prime example. To a degree, he always had some wacky beliefs about CWCville being a real place, but around the time of the "Dimensional Merge" arc, you can definitely see that his already poor grasp on reality was coming apart. I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you loose the measuring stick that is other people and the real, tangible world outside your room, it becomes very easy to start falling into a land of delusions. The sad part with Chris, as you pointed out, is that when most people begin repatriate themselves into the world, the people around them disabuse them of most, if not all, of whatever delusions they'd worked themselves into. As you mentioned, Chris only found people who worked diligently to push him further into them. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that he is, fundamentally, untethered from reality now in a way that he wasn't in the early 2010's.
I had to return here just for a quick...update. I guess you heard the news about Chris-chan and although nothing is really confirmed. But...Oh My God? HOW? Chris-chan will have a kid before me? WTF?
It's interesting that Chris-chan really was authentic like you said, but he wasn't really the "be 100% himself and not care an iota what others think" type either. After all, he did basically turn his own life into performance art, and he clearly wanted attention and cared about what others thought of his works. As for medication, again, as a layperson who's just armchair opining, I think he could have been more or less okay without it if he'd just left the internet and cultivated a healthier social life with real people. He was somewhat functional during his high school and early adult years, after all, as his HS "documentary" shows.
Or: I'm not sure he was always a monster, or always doomed to become one. Then again, who knows. I won't deny that they exist, even if they're probably pretty rare compared to people who end up corrupted by bad choices or incentives (or is that just my inner Rosseau talking?)
You're not wrong, but I do think Chris was ultimately more in it for himself than he was attention from the outside. If he was driven by attention and a need to please others, he would still be making Sonichu comics (apparently he is, or claims to be, though its been years since he's published anything) - there's a real demand for more and he lacks the motivation or drive to meet it. I will say that, outside of that, yes, he did turn his life into performance art - I recall him uploading videos based on suggestions from the audience that were increasingly bizarre and nonsensical, and even when he uploaded videos of his own volition, there was an element to them that seemed to be playing along with the crowd.
I also think that there was a chance that Chris was, at one point, mostly functional, and could have been. His biggest problem was that, whenever anyone did genuinely try to establish a cordial relationship with him in real life, he'd end up biting the hand that they extended. The infamous Megan is probably the best example, though others are littered throughout his story, both pre- and post-internet discovery. I was recently reading about how he made actual, in-the-flesh friends at the second game shop he went to after his perma-ban from the GAMe PLACe (he was banned from this one, too) that would go out and do things with him, but once the cabal of "Idea Guys" got to him, he gradually withdrew from them and sunk deeper into his delusions and fantasy world. One of them, when interviewed, even said "He had more interest in his made up friends than he did us", or something to that effect. It really does seem as if he's pathologically averse to fostering real relationships and basically sabotages all of them he gets into. That being said, I don't think he was doomed to be one - but I do think he did nothing to help himself avert that course.
That's a very fair summary, and you know Chris' recent history much better than me, of course. Maybe it's silly to turn real life into a storyline, but I can't help feel the "Idea Guys" represent his final downfall and loss his last tether to reality. Still, you're right that he's had a history of sabotaging every potential friendship long before them. His life really is a Greek tragedy, isn't it?
As part of the documentary, I saw that one video where he sits around a table at a bar (?) and they're laughing and chatting casually. Even if those people were internet stalkers, that whole scene still haunts me, how easily he could have passed for normal with different circumstances. He's still a little awkward, but not anything too out of the ordinary. Instead he sunk back into his delusions, poked and prodded by his cabal of trolls, and we got...what we got. Sad, but also weirdly compelling in its way.
Yes, I would agree with that (if you read the above response to Archenar, I say as much in more detail). Given that Chris's life has been literally segmented into easily definable "sagas", I think that was the demarcation point from which there was no real coming back from. Obviously, Chris has people in his life who keep him stable now (i.e. keeping him housed, provide income, make sure he actually fulfills the orders he gets from his Etsy store, etc.), but if they weren't there to provide a support network, I'm fairly certain he would be indigent. It may be uncharitable but I think after the Ideas Guy arc of his life, he's become someone who cannot function alone. It's dubiously fortunate for him that, given his notoriety, it seems as if he'll always have enablers who are willing to fit his bills for him. At least, for the foreseeable future.
I know exactly the video you're talking about, too. I feel the same way watching a lot of his early content - the videos where he's not screaming or yelling or throwing a fit, but rather just expressing himself and his thoughts and generally just expressing himself. It's definitely a sort of Sophoclean tragedy to have watched him unravel in real time over the years. It didn't need to happen, and how much of it was incumbent upon him to change and how responsible the revolving cast of bad actors around him are for it is something that I think even the greatest thinkers of the Athenian agora could debate for a lifetime.
This chain is getting long here, and I should probably wait until we get to the proper Chris article, but I can't resist a couple brief final points first:
"rather just expressing himself and his thoughts and generally just expressing himself."
That's another thing that struck me watching the doc: how good he was at creating personas and putting himself in roles he didn't have any context for, when he had a motivation to. Ie. the PaRappa contest, or my personal favorite piece of Chris media, the "Rollin' and Trollin'" video. It's obvious he doesn't have a clue about hip-hop, the PaRappa games, the Iraq war or what it's actually like to work 40 hours a week, but he throws himself fully into all these roles anyway. No embarrassment and no fear of the unknown, he just gave it his best shot based on his limited vision. In a way there's something admirable in that, isn't there?
"something that I think even the greatest thinkers of the Athenian agora could debate for a lifetime."
I love this way of putting it. Indeed. And now I'm giggling while imagining a Doctor Who episode where the Doctor goes back to ancient Athens to make the greatest thinkers of Western culture watch Chris-chan videos before watching that debate. ;) (Maybe I actually have to write this now...gods help me)
Well that ending felt like a Shyamalan level "What a twist!" moment. I can't honestly say I expected that comparison, and yet, I can't argue against it.
In any case, this was a fascinating read, and arguably among the best essays you've written. I've never heard of Darger before, but I'm glad to have learned of him now.
I don't know if I'll be able to say the same of the follow-up to come, though.
Thank you, I'm really glad you enjoyed. That's some very high praise! Hopefully one day, I can top it. Though, do rest assured... the Chris-chan follow-up may be some time in the making. That is not a subject matter that can be taken lightly, or succinctly, for that matter.
This reminds me, I really need to start swearing vengeance to the uttermost limit more often.
When I first heard about Darger, and outsider art in general, I found it inspiring. I'm not sure I can explain it, but the idea of a guy taking the anguish and turmoil of his life and turning it into an intense, nigh-impenetrable work of art helped get me through some dreary times when I was younger.
Nonetheless, I am not sure I am strong enough to handle Sonichu.
There very much is something inspiring about his story, but at the same time, the fact that he was so isolated and profoundly unwell, only to be respected for his output after his death... it's nice to think that maybe one might find fame eventually, but wouldn't we all like to enjoy the benefits of it while we're still alive?
Also, Sonichu isn't that bad. You'll be fine. I promise. We'll go through it together. Besides, it's not Sonichu the comic itself that's difficult to get through... it's the story about the man behind it.
I think the fact that he was willing to work so obsessively on something that he never expected to share with the world was what I found inspiring. He had no extrinsic motive, no paycheck or recognition he was going for. He was entirely motivated by intrinsic motives.
Who knew that the designer of some of the most iconic Americana product designs had such a peculiar and eccentric life? It does make one nostalgic for the days of the freewheeling creative.
The happy colors and lines of his work are an incongruous contrast to the dark subject matter, they are fascinating, though. I had never heard of Darger before, thank you for this engrossing look at his strange and lonely life.
Thanks for this. I'll admit I'd never heard of this guy, but it's quite a tale. I also thought of the parallels to Chris-chan about halfway through, once the illustrations came up, and I was curious if you were headed in the same direction. It's also interesting how Chris-chan's one overriding, tragic (in the classical Greek sense) fault is oversharing, while this guy never shared anything at all. Either way, I could see CC being the subject of academic historians, but his work in galleries? At least I sure hope not. :P I've also seen people claim CC is the most documented individual in history, which is either hilarious or really, really disturbing if true. I can never decide which.
And yes, thought-provoking points on the idea of all those thousands and millions of people making stuff for themselves in their rooms that no one will ever see. I think you're right that every artist should ideally create for him- or herself first, which is another argument for having other sources of income. Or doing what some high-profile actors do by alternating between commercial and passion work, I suppose.
"There’s an honesty to it that can’t be replicated by the Design-By-Committee media made to be consumed by a mass audience churned out by big entertainment conglomerates. And, again - that honesty may not be beautiful. But it is always interesting."
Eh, I don't know. Sometimes, sure. But I also feel these works are often as boring as the committee-designed ones, since they also tend be built 100% out of cliches and pop culture and fandom tropes. So it often boils down to the same thing, just with worse craftsmanship.
Kind of a random note, but it also struck me of Catholicism pops up as a common thread here, all through Darger's life. Every important institution in his life was seemingly part of that church. I guess that makes sense when they were a major denomination in the US at the time, but still. And while we're at it, how does someone attend Mass several times a day? I'll admit I don't know much about the fine details of Catholicism, but I thought it was a daily thing, or even weekly, kind of like Protestant services? Did he just turn up at different churches who had it scheduled at different times throughout the day to go through the same ceremony over and over?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who drew that parallel - I genuinely expected to be the only one. I don't see Chris-Chan's works ever being in galleries either, but I definitely think he'll end up becoming some sort of case study on what the internet can do to someone. Also, for what it's worth, I would absolutely make the argument he's the most well-documented individual in history; his entire life, down to absurdly minute details, has been documented, archived, and catalogued. In recent years he's dialed back some of his tendency to overshare but, back during the "Golden Age" of his content, he gave enough of his history to fill textbooks. Frankly, the only reason I think he's not doing the same now is because he's so clearly over-medicated and his mental faculties so severely deteriorated he can barely make a coherent sentence. Watching his recent livestreams is somewhat depressing because it's clear he's become deeply unwell in a different way than before; he was always out of whack, to a degree, but he could at least speak and articulate his thoughts, even if it was poorly. These days it's apparent that he's just... not all there.
I'd come down on the "disturbing" side of that, as funny as much of the documentation of him is. It is, at the end of the day, still the result of quite possibly the most intense and thorough and arguably invasive e-stalking campaign ever waged. I have mixed feelings on it because, for as obsequious as Chris-chan is, and as funny as his story may be, the guy was also quite literally gangstalked for over a decade to the point that I think it played no small part in his ultimate unraveling. Like you said, it's tragic in a very classically Greek way.
Also, I understand what you mean - not all "amateur" art is created equal, I will admit. I will say that I would still take a 100,000 word Star Wars fanfiction that's insanely strange and unorthodox over one of the new movies, but it doesn't change the fact that 90% of amateur fanworks are... well, simply put, not good.
Also, to answer your question about Mass, Catholic churches offer mass daily at least once, and depending on the size of the congregation, I believe some do offer it multiple times a day. I know on Sundays the larger Catholic churches around me can have five or six services a day. In Chicago, where there were a large amount of churches and a large Catholic population, I wouldn't be surprised if he was attending the same church offering multiple masses a day, or just going to churches that had daily mass at different times. Parts of the mass are the same every service, but other parts of it differ based on the Liturgical calendar, but for the most part (in my own experience going to mass), if you go multiple times a day, you would be getting the same experience each time. There's also high mass and low mass that have (respectively) more and less ceremony to them, and I do believe those are held in every church at least on Sunday. Again, I could be wrong, but that's what my own experience would lead me to believe. Point is - it definitely is excessive to attend mass multiple times a day, but I also personally know people who've done it for one reason or another.
He is certainly one of the most well documented but you can look up some journal writers and can find some really wacky stuff. For example there is Robert Shields who wrote absolutely everything to the minute detail of his life for 25 years. It is not public until 2057 but for an example:
July 25, 1993
7 am: "I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin."
7.05 am: "Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used five sheets of paper."
It is approximately 37.5 million words.
I had to look him up. He sounds like he was a very well adjusted individual with absolutely nothing wrong with him.
I didn't necessarily meant that they were not otherwise well adjusted, but there's certainly something with writing down every detail of your life for that long. That's the really wacky part, because let's be honest...we would all leave some of our stuff out.
(Actually it must have taken an ungodly amount of discipline to do that. That's actually amazing.)
To be honest, I'm surprised the mainstream still hasn't discovered CC, unless he's gained some notoriety now after the latest...well, let's just call it "development". When I first discovered him back in like 2009 or so, I remember thinking that his case would make a good feature article for a Saturday newspaper or in-depth magazine, especially since internet culture would have been slightly novel to a Boomer and older Gen X readership back then.
Maybe I'm jumping the gun here if we'll have a whole thread about him later, but I watched some of that super comprehensive documentary recently, even if I only got up to around where I stopped following his antics back in the early 2010s. I absolutely agree he was largely ruined by his stalkers, and for what it's worth I'd count myself as one of those who thinks he could have been semi-okay if he'd gotten off the internet and sought help back then (ie. followed the advice of that lady at his church). While I know the broad strokes, I haven't had the stomach to actually watch what his current videos and streams are like.
And thanks for the elaboration on the Catholic Mass. While Abrahamic monotheism isn't for me, Catholicism is my clear favorite flavor of it. Both because it's so much closer to polytheism with the saint veneration and because it seems less prone to the kind of po-faced, intense fanaticism Protestantism depressingly often falls into, even if it's obviously not immune.
There's many a different breed of creative, some would even scoff at bding called creative, being of a workman-like make, constructing a book or comic as a man might a chair he cares little for. What matters is not what he or the audience feels, but the chair, the book serve its purpose.
Some in a different sense are barely creatives.
Theirs is a tortured scream in words and colours, only God and themselves their audience.
Occasionally something beautiful rather than grotesque is born from these tortured souls, but some like Van Gogh are less a story of a tortured soul as a wounded man given care and love.
Van Gogh's brother kept him well.
A pity that the man of this post was not kept better.
Alas, who will help you when all your cries for help are colours in the dark?
Of course, since you bring up the Infamous Chris.
Sometimes there's a torturer beyond humankind.
Sometimes what would be cries of pain become dark curses.
Sometimes there's more than one voice in an argument people have with themselves.
The fate of many who tortured Chris, should inspire many a pausing thought, but this teller shall give no more spoilers.
Dark and rich are these wells of people.
Very beautifully and appropriately melancholically put. Is that a word? I'm going to assume it is. Depending on how the article(s) about Chris-chan go, I'd like to look into the figures that surrounded him. Dark and rich is an understatement.
I'm finally back here.
We have(had?) those bear honey bottles too. The design was clearly different, but I clearly remember them.
Now to the main subject.
I didn't know him before, but it's a fascinating story nevertheless. It got me thinking...would I want my ramblings to be publicised? We had Kafka, who wanted his works to be burned, but our culture would be certainly poorer without them. (And there were also that bureocratic/judicial hell about the ownership of the original scripts...you could say it was quite kafkaesque.) Knowing this, it might be much harder to write what you really think. I'm a romanticist myself so the thought feels nice that even after I'm gone, someone would see something genius in my writings.
Obviously there is also the problem of the person. It's clear that his childhood remained unfinished and he tried to keep it together by building his own world. Isn't there something very childlike in his beef with God? As many likened the old sumerian religions to an abusive parent-child relationship, I see something like this here too.
This will be little bit on a tangent but I remember reading about the Elsie Paroubek case. There's a good deal of anti gypsy sentiment to it, and as they were also from Eastern(I know...Central) Europe their immediate target were the gypsies. But I still can't shake off this creeping thought, that while we don't know what happened with Elsie, I know what abuse is going on even today among the gypsies. Just a few months ago I heard that one of the little girls from my former elemantary became mentally incapacitated because she was...assaulted by her father. I don't deny my disdain for them but there's always this feeling that those guys don't even have a chance. But I digress.
To be honest, at the really first, I thought you are hinting on Terry A. Davis. Probably because most of the time I'm a programmer too, I'm still somewhat fascinated with that guy. But then it dawned on me.
If you really going down that path...good luck. I hope you're up to it. I don't want to shoot all my bullets here but for a too long time I was also morbidly fascinated with Chris-chan.
It's just too all encompassing. I was blessed with a much more functional social life than those who generally know about him and I'm always in trouble when he comes up...because he comes up much more frequently than one would think. I mostly direct them to the Comprehensive History video series and that's enough to turn them off mostly. But then you have the heroic ones who brave the heights/depths and the insanity ensues. For every horrifying discovery they make I can only go on like Billy Mays("But wait...there's more!").
I don't know how will you handle him, but I know that despite it's absurdity, it raised big questions in me.
Authenticity...peak Chris-chan was absolutely real. But what do you do if you are a monster. It's almost like he is the single best refutal to Rousseu's noble wildmen.
Is all our civility against our nature...is it all just a thin veneer on the animal?
Also you mentioned here that he somewhat fell off and I agree. But he's not the only one. I believe people when they say that medication helps, but it's always like they were robbed to soms layers to them and I'm with Joey Diaz with this(" I like people with a little bit of edge to'em"). Like I promised to comment(maybe sometime in the future) on the Scott Pilgrim article and that girl is...alright...but she is nothing more than the husk of the original person I fell for (yes...it is mostly the dudes who deny medication). It is good to suppress some excess but also I believe in free will. Arghhh...I'm already getting too far and basically said nothing about the man himself(herself?...who knows at this point).
Still, when I saw that Sonichu picture I couldn't help but grin for a while. Good luck. It might be the post I can turn the people interested in him to.
Darger's one-sided fight with the divine is, in my opinion, quite childish, and the funniest thing about it is you see flavors of that in Chris-chan as well. Just as Darger quarreled with God, so did Chris, and when Chris's demands remained unmet, he took out his wrath upon his fictional city of CWCville. It's funny how the two align in such a way. Very much a result of arrested development, I think.
About the gyspies, there's a large population of them where I come from - one of the largest in America, believe it or not. I worked in a restaurant downtown and I got to meet people from every race represented in the city (which is a big one of almost a million people), and they all said the same thing - "Fuck those guys". They were like the only group that it was tolerable to be prejudiced against, if only because everyone of every race seemed to have an issue with them for one reason or another. Didn't help that they were, for a week, the talk of the town because of a mass catalytic-converter theft operation that got busted. All in all, I've never interacted with them myself, so I remain agnostic on the topic, but I do find it quite telling that seemingly everyone, everywhere has a distaste for them, both in America and Europe.
I can definitely see the parallels between Darger (and Chris) with Davis, but Davis... well, one day, I'd like to get to him, too. One day. He's still alive, btw. I think he faked his own death.
For what it's worth, I don't think Chris was born a monster. I don't even think he was a particularly terrible person before - well, you know. That moment marked the demarcation point in that transition, where he was forever turned from an eccentric but mostly harmless idiot to an actual deluded lunatic. I know the flavors of "deluded lunatic" manifested long before the final nail in his metaphorical coffin, but it never became more clear just how insane he was driven by the constant gang-stalking and internet presence until that point. I genuinely do think that Chris... well, he was never a good person. He was constantly making threats, constantly needlessly belligerent and, at times, petty and mean to those who caught his ire, but he wasn't evil. He was bad in the way, as we were saying, a child is - they're more immature than they are genuinely bad. Though, as we both seem to agree, that's definitely changed.
Davis is alive? Do you have any source on that? I would be happy if he really does.
For Chris-chan it was only after the "incident" that I'm saying that he's a monster. Before that, he was mostly harmless. But still can't shake down that he did most of that to himself, with support from the harassers of course. I can't blame any of his real life acquintances for leaving him.
And that's where his realness comes from. He was never accomodating, he never changed his behaviour. He was never thinking that maybe that's too much. The oversharing connects with this. He was doing what he felt right at the very first moment.
Maybe to connect back to Darger it resembles me on the ancient greek tries to find the "original". Like putting kids among mute people and the like. The uncannyness and originality for both him and Chris-chan might come from this. For much of their lives they lived quite isolated from the rest of the world and lived in their own creations. Still, the already imprinted memories couldn't be erased. For Darger it was the catholic upbringing. For Chris-chan...there was a few
Chris-chan ironically Chris-chan was isolated from the rest of the society by the constant harassment and his own belligerence and that's how he went of the tracks. In a way he is one of the most all-encompassing human experiment ever.
I think might explain how he went off the tracks, while Darger still had his faith and the Church, that while not caring for him too much, but still provided guidance for him.
Chris-chan had nothing. He had CWCville and the harassers. But fhe worst thing the harassers did was continously validating his own delusions, while he for further and further away from the surface.
And this is where one of my thoughts came in. Humans are truly social beings. Is this what isolation does, is this where the path leads to us without guidance? Well, these are just theoratisations of course. Still, the Chris-chan phenomenom did became over encompassing during the years.
In a way he is the avatar of the internet. Always somewhat degenerate, sometimes truly fine, other times absolutely vile...and still ending in depression and thinking about where we strayed from the wae.
Know too much about him, but I'm glad that I left that a few years ago, although I always go back to see how things are. And boy...it's not great.
Outside of some Patterson-Gimlin-esque photos of him in passing there is no concrete evidence. There was one very convincing video of a man in Yellowstone National Park that, if it wasn't Davis, it sounded and looked exactly like him (albeit he was a lot more coherent than Terry A. Davis ever was). I just choose to believe he's still out there, somewhere. It makes the world more interesting.
I think that, on the note of isolation, it's truly the most destructive force to the human mind, second only to chronic stress, which even then is highly debatable. I've had my severe issues with both so I've done a not-insignificant amount of research on both and, based on my own issues stemming from both, I think it can be separated thusly: stress will kill you physically (I was once hospitalized and incapacitated from a stress-induced condition that resulted in permanent nerve damage), while isolation will cause your mind to literally fray at the seams (fortunately I never went fully off my rocker but during my most isolated times, I certainly came close and started to believe some incredibly strange things that, thankfully, once I began to reintegrate with normal, functional people, fell away... well, most of it). They'll destroy you in different ways, but, to the issue at hand - isolation - it's amazing how quickly someone will unravel when left untethered to the wider world and the people in it, and Chris is a prime example. To a degree, he always had some wacky beliefs about CWCville being a real place, but around the time of the "Dimensional Merge" arc, you can definitely see that his already poor grasp on reality was coming apart. I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you loose the measuring stick that is other people and the real, tangible world outside your room, it becomes very easy to start falling into a land of delusions. The sad part with Chris, as you pointed out, is that when most people begin repatriate themselves into the world, the people around them disabuse them of most, if not all, of whatever delusions they'd worked themselves into. As you mentioned, Chris only found people who worked diligently to push him further into them. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that he is, fundamentally, untethered from reality now in a way that he wasn't in the early 2010's.
I had to return here just for a quick...update. I guess you heard the news about Chris-chan and although nothing is really confirmed. But...Oh My God? HOW? Chris-chan will have a kid before me? WTF?
The show might be just about to be back.
It never ends...eh?
https://youtu.be/gEWUxeTKCjc?si=kBBsmBoRsrRP2oM-
(There was a time when I listened to a shitton of BMTH and this was the first that came to my mind.)
It's interesting that Chris-chan really was authentic like you said, but he wasn't really the "be 100% himself and not care an iota what others think" type either. After all, he did basically turn his own life into performance art, and he clearly wanted attention and cared about what others thought of his works. As for medication, again, as a layperson who's just armchair opining, I think he could have been more or less okay without it if he'd just left the internet and cultivated a healthier social life with real people. He was somewhat functional during his high school and early adult years, after all, as his HS "documentary" shows.
Or: I'm not sure he was always a monster, or always doomed to become one. Then again, who knows. I won't deny that they exist, even if they're probably pretty rare compared to people who end up corrupted by bad choices or incentives (or is that just my inner Rosseau talking?)
You're not wrong, but I do think Chris was ultimately more in it for himself than he was attention from the outside. If he was driven by attention and a need to please others, he would still be making Sonichu comics (apparently he is, or claims to be, though its been years since he's published anything) - there's a real demand for more and he lacks the motivation or drive to meet it. I will say that, outside of that, yes, he did turn his life into performance art - I recall him uploading videos based on suggestions from the audience that were increasingly bizarre and nonsensical, and even when he uploaded videos of his own volition, there was an element to them that seemed to be playing along with the crowd.
I also think that there was a chance that Chris was, at one point, mostly functional, and could have been. His biggest problem was that, whenever anyone did genuinely try to establish a cordial relationship with him in real life, he'd end up biting the hand that they extended. The infamous Megan is probably the best example, though others are littered throughout his story, both pre- and post-internet discovery. I was recently reading about how he made actual, in-the-flesh friends at the second game shop he went to after his perma-ban from the GAMe PLACe (he was banned from this one, too) that would go out and do things with him, but once the cabal of "Idea Guys" got to him, he gradually withdrew from them and sunk deeper into his delusions and fantasy world. One of them, when interviewed, even said "He had more interest in his made up friends than he did us", or something to that effect. It really does seem as if he's pathologically averse to fostering real relationships and basically sabotages all of them he gets into. That being said, I don't think he was doomed to be one - but I do think he did nothing to help himself avert that course.
That's a very fair summary, and you know Chris' recent history much better than me, of course. Maybe it's silly to turn real life into a storyline, but I can't help feel the "Idea Guys" represent his final downfall and loss his last tether to reality. Still, you're right that he's had a history of sabotaging every potential friendship long before them. His life really is a Greek tragedy, isn't it?
As part of the documentary, I saw that one video where he sits around a table at a bar (?) and they're laughing and chatting casually. Even if those people were internet stalkers, that whole scene still haunts me, how easily he could have passed for normal with different circumstances. He's still a little awkward, but not anything too out of the ordinary. Instead he sunk back into his delusions, poked and prodded by his cabal of trolls, and we got...what we got. Sad, but also weirdly compelling in its way.
Yes, I would agree with that (if you read the above response to Archenar, I say as much in more detail). Given that Chris's life has been literally segmented into easily definable "sagas", I think that was the demarcation point from which there was no real coming back from. Obviously, Chris has people in his life who keep him stable now (i.e. keeping him housed, provide income, make sure he actually fulfills the orders he gets from his Etsy store, etc.), but if they weren't there to provide a support network, I'm fairly certain he would be indigent. It may be uncharitable but I think after the Ideas Guy arc of his life, he's become someone who cannot function alone. It's dubiously fortunate for him that, given his notoriety, it seems as if he'll always have enablers who are willing to fit his bills for him. At least, for the foreseeable future.
I know exactly the video you're talking about, too. I feel the same way watching a lot of his early content - the videos where he's not screaming or yelling or throwing a fit, but rather just expressing himself and his thoughts and generally just expressing himself. It's definitely a sort of Sophoclean tragedy to have watched him unravel in real time over the years. It didn't need to happen, and how much of it was incumbent upon him to change and how responsible the revolving cast of bad actors around him are for it is something that I think even the greatest thinkers of the Athenian agora could debate for a lifetime.
This chain is getting long here, and I should probably wait until we get to the proper Chris article, but I can't resist a couple brief final points first:
"rather just expressing himself and his thoughts and generally just expressing himself."
That's another thing that struck me watching the doc: how good he was at creating personas and putting himself in roles he didn't have any context for, when he had a motivation to. Ie. the PaRappa contest, or my personal favorite piece of Chris media, the "Rollin' and Trollin'" video. It's obvious he doesn't have a clue about hip-hop, the PaRappa games, the Iraq war or what it's actually like to work 40 hours a week, but he throws himself fully into all these roles anyway. No embarrassment and no fear of the unknown, he just gave it his best shot based on his limited vision. In a way there's something admirable in that, isn't there?
"something that I think even the greatest thinkers of the Athenian agora could debate for a lifetime."
I love this way of putting it. Indeed. And now I'm giggling while imagining a Doctor Who episode where the Doctor goes back to ancient Athens to make the greatest thinkers of Western culture watch Chris-chan videos before watching that debate. ;) (Maybe I actually have to write this now...gods help me)
Well that ending felt like a Shyamalan level "What a twist!" moment. I can't honestly say I expected that comparison, and yet, I can't argue against it.
In any case, this was a fascinating read, and arguably among the best essays you've written. I've never heard of Darger before, but I'm glad to have learned of him now.
I don't know if I'll be able to say the same of the follow-up to come, though.
Thank you, I'm really glad you enjoyed. That's some very high praise! Hopefully one day, I can top it. Though, do rest assured... the Chris-chan follow-up may be some time in the making. That is not a subject matter that can be taken lightly, or succinctly, for that matter.
This reminds me, I really need to start swearing vengeance to the uttermost limit more often.
When I first heard about Darger, and outsider art in general, I found it inspiring. I'm not sure I can explain it, but the idea of a guy taking the anguish and turmoil of his life and turning it into an intense, nigh-impenetrable work of art helped get me through some dreary times when I was younger.
Nonetheless, I am not sure I am strong enough to handle Sonichu.
There very much is something inspiring about his story, but at the same time, the fact that he was so isolated and profoundly unwell, only to be respected for his output after his death... it's nice to think that maybe one might find fame eventually, but wouldn't we all like to enjoy the benefits of it while we're still alive?
Also, Sonichu isn't that bad. You'll be fine. I promise. We'll go through it together. Besides, it's not Sonichu the comic itself that's difficult to get through... it's the story about the man behind it.
I think the fact that he was willing to work so obsessively on something that he never expected to share with the world was what I found inspiring. He had no extrinsic motive, no paycheck or recognition he was going for. He was entirely motivated by intrinsic motives.
Who knew that the designer of some of the most iconic Americana product designs had such a peculiar and eccentric life? It does make one nostalgic for the days of the freewheeling creative.
The happy colors and lines of his work are an incongruous contrast to the dark subject matter, they are fascinating, though. I had never heard of Darger before, thank you for this engrossing look at his strange and lonely life.