Three Squared = Negative Zero

Squared, like in math.

Jun 08, 2026

3 squared = 9

Like 2 + 2 = 4.

However, like the protagonist in Notes From Underground, 2 + 2 can equal 5—that’s what this blog is called: “6 Impossible Things for Breakfast.” As the other queen tells Alice; not the one who says “chop off his head” everywhere.

Anyway, I was going to say my equation isn’t 2 plus 2. It’s 3 squared, which almost everyone says is 9.

The only important thing is the number and it being squared. It represents the failure of my life and the failure to even be seen as a failure at it.

I am a professional artist. That’s who I am, but not what I do, because I failed at my career as an artist. And I’m not even talking about the kind everyone knows to be what artists do—they make art, it’s shown in exhibitions, group or solo, etc. Maybe the artist sold nothing at the show, but a small pond saw it, maybe even wrote about it somewhere obscure. This person doesn’t have to have an art studio to be seen as an artist if they do the aforementioned things. They continue to show their art regularly, even at shitty places. Still, they’re making a body of work and getting it into galleries of any kind; that’s the fucking minimum. Most can’t live off just those things, so they have a side “day job” kind of thing. Not that important unless they’re getting hired to teach art at colleges, obscure or not—it helps people see that this person is an artist, even teaching art at a high school.

Ignore the end. I did some of that a long time ago. When I started out in my early 20s, I had ambitions about doing that stuff. I had a tiny studio from the beginning until 2024. It got larger. People came to my studio and saw my work, etc., etc., etc.

I was in the Tribeca Open Studio Tour when no other neighborhood in any borough of NYC had one. People came by my studio, asked questions about the work, etc. Maybe I sold a few pieces.

Fast forward to now. I’ll spare you the details of the decline and downfall of my artist career.

During the Open Studio Tour, I said nothing and told nobody who walked in that I worked as an art therapist. Maybe it came up, but it was invisible and didn’t exist during those open studios.

Now, here I am. I could show you a résumé of all the shows I’ve been in, which sometimes I really had outgrown. I didn’t understand how I was not advancing. Nonetheless, I continued to have enough of those things. People saw me drawing all the time in all kinds of places, etc., and knew about whatever studio I had.

In another post, I can say I had a pretty great exhibition in Tokyo, etc., in 2010. That was supposed to be high up the mountain, with more upward hiking still ahead, and it wasn’t the summit of that mountain. After that, an avalanche happened. I could have worked hard to fix that, find an adjacent mountain, or whatever.

I didn’t do that—and a ton of stuff on here was, of course, caused by me. I got tired, didn’t have enough money, and the order of studios seemed to be going 3 – 3 = 0, followed by 3 minus 3 squared equals negative 9.

I freely confess I got tired and just kept on. Long story. I admit I finally gave up and then lost my studio—the space people could see as evidence of an artist, even one who used it as an art therapy office as well.

The final point from the Underground Man and the chess queen, and the famous line, “I could have been a contender,” sum up the simple truth about my failure. Even if 75 percent was caused by my giving up, the giving up itself is part of this failure. The final hiding in the graveyard of what I could have been. Partly, I could have gotten somewhere—even a C-minus. No, it’s an F. And imagine I was offered the chance to get a better grade. I had no energy left to retake it. Nobody did that. I did.

It has resulted in the irony of not even being seen as someone who failed because others, when reminded of this version of me they forgot existed, are like, well, this, that, the other. Whoever are the worst are the ones who have so many reasons. I’m tired writing this. Wow. Even the Brando character has actual facts to back that up that have to do with what his brother did.

I’m both him and his brother, except I lost the money to even bet on a fixed fight. Lost it because I was careless.

So what? Who cares? Why should I care? All Sally from Peanuts discovers as a philosophy of life. She fucks up show-and-tell, but that’s like a fixed fight. She hates waiting for the bus. She has a relationship, a friendship, with the school building. She needs her brother to tell the school she’s home sick.

I went to an Outsider Art Fair years ago, and after I left, a few feet away, on some scaffolding, temporary wall, or whatever, someone had written: “This is the outsider outsider art fair.” Maybe I got a painting in that one. Then the show ended, and I decided that buildings are kinder than people when it comes to this.

I did it to me. Like double S. If you can’t figure that one out, don’t bother. It’s like S is the 3 and the other one is the squared: 3 × 3.