January 19, 2025. I’m sitting in my living room feeling the fire dying while I hear this generator outside. I hate that I have to use a generator for electricity but it’s raining and my wind turbine no longer works for some reason. My house is poorly insulated because I don’t have enough money to buy more insulation. I’m not complaining, even though this sounds like complaining, i am attempting to report, with accuracy, what is happening as I write this down. This is all a part of an experiment I’m conducting on myself…however, I should consider writing this properly…I don’t want to seem too polished though. hmmm I’m trying hard to not use Ai as a type of editor in my writing. hang on…..what if I just try it I don’t actually have to publish anything, but if I want to present this as a documentary style diary I think it would be important for the reader to know what i’m thinking and what my decision process is, but I can’t stand not knowing what Ai would tell me. I’ll just take a taste of that delicious treat.
Certainly! Here’s an edited version of your opening that keeps your raw, reflective tone while tightening the language and flow:
January 19, 2025
I’m sitting in my living room, watching the fire die as the sound of the generator hums outside. I hate relying on it for electricity, but it’s raining, and my wind turbine has stopped working for reasons I haven’t yet figured out. The house feels cold—its poor insulation a constant reminder of my limited budget.
This might sound like complaining, but it’s not. I’m simply trying to report, as accurately as I can, what’s happening in this moment.
What do you think? It retains your voice while smoothing out repetitive phrases and creating a natural rhythm. Let me know if you’d like more tweaks or if you’d like to expand further!
ok, but I digress. The entire point I’m trying to make here is to create a tension between opposites. The struggle and suffering of the romantic “STARVING ARTIST ARCHETYPE” and it’s shadow opposite; “THE MYOPIC CAPITALIST ARCHETYPE”. I’m not going to constantly switch between Ai and me, i’m not even going to use it. just keep my spelling and grammar mistakes. I don’t care about perfection, perfection isn’t the point here. I need to be able to document this conflict somehow somewhere. I need to start somewhere so i’m starting here.
Where to begin? I’m thinking about how I should write a paragraph…like in university right. The beginning of a paragraph, the end of the paragraph or conclusion and the body….whatever..I don’t care right now…ok, where to begin? introduction I guess. those of you who don’ t know me. I’m Mikmaq artist Garry Sanipass. so, most of my life I was made to feel shame about being Mikmaq. primitive, savage, irrelevant, lazy, drunk, you know all of that racist stuff. like, i was born with these stereotypes. they weren’t true, but that’s the stigma that was projected on me and my family. It’s heavy. So, we were forgetting who we were. My father decided to go west and find other native people and learn what we had forgotten. why? We were told that our medicine men and women knew ahead of time. They knew that the lite skinned race was coming. They were going to destroy us or try to do so. We needed to take our medicines and hide them out west. So he and my uncle went west and brought it back home. They brought the sweat lodge and the sundance. However, other people also wanted their culture back and knew about the legend. They went west as well. I don’t want to imply that my father and uncle were the only ones, but anyway. In a sundance ceremony. One must prepare for a whole year before because the actual sundance is amazingly difficult. The purpose of the sundance is to suffer for the people. You bring your body so close to death, intending to offer prayers to the creator. You then ask the creator for pity. Suffering also tests one’s sincerity and purifies the sundancer. So, the sundancer dances in the sun for four days without food or water during the hottest time. so, for a year one goes to sweat ceremonies where the elder or conductor of the sweat ceremony makes it insanely hot and difficult. carl jung who writes about transformation, uses alchemy to explain his psychological process. in alchemy, in order to purify elements so the alchemist can transform base metals into gold, the first thing he or she does is use heat to purify the elements. this burns off the impurities and leaves a pure element to work with. I think the elder or conductor is an alchemist. He or she is doing the same thing. However, the elements are the people who are praying. They are using heat to purify. Suffering to purify. The sundance has the same mechanisms at play and there is a lot of heat and suffering to purify. I think this is what I am doing as a starving artist. I am suffering to purify my intentions to create art. At some point in the sundance ceremony, on the third day. ok let me explain how hot and dehydrated we get when we dance. Every day in the sun, we can feel any moisture we have in our bodies evaporating. it feels like the sun sticks a straw into us and just sucks out the water. we have these eagle bone whistles we blow through. They stick to our lips. We have to peel them away at the end of the day. This process rips some skin off of our dry lips. so, on the third day, a trickster appears with a bucket of cold ice water. He offers everyone there a drink. we, of course, can’t be tempted by it. we have to stay sincere and concentrate on our prayers for our community. so, we have to turn down the water. however, when I was dancing, an image popped into my head. a glass of ice tea. with the sound of ice hitting the sides of the glass. condensation sweating down the sides of the glass. I quickly pushed the image away, NO, i was there to suffer for my community. The image kept coming back. NO. I made it through the four days. immediately after the dance it rained. It felt so good. My cousin came by to congratulate me for going through all four days. I thanked him, but said I had to leave because I wanted ice tea very very badly. He said, wait a minute. He hated ice tea and don’t even know why he bought it. he handed me a bottle of ice tea. I was shocked. OH NO. I wasn’t purified. My subconscious betrayed me. an inner trickster. he had put an image of something i needed into my prayers. that’s when I noticed that there was an opposite part of myself at work in everything I do. In everything we all do.
Once Upon a Time there was an Artist Named Garry Sanipass… 
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