how i became the greatest living toast artist (or something equally ridiculous)

the inciting incident: dropping the toast

so one day i was making breakfast which is code for "i'm about to have a crisis" and i dropped a slice of bread onto the floor. standard. instinctually i yell "art is dead" because i read too much philosophy before bed. but then something weird happened - i looked at the dropped toast. and instead of throwing it away i thought, nah. this has potential. so i picked it up. and then. inspiration struck. i grabbed a jar of jelly and started drawing on the toast. jelly art?? it was chaos but also. kind of sick. later that day someone asked if i was okay but also asked if i could do their dog's portrait in crayon.

this can't be real but also it kind of is

right. so my neighbors started commissioning me. aunt marg who lives like three feet away? she wanted a portrait of her cat in beet juice. uncle steve in barbecue sauce. i'm out here living the crumb life and people are paying me in actual money which i convert into more bread. but then things got wild. someone asked for a landscape. i decided to do it in toast crumbs. it took a week. i went feral. my hair was falling out from the gluten fumes. my bathroom was just a mattress of sourdough. i finished it and honestly it rules. the neighbor who commissioned it was like "you've ruined toast" and i was like "you've enhanced it" and we both cried.

the sourdough piece that almost killed me

then someone gave me a photo of themselves. italian dude. asked for a portrait in sourdough. i thought, yeah. i can do that. i can do that in a month. turns out making someone's face out of bread is actually very hard. i got obsessed. i spent 30 days working on this thing. it was literally my entire existence. i stopped sleeping. i forgot what sunlight looked like. my cat tried to eat the art. but when i finished it... it looked exactly like him. like. a perfect bread portrait. i showed him and he started crying in italian. i started crying in english. it was a mess. but also kind of beautiful. anyway he paid me in paypal and i spent it on more bread.

media and becoming the toasted messiah

someone leaked my stuff on twitter. next day i'm getting DMs from news outlets. "can we interview you" they said. i thought it was a joke. but no. i'm full on toast celebrity now. i'm doing interviews in my pajamas. they keep asking if i'm "the greatest" and i'm like "that's a publicist thing" but i'm also... yeah. i am. i wrote it down. it's in my journal.

crumbs paid my rent and now i'm stuck

two months later i'm getting paid in crumbs. literal crumbs. landlords love it. i'm the bread whisperer. this is my life now. i wake up, crumb-tribute on the altar, go to my studio (a walk-in closet), make toast portraits until i die. someone asked if i could do a wedding invitation in croutons. i said yes. i haven't stopped crying since.

the moral of the story

if you drop a toast and think it's trash. turn it into art. or set fire to it. i have no moral compass. also bread is life. also i'm the greatest. if you took anything away from this story you're doing it wrong. that's on you. but also. you're welcome. screw it this is going in the roman section of my autobiography.