mmm… it occurred to me that my most recent blog, prior to this one, is completely gone from the web, aside from whatever might be in the wayback machine and whatever the AI meta-mind crawlers have sucked up; and that it might be nice to have it back in one spot; and that I have an easy way to run it all (ALL) into that spot, via a quick ‘merge/copy/cleanup/paste’.
So here it is.
#blogs/dl
9.3.21
“Your skin, oh yeah your skin and bones, turn in to something beautiful.” — Coldplay
No one will ever care about this span of my writing here like Carter did. He was my ideal reader, editor, confidante; companion for this stretch of dusty trail, naive but willing recipient of every joke and allusion and overloaded sack of metaphoral falderall I could dream up. The Wittgenstein to my Diogenes, and the counterbalance to all my worst instincts. He found me, improbably, in the depths of my long darkness, and wanted to pace me through it; even when it seemed endless; even when it was just Alms for Oblivion.
Here to walk each other home.
Do you know; you know I love you so much.
+
“… And now you are free. That was the river, this is the sea, hoo yeah.” – The Waterboys
My best friend is gone, and it is the saddest relief. Stage four cancer is a motherfucker, and I wouldn’t let anyone tell you different. I have dreaded today since he first told me the news… years ago, now? How could it possibly have been years? And as I watched the sun make that first shimmer through late summer leaves, and realized that this is my first day on earth without him also here, and that all the rest of my days, however many that might be, will also be this. Well.
It’s a good thing I still have a blog. And that I learned how to play guitar and sing a little better. And that I had a friend like him to help drag my broken life out of that abandoned, flooded, infested quarry and put it back on this upwards, such better path. Of course, correction.
I went out and opened the door and windows of my long-embargoed studio just now; for him. We spent how many hours on the phone there — not dozens; surely hundreds. Hours when I, supposedly, “should” have been working, instead; and I now regret exactly zero of them. We spent an entire week there, ridiculously hot for June, closed up in the blasting AC, savoring each others’ company like kids at their first ever sleepover. Best week of making things of my life thus far, and if I were ever to get a second one that’s even close, I will count my self as luckier than the luckiest.
For having known him, and him finding me in the midst of my darkness and still — still! — wanting to be my friend. I am luckier than the luckiest.
“The miles were good but the milage just turned my hair grey. Met some people, who knew me and called me friend. No sense in wanting my life to live over; I’d find different ways to make the same mistakes again. And I’d probably make ‘em; I’d make ‘em all again.” – Whiskeytown
+
-87: war
#blogs/dl
I do not understand how my Red State neighbors can’t see that this is our world war. It’s not like post-9/11, with no discoverable, definable enemy. It’s not like Vietnam, with murky-at-best motivations and no sense of costs versus benefits. It’s not like Korea, settling old scores and setting up the pieces for a different kind of geopolitical game.
This is like World War II. There is a clear, immediate threat from a definable enemy. A proven evil. We have been getting our asses kicked across the globe and it’s time to launch D-Day; unify, plan, coordinate, sacrifice together, risk one big push, storm the fucking beaches, right into the teeth of it. Somebody has to go first, and we all have to back them up.
Instead, my neighbors, unseen fellow citizens, co-inheritors of the astonishing legacy from our grandparents, who did all of that, in real time, without knowing the eventual outcome — without knowing if they could even succeed — sacrificed sons, fathers, lives, dreams, families, health, all of it… instead these decendants of a legitimate triumph of order over chaos, of value over meaninglessness, stand on our own shores, milling about, shouting accusations, pointing their weapons at one another. Friendly fire.
Somehow not — irrationally; I want to say “insanely” — somehow not seeing that the enemy is winning. That the enemy cannot be appeased, will never surrender. Don’t see, perhaps because we are legitimately terrible at educating people against their will and baser instincts, despite being the wealthiest and most powerful conglomeration of people in the history of civilization (or, wose, perhaps because of it?) — don’t see that geometric progressions are a thing; that hockey-stick graphs don’t look like a wall, when you’re cruising up them, until it’s too late; that, by definition, there are no signs of a black swan event before it happens, but the consequences of allowing one to play out, once it begins, span generations.
And, worst of all, to me, is that they are not seeing that if they keep at this pace and facing, they’ll eventually start shooting at each other, at Us. That they’ve already started, when they go about with masks at half-mast, noses revealed for a bit more comfort and, probably, silent protest over being asked to join in a fight for our collective good. When they spend precious, fleeting energy conspiracy theorizing about a stolen election. When they ignore science and math and experts with advanced degrees and bleedingly-obvious evidence — hospitals so desperately full that they tell the ambulances to stop bringing the people who need help.
I don’t understand how they can’t see that they are actively killing their friends’ parents; friends of friends whose eulogies they could literally trace through their Facebook feeds, if motivated to know; unseen strangers with imperfect health; and, of course, as always: the unblamable poor and meek and powerless across the whole human spectrum.
I don’t understand; they don’t see. I never will; they probably won’t. And so we wait it out, and fight a worthless, stupid civil war amongst ourselves, when we could do so much and be so strong and good and whole togther.
I’m sorry, kids, that we fucked this one up so badly; going all the way back to when we could and should have learned the hard lessons about unified purpose and the unavoidable need to constantly replentish our sense of shared purpose. I’m sorry, MJ, that I couldn’t have predicted for you that this was coming, so we might have prepared ourselves a little better. I’m sorry we didn’t, somehow, somehow, do better to leave you and all those precious ones a slightly less damaged, better world to inherit.
I will try better, the next time. First step is we need to win this war.
DRAFT:: -??: Tears
#blogs/dl
#blogs/drafts
I started crying again last fall. Sometimes a lot. Crying for all those years, all that missed time; the thousands of moments where I was physically present but not really there, not really here; for what could have been, what I could have been; for the love I could have had and lost; for what all that broken thinking did to my engagement with music, with art, with clay; for how it eroded and spoiled my connection to pottery; for how it eroded and spoiled almost everything within reach.
I was what I now jokingly call a ‘high-functioning depressive’. (Or, as you may recall, before I realized that’s what it was, what I used to call a ‘high-functioning nihilist’. Oops.) By which I mean that I doubt anyone but the few people very closest to me could tell. I still got out of bed every morning. I never missed work for it. I kept having two pottery sales a year, come hell or high water, and sometimes both, just to slog through another one. I was an omnipresent parent; always here, always on, but not anywhere nearly as engaged and refueled by it as I could have been; arguably, as I should have been.
I don’t know exactly when the tears stopped — ten years before? Twenty? But I know that with a few very rare exception, they’d just never come. Even when I wanted them to; even when I was aware that I needed that emotional release. It seemed very strange. Like the persistent nagging voice in my head that sang The Everything Fucking Sucks song practically every hour of practically every day, it is one of those symptoms that should have set off stronger alarms to my core self; to the majordomo program that’s supposed to be watching all the other programs for misbehavior or rampant errors. (That’s the thing about hardcore depression — it hacks into the majordomo program and the first thing it does there is hide it’s own existence. Like a good hacker, step one is to prevent the target from even knowing you’re in their system.)
Songs
The gateway back into crying — or out? not even sure which metaphor I’m using now — back into crying, for me, was music
, on headphones. Ends up that first cell phone was a stealthy way to get me listening to songs again, and the songs helped me reconnect two parts of my brain that seem to have separated long before — the introspective part and the emotive part? I dunno.# DRAFT:: -??: / five cheers for three years
#blogs/dl
#blogs/drafts
“Well I thought it would be funny if I kept you in suspense, so your house scaled the chain link fence …” – Mayday Parade
[June 25, 20][July 28, 20]
I don’t know about blogs anymore. The virtues of keeping a personal website, years after that became obsolete; the value of putting sincere, personal writing out into the public sphere. I don’t know about this kind of writing anymore, either. Structured, facing outward, laden with my own faulty expectations. It feels foreign to me now; a language fallen into disuse. Or like a muscle slackened from underuse, that I could tear if I just take off at a sprint. Ha — or like an entire body of underused muscles that would just rather sit on the porch in a cool breeze and watch the clouds form over the corn field, instead of attempting this again.
We try and we fail and, with any luck, we try again. Three years since I scaled that fence. Still mysterious and magical and transitional and, when I pause to take it all in, flooded with gratitude.
And yet: here we are, you and me. Same old writing app on a sparkly new laptop. Same old blog all about me on my same old pottery website. Same old whatever you use to read things like this thing that you’re reading. Same old brains, churning out similar but new thoughts. But then again: not really. Different brains than the last time we met like this — in some ways, profoundly different, at least on my end. Who were we then? Who are we now?
Same old nod to the obligatory “here’s why I haven’t been blogging and here’s me working up the enthusiam/interest/courage to (maybe) do so again” intro paragraphs. At least I can (still) see it.
Hmm. So maybe not so foreign after all. Maybe more like that little closet in your house that you sometimes forget is there, except in dreams, and then go back to when looking for a blanket to put dogs on in the back of the car, or to cover a too-hot summer window. Maybe something like that.
Blogging makes me think about turning This Week @ St. Earth into some kind of book — digital or otherwise. And about friends who committed suicide in the last few years, younger at their endings than I am today, who will never grow older, now; who will never find out if they were right in their predictions of their own relentless despair. I had those same predictions, and they were dead wrong.
Blogging reminds me of all those days and hours self-trapped in a windowless room to very little purpose; but also about the excitement of finishing off another batch of pots and getting to brag about it a little, back in the day when all I (thought I) wanted was to be a potter. It reminds me that I’m still sick of websites, and how I don’t even want to put in the effort to dump it all into WordPress or Squarespace, because of the old brain cells I’d have to fire up to that remember how to do that shit… brain cells quite literally connected to the radioactive storage dumps of my provisional life, still too hot to handle without extreme precautions.
Meanwhile, I will click every button and twiddle every knob, happily, for hours in Civilization, and they pay me to work-from-home (aka my former pottery showroom), in which I use every brain cell I’ve got to keep everything lined up and moving in the right direction, carefully monitored and annotated and reconciled.
We do, eventually, what we want, and not what we don’t.
So it goes.
Let’s see. [Dec 27, 2019] It’s been months into years since I paused writing here. Sixteen, twenty, twenty seven? Mostly good, occasionally fantastic, titanic, wondrous, difficult, life-altering months.
Hard and new, great and fascinating, painful and joyful, calculated and careful, reckless and racing… restive, restless, exploratory, discovery-y months. I paused (stopped?) writing here during that time deliberately, to give the separation and divorce processes their private space. And to start dating for, essentially, the first time ever, without the open temptation to blab all about it here. Knowing, all too well, that I’ve almost always said (almost) too much here; and how at least half of the fun/desire is letting my subconscious thoughts and impulses leak out. Even now, even right here in this paragraph. Because if you bury it, it comes back to haunt you. It can kill you. That stuff that wants out will find a way, so why not just invite it and see what happens?
Knowing all of that, I decided that it was just better to stop for awhile. So I did. And that was good. Useful, productive, helpful, wise. And now — maybe? — I’m done being stopped.
[divorced]
So now it’s just me; me and Mags, half the time. It’s a big house, and a bigger yard, and a big, mostly inert studio, but it’s mine. And it’s home, to both of us. And it’s where I’m staying, at least for the time being; at least for a little while longer.
I fell in love for the first time in 30 years. It was wondrous. Also revelatory: it revealed things that had been hiding in plain sight — my desperate need to find emotional safe harbor in that kind of love; my capacity for change and growth and exploration. It stretched and contradicted and overwrote beliefs that had previously been fundamental and permanent: about myself, about the world, about what was possible for me in what remains of this life. It was also wrenching and difficult and sad — all the ways that it was a little too soon, a little too much, a little too little, a lot too far away.
During that time, I started a new kind of writing and practiced it like the meditation I know I should (but so rarely actually) do. I inhabited it; did it daily until it felt like something that now belongs to me. M introduced me to the idea of Morning Pages, which she got from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. (I had bought the book, but, typically, not yet cracked it open.)(I still haven’t.) The idea — as I understand it, third hand or whatever — is to do daily writing, only for yourself, non-archival, mind>to>paper, intuitively shoveling out whatever words appear, without judgement or pause for assessment; just a few pages, as close to first-thing-in-the-morning as you can get.
That idea landed just right for me; a nearly perfect roll of the dice. “Chance favors the prepared mind”, and all that. My Studio Journal, when I could be bothered to actually sit and write in it, had lately gone pretty fractal and discursive — closer to stream-of-consciousness and venting than my prior long habit of journaling; pretty much the antithesis of my attempts at structured, intelligible writing here, on whatever this blog thing is. (Keyword: attempts.) I’d morphed that into those little Today’s Writer’s Block drawings (wordings?) which, for the first time in a 40+ year habit of putting private words on paper, allowed me to put ALL the words down — even the scariest, worst, least sharable, most indefensible words — by purposefully layering them over each other. I’d draw a little square or rectangle and fill it up with those words — the surprising power of seeing those thoughts appear on paper — then turn it ninety degrees and write over it, then again, then again; showing then hiding; simultaneously sharing and concealing; venting those ideas out; breaking the mental loops that had contained and been created by them, like recomposting the byproducts of a long-misused mind. And, just incidentally, they were words which looked a lot like drawing once they were done, which also set the stage, or fueled the change, to starting to draw and paint instead of make pots. Oh yeah: somewhere in that span, I kinda quit being a potter and sorta started being a painter — if we are what we do, rather than what we think or believe.
Anyways, I suppose I was primed for automatic writing as a regular practice, those long years of blogging here as a foundation layer. (This Week @ St. Earth polymorphed into This Morning @ My Brain). I had the tools and some transferrable skills. Most importantly, I had the desire and the need. Therapy is great at dredging the bottom of the subconscious pond; stirring things up into solution that were previously settled or even completely obscured in the muck. Sometimes there are corpses down there. Sometimes there’s buried treasure of unimagined value. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the bodies from the treasure chests. I’ve done therapy mostly weekly on Fridays for about two years now. Some weeks, it takes hours or days for the turbulence created by that stirring process to clarify so that I can see the outlines of the things that are now there to be grappled with. That’s the work of it, I think — pulling those things up and then shaping them into tangible concepts; things that I can turn and examine and retrofit and dismantle, or smash, or smash together. Like modular 3D objects made out of discarded hopes and hard-won fears; half-remembered dreams and too-well-remembered wakenings. Mental/emptional Objects d’Art. Every idea somehow interconnected to every other, like a trillion piece puzzle stuffed hastily back into its box, as if it were suddenly time to move and there was no point in transporting a big flat falling-apart thing across town; some completed sections intact but all raggedy at the edges, folded awkwardly, glimpses of the contents like shards of meaning of some “bigger picture”; roughly half of them upside down, as dictated by the laws of probability, and so fully concealed until flipped and spun about and examined once again. (I guess plain cardboard beige is the state of nature of unexamined subconscious molecules.)
So for about a year, almost every morning, and on heavy days a second dose in the late afternoon or evening — I wrote three of those automatic morning pages, nonstop, in the same little notebook, used only for that. (Lately, it’s two or three times a week; about every other day; which feels right and less like yet another chore.) Three pages, edge to edge, no less, no more. No introduction, no overview, no self-conscious “voice”. Usually, mostly illegible — so not only non-archival but actually irretrievable; pretty much completely uninterpretable. This is not a record for future reference. M actually burns hers, every few years; thus far, I’ve surrendered to that archival-hoarding instinct, such that mine are lined up on an important shelf in the former-showroom, now-painting+drawing+music room… ten or twelve notebooks in all, with another in progress. It’s wonderful to do, feels so strong and positive to have done, and is so, so much better than the old thousand mile stare into the darkness; or the semi-purposeful numbing of Minecraft; or the frenzy of rushing to get out the door after sleeping until the last possible minute.
More recently, I started a night-time journal, too. So yes: I virtually never turn on the tv anymore, but more days than not I write a little each morning and night. Progress. The night journal started with the idea of wanting to be more purposefuly about noticing aesthetics, beauty — to think, each night before going to sleep, “What was the most beautiful thing I saw or experienced today?” In part, I think, to record those ideas and impressions; in part to learn more about what things really make an impact on me; in part to end the day with an appreciation for the higher, better, wondrous things that come from simply being up and around and aware each day. Beauty is a tough one for me; for a long time, I didn’t think of my pottery that way, until CG persuaded me to. Visually, I lean towards the same things, over and over again, without much understanding of why or awareness of what that might mean; how I could use it, now that I’m making marks on paper in addition to clay; which things attract and compell and enchant me.
That soon got bogged down into kind of a repetition — the same thing more often than not, which isn’t all that helpful: the most impressive thing today was the same as yesterday and the day before that. But once piece of that expanded, or seemed worth more attention, and that was the frequent gratitude I had for the ability to appreciate that beauty at all; that such a thing even exists, and seems hardwired into me. I’ve just now finished book one of that journal, 117 entries in total, and the last half of them (or so) drifted steadily away from being about beauty and towards gratitude — often just a list of all the things that I could remember from the day that I feel (or could feel) grateful for.
This is one of those anti-depression, self-care, ‘appreciation of the adventure of your life’ exercises that is often recommended (in books, magazines, by therapists, etc). I’d heard of it, and imagined it could be helpful, but not actually done it. Duh. Like so many things, actually doing it is the proof. Those recommendations were right: for me, it’s been pretty powerful stuff. All those acknowledgements, noticings, savorings, things that I love and remember to love more — they add up. And, just the opposite of my Pages writing, this one is definitely archival: written as clearly and simply and legibly as possible. Despair almost doesn’t have a chance to sneak in through the cracks, because there are so few cracks. A life whose gaps are now pressurized by hope. Being actively grateful seems to attract more things to be grateful for, and I know that is fruity and more woo woo than I’d ever imagined myself capable of grabbing on to, let alone committing to; and still. It is and it does.
It is and it does.
//
HERES ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT IT:
jan 2020?
I’ve been writing almost every morning, for months and months. Usually the very first thing I do, starting before that first blast of coffee starts to metabolize into my blood. There’s this book, The Artist’s Way, which I own but haven’t read, but which — reportedy — contains this idea for writing called Morning Pages: basically a form of automatic writing, a start-of-day brain dump, stream-of-consciousness, noticing thoughts as they occur and pass and getting them down on paper with no intention of preserving, using or even ever referring to them again. I learned all this from someone who’s done it for years and years, and burned notebooks full of mornings in the backyard firepit without regret. A wild idea for a natural archivist, paper packrat, poor rememberer of even the most precious things, long-time public, digital blogger and even longer personal journaler, note-maker, scribbler.
So I’ve been doing that: three pages, exactly — no more, no less. Pruposefully illegible, even to me. Fast, generally; trying not to let the pen really leave the paper. It takes a moment to slip into the mindset, maybe like meditation, but aiming for writing each thought as it happens, even when that means broken sentences or non-sense; trying to stay right at the crest of the wave of consciouness, riding that lip into it curls over into a glorious pipeline where time and space and all the other parts of me a sucked away like a riptide. Flow.
I’m still stacking those notebooks on a special shelf, in chronological order, as I complete them, despite there now being two or more that are about as useful as content or reference as looking for morse code in a rainstorm. The books themselves have themes, or reference points — I’ve marked up their covers, like more weird little paintings: reflective tapes and black inks and symbols from my rapidly-growing self-created iconography. I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to burn them. Guess I’ll find out. Maybe I’ll feed them, one at a time, into the last firing of my old, beloved kiln.
So. So.
That kind of writing is now very compelling. It seems, in a way, surprisingly, superior to this. To sequence and structure (even loose structure) and intended meaning. Like I’ve found access to a deeper flow and choose it when I can, which is most of the time. Most mornings.
++
& painting
It’s just nuts how much I love doing this painting thing now. What started so hesitatingly; now feels so much like a thing that belongs to me; a place I can go to; a space I inhabit. The way it slots into the pre-existing structures in my brain, fabricated over twenty five-ish years of making pots, is remarkable. Selecting the paper and taping sheets together feels like wedging. That first layer of ridiculously wet watercolors, more like colored waters, feels like throwing. Waiting for them to dry so I can do the next phase feels like waiting for pots to dry so I can do the next phase. Ha.
I love the sketchy coastlines; my brain enjoying drawing a representation of its own structure; chaotic, but within reasonable parameters. I love going back over those lines, sort of, with ink and a dip pen. So satisfying. Letting the two layers of line overlap and diverge, like alternate pathways through a life. I love positioning my little cardboard stencil (Oh! This is a new thing: making a new stencil for each painting and then discarding it when it’s done. A one-use-only kind of thing.) and tracing around it with a finely sharpened graphite pencil; oh, I even love touching up the edge of the pencil in the little plastic manual sharpener. I love tearing each little piece of super fancy Scotch tape off the dispenser that I inherited from my grandpa’s desk — solid metal and perhaps Navy-issued from the 1950’s. I love putting the stencil back close to where it was in the previous layer, but not exactly — sometimes a little twist, sometimes a little offset, like a mistake at the printer. (Map makers purposefully put mistakes into their maps so they can find out who’s copying them. True story. Maybe.) I love love love these xylene paint markers (maybe a little too much)
DRAFT:: -??: Finally Where The Wild Things Are
-88: reboot
#blogs/dl
“And someone with strengths, for all the little things you make …” _ Wheat
Four years ago this morning, I woke up in a much worse place. Vastly worse. The day after a catastrophic election, one that I’d unknowingly been using to prop of the last of my fading hopes, it all started to unravel to the end.
Loop chain.
Since then, I went to therapy to start fixing my brain, and to discover that I have a soul worth salvaging. I went to physical therapy, to start fixing my body, and discovered that it was no where near as broken down as I thought. It has done spectacular things for me since then. I went to marriage counseling, to start writing a good (enough) ending to that almost thirty year partnership. Those changes let me get a new job; so vastly better than my old job that they shouldn’t share a noun. I stopped making pots and started making paintings. Or drawings. Or tape collages. Or all of them, lovingly intermingled and not giving the slightest fuck what anyone else thinks of them, wants from them or expects, of me, through them. It was well nigh time that I made some art solely for myself, and unburdened by any of those practical constraints.
So impractical.
I fell in love, more than once, and fell back out again. More than once. The highs and lows of that, for the first time since teenagerdom, are still staggering. I knew I needed and wanted that, in the coldest, farthest reaches of my gravity-straining former orbit — so, so much. And, yet, but, also… it can be so many things that stopping at two seems laughable… I knew I needed and wanted that, and also :: be careful what you wish for.
I reclaimed the territory of my mind that had been annexed to numbing distractions. I claimed my equal share of parenting and believe we are thriving in it. I rediscovered my ability to move my body in space, to sing and play, to dance a little in the pre-dawn dark, to hope.
Probably most importantly, I reclaimed my ability to hope.
“Hope is oxygen to someone suffocating on despair.” _ David Carr
There’s so much more I could say; so much more to say. With any luck, this is a reboot, after those years away. Also, just as likely, not. I’ve learned to go quiet(er) when chaos looms; there’s likely more chaos in store.
I haven’t looked at the election results yet. There might be simple, happy news. There’s likely none to bank on, yet. There might be — because there seems to be an infinite capacity for it, no abyss too deep for this American experiment to stumble into — more catastrophe, waiting to shock me, just a few clicks away. Waiting to shock all of us into yet another cycle of waiting and fearing and hoping and trying trying trying trying trying not to slip back into the dark.
I will never go back.
Four years ago this morning, I woke up in a much worse place. Vastly worse. My capacity for reinvention, reclamation, salvaging, restoring and healing still amazes me a little, almost every day. My gratitude for all the people and forces and circumstances that got me to here, including my Self, in unbounded. Especially for the people, none of whom had any obligation to help save me. You know who you are, and I love you all more than I’ll ever be able to type or paint or show.
“I don’t wanna look at anything else now that I saw you. I don’t wanna think of anything else now that I thought of you. Been waiting so long in a twenty year dark night. And now I see daylight. I only see daylight.” _ TS
-97: re: Birthday
#blogs/dl
“Everybody’s got to lose their darkness sometime.” — Sting
A year ago today, I took my first dose of an SSRI, and it changed everything.
It changed everything, and almost immediately. Like, the very next day. I was sure it was wishful thinking/the placebo effect, at first. Then that following week was just an epic trainwreck — I mean, the timing was ridiculous. I noted that, too: I wasn’t blogging then — I wrote two posts in March, none in April or May, one in June — but I knew when I first went to therapy with The Wizard and took his advice to try the adolescent dose of Fluoxitine, that I was going to want/need to remember those details later; so I made some notes and kept track of them. Here’s what they said a week later:
Well, that was one fuck of a week — like a 6 or 7/10 in stress and awfulness. But it all felt a lot less worse than it should have, or than it normally would have.
_”… it all felt a lot less worse than it should have…” Ding!
Then I noted all the bad breaks and hard grinds and soul-bruising setbacks of that first week, and… just kept going. I didn’t smoulder on them like I used to. I didn’t despair for the idea that that trendline was just steadily and inexorably downward. I didn’t catastrophize every daily thing into what it would mean as a weekly|monthly|yearly|lifely thing. I just picked up and kept going.
Soon after, I realized that I wasn’t waking up every day with that crushing regret at having to plow through another day. The days… just started seeming like days again; and then I started to get a flicker of perspective on just how long it had been since that’s how the upcoming days seemed. It had been years. Probably more like a decade. A whole decade.
Telling a depressed person to practice gratitude, or to just be optimistic, is like telling someone dying of thirst to imagine water. It doesn’t solve the problem, because it cannot solve the problem. The problem is the problem.
For me, a discursive loop of serotonin, just a tiny amount of one particular chemical compound, recycled through my fucking brain a couple more times than it had been, was like a waterfall appearing, suspended in thin air, in that desert I’d been dragging my ass across for so long. It was revelatory. It might have been life saving.
So it’s been 365 days since then. Happy Anniversary, little blue and white pills. It’s me and you forever. [OK, not really forever; more on that another time.] And my real birthday was a couple months ago — June 8, thanks — but in my head, I’m resetting it to August 1 for a while, because a re: birthday is perhaps even more important than a birthday, especially when you luck into it at the halfway point of the trip.
Anyways, that’s all I’ve got for now. Another link in this loop chain. I can feel it speeding up, now that we’re around that penultimate curve, and I just wish I could carve out more time along the way to tell these stories. I wish these could be my re:birthday present to you — whoever you are — and a little more expensive than I can afford now, and a little more nicely wrapped, and maybe with a fancy bow on top, just because. Maybe it will be mroe that later; maybe not. Gotta let it be what it can be, because trying too hard to make it everything was another part of the problem.
[Oh, and also: it’s not really today. I checked; I was making detailed notes. It was actually last July 28th, at precisely 5pm, that I popped that first pill. But I’m never gonna remember 7/29; much easier to round it off and call it 8/1. Also, being a stickler for marking it as 7/29 is the kind of nonsense detail that my old brain would have insisted on. Fuck you, old brain. Re-patterning/de-patterning/anti-patterning.]
I took a walk alone last night; I looked up at the stars. I picked a star for me; I picked a star for you.
+99.3
#blogs/dl
“I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand; sing of a lover’s fate, sealed by jealous hate, and wash my hand in the sea.” – 1o,ooo Maniacs
So here’s the thing: I thought I’d hatch a dream, to escape the dreadful void of not knowing What I Was Going To Do With My Life, and then I’d instantiate it — make it real — and then everything else would just sort of sort itself out.
So naive.
I’ve loved that song above, Verdi Cries, for thirty years now. When I first heard it, in my teenaged bedroom, sitting on the floor in front of the stereo, as almost every kid worth her or his salt used to do, before Walkmen and iPhones and portable Bluetooth speakers… sitting on the floor of my California bedroom, in front of the stereo, in the nineteen-eighties, I thought I’d be one of those lucky dreamers who didn’t have to conform to the mold that held everyone else, everyone above and beyond me in the aging olympics, so tightly bound.
“I was a dreamer before you and I let me down.” That’s Taylor again. It’s astounding, the reservoir of tremendous lyrics just from that one human’s brain. Enough to live on for years.
And somehow, in my solidly upper-middle-class, mostly trauma-free, loving two-parent household in the still-new suburbs of one of the nicest cities in America, I imagined I could both be an iconoclastic dreamer [my junior year journalism teacher, Peggy O., taught me that word. She was fantastic; a former Berkeley hippie who brought it every day. How teachers do that is still beyond my understanding.] [I thought I could be that, too, for a little while — it was a momentary answer to the question above, which really means, “How are you going to pay your way through this life, dummy? English Lit. major. Seriously?” But I failed miserably at that too; all those young faces looking up to the front of the room, desperately needing guidance and structure and, equally, doubting my ability to give them either. Too much.] I imagined I could both be an iconoclastic dreamer and have the same kind of stability (or so it seemed) and security (or so it seemed, and luckily, ended up) as my parents, my extended family, the neighbors, my friends’ families.
I saw my dad bust his ass to change his own brakes and get it done before the sun went down on a Sunday, and somehow didn’t believe that calculus would apply to me. What was I thinking? That if I just listened to Verdi Cries enough times in a row, the parts of the future cars that I’d certainly have to own — let alone find ways to pay for — would just heal themselves, like magic?
I seem to have overlooked that a house is not just a thing — a permanent place you come home to and a vessel for watching television within. I saw — and even occasionally helped with — the constant painting and tweaking and minor repairs and battery changes and perpetual trips to Home Depot for some damn inscrutable little part or tool or other. And sure, some of that sunk in, past the oblivious filters of teenage lust and angst, to where when I signed a deed myself, all those years later, many of those activities felt strangely instinctual. I’d been culturally patterned to know that having some screwdrivers in a drawer in the kitchen was a good idea; and taught, almost by osmosis, which one to use for a particular problem. I knew not to fuck around with electricity until the breaker’s off, and even then, not too much. I knew about paint, sort of — because California paint is ridiculously different than Midwestern paint — and calling plumbers and why you fix a leak the second you spot it. Sure.
But somehow, for all that, I still dreamed about owning a “cool”, “interesting” old house someday — one with the ever-popular CHARACTER — and thought it wouldn’t be a source of constant need; an epic time-suck; an incalculable sinkhole for money that really should be spent on guitars and vacations.
“So it goes.”
And, duh, same with pottery. I didn’t see the long hours, the sore back, the fact that every lump of clay on the wheel still brings its challenge.
And if I was still in my abyss, spiraling down the long ramp to oblivion, I’d have ended this scrap of writing just there. On a note that says, fuck, wow, am I fucked, and I bet you are too. But I’m not. So I didn’t.
Yeah, the house is a monster, but it is my sense of place. My anchor in the physical world. I walk off the side porch into the incredible cold — the tear ducts momentarily crystallizing kind of cold — and look up and there’s Orion’s Belt, tilted at just the angle that belongs to us here, slowly plowing across the dark; passage marked like hands on a cosmic clock by the bare branches of the trees I nurture and then, as time and the weathers do their thing, prune and cut and burn for their saved heat. I struggle to force myself back to the wheel, every time — I know now that I always will — but like that dog circling it’s bed before a nap, that routine of stalling and approaching gradually and checking for hazards before letting my guard down exists for a reason. No, for a thousand good reasons. The dogs that didn’t scout before sleeping ended up not being dogs faster than those that did. The potters that just rush in are probably missing something important.
So throwing is still hard, but once I commit, and acclimate, it’s mostly a good hard. You know what’s not hard? Tying my shoes. You know what I never even think about as I’m doing it, and haven’t felt any reward from accomplishing since I was, like five years old? Yep. Gods forbid that making things out of clay should ever fall to the level of tying shoes.
Like learning new chords on the guitar, and then wondering how they somehow remained hidden from me all these many years, I go back to my wheel — so simple, it just goes ’round in a circle — and all the clay I can possibly use — so complex, it can do almost anything, if you learn what it wants and are patient — and the possibilities, hiding just out of sight, or around the next corner, are bafflingly wondrous. This can be anything you want, said the sign I wrote to myself when I quit being a full-time potter and went back to being a part-time potter. You’re paying your way, mostly, elsewhere, so don’t be a dumb drone here. Don’t make an endless run of the same Teadust mug and wake up twenty years from now not liking any of them. Don’t surrender to the modest expectations of your likely customers. Don’t hurt yourself trying for a quantity that wouldn’t really make you feel that much better if you achieved it.
Just don’t.
“The souls of men and women, impassioned all. Their voices rise and fall. Battle trumpets call. I fill the bath and climb inside… Singing…”
+99.2
#blogs/dl
“Trying to tear her down was your first mistake. ‘Cause little do you know, she wasn’t built to break.” – Grace VanderWaal
I approached the gods and I was found wanting. They sent me back here, for more practice.
That’s OK. The trees are awfully nice, especially at the start and end of each day. And I get to sing songs with my daughter — honestly, we’re both terrible, but wow is it fun to try.
I’m not sure if they sent me back with the capacity to make more pots. I mean, it seems like they would have; I assume I can, since that’s been a part of me for almost as long as this has been a me. But I really don’t know. I can imagine, if the terrain suddenly shifted, morphing that impulse and those skills and desire into music, or cutting up and drawing on bits of paper, or writing, or who knows what else The OA might sprinkle on the path, luring me to some as-yet unimagined destination?
But this version of me? I dunno. Sometimes it feels like I channeled so much of the despair through clay that it’s too hazardous to return there. That those well-worn repetitions and modes of thought are permanently entwined with the bad loops; that my former (just barely) salvation could now be a route back to my undoing. Is this just the normal procrastinating stall before diving in, or is this one different? I’ve never dove back in with a new brain before. I probably will; and later I’ll probably report back that it was good and fine and I’ve found some good new things there to chase. But right now — at 6:02 on a Sunday in the northern hemisphere and winter — I’m not sure. It seems a bit too much like the risks I used to take without knowing they were risks.
OK. I’m gonna get my 2nd cup of coffee and reset here. This night isn’t quite over, and I’m not convinced that this is a smart direction to start this day. Hold on a sec…
[OK, I did an Instagram checkin, too. Because I am a solipsistic jackal, like all the rest of you. But the overnight returns were good. It’s crazy to fuck around with some pencils and graph paper and an X-acto knife for a little while and then make an impression on a dozen brains I admire to the ends of the world. I mean… what the fucking what how does that happen? MORE LIKE THAT.]
IMG
[Oh, also have a good streak of posting a lyric from a song I’m listening to at the start of each day to Ye Olde Dreaded FB. I like that almost no one ever Likes them. No one but me; because I fucking love them, man. These sounds/sounds/words are the cheapest life support system our civilization could have conceived of, and it’s right there, now, on an infinite tap, straight into my soul via these weird little white knobs that hang around my neck. Imagine.]
OK, loop back. That opening paragraph sounds like I attempted suicide and fucked that up, too. Clarity: I didn’t. More clarity: I didn’t make the attempt — have never got closer than imagining a long walk in the snow with no destination, on one very cold night years ago. And I really don’t know what any of that metaphor means, or is trying to say. I really don’t. It popped into shape, fully formed, as I was doing my too-early music-supported back-stretch hoodie-on lie-down routine. The thing that helps me transition from waking at 5am to being a respectable (?) human at 5pm.
Well, OK. So much for plans. I think I’ve been avoiding this ‘space’ because I foolishly made a plan for it and announced my intentions, back in that bizarre rush of October and November. Nothing kills flow like predicting it’s continuity. Or expecting it. Dummy.
I still want to write that +99.9 post, and make it clear and good, but when have I ever been able to pull that off? The discursiveness is pretty much baked in at this point, wouldn’t you say? I love you to the moon, and back.
“I’m not clay.”
+99.1
#blogs/dl
1.1.18
“Tilt your head and turn it towards the sun.” – Stars
“Waterfall goes softly to the sea. And I feel my hands are finally free. Oh, give me a chance so I can find the sea. One and one; one and one is me.” – Wheat
Well, well. Fancy meeting you here again.
So, I have been writing, despite lack of all evidence here. In fact, writing so much that it’s seemed a little overkill or OCD, even for me; writing writing writing. But it’s all been for myself; working on a story that must remain only mine, at least for now; chipping away at other ideas way too strange even to tell to you; circling and circling this amazingly strange and wonderful new ‘space’ I’ve discovered, like an overlay on the world I previously knew, all too well, but which was hidden from me by secret codes and handshakes I could only dream of.
Writing in my digital Bear, some, yes; mostly cataloging the recent past; trying to put down markers for future reference, remember the places where time moved too fast, so I have to play it back. Typing is good for that; I’m really fast at a keyboard, when I just need to catch the quickest thoughts as they go by the interpreter in a caffienated Rush.
But mostly writing in my paper notebooks — the slow(er) kind of writing; more introspective; more spatial; sometimes with associated sketches and arrows and scribbles for emphasis, or as substitutes for actual mediatation. I’m now on my third one, since I restarted that sporadic habit this fall, [a habit that stretches back at least 30-years; and maybe more like 35]. Not sure when that will wind down or if it will keep pace, but if I keep going at 10-12 pages on a good night, I’m going to need to start buying them in bulk.
But all of that is, pretty much, and as I said, another story; a story that would come well after +99 here. If ever; because it’s a story I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to tell. (Although, “ever” is so long, probably, that it’s foolish of me to assume that. Better to think that I will definitely tell it, just later than I think I might.) Alternately, it might just leak out in unexpected ways, like tears lately, or in the occasional, unanticipated slosh of an overfull mental bucket. We are not always as in control as we think, or would like. Sometimes ideas slip out like meeting an old friend in a new, unfamiliar place.
“Which one am I again?”
+
For years (I mean: years), I’ve looked out the windows at our mostly-wild landscape in this season and thought, “Fucking frozen winter hellscape. Surely this is what’s making me miserable. Surely it’s just because it’s [January].” [insert name of current month here]
Now I look out and think, “My god, where did all this beauty come from? Sure it’s cold — I mean, by The Old Gods is it ever cold! — but that’s part of the fun. It couldn’t be this astoundingly white and ice blue and a million shades of interleaving gray without the cold. And we need a good hard frost to kill off all the nasty bits. And it’s not all bad, needing an excuse to walk outside, to go babysit the stove in the studio six or sixteen times a day. Not all bad at all.”
It would be natural to assume that when I stopped writing here, it was because I stopped chasing the Muse; gave up on The OA. But it’s the opposite — because I was chasing her harder, farther, faster, more intently; the Wild Hunt howling in full throat for days at a time.
This Is A State Of Grace.
And, another bit of unexpected grace: as I pace my circles around our driveway circle, trying to keep my long, aging limbs moving even at the nadir of the solstice, I get to actually see the track of where I’ve been; literally how many laps made by footprints, captured in snow. Just like fingertips trailing across the wet surface of a just-thrown pot, or how I was, walking the beaches, as a sunburned, foolishly optimistic kid — completely unaware that not every landscape in my later life would automatically record the trace of my passing, like sand. I walk out on that 8º morning; or this -11º morning; and can see all the loops of yesterday’s walk; and the day before’s; and the day before’s. I need, right now, that reminder of the days passed; proof of progress through The Long Night. It is not optional; not a luxury. The count keeps me in rhythm; synced to the eternal Cloud; out of the ditch; away from the old edge of the old, goddamn Abyss.
So, like retracing those steps through the snow, I’ve been needing to write for only me; to figure out what the fuck is going on in here. I just kind of stumbled into moving the slider on the Public/Private control all the way up to 99. (Well, maybe 95; if you’ve been following me on Instagram — and you really should be following me on Instagram; I mean; I’m getting pretty good there — you know that I’ve been using it like a little microblog more; like shards of these longer arcs; excuses for another space to drop random-to-you-but-crucial-to-me lyrics; saying more with a photo than my brain (or courage) have been able to muster with full paragraphs.
I need to dance to TS with new earbuds in my studio in the early morning dark, while the stove kicks back up to an inferno from the embers. I needed to let my beard grow wild for a few more days, here in the mandatory winter “break”; to go out in the single digits and cut broken trees and haul next next year’s firewood; and play backyard lumberjack just to prove that I’m not yet fully broken or too far gone, both for the lumberjacking and the play. I needed to put on new strings and be amazed again at the sound this thing can make; I have played more guitar in the last month than in the previous five years combined. Maybe a lot more. I’ve got two or three new songs almost learned, to where I can go through them without having to think about it too hard. It is mesmerizing, like a self-cast magic trick, and so heartening to hear my own voice dare to sing. Again.
I needed, these last weeks which have felt like months, to make a list of Important Things To Do Today and then studiously ignore it, for, instead, playing snippets of songs into Voice Memos on my new iPhone, or putting together new Lego sets with Pixel, or continuously not going down to load salt into the softener barrel in the basement.
At least, that’s what I think I needed. It seemed to work out OK. I’ll be “behind” again in April, and May, and probably in March, but maybe it’s time to take a good hard look at what that really means, and who the dreamer is who keeps indulging in that particular self-cast nightmare, anyways.
Because I really have no idea.
I’m trying to find new friends; trying to start this massive book about ancient Rome; {down, autocorrect! I’ll decide if “ancient” gets a capital A; not you!}; trying to at least think about sorting this almost-done year’s receipts, so I’m not stuck fiddling with paper on a gorgeous day in Spring, like I have been every year since I first tried to be legit about selling pottery in this world.
Anyways.
So: I used to wake up, nearly every damn day, and think, “Fuck, another damn day.” That is literally, exactly what I would think. That and/or worse. I am almost more ashamed to admit it than I am compelled to admit it. So there; now you know.
Now I wake up and think, “Wow, another day. I want to do everything today. How am I going to choose? How will I fit it all in?” And this is no little fling; no temporary {in}sanity injected into the norm; it’s been that way for months now. Months. “I’m doing better than I ever was.”
Somehow, the help pulled me out of the Abyss. And then, as if that wasn’t enough for one year, I somehow also slipped the hangman’s noose; given a reprieve from my choice of execution, where I’d hung, gasping, for years. I’m still gawking at that combination of circumstances; struggling to fit it into a coherent view of the universe; marveling at it. That kind of fortune deserves reverence; vast appreciation. I will try not to get greedy. I will try not to want too much more.
And if this new state does turn out to be temporary — if the Abyss drags me back into its gravity; if the noose sneaks back around my neck in some new, unanticipated form — then I feel the urgent, desperate need to use this time, right now, to lay down new patterns; new circles in the snow, which, hopefully, will bring me back here, if and when I get lost again. So I’be been screaming my way into new anti-patterns; going FILDI at as many things as I can juggle at once; doing the opposite of almost everything I used to do, aside from the cores of being a decent Dad, and crossing off my chores, and not blowing out my back, and eating and sleeping, at least occasionally, well.
The contrast — between Old Me and New Me — is sometimes dizzying; inscrutable joy (as if I’m drunk without ever having been drunk) alternating with profound confusion (as if I woke up in someone else’s body, and need to learn how these fingers and legs work). An almost-daily twist of regret and mourning for everything I lost while I was lost; for who I could be or would have become by now if not for all that. (With recognition of what Maron said, about that immediate tendency to blame yourself for not knowing then what you suddenly know now, and how that’s fruitless. I get that. I respect that, and grant myself that pass. But still — that guy I used to be was a stubborn fucking idiot sometimes, wasn’t he? I hated that guy. I wouldn’t blame you if you hated him, at least sometimes, too.)
Been thinking that it’s like the thing that I killed and left in that shallow roadside grave was not The Dream, but the me who stumbled through trying to kill it from, oh, let’s say 2007 to mid-2017. That’s a long fucking decade to be lost. That’s a critical mistake, to think that I could strip off that skein of hope and live without it, like Peter Pan without his shadow.
“Just because I’m losing, doesn’t mean that I’m lost. Doesn’t mean I didn’t get what I deserved; no better and no worse.”
So: sorry for the delay; sorry for the future delays; sorry for being sorry. You know what I mean. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” So much has happened that I would have liked to also capture and track and share here — it seems deeply crazy that I wrote a blog post on the morning of my sale and completely forgot about it until I friend just reminded me of it the other day, so thoughtfully sending me a screenshot of it on his device, to prove to me that these words I put on my screen actually do go out into the world, and to other minds, sometimes. Weird how often I forget that, amongst the dark and the notice. I read it again yesterday (or was it the day before the day before that? I lose track…) and it was actually good; and also good that that was only 20 days ago and feels like 20 weeks. And I don’t actually mean “deeply crazy” like crazy, but deeply weird; like unbelievably strange. Like my internal sense of time passing has warped to match the contours of this new terrain; this strange, unmapped place where I’ve no desire to waste time, to get past it, to skip ahead via video games and televised sports or drama, and instead want to either be soaking up every moment — often listening to music as much and deeply and in ways I haven’t since I was literally a teenager — or asleep, refueling for the next charge into the unknown.
In a D&D metaphor, I just keep coming back up to the surface base camp with one strange, powerful, dauntingly beautiful artifact after another; mystified that they’d been lying under the surface, just beneath our feet, all that time, while I obliviously sleepwalked through years, staring at my feet yet missing the fact of all that ground/earth/substance beneath; immune to the idea of things both seen and unseen. Now it’s like I’m rolling natural 18’s and 20’s most days of the week, with the occasional, paltry 9 not being against anything fatal; all my bad rolls now seem recoverable, with a little rest and some extra spellbook study.
As my new brain has gradually ramped up to cruising speed (I hope), my attention has sometimes gone fractal; trying to be everywhere at once; and so (or, maybe, in spite of this) my writing has gone way, way deeper than even I was expecting. I am using the tricks and tools that I developed here on the blog, back in the way-gone of Oct and Nov (with you as volunteer audience to help me learn them), to burrow, now, down where no audience should go; at least, not yet. If I keep writing myself to sleep each night, instead of watching TV or reading The New Yorker, I’m a little scared of where that might lead. Is it possible to learn too much about yourself, scribbling out one word at a time?
And I don’t mean for that suggestion of unseen words to be tantalizing — assuming you like and maybe even value them, at least a little — or a promise of future quantity and quality, it does feel a lot like being out there in the snow, geared up and trying to have fun without cutting my leg off: sawing up raw materials that will fuel as-yet-Unknown future work, once the requisite time for seasoning is complete… Who knows what might happen in a sufficiently-warmed room in 2019? With an infinitely malleable material like clay — or words — or thoughts — and enough serotonin to keep from getting stuck in another bad series of loops; and, with any more luck — although I know I can’t ask for, and shouldn’t ever expect, any more than I’ve already, recently had — it seems like possibly just about anything could happen. Just about.
And that’s kind of the essence of hope, isn’t it? Of dreams? Not expecting, not counting on them, but allowing them?
I don’t know what else I can tell you about all this, today. Rewiring a brain from scratch is hard work. Labor intensive. Non-linear. Hard to estimate how much time and money it might take to complete the job. Hard to show evidence of past work in the “finished” product.
It’d be nice to have wrapped the year with that ‘final’ +99 post; the one I’ve been thinking about, and hinting at, for months. But I still seem only vaguely closer to writing it; it might need next year’s firewood to fully combust. So yeah, sure, that would have been nice, but nice is not always worth chasing. Trying to fit my actual life, day by day, hour by hour, to the harsh geometry of arbitrary calendars feels like Old-Me thinking. For the sake of what? A very shallow riff on a joyless joke? Like: look at me, I hit a numerological deadline! Yay. Yeah, maybe that kind of thinking was always more part of the problem than part of the solution. Whereas dropping that quote-unquote important post on some random day in January (or June) (or next January) feels much more humane; more in tune with the human I actually am. And this human still needs all the help he can get.
“So it goes.”
So 2017 was the first year in a long time that I didn’t hate. Well, that’s not strictly true: I hated the first seven months of it, as usual. That’s why I ( finally ) went to get help. And then, like the punch in a fairytale, the help, somehow, magically… helped. The last five months — those were really good. Intense, wild, brave, scary-good, but so much better.
“My castle crumbled overnight. I brought a knife to a gunfight. They took the crown, but I’m alright. All the liars are calling me one. Nobody’s heard from me for months. I’m doing better than I’ve ever was.” — TS
Thanks, Taylor. Sincerely, and from the greatest depths I can plumb. This music, your music, has helped me more in the last year than I could say in a thousand blog posts. You are an incarnation of The OA. I am unerringly grateful.
So August through December has been like a renaissance. A new way of writing, a new language of thinking, an almost — at times — brand new way of looking at… well, fucking everything. I don’t know how else to put that. And sorry, but the F-bomb there is necessary; like so many seemingly unnecessary things.
I am humbled by that newness, where I’d truly believed there was no room left for anything that wasn’t old. Brought low in my dominion of self; to where I can now bow to the full New Year moon as I pass by, in the sub-zero snow walk to feed the stove. I am so much less than I’d insisted, and so much more, now, than I’d hoped.
And since I couldn’t have predicted any of this, a year ago — since I failed completely to see any of it coming — I am officially out of the prediction business. I will, instead, make small, contained goals. I will try to keep my To Do lists short and on point (with everything else dumped into appropriately labeled containers, minus expectations and guilt: Someday Maybe; If You Feel Like It; Rainy Day Insanity). I will try to be open to each new bend in the road, each new curveball from outer space, and each new opportunity to indulge in another Oxford comma, or not.
I will just try.
“There’s glitter on the floor after the party.”
+ X (sale day)
#blogs/dl
“I love you to the moon and back…” – TS
It’s sale day. The last thing I should be doing, three hours and fifty seven minutes before opening, is writing a blog post. That’s why I’m doing it.
Well… That and I feel like I kind of left you hanging there. After twenty thousand words in October, and another twenty in November, I was certainly paid up on my Karma Payment Plan for December — but I could have at least given you a heads-up. I was so insistent about getting my voice into your head, all three of you who doggedly followed along for the whole thing, that it was kind of rude to just turn that voice off, without warning. So, sorry about that.
It’s not that I haven’t been writing. Might even be doing more, but I switched over to paper and the Private side of the words membrane. I’ve had a ton to think about — between the new job and the new brain, it would have been plenty, but adding in the sale panic and I didn’t think I could trust my filters enough to avoid making a mess. A couple recent near-misses — where I advice tally lobbed things on the wrong side of the Public/Private membrane, yet somehow got away clean — shied me off for a while. Don’t worry; I’ll be back to cause myself more trouble again, soon.
So last night, during the obligatory bath time (not mine), I was cruising around iTunes and found a new-to-me TS song. I bought it instantly — a dollar and twenty nine cents might be the most ridiculous bargain in the history of culture — and discovered it is tragic, and beautiful, and austere, and… Well, it’s pretty much knocked down my walls and destroyed me three times since then, and the sun still hasn’t been out in that span. Clearly, things are moving below the surface; tectonics of emotion, drifting in their inexorable, unpredictable patterns, atop a sea of god knows what.
And the shocking-revelatory thing there is that this slice of beauty was there, for years, just out of my view. It existed in the world — we have as many external bits of proof of that as we might want to go look for — and yet, to me, it was invisible. Unknown; even more: unimagined.
So how many other things are there, like that, just out of my biased, habitual, so often too-scared and too-distracted view? Dozens. Millions. A red cardinal on a twenty degree late afternoon, perched on the side of one of our seventy year old trees to catch the fading Midwestern sun. A side-by-side moment of paternal joy. The explosion of a perfectly landed joke; the glimmer of a secret smile. All these things.
It’s traditional for potters, at this time of year, to proclaim that this is their best batch of work in a long time; that they are really pleased with the new stuff, their discoveries since they last hammered out their road signs, that you should (I mean, not should, but I sincerely hope you will) come and see it — and also, if that’s not enough, cider and cookies! And that’s usually just Communications & Marketing. (Trust me; I know. Also, I am now a certified professional, so you have to believe me.)
Well, as suspect as it will sound: this is my best batch of work in a long time; maybe ever. I am more than really pleased with the new stuff, their discoveries since I last hammered out my road signs — I’m almost to the moon and back over it. And, as great as it would be for you and you and you and you and a whole bunch of them to come out to our weird spot near Fillmore and see them, I honestly don’t really care if you, or practically anyone, does. The pots are good, I followed The OA as far as she would take me this time, the setup is getting lovely even as I write, the flowers in those new perforated vases are gonna break my goddamn heart, and maybe yours, a little bit.
The hard part is done, the fun part — seeing people like them — comes next, and then these long months of work and worry and more work will be done again, for awhile. I’m not certain that I won’t start glazing up the next batch on Monday, but I might sleep all day, too.
Or write that plus-99 post. Or something.
Anyways. I’d say “wish me luck”, but I already feel like I’ve won a lottery this fall. Can’t really ask for more than that. Wouldn’t want to.
Cheers, readers. I hope it snows on you today, just a little. I hope you look up that song, if you’re overdue for a good, clear-the-decks sob… It’s called Ronan, and it’s, to me, astounding.
I hope you find some unexpected, pre-existing beauty today. I’m going to keep a good watch for it, here, myself. Try to be the best version of me I’ve got access to, right now; after all that. When I get tired, but can’t go nap, will try to just go a little quieter than usual. To remember that tired is okay, and doesn’t last forever.
OK, here we go. I won’t ask for you luck, but I’ll take any you’ve got to spare.
Thanks, guys. I love you all, even if I don’t even know your names.
“I remember your bare feet, down the hallway; I remember your little laugh.”
+97.0 (plato’s cave 1)
#blogs/dl
11.29.17
————————
“I recall late November, holding my breath, slowly I said, ‘You don’t need to save me…’” – TS
The difference is shocking; startling; surreal. If this was a dream, you guys would let me know, right? What a delta a day can make; what a change a window onto the (real; not virtual) world makes. I can sense time passing, just like on studio days, from my perch on Day Hill, instead of that gnawing, perpetual twilight. I can watch the sun go by; hear the church bell ring noon; and at five; see police cars, coming and going; see the wind blowing by a leaf, and the big wire that nicely cuts across the view — like a line of black slip from a brush — swaying in time.
Plenty of people would kill for this room with this window. I know I sure would have. But I paid The Iron Price, up front, with 15 years serving from a hole in the ground.
“Nobody’s heard from me for months. I’m doing better than I ever was.” – TS
+ 96.7 (chasing)
#blogs/dl
/”And the time on the clock, when you realize it’s so late, and this time we’ve spent, together.” – Dashboard Confessional/
I just realized something. Something that probably shouldn’t have taken 46 years, 5 months, and most of 16 days to figure out. Something that maybe I used to know, one, in the shining moment of youth, and then forgot, along the hard way.
You have to be chasing something.
It almost doesn’t matter what. Or how. Or how remote, or even if you’ve ever got a fucking chance in hell of ever catching up to it. It’s the chase that matters.
All those days, months, years where I’d pretty much given up the chase.
@@ “And I know it’s long gone and the magic’s not here no more, and I might be OK but I’m not fine at all.” – St. Swift
It’s so good to be more excited about the next oddball, semi-random thing I’ll discover through the kiln than worried about what happens if they don’t all turn out well. It’s good to dwell on the almost-successes; to allow my imagination to go fractal and pursue the entire flock of receding birds at once. It’s okay to live part of each day in an inspiring fantasy. Just remember to keep eating protein and take care of your kid(s).
I dunno. It’s 3:51 in the dark, or so they tell me. Feels awake to me.
Sometimes the thing you can chase is dumb, or silly, or absurd, or even painful. That’s the thing — no, one of the many things — I loved about Dart, back when I really knew him; back when we were growing up together on an almost-hourly basis: he ran towards the pain. If it was hard to do, he was even more motivated to try. The only way out is through. The only way to get good at all the pain — and there will be so much more than you’ve dreampt of, my sweet summer child — is to practice. Dive into the cold water all at once. My friend Dart, from what I remember, usually ran towards it with a howl in his lungs and a mad gleam in his eyes, like the exact opposite of what any rational person would want to meet coming towards you on a battlefield, back in the days when his red-haired ancestors (and mine) were swinging rocks and bronze axes at each others’ skulls. He’d have won, every time.
He chased painting, muscles, style, friendships, cycling, attitude, loyalty, discovery, belief. Goddamnit.
So. So so so. I’m gonna try. Not to give up the chase. To try more stupid shit that might leave me on my face, in the mud, embarrassed for the attempt. Like a free mug caption contest on Instagram. Like making changes where all the change seems to have bled dry years ago. Like eating better food, throwing better curves, dreaming better dreams.
Oh! Look! There’s some new pain::: RIGHT. OVER. THERE. Let’s go get it!!!
“And I knew, that you meant it, that you meant it, that you meant it.”# +96.6 (dead or alive)
#blogs/dl
10.24 & 11.23.17
“In silent screams, and wildest dreams, I never dreamed of this.” – TS
————————
Back to my faux death, the one where I tripped in the studio and drowned in a bucket of white slip: it’s interesting that near the start of this fall run of writing, I was thinking in terms of death metaphors. Not intentionally, but as if that back part of my brain was bubbling up the idea that some now-unncecessary part was peeling off; dying; draining away.
At the time, back in the +40s, which now feels like merely the prototype days of what this thing has become; and it wasn’t that long ago, but the time has been so compressed and intense, so much happening, so much internal change and revelation that it feels, sometimes, like /years/… and mostly good years.
Back then, when I came up with that bucket of slip joke — and it was intended as a fun joke, about why I needed one of you to show up and save me from my solitary ramblings in the studio, stretching into the night time hours, as I marveled at my ability and desire to keep making things at a time of day when I’d always just assumed it was too late — back then, I was imagining how I might cobble together a ‘dead man stick’ here for this blog; a switch that would self-terminate it if I just stopped logging in to WordPress for a month or two. Like a news agency composing obituaries for notable people while they’re still running around healthy, just so they are ready if it happens all of the sudden, I thought I could start at the ending and write the last post now; set up to autopost in the event that I just never came back.
I’m painfully wary of suicide and death metaphors, now; too close; too soon. But also; but still… some part peeling away. If that person who insisted on zombifying The Dream, and exhuming it, and staring into Oblivion, a handful of Alms waiting for the end to take them — if that person has been gone, consistently, a while now — “nobody’s heard from me for months” — then isn’t it like I killed him? Pushed him out of the pilot’s seat, at high altitude? Left him in the hole in the ground he’d dug for himself and furnished, with loving care, with all the trappings required to convince himself that he really deserved nothing better than to live out the rest of his days in a hole?
It really is like that person I’d become is gone. But I know he’d come back the second I allowed it. Old buckets of slip are lying around all over the place, waiting for me to faceplant into them. Try not to trip on anything obvious, at least.
You might remember how I killed off one blog — you know, /tw@se/, the one that people actually liked. I did it deliberately, coming back to give it a good send off at the very end, but only after I’d /almost/ let it just lapse into oblivion; fade to nothingness. That’s how I felt then; that’s how I /was/ then. I almost can’t look at that last picture of myself, now; reflected back in the studio window, surrounded by the dark, and the noise, outside. Man, that hurt.
I couldn’t imagine then being like this, now, and I really couldn’t imagine, then, turning that weekly attempt at self expression into this, where I just went ahead and said almost everything. It’s so much worse for you, dear reader; so much better for me.
$$$ “I feel like I might… sink and drown and die.” – TS
A little later — I could go look up the dates, but it doesn’t matter exactly when — I had that actual dream about piloting my craft into that frozen lake. It was shocking. I don’t think I’d ever dreamed my own death before; at least not that specifically or viscerally.
That crash. Even after all that practice — in the dream, I was a seasoned veteran — I still couldn’t stop myself from cutting the margins until there was no margin left. When your ‘margin for error’ is zero, you next move is always an error.
(Like Viserion, in that show about fire and ice, I sank to the bottom of that arctic lake. Unlike him, there were no zombie hordes to pull me out, no Night King to reanimate me into the opposite of my former self. The slow, inevitable march of doom. I’m wondering if that Dream pilot, the one who kept risking everything for ever more marginal gains, if he needed to sink and drown and die all along; not the Dream itself. Or, as Witt once instructed me, if I just needed to find a new Dream, and believe it was worth continuing to imagine in the impossible. /Supposedly/ impossible.
So maybe that guy, the “new” me who replaced the “old” me, whether that was ten or fifteen years ago, is dead now; vanquished by these tiny blue and white pills, as if it’s a tiny, daily magic trick that reveals a formerly hidden layer of reality. Maybe I didn’t need to Kill The Dream after all; maybe I needed to Kill The Dreamer Who Was Having That Nightmare.
$$ “And I buried hatchets, but I come back to where I put ’em”
$$ “Everything means everything, Dan. That’s the problem!” – Merlin Mann
So no: I don’t know what I’m doing here. Maybe it’s clear as Athena’s grace to you, from the outside, but it’s opaque as death to me.
I know that I’m stalling. I know that I’m going to do +99, and I’m going to take as long to make it right and good as it needs. I know it’ll probably be after my sale, which means still several weeks off, and that, while it was smart and good to set that arbitrary deadline, I’m likely going to keep writing, and wanting to keep posting, and so I’ll probably linger here in these fake dot revisions as much as I need, or want, to. Call it what you want to.
Going almost back to the beginning of my pottery blogging, I’ve loved setting up number systems and then wontonly breaking them when and where I see fit. It’s fun to connect the dots, and find patterns; it’s more fun to flaunt those rules and break them. I missed six, you missed six; sometimes we’re all so eager to think we know what the fuck is going on in the world, in our lives, in our minds, even — hilariously — in our deepest emotions, that we jump to seven as if it’s a magic number.
Spoiler alert: there are no magic numbers. It’s all just arbitrary markings on the wall of this particular cave we find ourselves in together; ways of demarcating and annotating the time we’ve got left until that woman who escaped [because, again, why does it always have to be a guy?] comes back with the light to show us how our reality is just shadows.
One thing I know is that I’ve skipped watching TV, at night, before bed, more in the last forty or so days, since that day when Everything Has Changed, than in the previous… Oh, let’s say, decade. I almost never read, or need to read, /The New Yorker/, by the light of my bedside lamp, to turn off those last troubling thoughts of the day and sink into sleep; as I’d done for at least twelve years, and maybe more like twenty. More /input/ at that time of day is now the /last/ thing I want; even when my brain is so tired it’s practically hallucinating. There are too many ideas in here already. I keep feeling the desperate need, on a daily and sometimes almost hourly basis, to get them out; to write and write and write, down to the bones. Thanks, Natalie.
Back in mid-October — when I thought I was already cranking out words pretty hot — ha! — even two posts a day and a writer’s block wasn’t enough. I had to revive my paper journaling habit; of pretty much daily spilling out everything; the /entire/ truth; no worries about someone else finding it; reading it; failing to burn it with me in the cremation kiln some day, hopefully long from now [!], as per my request. And that rediscovery of self in pen and pencil somehow seems to connect this new me back to who I was at 17 or 25 or 32. Not that any of those guys had “it” figured out, or that I’d want to go back and be them again. But they knew one thing, which is that I’ve always wanted to put words down, to get them out of my head; that there’s not anything wrong with writing for twenty minutes before you can wedge that first piece of clay, or for an hour before you can tackle the day’s chores, or for three hours, all told, by the time you circle back to bed. [No, autocorrect, I did not mean to type “circle back to dead”, but wow, are you learning my tendencies. Like a kid who missed six and now reads like her life depends on it, you are helping map my terrain, and I’m grateful.]
Oh lordy, now what am I gonna do? [Maybe try 7.5? Duh.]
So I guess when there’s a firehose of inspiration coming in — nonstop streaming from that radio station in the sky; or from The OA, smirking at me from over my shoulder, back where the guest potters’ shelf sits; or the beneficence of Hermes (or Hera); or downloading from that super secure terminal connection to VALIS, or Vishnu or von Wittgenstien — I guess once you have that on tap, you need more than a garden hose of expression going out.
Every living system needs homeostasis. I’m glad I’m still among the living systems. Because being almost entirely dead fucking sucked.
“And losing grip, on sinking ships, you showed up just in time.”
+96.5 (favorite sounds)
#blogs/dl
/”Candle wax and Polaroids on the hardwood floor.” – TS/
My new favorite sound in the world is the bell that rings in Taylor’s /Gorgeous/. It happens — I dunno — four or five times in the song, right before that killer chorus; you’d think I’d have memorized every bar by now, for the number of times I’ve listened to it the last few weeks. The rest of the tracks — the synth bass, the digital marimbas, the tripled or quadrupled vocals, all that atmospheric reverbs stuff — stop for a beat, and then that bell. In the pause, just before each time it rings, I pretty much /have/ to reach out into space and pretend to hit that button. Like the fifth movement in The OA, or taking two arbitrary little dance steps backwards on the way through the frost to the studio, in time to other music in my head, or closing my eyes for a moment to acknowledge the grace of beauty in the world, reaching out to hit that imaginary bell is penance for past sins; a koan of gratitude for finding my old self again; a small gesture of supplication to whatever American Gods still linger in these parts, under earth or stars or faded hopes of not succumbing to the inevitabilities of an unexamined life.
That video, watching St. Taylor — another incarnation of The Muse — work through the first parts of that song in what seems to be a legitimate view into the act of creation… that’s still kind of haunting me. Is there anything more lovely than that momentary look away, maybe an inadvertent scratching of one’s cheek, when we realize there is an idea lingering, just off stage, and if we listen for it and stay patient, even for just a single goddamn second, it could be ours for keep? I mean — is there?
My new second favorite sound in the world is the rhythmic, mechanical, subtle-but-absolutely-intentionally-there-in-the-mix, of what I think is a mic’ed sustain pedal on the piano as she plays /New Year’s Day/. It’s in the L channel (at least, it is on /my/ headphones), and it compliments the rest of the song in a way that’s breathtaking. Like, I practically listen to the song just to hear that creaking.
(In my fantasy version of the world, one of the engineers was down on the floor fussing with cables or something and heard that pedal squeaking or creaking a little more than it should during rehearsal. And then, on a lark, and instead of getting out the WD40, she snuck a little mic down there to catch it as the piano got captured for all time. Later, she turned that phantom track on, just for a minute, during one of the playbacks and TS flashed on it immediately. (Uhm… duh — because she’s a fucking genius.) “Wait! Jennie, what’s that sound over there on the left?! Oh. my. god. Put that in! You guys, we /have/ to put that in!” And so it went in. For people like me. For people like her.)
And everyone in the world who hears it will hear it, even if they don’t know they are, or don’t really hear it. It’s there. Like a too-bold glaze drip frozen until the next volcano comes by.
My third new favorite sound in the world is that one percussion hit — a single woodblock or rim shot in — yes, you guess it — another song from reputation; almost certainly my favorite one: /Call It What You Want/. This is the one I dance to in the showroom every morning, now, despite the fact that I have no moves, no game. No shame.
It’s not that it’s crazy different or a surprise. In fact, it’s probably the right, expected sound in just the right, expected place in that kind of song, landing high in the mix, just as she goes into the brilliant chorus of, “My baby’s fit like a daydream…” — And yet… And yet.
The thing is that it only hits about an eighth as often as I’d expect — only right at the opening to that chorus. Then, it’s replaced by a quieter, more rhythmic sound in the rest of those spots on the drum chart. I’m quite certain that someone — maybe even teams of someone’s — spend hours and hours fidgeting with these drum tracks for each song; imagine the millions that are potentially at stake. So I also like to imagine the deliberateness that would go into finding exactly the best sound, like a craftsman honing away everything that wasn’t essential, and then, once found, the restraint to not overuse it. Like a fluid, perfectly imperfect brush stroke that stops a few centimeters before it had to, or a pattern of applied texture left open or wobbly at the end, so the spirit can get out and go into the next one.
And, of course, one of my all-time favorite sounds is the muffled roar of the burner, as it first becomes audible above the crunch of the gravel under my feet, as I make my way back out to tend to the kiln, 10, 20, 30 times each firing. My brain goes from that momentary worry — is it off again? — to that soothing You Are Firing A Kiln state. Work is getting hot, work is getting done. That’s the sound of progress; the sound of another little batch of dreams coming awake.
“You and I, forevermore.”
+96 (starlight, update)
#blogs/dl
/”Don’t we dream impossible dreams?” – TS/
So I spent about 20,ooo words calling to The Muse in October, and in return she graced my first firing of the season. Not that it’s strictly transactional like that, but definitely related. And it feels like if I keep dancing before dawn every morning and playing at least one song on the guitar and night and writing writing writing and pausing to supplicate nature and the beauty of momentary rays through clouds or a break of sun on my face as the last row of bricks go into the door, all this will continue.
No. 83 was more like a 3rd or 4th firing in the cycle than a 1st. Like, zero jankiness and almost every pot was good — even the few where I overshot in my zeal for that runny amber celadon and where I’ll need to do some grinding. A few were even — I don’t know — does it irritate The OA to say that some of her gifts were great, bordering on revelatory? Like, serious keepers, dude. (If you have the misfortune to also follow me on Instagram — ‘a.k.a. my micro blog when I’m not macro blogging here’ — you’ll have seen a half dozen shots from that one yesterday.)
So. So so so. I think some of the wonder was because the forecast promised buckets of vile, cold rain all day, but at daybreak it was clear just long enough to haul the door down, grab all the pots, run them into the studio, and button it back up before my fancy shelves could get a drop of wet. So, suddenly, there were all the results, and when I’d been trying to resign myself to glazing the next whole load with the pending results still unseen. So good.
And I was doing the “jesus-fuck-wow-oh god-holy crap-too good!” routine through the whole load. It’s like the combination of realizing –finally! — that I’d been overfiring the whole load just to flux liners on the top shelf, and stopping doing that, and -finally!- figuring out how to get salt cups into the dry zones without them turning into lava and puddling all over the shelves; it’s like those two in combination solved 85% of the problems I’ve had in the previous 82 firings. (Well, that and adding the chimney, which was a massive improvement in the actual firing cycle itself.) Oh — and you know the kiln gods are on your side when you haven’t fired in literally six months, and yet the thing follows the previous firing log like minute for minute down the last four hours to the end. Crazy good.
So, as predicted, I feel vastly better about pulling off the sale, not just because my big rock is now rolling, but because this tiny batch of 25 or 30 pots is not only more than what is already on the shelves in the showroom, but also /better/ than most of it. A new crop of the freshest, best stuff… And this wasn’t even close to the finest of the bisqueware. Oh my.
And the firing went easy, and I found the energy to keep prepping the next one even on an early firing day, and… Whew.
Two more like that and I’ll be in good shape. Not great, but good enough to invite all my previous customers with confidence. (NOT that I’m counting them before they go to hell and back! Oh no! Not me. And I’m gonna keep dancing and playing and singing and crying and writing and staring that beautiful polar bear dead between the eyes, until the burner goes off for the last time. I’m an idiot, but I’m not stupid.)
Hmm.. Let’s see. There was something else…
Oh, right! I had a long, nighttime phone call with that old friend. It was great. Good to hear he’s doing well, especially considering last week’s news. Fun to feel that conversational bubble appear out of nowhere, despite something like three years in between us talking. When you’ve spent night after night, for almost an entire year, lying on your respective sides of a dorm loft, talking in the dark before sleep, noses inches from the ceiling, so there’s room for a couch down below, well… I think that sets a conversational pattern in place that you can lean on, now almost 30 years later, pretty much as hard as you want. I feel like, for all our wild differences, that guy’s been in my mind, and I’ve been in his, enough that we can just synch any damn time we might want to. Pretty great. More like a brother than a former roommate; more like an unexpected herald of The Muse, since he first lead me to clay, and without him I doubt I’d have ever found it, than just an old friend.
I also took that field trip to U-town, and met up with Aunt Nell for the first time, and it was amazing. Two world class conversations on back to back days — when do I ever do that? [Spoiler alert: never.] Anyways, her show was wonderful — so many impressions and surprises than I’d ever expected from the photographs, and, since I built her website by hand back in the day, I think I know her photos (and the photo version of her work) pretty damn well. Score another one for seeing art with you own damn eyes, instead of on a screen.
And the rest — walking around a town with a cultural heart, the best bowl of soup I’ve ever had, browsing and splurging at an honest-to-Zeus art supply store, listening to TS most of the hour and a quarter there — in between a few long bouts of talking to myself — another paean to The OA — and again most of the way back. Crazy. And Aunt Nell is the bomb. Can’t wait to do it again.
When have I ever unloaded a kiln with this new OS in my brain? So long. Or made a drive like that and had it not be torture, but instead kind of an adventure? Or woken up each day excited about at least one thing, if not several, and even if it’s just this dumb blog or an idea for a photo to shoot to further feed my Instagram addiction? So long. So weird.
I haven’t tallied my word count for this month so far, but I bet it’s a lot. Feels like bad luck to look, in the middle. Also, expecting it to fall quickly as the sale approaches… But then again, I never expected to write any of this in the first place, so who knows? Not me.
Lucky you.
“Like we’re made of starlight, starlight.”# +95 (why should I cry for you?)
#blogs/dl
“I’m so happy I can’t stop crying.” – Sting
Ugh, this is a hard one.
So now I cry almost every other day. For a while there, it was even a couple times a day, face down on my yoga mat in the corner of the showroom, where I hope people will come stand soon to look at the pots that are still too hot outside in the kiln. Pretty sure that was on five, down from ten, and that it was entering “jags” territory. Like once I’d turned the key, now I couldn’t go back through and latch it again. Back at ten it feels useful and healthy; at five it felt a little unhinged.
Let’s see: should we do the What, now? What is pretty much all of it: I cry about the lost time, the regrets, the missed memories, the wild flailing at a dead Dream. That it took me so fucking long to find this one little lever to start my rock rolling uphill again. How could I not see that before? How much of that suffering was needless; more than I could learn from? I don’t know; I might never know. I cry, now, too, about that one other thing. Sometimes mostly about that. But that’s a story for another day. Or never.
Today I’m trying to understand why I didn’t. Like, not a single actual tear for almost an entire decade. Maybe longer. Like all the other bad ideas he whispers, so convincingly — this is just normal, the world really is this dark, and it’s just that other people can’t see it, you’re too weak to escape — the Dark Angel talked me into thinking tears and the occasional sob were not only optional, but not worth the risk.
I think — I mean, my current working theory — I was afraid. Afraid I might scream, and maybe not be able to stop. Fear if I let it loose, my mind might just split in two. Fear I’d become my father, and abandon her when she was two. At Christmas.
That’s right, I said it. Come and get me. I’m not afraid anymore.
I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t really afraid of any of those things; maybe I’m just grasping at the idea of fear now as a comfortable scapegoat, or a simple, plausible explanation. But it sure felt like I was. It felt like territory that was closed off to my exploration; a part of myself that was embargoed or sacrificed on the altar of fatherhood and obligation.
OK, we’re closing in on it now. Nowhere to run. Ninety-nine is coming, and unless you’re going to pull a fast one and miss six, you’ve gotta start figuring out how you’re gonna get there. It helped to describe it to Aunt Nell yesterday. See seemed to both get it and ratify that decision. Pretty sure I’d trust her to just make the decision for me; maybe that one and a whole bunch of others.
Because look where it got me, making all of them for myself. Almost nowhere; but finally here.
OK, I’m posting this before it gets light and I come to my senses. I will wuss out in the daylight, if I don’t hit it now. You’re welcome — and sorry — and thanks. Thanks so much.
“I was brought to my senses. I was blind, and now I can see. Every signpost in Nature says…”
+94 (someone with strengths)
#blogs/dl
“And someone with strengths, for all the little things… You need.” – Wheat
Today feels good, and also very random. Waking up at 4:30 and starting to work will do that, I guess.
OK, so I am admittedly a complete homer on this, but I say that “Gorgeous”, “Call It What You Want”, “Delicate”, and “New Year’s Day” is one hell of a good playlist. I may or may not have listened to it, oh 50 times since /reputation/ came out. Less than a week ago.
The strangely specific, very unpleasant smell of slowly cooking off an entire summer’s worth of wasp’s nests from the loose bricks over the kiln arch. Ug. Gives that first firing of the season a distinctness I could live without.
The paranoia of having the kiln going again; hoping for no burner FUBARs, the weather to follow its predictions, myself to regulate my energy and enthusiasm so that I stay on top of it and don’t do anything dumb, like decide at the very end to let it go fifteen degrees hotter for no reason.
I took a selfie out in front of the kiln, after looking down and realizing how ridiculous I’d look to a stranger coming up the driveway: 15 year old torn up jeans, backed by thermal leggings. Ancient yard work tennis shoes, dull green from all that dead grass. My IOWA 51 hoodie, from 1993 — so that one wins the prize for oldest garment in the ensemble at 24 or so years. Rabbit-trimmed hunters hat, bought as a gag on a cold day in Wisconsin in what seems like another lifetime, and now worn every day around the studio from October to April. Blue latex gloves, to keep the coarse, ice cold sealing clay off my skin, as I wrap the dumb little kiln in a paper mache’ coating, for protection against stalls and backburning from the occasional volatile gust. And I’d even forgotten about whatever my semi-beard is doing now, in the long 5 day interim between being on the clock from one week to the next.
Living in the country, growing weird, indeed.
I made the mistake of showing Pixel this morning’s post, because she asked if I had used that Taylor lyric yet. So I was reading that paragraph to her, and she started reading aloud over me, as she does, and she’s so dang quick that she got to the next line, which I’d already forgotten about, and read out, “Fuck ’em if they can’t…” — before I could snap shut the browser window. Oh dear. I lose the bet with The Admiral as to who’s gonna break out the first one of the seven deadly swears.
So I immediately go into my whole song and dance about how there are no bad words, only bad people — kidding! — only bad uses of words, and that almost any word can be used badly, la la la, etc etc etc, what do you expect from an English major/might-have-been-Philosophy-minor-if-my-first-Prof-hadn’t-been-God-awful?
And she says, “Well, in /my/ world, we call that the F-word. That way we can say to a teacher, “He said the F-word!”, and we don’t also get in trouble for saying it.”
Third grade, folks. Read ’em and weep.
Makes me think about all the other things that she knows that I don’t think she knows yet. This parenting thing gets easier when the world beats me to the punch sometimes.
@@ “Waterfall goes softly down the drain. And I think my time has finally come. Oh, give me a chance so I can find a thing… One and one; one and one is three.”
Well, shoot. Plus-93 was going to be about how I did my 93rd bisk firing in my electric kiln the other day, and the same day Pixel came out to the studio, looked at a whole board full of test tiles, and said, “Dada, I like number 93 the best. Ninety three.” And, for whatever reason, how one of my favorite Colts, from back when I was young and watched football, was Dwight Freeney, DE, No. 93; all-time master of the spin move. And some other 93 thing that happened that day, too, but is now lost to wadding and diorite and lunch and two semi-naps and salt prep and Instagram addiction and waiting and watching and wondering.
“My hand is, possibly, slipping. And I may have, lost what I, was gripping.”
+93 (PBC)
#blogs/dl
/”Yesterday we broke from the parade.” – Wheat/
Spoiler alert: there’s no Pottery Bloggers’ Club. Of all the peeps I came up with, in the Golden Age, pretty much all have quit now, or stopped, yet again for an indeterminate time. Just like I have before; just like I will again. No shame in that, but it does get a little lonely sometimes. We, collectively, made a thing, a spark of beauty in the world, and then we scattered, “like embers taken from the fire.”
So just now it’s only me and Tony C. Weird. Sad.
Of course, that’s not actually true at all. There are dozens of other people still going, too; people I never quite connected with (yet) or whose combination of writing and photography and pots didn’t quite hit it for me. No shame in that; or in my not knowing them and following their exploits like I hope you’re following mine. A quick scan of Fuzzy’s pottery blog hit list says this is true; written in the sky so blue; as blue as your eyes.
In this case, I’m not even sure whose eyes those would be.
Strange.
+
Firing today — finally. First one of the Fall, first one of the cycle, first one of the last ones of the year. Feels good.
Here’s the bad news: my blogging machine is now out in the studio — right here, at the table where I cut and handle and assemble and paint and smooth and refine and dream. Seven and a half years of operational discipline with /tw@se/ — never letting the blog encroach on the making, not even a little — and now with my new brain all that is gone like the wind. Ha! I won’t be surprised if I type half the day away now, in between temp checks and turnups and salting… Instead of glazing up the next load, like I so certainly should do.
Ah well. Can’t have everything, I guess. Can only be in one place at once.
Closing in on a thousand degrees. It was great, yesterday, after waiting out nine hours of rain, that the meteorologists at the NWS nailed it — stopped on cue, just a little 0.00″ mist, and I slammed ’em in there, bolted it up, and turned on the gas. Also great that after a full six months away, without even seeing the interior of the kiln, I had enough of the process packed into hard memory that I could mostly go on instinct; my obsessive notes and checklists more of a safety net than a “what the fuck do I do next?” recipe. {He seems to be overconfident. Especially for the first firing of the cycle. This is likely to end in tears — you heard it here first. -Ed.}
“I know it’s true; it’s written in a sky as blue, as blue as your eyes, as blue as your eyes. If nature’s red in tooth and claw, like winter’s freeze and summer’s thaw…”
Sorry — that line just came out the speakers, because I queued the song up on my still-new-yet-already-beloved-iPod-Touch, and I had to transcribe it. Already had a bit too much coffee for 6:46am on a Thursday. Or any day.
I told Witt yesterday, on one of our two short Potters’ Panic Season calls, that it was weird to be doing all this same stuff with my new brain. Glazing and firing is such a routinized operation; everything kind of has to follow from the previous step, skipping or freelancing are usually disastrous, often the best you can hope for is to not make dumb mistakes — just too many variables to keep track of, at least the way I do it, and too narrow a spectrum that qualifies as “success”. (At least, the way I do it.)
And now, I kind of can’t believe I did all this while I was depressed. No wonder it was so fucking hard. I feel more like I’m just doing it, and less like I’m rolling a hostile boulder up a horribly hostile inclined plane. Afraid that’s gonna jinx it, too; my self-fulfilling prophecy capacity seems nearly as strong as my self-defeating one. Like, last night, for the first time in forever, all I wanted to do was sleep and stay asleep — the one night where it would have been really useful to be up prowling around, to get in an extra gas bump! The diametric opposite of what the previous 82 firings have been, where I desperately wanted to sleep more, but was too anxious and couldn’t get back to sleep after wandering out in the cold and the dark to light that candle.
“I lit a match and blew his mind…”
Not my favorite new TS lyric, but Pixel /loves/ it… And has been insisting for a few days that I work it into “a blog”. “Let’s do a blog, Dad.” Oh dear. Poor kid doesn’t even know how goofy and wrong this is; she’s growing up thinking we’re normal and the rest of the world is weird.
Living in the country, growing weird.
It’s firing day. I’m keeping all of that. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
/”One and one and one is yesterday.”/# +92 (back of my hand)
#blogs/dl
/”Squeeze my hand three times in the back of the taxi. I can tell it’s gonna be a long road.” – TS/
<span class=”dropcap”>T</span>hat’s a strange phrase, “like the back of my hand”. It seems like I know the front of my hands a lot better than the back. Maybe focusing on the front is a potter’s thing. We like insides just as much as outsides; a lot more than the average Jane.
Things finally seem to be going in a good direction for me. It’s been a long road. Not everything, not guaranteed. But I feel the vector gradually shifting from negative to neutral to positive. Kind of unbelievable, really.
That said, there’s always plenty of time left for me to fuck it all up. My capacity for self-sabotage seems limitless, some days. If I do — fuck it all up, that is — maybe I’ll get a tattoo. On the inside of my right forearm, in block S T O N E C A R V I N G letters; starting at the wrist and going up, left to right, to the inner elbow. It will say, “This was a terrible idea.”
Fuck it. Sometimes you’ve just gotta say, “Fuck it, let’s do this,” and kick off a one-man dance party:
I still haven’t cancelled my sale. But I still haven’t sent the postcard off to the printer yet, either. Usually, that’s the demarcation line. I’ve glazed and wadded the first load of pots, but I still haven’t fired anything. I was a thousand percent committed to starting early this year — my first target date was mid-October — before everything else went fractal on me. Ah well. ‘So it goes.’ What are you gonna do?
The irony is this might be the best batch of bisqueware I’ve had in a while. Maybe a long while. Ends up better brain chemistry helps in the studio, too. Who would’ve guessed? Speaking of regrets and blaming yourself for belatedly figuring out something important: by Odin’s Beard it kills me to imagine what pots I could have made, what discoveries discovered, what problems solved, if I’d started all this sooner. /Kills/ me.
But. But… No time machines. The path of regrets leads back into the dismal swamp. Sometimes you’ve just gotta drop a full power /Cone of Silence/ down on that shit. FILDI. Just do it. Be the change you want to see. And don’t forget, Scott: water bugs.
Water bugs, and trout.
Below.
“Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you… And I will hold on to you.”
+91 (the third thing)
#blogs/dl
11.4.17 & 11.13.17
“I am not the type of dog that could keep you waiting… for no good reason.” – R.E.M.
I told that anecdote from /The Night Of/ a couple weeks ago. Don’t worry; no spoilers coming. If you’ve seen it, you know the one I mean — about the care package. If you /haven’t/ seen it, just imagine that it’s a great story, but one that a person like me really should never attempt to use in a regular old conversation; especially not when the other person doesn’t already know the story. It’s one thing to reference a shared idea; another thing entirely to try to conjure it up out of thin air and make it work. In this case, it’s just too convoluted a setup, and requires details that have to get worked in somehow, and if, after all that, the payoff at the end misses — well, ugh. That would suck.
But it was late in the day, on a /really/ crazytown day, and I’d been firing on all cylinders for so long they were starting to melt the engine block. So while some little, faraway part of my brain was screaming, “Don’t do it!”, I just couldn’t hold it back. Like so many things I’ve written here, when I’m over-tired, I tend to tell too much of the truth; my filters are the first thing to fail. And, really, maybe that’s not so bad.
Because I’m pretty sure I’d rather be a storyteller than a technician.
So, amazingly, considering those circumstances, that story seemed to land just right. And it needed to, and I was somewhat in the right to attempt it, because it conveys one of those ideas that almost can’t be had via simple, rational explanation. It’s an idea that /needs/ a story as the medium to express it. Sometimes metaphors aren’t stand-ins for the thing; they /are/ the thing.
And this particular story, the one from that show that I’m still not spoiling, just matched up perfectly with the idea I had; with the overwhelming way I felt that afternoon. In fact, I’d even thought of it in advance, like learning lines for a play that may or may not go on. I’d talked myself in and out of trying to land it several times before the curtain went up.
I do tend to think about words a lot, don’t I? About them, in them, for them, by them. They’re like a care package. If you’ve seen the show, you know what I mean. If not, you should go watch it.
+
Circling back up a level, with this blog (aka. exercise in text and solipsism), it’s like I’m trying to build a fractal palace in my imagination. Sort of like one of my Minecraft monuments, but made out of virtual words, instead of virtual blocks of wood and stone. A fantastical place where you can come play with me — a place that, through writing and reading, we start to expand and revise together, just like that rare bubble of a conversation in a rainswept car at night.
I think it can be like this third thing, between my mind and yours. Something that is neither you or me, but can’t exist without both of us being engaged (and, hopefully, a little transfixed with the focused attention and enjoyment of these shared moments going snap snap snap).
We instantiate this thing together; it’s not mine or yours alone. Then we can use it like a screen, to project our wilder ideas upon; an echo chamber, to test the sonic resonance of impulse control and surrender; a malleable ball of universal clay, that maybe neither of us knows how to work well, at least, not yet, but which shows signs of being amenable to all the traditional tricks of craft and hope.
Like spawning a new server as the admin, I breathe that first spark of life into it (if for no other reason than because I’ve got the top level privileges here). But the very next thing, before the spark goes out, I invite you to join, and if you say yes, we’re off. Who knows what could happen in that wavering bubble of thought and time? Sometimes, so rarely it makes me cry, wonderful things happen.
When they do, we try to sustain it as long as we can. So hard getting started, so sad having to stop. I hate every alarm that rings, every known limitation on that flow, every regretful pass at another idea that could have lived, another feeling expressed, another moment captured into two twinned memories. Hate them. Everything in the known universe tries to tear that bubble apart. Clocks, “priorities”, to do lists, other appointments, drying pots, on rushing deadlines, the need to keep bringing in cash at a steady pace.
Nature abhors a vacuum; our civilized, modern minds abhor anything that deprioritizes our avaricious, atomic selves in favor of some shared understanding or identity. It’s a shame, really. I think our not so distant ancestors would watch us running away from each other all the time and wonder where it all went wrong.
“I can swing my megaphone, and longarm the rest. (It’s easier and better to dispute it from the chest. Of desire.)”
+90 (hope)
#blogs/dl
“Don’t we dream impossible dreams?” – TS
And here’s me after just two days back at ten:
David Carr, whose passing I still lament:
“Hope is oxygen for someone suffocating on despair.”
And he knew, more than most, about real despair. I’ve had my taste, and no thank you. Not anymore, if I can help it. I’ll go to the doctor, go to the mountain, look to the children, drink from the fountain — you name it. (Well, OK. Pretty much anything except American Jesus. I’ve also had more than enough of my share of that, and no thank you. Seriously, if it works for you, great. But I’d rather try Taoism or or rock climbing or Gluten-Free.)
When the afternoon tiredness hits — and it hits hard on a wake up cycle in the 4am hour — I am either just tired or I am despondent. At five, it was the despair; the old, well-honed mental machinery cranks up again, glad to get a chance to work. Every possible pessimistic thought, every denial of a hopeful view of tomorrow or next week or ever, every excuse to find some momentary wrench to shove in those gears and make it stop.
At ten, I can see those gears — giant and looming over my landscape like artifacts from a long departed, indifferent alien civilization — and hear them shuddering, as the hidden underground boiler tries to churn itself to life again. At ten, I can turn my back on that, and put in earbuds and listen to @@@All Too Well or New Year’s Day and find some comfort. It also helps if I’ve got enough clear space to take a nap; which has been happening lately and is gonna be difficult come Monday.
+IMG
So I missed my first firing window, and I was sure I was going to be despondent about that, too, yesterday. But instead it felt weirdly like relief. Relief that I didn’t have to be out on the first 25º morning of the year; that I didn’t have to keep rushing to an automaton’s schedule; that I could indulge myself the slack of putting up those lights. (Which, at mid-day, seemed like stupid folly, once I was wiped out and hot from being up near the styrofoam ceiling and with the bright cold day sun glaring in the windows seemed to add almost nothing. After blessed dark again — and a rare chance at napping, eating dinner, and then going back into the studio — they were… Wait for it… Yep, you guessed it: incandescent. [There’s something else I dearly want to say there, but I won’t. At five, I might have. Which is fan-tastic. Call It What You Want To.]
Every day, while I wait — to fire, to see if I’ll actually be able to pull off the sale, to see what this batch of brain chemistry will spawn — I hatch little plans. Mini-Dreams, to see me through. As if I need to learn how to grab a Dream, and savor it for a while, and then let it go just as easily. Cycle through them, instead of getting fixated on a single one, with a 10 or 20 year horizon. That’s too remote for hope. Too far to really see with anything other than wish fulfillment. A good dream would be intrinsic; something I can visualize in all its complexity and with the grit and texture of daily life on it. Not a city on a hill. Not a lottery-winning utopia. Not getting saved by some @@@@deus ex machina.
{Someone notify the Autocorrect Department that “machina” is correct, and should not convert to “machine”. (Although, @@@@deus ex machine is funny, in it’s own way, especially when composed by a robot. Oh — maybe I’m not giving it enough credit, and it was trying to make a joke? Hey — save comedy for the meat bags! What the fuck else do we have left?) Seriously, though, the bots should totally be smart enough by now to recognize the kind of popular Latin that this simpleton is able to pull out of the air on impulse. -Ed.}
More optimism: I called in an airstrike from St. Philbeck and he’s gonna sortie his jets. Awesome. My customers really like his pots. (Maybe better than mine, but I’m not jealous. I swear.) I’ve still got a really fine crop of Phillips’s and Gillies’s, too. That’ll help. I remembered that I have a small group left at the shop in town, too, that I can raid for the big weekend. (It’s been so long since I had any in town that I’d forgotten about them; they’re pretty much the best of the best of what was left over from the spring sale there, which means they’re better than anything here in the showroom (aka writing room) now. That’ll be a good boost, both to the display and my confidence.
And Change Master encouraged me to skirt around my kiln/weather problems by just glazing up as much as I can in advance. That I’ve been doing this a long time, and mostly have my glazes dialed in, and it’s worth the risk to get them fired to take a few shots in the dark. Better than good bisk on the shelf on sale day.
And there was also some talk yesterday about actually buying a piano — maybe after the sale? — and about how, if I did get serious and actually start building a kiln, I might be able to call on reinforcements for vastly-needed expertise, as well as hugely valuable labor, and priceless comraderie. Can you imagine? Having that much fun @@@and ending up with a new kiln?
Now @@@that seems like an impossible dream.
“Like we’re made of starlight.”
+89 (crumpled)
#blogs/DL
/”I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here, ’cause I remember it all, all, all… too well.” – TS/
So here’s me after about a week at five, written a couple days ago:
It’s been intense. I’m worn out. Worn down. Worn.
Trying to work when everything is screaming that I’ve earned another hour off, a day off, a week off. Imagine: taking a whole week off. Insane, but definitely insane in November. Potters gonna Panic.
The problem with being this tired and this emotionally wiped is that the Dark Angel sees my weakness and pounces. He has so many terrible ideas for me, each one wrapped in a chrysalis of hope and the promise of momentary salvation. I have to bat them away like flies. Very, very tempting flies.
Stupid Internet ruined everything. Everything and everyone always being one click from everything and everyone else is freaking dangerous.
Oh, you mean, ‘what else is wrong’ /besides/ the fact that I’m a fucking idiot who can’t stay out of his own way? That I can’t seem to sleep more than three hours in a row without needing a break for music, writing, Minecraft or all three? That I’m /still/ not sure if I’m having a sale, even after posting the event and dates to the dreaded FB? That work has gone from it’s usual somnambulistic mediocre haze to a white hot rush, including more drama and intrigue than I thought possible anymore? (Followed by the bizarre sensation of suddenly caring again, like I did back when both me and the web were still young?) Or that I had a weather window for a firing this week, and really, really tried to hit it, and still came up short. /So close/ is useless on Sunday, after it’s started raining.
Or — I mean, seriously, check this out — the sneaking suspicion that I may have — simply through being stubborn and determined to ride my existing coping skills and mechanisms all the way to rock bottom, if need be — I may have squandered the better part of, oh, six to eight years of my life, for want of a little blue and white pill at dinnertime each evening?
Yeah, sure. I mean, /besides/ that stuff, there’s nothing wrong. It’s all good.
/”Time won’t fly, it’s like I’m paralyzed by it.”/# +88 (fit like a daydream)
#blogs/dl
“You make me so happy it turns back to sad; there’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have.” – TS
I went back up to ten. It was getting a little too sad in here; sad in a way that felt too familiar, and so a little scary.
There should still be a range, ups and downs. There’ve been a lot more ups — like, super ups — lately than I’d have guessed possible; so I’ve gotta swallow my downs, too. But then there’s /too/ down, which is where the shit that the Dark Angel is whispering at me starts to seem like a series of plausibly actionable ideas, and it’s not about controlling how you feel, but you’re always responsible for controlling what you do.
Downs like when an old friend dies; like a light going out over your head, the one you were using to see the page, but didn’t even know was on. Ambient like versus direct. Easy to mistake one for the other, then take it for granted.
I don’t know what that means, and I doubt the analogy holds up, but it feels right. I’m gonna go with what feels right.
Music and writing instead of tv last night — again. Like I’m someone else. More like my 20-year-old self than a recliner-bound has been. {Remember when you used to write obsessively about everything, in those 300-page spiral notebooks? This seems weird now, because the intervening 25 or so years have kicked you ass en route to teaching you a thing or two, but, arguably, that’s who you are as much as anything else. You used to play guitar and sing a lot, too. And cry. And have unimaginably remote, impossible dreams. And fall in love like your life depended on it. (Maybe it did.) – Ed.}
I’ll take sleeping straight through from 9 to 4:30 any day over that ghostly Dark Wake mode. Fitfull sleep, but solid, I think. Helps to reload you cache.
[OK, going weirder And into more computer/as/metaphor shit now. Feel free to bail.]
Woke up thinking that this is like in the old Mac OS days — for me, the entirety of the 90s — where all the non-core things you wanted the machine to do required little bits of software called Extensions. (I was /not/ in IT back then, and had zero clue that would be my fate — I mean, that would have seemed as ludicrous to me then as working in the hardware department at Sears as a tool-clueless 15 year old had in 1986.) Anyways, I was still a tech civilian back then, so I can’t tell you what an Extension really was, in CS terms, without doing some Wikipediaing that, at the moment, I don’t give a shit about. But my guess is they were “extensions” of the basic operating system. Things the Apple Gods had deemed outside their purview to include. And so, things that were absolutely necessary if you wanted to, say, print. Or calibrate the color of your monitor, or “distill” a PDF file, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. (Perhaps that Adobe was some renegade bootlegging operation; the good little guys to the Mac’s Death Star; why do the rebels always end up as tyrants once they seize 51% of the power. Have they no shame for their hippie roots?)
Anyways, because Extensions were outside the main, they were, [oh, let’s say a Wild west], yes, they were a Wild west of roll-your-own, slap-’em-together, figure-it-out-yourself hoo-hah. (Today’s “DYI” sounds so punk rock, whereas that was more like a trip to Radio Shack with a broken soldering iron with Journey playing on the cassette deck. But the weird inversion is that today’s version is much more tame and guided, way more corporate and safe, than the old school one, which really was a new frontier. We tell ourselves lies and then layer over some hubris to hide our tracks.)
So you’d find an Extension — not online, because online (mostly) didn’t exist yet. It’d come on a floppy (not a CD, and certainly not a install DVD, because those didn’t exist yet, either, outside of some R&D lab — and you’d install it and then you’d reboot the computer, often needing to also invoke arcane spellcasting like zapping the PRAM or holding down three special modifier keys, which sometimes did nothing and other times caused their own special weirdness. The machine would come to life and… anything was possible. Now you could, say, print, but your mouse didn’t work. Yay, command line interfaces again! I knew all that pointing and clicking was a fad.
/”There’s glitter on the floor after the party.”/
I can’t believe I forgot to convert the italics in that message. I can’t believe I didn’t offer to drive, didn’t say that one part that I’d planned, over and over again, to say, didn’t see that my excited gesturing was looping ever and ever closer to the top of my ill-advised Starbucks cup. [Note to self: even for 4:40pm meetings, maybe recaffienating right beforehand is a bad idea. Better to go in too cool than too hot.]
For the amazing string of things I got right — I mean, there were a few that I nailed like a bullseye from across the room, with my contacts out — for all those successes and good things, I can’t believe all the things I got wrong last week; all the near misses and missed opportunities, only realized in shocking jumps hours and hours later. That is definitely the kind of obsessive, self-critical thinking that I’m supposed to steer clear of, because while we have to examine the past to learn anything from it, imagining a time machine is not helpful. You cannot go back for a do over, you can only try to do better the next time. And it’s not that any of those little misses or mishandling so or unfortunate turns of phrase really mattered, not really. Nor will it make a huge difference one way or another, that, say, I had to stand there for 15 minutes with coffee dripping down into my pants. Who knows? Maybe it clarified the mind and stiffened my posture and helped me nail the rest of it? Because it certainly went unexpectedly fractal there for a while, and I held up well, almost as if it was one of those crazy interview stunts where they purposefully stress test the candidate. (Hilarious to imagine that I think everyone else is just playing checkers, but they’re full on chess masters, and so that’s /exactly/ what they were doing, and I was too dumb and arrogant to see it; but somehow passed the test anyways. For all the ways ceramics has ruined my life, having to stand in front of a kiln load of complete disaster and retrieve your mistakes from the void, one painful lesson after another, builds a shit ton of character. To where standing there with an unfamiliar iPad and coffee in your underwear and random important people popping in and out like it’s a 70’s improv sketch and everyone else is on coke is pretty much a walk in the park. (If that’s true, I should blow all this off and start a consulting gig where I travel around in a fancy POW-style bread truck to fancy corporate HQs where they force their employees to wrangle with glazes and trimming bowls and the ego-sandblasting of blatant inexpertise and clear, unrelenting failures. There’s probably a million dollars in that idea, for someone more shameless and motivated than me.)
So I’m trying not to dwell on my missed opportunities, but damn does that gully go deep. Neural pathways, it ends up, take some serious time to rewire; and in the meantime, it’s like every wire is hot, nothing is labeled on the panel, and some dummy didn’t even bother to put covers on all his comically-wired junction boxes. It is a “hot mess”, my dear.
But sometimes I really do wonder, with my new set of Extensions, if all it might take is one of those little things — just one more unlikely piece added to the stack — to tip the whole thing over into something else. Some new reality. [Like, what if true A.I. was there, waiting in some inscrutable configuration of this piece and that piece and definitely not that piece, and no one ever thought to wrap them together and say, “Run”? Some of this undeniable moments feel like that; like if I could have just threaded together disparate elements in such a way, like a pagan charm, it would be the thing that would make all the difference, as if it could somehow leap me out of this reality and into another one. That’s some high-octane mystical thinking, there, which maybe speaks to how wide I’m casting my net in trying to sort out this new brain.]
Sorry again for the hypergraphia. Really; you don’t have to read all these — certainly not now. They’ll keep; I’m not gonna rush over and delete the whole thing the first time it catches me up in some minor unintended consequences. (And, even if I did, pretty sure the Internet Archive’s got it all covered. Every momentary thought, crystallized into an unrelenting permanence, simply because I couldn’t find that last bit of self restraint, again. I dunno — it might all come back to bite me in the ass, but there’s something beautiful about taking that risk. At least if the bill comes due, I’ll have paid it forward as best I could.)
OK, that’s enough for now. Sorry again. It’s better than the one I was going to do.
“I recall late November, holding my breath, slowly I said, ‘You don’t need to save me…’”
+86 (I never)
#blogs/dl
“And I never saw you coming. And I’ll never be the same.” – TS
On a typical day, now, I wake up thinking. I’ve got an idea for something to write, and I’m just going to keep thinking it until I’ve filled up my RAM and boxed myself in somewhere. I have to write it to get out of the box. When I don’t get to write it, I can just keep thinking myself farther and farther into the box, until the best part of the day is gone and I’m just a mess. Stuck in that box.
[I /did/ restring my guitar; at least, the first three. (All six at once boggles my mind, with all the stretching and retuning. Top three are up next.) And I’m learning some TS songs: /All Too Well, Call It What You Want/. Singing ‘me, too. I even bought a couple new songs just now, which is so rare these days. Like I’d given up on music as a young man’s game. Whew, that was close. Let’s not forget again.]
[Spin, Fidget Ninja, spin! Don’t let them stop you.]
I’m still a little stunned by how many posts I wrote in October. [Or, I should say, how many I wrote /and/ posted. 33 doesn’t even count that Drafts and Scraps in their respective Bear bins, or the half notebook I filled with private scribbling, or all those ‘today’s writer’s block’s I did. So many words.]
I joked to Witt that I’m now posting so much so fast like it’s a buffer overflow hack on your wetware — trying get so many of my thoughts into your RAM that your system can’t handle it; exploiting the mechanism where that lets my input start to bleed over into your other processes. “That’s how it works.” Pretty soon, you’ll be dreaming of muses and watching The OA and listening to Taylor Swift all day long, just like me.
As the comedian Dana Gould had it, crudely but essentially correct, “Let me put my thoughts into you.” Isn’t that pretty much all of Communication? All Marketing? All influence, persuasion, reading and watching and writing and singing? Practically all of /culture/, when it comes down to it?
/”And I loved in shades of wrong.”/
So you’ll probably find this little admission just up against the border of pathological: I’ve also been writing in my paper journals again — a lot. It started with those Guest Check cards — still so fun, but I’m mostly using them for lyrics and quotes and lists, and less as blog post starters. Poor Natalie Goldberg got me started up so fast that I read the first fifth of her book and haven’t cracked it open again since — like the boulder in Raiders, or Ol’ Siss on a bad day, it’s like I am racing down a preordained track and cannot be stopped.
The journals are for the /actual/ private writing. The things (even) I don’t dare say here, or that I type here and then think better of. But, also, for just free associating. I find that moving the pen or pencil makes my thinking better; less fractal; less obsessively looping. And I’ve got a lot of thinking going on. Too much.
I started back into them, maybe a month or six weeks ago, with those little “today’s writer’s block”s — a gimmick that let me write what I was thinking, but without leaving a trace. A lot of stuff I needed to write but not worry about saving, or even seeing again, myself. Then it kind of morphed into deliberately scrawling across the page, like shorthand by a speed freak or something. {Note: He’s not actually on speed, all appearances to the contrary. Too much coffee, sure, but other than that still pretty much straight arrow clean. /- Ed./}
But then I realized I was having trouble processing it without the actual, legible recording of the thoughts. Fast and sloppy was good, for just blasting things out at the speed of conversation, but I kept finding that I wanted to at least /have the option/ to go back and see what I’d said. Sometimes I need to refer to the transcript to figure out where the hell I am now. But the catch there was that by going back to legible script, I really was leaving a paper trail — a literal one — of all my worst, least appropriate, indefensible, momentarily (?) nuts ideas. That’s a tough one. Even if those notebooks never leave the house, it’s hard to secure them in a way that doesn’t feel like leaving dangling, important bits all over the place.
And then, one day, I just said, “Fuck it.” I need to write what I think, so that I know how I feel, so that I can keep going, and I’ll write “BURN BEFORE READING” and the date on here, and if anyone is stubborn or foolish enough to ignore that warning/request and plow into it, then they kind of deserve to know what they find.
So — hey — one of you: if I croak first, next month or 167 genetically modified years from now, please go through my shit and find all the paper notebooks with that on their covers and stick ’em in a nice, piping ∆14 firebox. Thanks!
“This is a state of Grace. This is a worthwhile fight.”
+85 (one thing, right?)
#blogs/dl
/”And I know I make the same mistakes everytime, bridges burned, I never learn, At least least I did one thing right. I did one thing right.” – TS/
Now if I could just figure out what that one thing was.
/Call it what you want to./
Man, those typography videos just nail it for me. Even the parts that are a little obvious or formulaic; all in all they’re just grand. I love — love! — the canvas scrolls, so that it feels like the camera is tracking across this larger, unseen space, where all the words are cascading and morphing in all across the whole. And typewriter fonts. . . well, I probably should have realized that would have been enough to sustain me when I first played with moving them around on screen seventeen years ago. Damn, Scott, you should’ve gone deep on the typewriter fonts when you had a chance. Could be making Taylor videos from your parents’ basement by now.
/”All the drama queens taking swings jokers dressing up as kings.”/
Hmm… which of those three am I? On any given day, some of all three. Perhaps mostly the joker, although I do seem to enjoy the drama lately more than I expected myself too. My misanthropists guise is slipping daily.
Things at work — you may recall the ‘everything has changed’ bit — are continuing apace. [No, unhelpful autocorrect, not “Apache”. Trust me; I was an English major before the Internet. “Apace” is a word.] Which is to say that it’s like I’ve got this donkey. He’s a stubborn motherfucker of a donkey; like, won’t take yes for an answer kind of stubborn. And we’re stuck halfway between hell and high water, so I’ve gotta get ’em to town. (Let’s call him Stan.) So Stan the donkey and I are on the road; I’ve got a lead rope on him, and I’m pulling in the direction we need to go; I mean, of course it’s the right direction — haven’t I been down this road a dozen times before? But no — Stan wants to go towards just about any other point of the compass rose, or to just stand still and wait for fate or retribution to smoke him into ashes and regrets.
So I’ve gotta pull him, just enough to get his feet up, and yet only about an inch forward. Then I stop pulling. Wait. Wait | Wait | Wait. Gauge him — still huffing? Weird donkey saliva still bubbling on his weird donkey lips? Or is he ready to move again? If ready, I pull some more — hard — but only another inch. See, I have to wait for stubborn Stan to forget that we just moved an inch a few minutes ago before he’ll let me move him another inch. It’s ludicrous; Sissyphus is lapping us on a regular basis, and laughing his ass off as he does. “Rock and Roll, Dudes!”, he says as he goes past. [Weird that, for some reason, Ol’ Siss speaks in Title Case. I do have to wonder what he’s listening to on those earbuds.]
So odd, dumb Stan and I are stuck on the road, one inch forward at a time, with thunderheads looming and one of those freaky, barn-killing sideways winds coming; fifty degrees colder than it just was a couple hours ago. “L E T ‘ S . G O . S T A N.”, I plead. “For fuck’s sake, we’ve already been waiting so long; let’s go!”
Goddamn Stan.
/”My castle crumbled overnight, I brought a knife to a gunfight, they took the crown but it’s alright.”/# +84 (look what you made me do)
#blogs/dl
“I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me…” – TS
It’s been reported to me that some girls were singing /Look What You Made Me Do/ during a bathroom break at school. And they were even ‘on chorus’, which I’m not sure if that means ‘on tune’ or ‘in harmony’. Either way, when I asked (already knowing the answer was no) if she joined in, she said, “That’s not me.”
Sigh.
That was never me, either… And the times I tried to make myself become that, I always ended up flat on my face. We are who we are, and it appears that much of that flows down through the generations. Oh well. Not everyone needs the skill (or is it the will?) to rush out and make friends.
Either way, we’re pretty excited about reputation coming on Friday. I’m still listening to the four pre-release tracks daily; sometimes on a loop for Gorgeous and Call It What You Want. Possibly even dancing around the house, with earbuds in, at the 5am dark wake time. Quietly, but actually dancing. So fucking weird.
“But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time.”
+83 (you’re not sorry)
#blogs/dl
“Say you’re sorry, that face of an angel comes out just when you need it to.” – TS
How come the only things I really want are categorically impossible to get? Is it because that /is/ the point of Dreams — not to achieve them, but as a goad to get us up off the couch? So that we at least do /something/? Something slightly better than nod through life, supposedly safe in our protective cocoons?
How to dream again and not get crushed by waking up when it’s over? Do I have another one in me? Witt told me, even back then, that I needed a new dream, and I was like, “Oh hell no. I’m done with that shit. It’s just grim, prosaic life for me from here on out.” Well, ends up that wasn’t going so great. Not sure it has to be a binary choice — dreaming or sleepwalking — and not sure this reawakening feeling isn’t just the momentary fantasy before the next magnet snaps together, snapping me stuck in between them, again. I might be buying today’s optimism with procrastination, which means when the bill comes due tomorrow, it’s gonna be steep. Maybe?
Questions… so many questions. Oh boy, do I have questions.
————————
Oh, here: this feels like a new thought: maybe I never actually killed The Dream. Maybe I just buried it alive and tried to grieve it as if I had? That bit at the end of my published version, the SFW version, where I said something like ‘life without it [the Dream] isn’t so bad’ — ? “Isn’t so bad”? What’s that, a euphemism for “hopelessness gets a bad rap; you should try it”? Fuck me.
Now, a decade out from my dream time, and a few more years logged in “isn’t so bad” territory (and, thanks to the neurochemical enhancement, maybe slightly more awake than I’ve been in a while), life without hope seems like a fate /worse/ than death or shattered dreams. Like, if I was never gonna dare to fly at the sun again, I should have just wandered out in the deep snow while I had the chance.
[Sorry for that one. It’s what I wrote on Saturday, and it still feels too true to cut, although the timing and context are now abyssmal. I guess I can say that I’m not making a joke about suicide here; I’m referring to the time when I got closest to the real thing. And not that I was /that/ close, but I could see it from there, and it scared the hell out of me. Three months without sleep in the dead of winter is not a recipe for a reasonable perspective on the world and one’s place in it.]
Huh. I know I shouldn’t be saying any of this, and yet — it’s pretty much the only thing I want to say. That and the lame references. Oh, and the song lyrics… Lucifer’s Hammer am I loving music lately. “We’ll dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light” is a long, long, long way from “If you need me, I’ll be out in the deep snow.” A long way.
Approach/Avoid/Approach/Avoid ”’ <loop>”’
And so it’s as if that first Dream rotted and zombified, and went lurching off into some horror movie that I can’t bear to watch. A consequence of my unholy act or original artistic sin — failing to give it it’s due. I mean, I tried to, but I got scared. I got tired. I saw a softer landing spot and just thought I could rest up a bit before restarting the climb. And then I just quit climbing. And not even to say that that was the wrong choice; everything considered — the sorry list of ills and misfortune that I cataloged in that /Killing The Dream/ essay — still seems like plenty of reason to back off and think about either a different target or a different approach to hitting it.
That undead dream probably can’t be unearthed and revived; even if I wanted to. ‘Exhumed’, to borrow the great R.E.M. word. [Single quotes again. I know I shouldn’t.]
I think the pagans would say you have to perform some rituals now, to get out from under that past. Special plants cut at midnight, under a harvest moon like the one out the kitchen window last night. (Why do I stay inside? Sometimes, it feels like freedom to just stand out under the dark.) Maybe that’s the thrust of this whole pseudo-Goddess/Muse/OA thing. Appealing to some mystical power that can erase what time and math and money have wrought.
If I do exhume it, or sanctify or put it to rest; if I did; would it make room for a second Dream? Another spin of the big wheel? So many questions. And if so… if it did, would it be worth the nearly unfaceable costs to pursue it?
Because, see, I already /know/ what that dream would be, deep in my sneaky little heart; and of course, like a character wishing for extra wishes in a badly run D&D campaign [not helping yourself with these outdated nerd references, Scott], the new dream would somehow try to quietly wrap the best parts of the old one into itself. Like: I could get used to not actually working.
————————
So the big one is coming up. I might be subconsciously racing towards Oblivion so I can get it here faster. The pressure to spill is building; I foolishly think I can lead you to it, bit by bit, Iike dragging my stubborn mules to town, one inch at a time, so they don’t quite flash onto the fact that we’re on the move. {Please clarify: is that ‘bit’ as in ‘bit and brodle’ or bit as in ‘pieces of eight’ or bit as in ‘1/8th of a byte’? /-Ed./} [S T O P !].
:: so that when we get there, you’re ready for it, and won’t crucify me for my excessive honesty :: i don’t want to be your martyr ::
Whatever ends up happening with that — the how — I’ve already decided that the what is going to be +99. Because that’s a /real/ magic number. That’s how my blue-painted ancestors would have done. Not +100. One hundred is as magical as the imperialist White King’s boiled roast beef. Drained of life, propped up on a throne encrusted with our stolen jewels, as arrogant in his certainty as the weakest among us. Ninety-nine is where it’s at. Or, I should say, where it will be. So if you want, you can skip out the rest of this slowly bending dramatic arc and just jump ahead to the grand finale.
Sixteen to go. (You missed six!) I’m scared, but I think I can get there. Better offload some more casual readers before then. Let’s see… Are there swear words I haven’t used yet? Topics so banal and grim that even Witt or K in A might turn and look away? (Not that I want them to; I just mean, bad enough that practically everyone else will.) Maybe I should abandon this ‘hiding in plain sight’ nonsense — duh, Google — and think about converting it to a subscription-only TinyLetter or something, instead. Like, before 99. Yeah, maybe. But you know I won’t.
Damn. I’m doing that thing again where I’m writing checks now that my dumb ass might not be able to cash later. I should qualify all that, as I hear tell that I am quite unreliable these days. Even on 5mg. So OK, my /plan/ is to build up to +99. I /hope/ to. I /aim/ to. YMMV. All of this could very well come collapsing down under its own weight well before we ever reach such a lofty total.
“If my FILDI is weak, let me”… Eat my critique? I forget. “But if my FILDI is strong, let me…” I dunno. I forget. Oh, Ze… Where the fuck did you go, man? I need you — maybe now more than ever. I hope you’re happy, wherever you are.
If my FILDI is strong, maybe it will let me face down the armored bear — grasp his hot-fanged jaws between my hands, moments before they find my throat, and leap onto his back, like a Minoan bull rider. Then, off we’ll charge, to kill the enemy and redeem this overly-long, sad, silly story.
Maybe I’ll let that face rearrange my stars. Maybe by different starlight I could find another dream worth having.
/”And it’s too late for you and your white horse, to catch me now.”/
+82 (bullseyed redundant word salad)
#blogs/dl
/”Autumn leaves were falling down like piece into place…” – TS/
And I can picture it, yes, even after all these days. And I know it’s long gone; and I know there’s nothing I can do, but I forget about You long enough to forget why I needed. To.
That’s Taylor, not me. Credit to the ghosts.
Back in the expanse of woods behind our ten acre plot, I step outside the back door of my studio to hear tens thousand leaves — a million — falling to the forest floor as one. Today’s wind takes them all. Tomorrow’s wind will take a million more.
And inside every turning leaf, was the pattern of an older tree. Things I’d never seen; things I’d never see.
That’s Gordon, not me. Credit to the ghosts. Ghosts in the machine.
(And if you get that reference, you are my kind of cool. I love you.)
[Firing up the fidget spinner, on the pale wood top of my drafting table, for momentum. Get it? /Drafting/ table? A place where one goes to make drafts? {Oh boy. It’s gonna be a long ass day if he’s starting it like this. – /Ed./} It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized I don’t have to hold it; it’ll just spin like a motherfucker on the tabletop right here, between my Delete key hand and my first five am mug of coffee. Likely the first of many too many. As close to a perpetual motion machine as I’ll ever get. Only way out is through.]
That’s all me. Don’t blame anyone else.
I’ll try not to call you up again — everytime I don’t, I almost do — but I can’t promise not to break you like a promise. I’m unreliable these days.
Soon enough, we’ll take our frigid winter walks there, soaking in what little daylight there is in an Indian winter, traipsing near where they made mounds that are now planted with corn; then holy sites or more. A legacy of blood. What else can we do? What else, beyond seek a reprieve in daylight?
I don’t know what that means, or how I can be… already dreading and anxiously awaiting it, all at once. At least once it snows, it means I’m done firing for the year. Call it what you want to.
“…The air was cold, but something about it felt like home, somehow…”
Taylor again. Pretty much if it’s in quotes and it sounds good, it’s her. Call it what you want to. You make me so happy it turns back to sad; there’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have.
Stupid kiln.
More dead Dream thoughts. Tons of them. Before that tragic news yesterday, I had a whole three pages (or whatever) cued up about burying it alive but mistakenly thinking it was over; now it seems like an awfully petty metaphor. But “this love left a permanent mark”; I can’t help but run my fingers over the scar.
And I [shouldn’t] forget about you [dream; else] long enough to forget why I needed [really, still do need] to.
Yes, Taylor. That original line: can you hear it and think of anything better in that spot? There’s no way. It is perfect. But the brackets in my mongrelized version there; if you hadn’t flashed on it yet, I’ll spell it out, since it’s still a couple hours from daylight and I need a friend:
[Stuff in straight brackets is what would have been endnotes, back on /tw@se/. An affectation born of a technical limitation, like most decent creative ideas are. The OA loves limits. These are my thoughts to myself, the meta layer as I’m writing; thoughts which any decent writer (or person) would leave out; would cut without a second thought on the first editing pass. (Yes, you may be astonished to know, but there actually are multiple editing passes on most of these. Sometimes with additions and corrections days later, just to really mess with Witt’s head. Not nice, but he should know better, by now, than to believe in the permanence of text. It’s not canon until all the guilty parties are dead.) Stuff in straight brackets is for me for you, if that makes sense. It’s a stubborn rejection of the Gygaxian Premise (which, you won’t recall, is that any part of a writing that you like the most is probably the part you should cut. I keep them all. You’re welcome.]
(Stuff in parens is just normal usage: an aside, something tangential, but often as a qualifier or way to undermine what I’m in the midst of saying. They’re fun, and they help keep me honest. Probably also infuriatingly loopy and hard to track. All the blog you can read, or your money back.)
{Stuff in /curly/ brackets is a new goof of an idea; I’ve introduced the character of an imaginary Editor, who steps in, like in the grand old days when journalism was about facts and accountability, not debating whether people could and should have their own “facts”, sans accountability. Who know the World Wide Web was going to be the downfall of our civilization? Not me, or the hippies and scientists that built the damn thing. They genuinely thought it might bring about a new Golden Age; a utopia of knowledge and communication. Idiots. We are monkeys with machine guns.}
{OK, as you probably noticed, because you’re smart and a careful reader, Scott just broke the format in that previous paragraph /while trying to explain the format/. Jeepers. It’s like he can’t help himself. And this, I’ll note, is on only /one/ cup of coffee. So this — this paragraph right here — is an example of what he was talking about. If it’s in curlies, it’s by me, The Editor, which means you can trust it and take it as T H E . F I N A L . W O R D . Word to your mother; /-Ed/.}
Well. That went off the rails in surprising order, now didn’t it? Guess we got some shop talk in, but hell. I was aiming for abstract poetry and bullseyed redundant word salad.
Damn it, I told myself that I wasn’t going to rush in here and cover over that eulogy so quickly today. The one time I manage to hold it together and write something linear, concise and with only a justifiable amount of profanity; it should get to linger at the top of the page longer than a (very short) overnight. But what can I do? Sleepers gonna sleep; bloggers gonna blog.
That I should hover and write in the background today, if I couldn’t help it — nothing wrong with honing some stuff in Drafts, so that it’s eventually maybe a little better than this. I like the ones that linger and morph and grow strange new fruit when I hold onto them for a few days or weeks. Ah well.
I’m thinking that innocent civilians might be stopping by, linked in from polite society {I think he means Facebook. LOL. – Ed.}, to see that one thing I wrote that wasn’t a steaming trainwreck; nice old ladies. Which is fine, but then if they scroll up or down a little, holy god get me out of here. “I wonder what broke his brain so bad?, they’ll ask their daughters (my former high school friends) on next weekend’s obligatory phone call. Like I said, the Web is basically a harbinger of our endgame. As we (the sane, rational half of us, anyways) have so recently discovered — and to our collective peril — everything is basically one click away from everything else, now. Beauty from madness, joy from sadness. It is the way of the world. I can’t be blamed too much for that.
[Bonus points for working in “peril”. That one’s for you, Adam. And I’d bet Dart would have liked it.]
So it goes.
That’s KV. Maybe the best line ever written in English.
“Maybe we got lost in translation, maybe I asked for too much and maybe this thing was a masterpiece, ’til you tore it all up, I was rare, I was there, I remember it all too well.”
+81 (Dart)
#blogs/dl
“It was only one, I recall. It was all so different then.” – Peter Gabriel
Back in the expanse of woods behind our yard, I can hear ten thousand leaves, falling to the forest floor as one. Like pieces falling into place, and yet not like that, too.
I loved this friend of mine, so many years ago, who I just heard today is suddenly gone. “I grieve… For you.” We were only together for a couple years, but they were those crucial ones — kids just starting to see who they could become as adults. He was at my elbow as I fell in love with my future wife. His enthusiasm and tenacity were infectious; he made me see the world more like he did — open and full of possibility. He ran towards new experiences and pain, instead of away, like me. He let me shave his first mohawk. It was an honor; I admired him and loved him like an older brother.
I’ve already told one story about him today, elsewhere, and it feels wrong to just repeat it. So here’s another, a short one, that I think will give an idea of who the person I knew was, well twenty five years ago, now.
I was flying back in to some rural airport in Iowa, back to college after Jan term away. I knew some number of friends would pick me up. (Details were spotty, back before cells, texts, email. None of us had even heard of the Internet yet, and the Web was yet to be invented.) So I get off the plane in this unfamiliar, frozen place, get my bags, and hear, from what must have been halfway across the concourse, “Super Coop!” A mad bellow; the kind that would bring a post-9/11 security crew down on you with M16’s drawn, if you tried it in an airport today. And then he’s running — like full speed, lunatic weight lifter/cyclist speed, right at me, no pause as he crashes into me, knocks my bags to the floor, and bear hugs me until I’m sure he could snap a few ribs without much effort. “Hey, man! How the fuck are ya’?!” He even had on that goofy leather cap I gave him, because it was too small for my big head of hair, and looked ridiculous atop my six foot five, but precisely perfect over his bushy red eyebrows and glasses.
In the intervening years — goddamn decades, now — I can’t believe I let him go so easily, and that now I’ll never get the chance to say so. To apologize to him for that, and to try to fix it. What would I not have done, a week ago, if I had somehow known? I would have dropped EVERYTHING. Cancelled the sale; if need be; torched the huge changes at work; if it would’ve helped. Gone camping or shared my brain meds or just stayed up all night talking until it might have made a difference. God damnit.
Can’t fix it now. But I’m overawed at the thought of all the other people I’ve genuinely loved, and been so lucky to know, and yet let slip away, as life carved its own channel into these distant sands. I should, somehow, find the time and make the effort to fix some of those gaps. It’s not my job to be the catcher in the rye, but it wouldn’t hurt anything to try a little better.
“Did I dream this belief? Or did I believe this dream?”
+80 (TS)
#blogs/dl
“Swift writes about her life so directly that the listener is forced to think about her persona in order to fully appreciate what she’s doing creatively.” – Chuck Klosterman
Now look: I really like Chuck Klosterman. I read his books, enjoyed his columns when he was The Ethicist for the NYT, avidly awaited his podcast chats with Bill Simmons, about college football and pop music and random self-searching thought experiments. He’s way smarter than me; a vastly better (and infinitely more accomplished) writer; probably an order-of-magnitude better thinker. And he’s spent some amount of time /actually being around/ TS, interviewing and observing her for a profile he wrote on her a few years back, where all I’ve done is imagined having a single coffee with her and how it would remake my world.
But I think he’s dead wrong in that quote above. Exactly wrong. In fact, it bothers me how wrong he is, because he’s saying that her music is somehow not enough on its own, and the biography (as told through other media) of the musician is the key to decoding how great her music actually is.
Extend that and it also says the biography of the potter is what really makes the pot. That provenance is more significant than gut-reaction. That we must become vacuums of all the peripheral flotsam of the culture we desire, to fully “get” the culture we’ve somehow missed.
Fuck that, Chuck.
I don’t give a hot damn about who which song is about; what it says in the (now virtual) liner notes. Whom Taylor has been dating and for how long and what the gossip blogs have had to say about it. The critical supposed-think pieces, baiting their clickbait hooks as if their lives depended on it — oh, because their financial lives actually /do/ depend on it — {insert quote about a man not believing something if his salary depends on not believing it – /Ed./} — click click clickity click. Never trust a critic who hasn’t spent /years/ trying to do the thing they’re criticizing. Otherwise, it’s just all frustrated-artist speculation and wish fulfillment.
“Which is more than they can say.”
The videos, while occasionally entertaining, don’t do much for me. If anything, they diminish the songs, like a mediocre adaptation of a favorite novel. Clearly, they’re aimed straight at the 14-year-old segment of her audience. But, I swear, some part of the songs is aimed directly at me, the jaded, 46-year-old, ‘reawakening for/after the Fall’ guy.
(They are Swifties; I’m just swift. But man, when I get that TS tattoo on my forearm — in medieval S T O N E C A R V I N G script, of course — it’s gonna lock down Coolest Dad Ever status, come middle school. I might even beat out Dorian for the Most Preferred Carpool Driver job. [See my post on Linked In!!!] “OMG, how does your Dad already know all the lyrics to /Call It What You Want/? And he likes /White Horse/, too? A-maze.)
All that said, there are bits about her public persona that I like. She has charisma to burn; I would cast her for the role of Muse in the remake of some Jon Hughes movie. Banging on her drumkit like her life depended on it, or whatever. I can see why the Big Pop Machine decided it could make her famous. Don’t think I’ve watched an entire interview, because they’re painfully self-conscious — image grooming — and they also belie the depth that can be found in some of her lyrics. Either she’s a better slow writer than fast talker, or there have been a lot of other people feeding her words to sing over the years. (It’s probably a good dose of both. Even so, she deserves all the praise; when I am speechless at a turn of phrase or the nuance of a repeated line, I think of her. The byline still gets the credit. We ghost writers knew the score when we signed on. “That’s how it works. That’s how you get the girl.”)
Oh! Except there’s this one live performance on YouTube — complete with allergicly-wretched lead-in promo, and couched in whatever Star Search type show those fucking things are these days — there’s this one video that, even compressed by that awful format and venue is simply /incandescent/. I mean, so much so that I really need to track down the audio version. I am a lifelong sucker for a great bridge, or late break, especially when the music drops and the vocals jump to the top. J U M P. And in that one, TS just eviscerates any doubts about her singing chops; the spot where her voice almost breaks just about breaks me every time. That’s not a limited range. That’s the empty spot deliberately left in the Mimbres bowl, so the spirit can get out.
[Damn, I guess I should link to it. Should I link to it? I’ve been making a point of not linking to things, ’cause it gets out of hand so readily. And I hate how the highlight pollutes all this pure black on white, like contours wrapping around a sacred curve. Nah. Fuck it. /You/ go find it; I don’t care. Well; OK. I care. Ask me, if you want, and I’ll send it to you. We can be Friends. Or Followers. Or whatever the hell they’re doing on Snapchat.]
All I knew, this morning when I woke, is that if the remaining 11 songs are half as good as these four, two of which I already adore enough to just play them on loop almost every day, then you and me, TS — you and me are in great shape. I cannot believe I doubted you even for a minute. Like The OA, I’m really sorry for all the times I tried not to look you in the eye, afraid for the current pattern of my stars.
“Starry eyes sparking up my darkest nights.”
I actually feel sorry for the sanctimonious jackals who are too far gone to enjoy this. Populism, as we’ve seen in the mass hallucination that’s overtaken our Red zones, is its own reward. I really hope they — the too-cool critics, not the self-abnegating voters — are enjoying whatever else they’re listening to, instead, half as much as I’m enjoying this. If they’re not, then they deserve it. (“Some indie record that’s /much/ cooler than mine.”)
Punk rock Penny can ridicule fantasy-novel-memorizing Quentin all he wants for looping /Shake It Off/ in his head. We become King, in the end, and you’re just a cryptic library security guard with no hands, dude.
(Here’s another reawakening thought: when I first watched that show, I had no clue who TS even was. I’m so out of the mainstream culture, gladly so, that all those references were lost on me. Like I was watching a show made for someone else. (Hint: I was. The /novels/ were for me. Thanks, Lev.) So, if I hadn’t later heard it on the radio, and bought it for Pixel — thinking only that she’d like it, and I could live with hearing that horn section a few more times — what would have been different? Would some other music have occupied 87% of my hindbrain these last few years, or would there have been no music at all? (It’s shocking, now, how little I listened to for a while there. Where “a while” is a euphemism for literally /scores/ of months.) And so does that mean there’s some other singer or band out there that I missed, that would have been capable of filling that gap, that role? Or it was this or nothing? Or something not music, which I’m also lacking now? Stonecarving? Hard drugs? Poetry, for (The Old) God(s) sake? That’s a trip down the rabbit hole, if you’re inclined to follow that one. Loops galore. Danger; trout below. Look out for hope.)
Like the way truth will out, Taylor doesn’t need five star reviews by Dads who actually saw The Replacements play live. [Mother fucking piece of shit world: I didn’t.] She’s gonna get 9.4 million views in two days no matter what they (we) say. Populism is its own reward. [No, Bear! Stop inserting an apostrophe in “its”! You’re making me look like a fucking novice, and right about now it’d be helpful for me to appear to have a few chops of my own.]
[Hmm… hey, Witt, check this out: Maybe the third character, the one with the whip, /is/ the polar bear. Like Iorek Byjornsson in /Spyglass/, a massive, armored beast. How can you /not/ stare him down when he’s charging to devour you, rag & bone?]
Anyways. So yeah — pop music. Guilty. “If bein’ strong is what you want then I need help here with this feather.” {See how he did that? Clever. – /Ed./}
“A nuanced sense of humor does not translate on a general scale, and I knew that going in. I knew some people would hear ‘Blank Space’ and say, /See, we were right about her/. And at that point, I just figure if you don’t get the joke, you don’t deserve to get the joke.” – Taylor Fucking Swift, yo.
+78 (I almost do)
#blogs/dl
/”And I just want to tell you, ‘It takes everything in me not to call you. And I wish I could run to you and I hope you know that everytime I don’t, I almost do, I almost do.’” – TS/
One-thirty. With half a night’s sleep earned & banked, my mind turns on like the row of burners in the furnace below my writing desk. When the thermostat calls for heat, you get heat. Whether you wanted more of it yet or not.
Back at five pm, when I looked around for The OA, my hands sore from painting, my back sore from stooping, She was nowhere to be found. Just a Muse shaped hole in the blinding blue sky up above. At six, after making dinner, still gone. At seven, with Pixel finishing her Friday evening bonus Minecraft time, I wanted to cry out to her, “Where did you go? Are you ever coming back?” But I didn’t. I’m learning to know better.
Then at eight, as unexpected as a good dream, I make room for Her to return without me noticing — the opposite of ‘can’t you see that I’m driving?’ is ‘hey, just a guy here with his fingers poised on ASDF JKL: again; just in case’. And, just as suddenly, She’s there again, lingering in the corner of the room, by the shelf still jammed full of guest potters’ pots, checking me out; seeing if I really did have the wisdom not to call.
A N D W E ‘ R E O F F.
[A note of apology from the Editor: Now that Scott has flashed on this new compositional affectation — the simulated stonecarving letters thing — it seems quite likely that he’s going to beat it so far into the ground it’ll end up down where our well water seeps into the limestone. Like, 200 feet deep. He can’t help it; it’s just how he is. But still, that’s no excuse in a public forum like this; so when you’re rolling your eyes in exasperation and reaching to X out of this browser tab, swearing that you’ve had enough, and can’t possibly endure any more of it, go ahead. You know you’ll be back, and you know we’ll still be here, <looping> and ‘Sigh’ing and random-lyric-quoting and codename dropping and “I dunno”-ing A N D A L L T H E R E S T O F I T whether you’re here to see it or not.
As he used to say on that old blog, the one you actually liked: You’ve been warned.]
So I wake up after the first sleep and literally three distinct ideas for posts roll into my mind, in sequence, like waves hitting from a distant shore. One about W’s. One about another goddamn snake dream. One about the S T O N E C A R V I N G letters. Or no — wait. Ha… Maybe not so distinct after all. OK, the S T O N E C A R V I N G letters was supposed to be in the one about the ridiculousness of W’s, since “double you” is just V V, for expediency; and the third one was about baskets, and visual influences, and that thing Clary said, back in the Middle Ages, about having to be careful about what things she brought into the studio because of their tendency to creep, unbidden, into the clay. Like The OA, eyes wide and giggling madly, her mouth covered by one hand, in the corner as She throws another curveball at her willing fools.
OK, that’s all I got for now, I think. Sleepy again. Not publishing yet. Can’t trust myself to have not said something nuclear. I think it’s OK, but then I would, wouldn’t I? Hopefully after the next sleep. [Try not to wreck it by fluffing it up too much, yo.]
“Oh, leaving me quite a mess, babe. Probably better of this way. And I confess, babe, in my dreams you’re touching my face, and asking me if I want to try again with you. And I almost do.”# +77 (call it)
#blogs/dl
11.4.17
“Nobody’s heard from me for months. I’m doing better than I ever was.” – TS
Somehow I got through the whole day without cracking open a glaze bucket. Not sure where the time went, but it went good. Well and good. Felt like The OA was around most of the day; mostly productive thoughts. Five mg thoughts.
Some regrets, some guilt for not trying harder, for not pushing farther. Call it what you want to; one way or another, it’s about time to call it another day.
I almost threw out caution and drove down to Bloomington tonight for that opening. Almost. Not quite. Still feeling like I have no margin to spare, even for something cool — especially when a whole day can just coast by like that with really not a ton to show for it. Not laziness, exactly, but more like a refusal to not linger in the moment, and then another moment, and then a song, and then some ideas for writing, and the next thing I know it’s past lunch time and I still need a nap (stupid sickness) and I’ve just started into the second of five things I was hoping to do before dark.
Later, I did manage to get out and do some more scraping and sanding and pushing the paint on down the wall towards the North; using up the last of the precious good, dry weather. The kind of weather that would be good for almost anything, so anything I choose will always feel insufficient. A dozen more days like that in a row, free, and I might be in good shape. Ha.
I added three more Guest Check cards, scribbled with lyrics and ideas, to the top of the stack today. Intents still outpacing spots. Guess that’s better than that dreadful feeling of wanting to write and having nothing to say. Certainly not my problem, lately.
I don’t know why I’m telling you any of this. Maybe now that we’ve pruned away any possible non-die-hard, and turned off the “hello world!” functionality, it does feel like it’s just us here; this strange little band, hiding in plain sight. Maybe that’s freeing; maybe it’s a false sense of security. You’ll pay for this in time.
In time.
We’ve got /reputation/ marked on the calendar, for when our pre-order will come in. Song number four dropped overnight (I think that’s the lingo the kids use these days, but who knows?) and we streamed it out to the studio when she got home; how many days of the year do you get a new TS song?; she danced around in the lush fall grass while I went brush brush brush on the same wall that hasn’t been painted since I stood there one day in October with her in a Baby Bjorn. I’ve got the photos to prove it. “Life carries on, and on, and on, and on.”
I bought a fidget spinner at Satan’s Emporium (aka WalMart) yesterday, on my transition-day-run-to-town-for-oddities. So now I sit here and spin it next to my ear, when I’m waiting to see what words will stream down from VALIS next; or while I’m waiting for the page to reload over our pokey connection to the Internet. In the vibration of its spin, and the sound of the air looping past, I think I can hear Her voice. She says I can call it what(ever) I want to. That maybe it’s good nobody’s heard from the old me for months. I’m doing better than I ever was. It’s sweet of you to check in on me like this.
And I don’t even know who “you” is — it changes all the time. Sometimes it’s me; sometimes it’s you; or you; and you; or all of us at once, and that other person over there, too. “You” might never even read this, but it helps me to imagine you will, or have, or are. Or might, if everything fails to go according to plan.
And then I’ll say, “Hey! Look here. I’d forgotten all about this, but this is what this was, and this is what that was, and see how I used this word here and that phrase over next to it, and wove it together so it was obfuscated just enough to hold water but not so much as to hold my breath? [Because I’m having a hard time holding my breath.]
So weird. So dumb. Like anyone in the world cares, besides me. I’ve become an expert on myself. Or not. Or.
Might go sand down some more porcelain holes after Pixel’s sorted. Might start rewatching The OA — been holding it off. Somehow, fell into Forrest Gump the other night; was looking for that first part of Braveheart; and most of it gets me every time. Gotta give the TV some love, I guess. Still doesn’t feel as whole as this, but if I write all the time then I’ll stop having things to write about.
I think.
Maybe not.
“Slowly I said, ‘You don’t need to save me…’”
+76 (my old self again)
#blogs/dl
/”And you keep my old scarf, from that very first week, ’cause it reminds you of innocence, and it smells like me.” – TS/
God/Goddess/Goodness… How many times did I imagine wanting to be my old self again, but still tryin’ to find it? How long, and in how many places, and in how many ways did I look? And now, so strange it’s surreal, it seems like he was right here all along. Buried under a layer of soot and ash? Hidden by the veil of tears? On temporary reassignment for other duty?
/”Back before you lost the one real thing you’ve ever known.”/
All I know is the sun just crested in the archtop window behind me. Like I scraped all that evil black paint off overnight, when I was up prowling at one-thirty, and then forgot during the three more hours I crashed back into my pillows. Snooze | Snooze | Snooze.
To riff in a different song here, “I feel your light upon my face.” I think I might be able to do this. I’m going to try to do this.
It’s not gonna be too cold; I’ve no errands to run — no one to answer to — nowhere to go; two electric loads of hard pots awaiting glaze, and plans and anticipation. Gotta fire up the glaze brain; it’s been dormant way too long. [Again.] But I can; I will; I always have before. The first load always feels worse and harder than it is. Even during those times — years? — when I wasn’t here anymore to do it; even when that imposter had to go through the motions to get through another firing, another sale, another life.
You can choose to live in your regrets, or not. It’s good to see the recursion coming, and to know when to
/”I was there, I was there, and I remember it — all to well.”/
+75 (blogging, update)
#blogs/dl
/“Sometimes the words are part of the problem.” – Witt/
Back in September, I surprised myself by writing seven posts — I mean, when have I ever done that before? That was almost two a week; practically double the old quota. Then, with that milestone reached, some sneaky part of my brain went, “Say, now that you’ve done seven in a month, what if you write the next seven /in a week/?” So I did that, too, and it was fun — maybe too much fun.
(That is: it was fun /for me/, but probably more like an irritating rash for you.)
Predictably, then I started imagining what it would take to do seven in a day. Haven’t gotten there yet, but there’ve been some 24 hour spans where it seemed possible. If there’s still any wall between my momentary consciousness and what I allow to blast off into cyberspace from this launch pad these days, seven in 24 would probably finish it off for good.
Treacherous.
Check this out:
2017
01 = 0
02 = 1
03 = 2
04 = 0
05 = 0
06 = 1
07 = 0
08 = 2
09 = 7
10 = 33
11 = 3 (to date, including this one)
So over the first eight months of the year I wrote 6 posts. Then 7 in September. Then 33 in October — an average of more than one per day. /Thirty three!/ Jeepers.
It’s like something dramatic changed in August or September, and then really kicked in the afterburners last month. Hmm… What oh what could it be? Nah… I got nothin’.
And it feels like this is still kind of the new, steady rate. Where the heck is this thing gonna go from here? Probably plummeting back to earth, but I honestly have no idea.
I think part of the initial motivation, once I got back on the horse, was simply to mess with Witt, my #1 fan, who feels obliged to read everything I write and who almost always sends me thoughtful, useful feedback. I don’t know why I enjoy tweaking my friends so much, but I confess that I do. Not like he needs me screwing with his mind and/or firing schedule as we round the corner into Potters’ Panic Season.
Then it became a way to do something with all those weird vampyre hours; these creaking nighttime musings; the so-early-it’s-wrong-to-call-it-morning-yet mornings. Not happening as much lately, but still does some days. I wake up, The OA’s right there waiting for me, and there’s words. Lots of ‘em.
The near-daily blogging, scraps and jotting notes and mulling on it at all hours of the day, merged into working on pots at night, once the heat left enough so that it wasn’t still ninety degrees in there at nine pm. And also in the pre-dawn, sometimes, and even after office days — totally nuts.
Back in the days of cassette tapes (ask your parents), I used to do an annual /Reawakening for Spring/ mix tape. It’d be a compilation of all the latest songs that were inspiring, that made me want to be creative and try things and treat life like an open ended adventure. Perhaps needless to say, this is back when my ‘job’ was still mostly to be a student. Before having a job that was a job; meaning the kind of thing that made such a mixtape a ridiculous affectation.
Anyways, this weird fall of ’17 has (is) the feeling of a /Reawakening for Fall/ mixtape. I’ve even catalogued many of their lyrics here. So weird. I used to hate fall. Sometimes now, aside from the bone-chilling part, I even look forward to winter. At least a little. Scarves and boots aren’t all bad.
I’ve got — oh, I don’t know — three other drafts in progress here in Bear, another 15-20 typed scraps, one or two dozen of those Guest Checks — which I stopped doing as a writing assignment, because I also stopped reading that book. There hasn’t been a morning in a couple weeks where I could even stand, let alone needed, more input before I started banging out my output. Words, words, words. Then hundreds of old quotes in Evernote, other assorted papers and post-its and notebook pages in several difference caches — most of it probably outdated garbage, but some have all the way to entire posts (or outlines for them) on them. And that doesn’t count the mass that was left from my last writing software (Ulysses), which I exported and archived and haven’t looked at since. I’m sure there are some good bits there, too, but I’m hardly at a loss for more starters; outta sight, outta mind.
I had three new ideas this morning by the time I’d finished my back stretches. Wrote one of them, the other two are lingering here — this isn’t even one of them. They might make the cut, might not. It’s a problem that several times a day, I cue up a song and it seems to have enormous portent, or relevance to something else I was just writing earlier; connects to a previous thread, or makes a dumb joke on commentary on some earlier idea, or connects some new dots… Or just seems too fucking rad to let go. Like, how can I go: TS > Sting > Waterboys > Paul Westerberg > The Shins all in one day, and feel like each one is a musical postcard from The Goddess, Herself?
(And that’s on a day that started like hell and almost got itself trapped in a box of my own making. That’s just /after/ I pulled out of the tailspin.)
I dunno, people.
It’s wild.
/”The work was a project of self-realization.” – Bruce Springsteen/
+74 (where do we go?)
#blogs/dl
“Be still my broken dream. Shattered like a fallen glass. It’s not ready to be broken just yet — lessons once learned, so hard to forget.” – Sting
I scratch the names of The Muse in clay; until they carve all the way through. The illusion of separateness is broken, and there’s nothing left but scraps and dust.
Where did you go?
I think I would have been a good letter, in a stonecarving shop. Like, Rag & Bone Buffet era. “Bring out your dead,” all that stuff.
The slow craft of it; knowing each day that you’ll S T A R T . A G A I N . E X A C T L Y . W H E R E . Y O U . L E F T . O F
Sometimes I get stuck, on a segment of a line. Staring the polar bear dead in the eyes, when there are plenty of ice floes around to hop on instead, and — perhaps more productively — drift away. Watching the recursion coming: the place where the loop will cross back onto itself and start the slow, spiraling descent: and knowing I shouldn’t let it get to there, but feeling how hard it is to break off that pattern. Loopers gonna loop. Bears gonna bear. Potters gonna… I dunno — Look for any excuse /not/ to pot, once the tragic deadline hits?
That thing I wrote about in October — that astounding bubble of a night-time car conversation, parked in the rain, the external world almost completely shuttered out? It’s real. So amazing when it clicks; effortless. Or, I should say, the only effort is in not allowing each moment to snap together harder than it should; like magnets.
“You should think about the consequence of your…” No, Taylor — you shouldn’t. That’s /my/ job.
Trying to work it through. Work it out. ‘The only way out is through.’ It’s a web that still needs some fixing. Probably needs a nap, at some point, too. Think I can get around to unloading bisk #2 this afternoon. Shepard the rest of the new ones closer to #3. Start cleaning up to start plotting and glazing tomorrow? Maybe not a lot more than that. Sickers gonna sick. Workers gonna work — but yesterday was a load and a half. Gave it everything I had; went well; debts to be paid. Wise to recover a little, even if maybe not also Super smart.
Lookout for hope.
“Sink like a stone that’s been thrown in the ocean, my logic has drowned in a sea of emotion. Stop before you start; be still my beating heart.”# +73 (ftw)
#blogs/dl
11.1.17
/”Fix the Web?” – Emdub/
We’re ‘fixing the web’ at work. Finally. It’s great. Everyone will be so pleased.
And I’m not saying more than that, because the zeroth rule of Pottery Bloggers’ Club is, “Don’t lose your job because of Pottery Bloggers’ Club.” Yeah, I know — that jumps ahead of Rule 1: “You Don’t Talk About P.B.C.” and Rule 2: “We Make You Wade Through Hot Garbage To Get Go The Good Stuff”, and all the rest of them. But I like few things as much as starting a pattern (like, say, a counting system) and then breaking it (like, say, missing six). And retconning a Step 0 or Phase 0 into an existing ordered list is pretty much the ultimate in pattern breaking. I mean, it’s such jerk move; “Yes, yes, my good people: I fully submit to this hierarchy you’ve created, and I applaud you for your skill and good judgement in prioritizing all these items. You’ve done some great work here. But I just need to add one little thing at the top. (Ahem… which will, of course, ripple down and change everything after it.) OK?”
5’jg
[Sorry. That extra “5’jg” was Pixel’s contribution to this writing effort. It’s like she’s three months old again, sitting on my lap while insistently sticking her fingers in my mouth; except that now she’s using them to randomly tap on the iPad keyboard, as payback for me not giving her my undivided attention. Guess it’s time for a writing break.]
Siracusa & Mann would call adding a Phase 0 at the very end of the process “popping the stack” — jumping up or over several levels to get at a problem from a more privileged place in a system. Sort of like ignoring the chain of command and going right to the Big Boss; or deciding that instead of finally repainting that wall in the dining room, you’re gonna go get the sledge and take the whole thing down to the studs instead.
Popping The Stack. Sounds so sophisticated. Good band name; if we ever reform the band. {Sigh. Yeah, that’s never gonna happen.}
Anyways, so yeah. ‘Fix the web’. Sounds so easy when you say it like that.
And speaking of people talking about things they don’t actually understand — and veering back to the topic of The Muse — it’s occurred to me that a temporary incarnation of a thing is not the thing itself. Like Plato’s cave or psychological projection or emotional transference or whatever, a thing is not it’s reflection; an idea is not it’s execution; a moment in time is not forever.
A temporary incarnation of a thing is not the thing itself. A temporary incarnation of a thing is not the thing itself. Repeat that a few more times, if you wish. I sure did.
But still; that said: even an /incarnation/ of The OA is an order of magnitude more intense, or emotionally engaging, or, dare I say again, /incandescent/, than stubborn old reality. The mere shadow of a deity is way more noteworthy than the complete absence of one. Deus Absconditus. So even if what I’m seeing lately is just a shadow on the wall, a simulation of the Platonic ideal, a Matrix-style reality that I should be glad to be freed from… it’s still one hell of an appealing shadow.
“And the clouds are like headlines, on a new front page sky. Shiver me timbers, I’m a-sailin’ away.”
+72 (changes)
#blogs/dl
/”Now I know why all the leaves change in the fall.” – TS/
I’m thinking about cancelling my Holiday Sale — again. Oh, wait… that doesn’t sound right. Isn’t it great, how imprecise language can be, even when we’re trying to make it dead simple? Let’s try that again:
I’m thinking again —eg. as I do every year around this time — about cancelling my Holiday Sale.
Not thinking about cancelling it again, as if I’ve succumbed to that intense desire and cancelled it even once in the past. Oh no — I’ve got an unbroken streak of 34 (give or take) going, including so many varieties of reasonable excuses not to that I’ve lost track of some of them. I’ve always just kept plowing on ahead: through moving house, having a newborn, blown out lumbar discs, raging poison ivy, getting sick for a whole week beforehand, not having enough pots, working (what felt like) two other jobs, etc, etc.
‘Any 16 hours a day that you want.’ Ha.
So I’m not really thinking about cancelling it — am I? No, more thinking about how great it would be to just skip making the turn to bisk and glaze and fire, and instead linger in the wet clay longer. As I always do when it’s past time to stop. I’d kind of like to make, say, twenty or thirty more of these basket/strainer/whatever things. And more vases with holes. And more of… You know — whatever came to mind after that.
Or, I don’t know… take a month off to rest up and play Minecraft? Maybe write some songs? It doesn’t help that I’m getting my annual Fall cold; my tools are not sharp; my will is like weathered stone, ready to fracture in unpredictable patterns. I am not in a good place to start a new slog up that same old hill. It feels like I’m gonna die on that hill one of these years. Not sure that’s a decent way to go.
And sure, all of that other stuff sounds so appealing right now. It sounds appealing /precisely because/ there’s the mounting pressure to do the other thing; to start the sale cycle. I know that I’m pathologically kneejerk about wanting to do the opposite of whatever I /should/ be doing. I am the King of the Dogwash. Granted.
But still…
The dark angel whispers at me: Would it really matter if you just skipped one? How sweet would it be to just let the pots keep piling up? Banked those potentially-now sales into future sales? Your customers would come back next time, maybe even with redoubled enthusiasm? Right? (The OA counters, “Or would they revolt, stunned at your callous indifference to their seasonal shopping needs? How many would leave to find another potter to fill their cupboards, never to return? Do your duty. Find your bootstraps. Suck it up, buttercup.”)
Or maybe that’s not The OA. Maybe that’s whatever character I need to invent; the third one, who carries the whip and rides my ego into daily submission.
Ugh. So tempting. So impossible.
We are ciphers, even to ourselves. Maybe especially to ourselves.
+
It’s crazy, the things that we can attach our emotions to. So strange how seldom we get to choose. Treadle wheels, clay, in the first place, then very particular clays and styles and kilns, later; lonely hillsides in the middle of noplace. Visions of muses and pots we can’t quite catch and ideas we can’t ever quite express. Even when we really try. Even when we think it’s worth the risk.
There I go with the “we” business again.
stove
mow
brain
weather
wet clay to hard clay
making to finishing
to firing
to selling
to…
/”I know you’re not scared of anything at all.”/
+71 (to sleep; to dream?)
#blogs/dl
/You can only sleep at night – Notch/
The OA came to me in a dream for the first time last night. It was intense. Unlike most of what bubbles up from my subconscious during sleep, this one didn’t follow that weird dream logic. It had time and space and a sequence of cause and effect that holds up now, in the pre-dawn, to caffeinated examination.
[She was in her human form, which makes me wonder: if I’d spent the last month writing out this fever dream on my other blog, the too-sad one that even more nobody wants to read, would she have appeared as a Raven? And would the dream have been about us finding a way to pick the lock and then dismantle the cage into a trillion unrecoverable parts? I don’t know.]
Anyways, I realized that it’s OK to peruse The Muse as long as she doesn’t know you’re chasing. So in the dream, I spotted her in a crowd; bestowing her grace on others; terrific envy. I devised a plan, a ruse to get close to one of them, in hopes that would get me closer to her. Long dream chapters unfolded, like watching a streaming series in back-to-back episodes. (Yet, contrary to what I said above, somehow compressed in time; more like the memory of a long series than actually watching it in real time.) Like a narrowing — not widening — gyre, the plot looped in closer to her. Two steps removed, then one. “Oh, you guys went to Iowa, too? I was there in ’93. What? Oh, that’s ten years too soon. Yeah, well, I bet we still know the same Dubuque Street, and that ‘foil wrapped abortion’ of a Gehry building down by the river, and — no, I was there when the old art building was underwater half the time. [Note: I filed that memory ‘under water’, just like Michael told me to.] Yeah, I just saw the new one, on its stilts, online the other day. Crazy.”
That kind of garbage dream dialogue.
And then it took a hard corner and bam! She was right there next to me. Looking me in the eye, addressing me directly. /Incandescent/. Unnerving. But somehow she was blaming herself for my infatuation with her gifts; sort of a, “Dammit, I did it again, didn’t I?” And I said, “No! No… It’s not your fault. It’s me. I’ve been chasing you all this time. Or, at least lately — I lost the trail for about a decade there, and I’m really sorry for that. I hope you won’t take that as a sign of a lack of devotion. Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite. Prairie.”
“Because here’s the thing: I am now willing to blow up my entire life for you. Everything. If you want me to do painting instead of clay, just tell me. I’ll make it words, I’ll restring my guitar and try to write you a song — or, at least, try to learn a few old ones. Do you like St. Waits’s /Shiver Me Timbers/? Or St. Sting’s /Valparaiso/?
/”Chase the dark star, over the sea / Home where my true love is waiting for me.”
/”And the sand’s shifting and the storm’s lifting and I’m drifting on by / Old Captain Ahab’s got nothin’ on me.”/
And then — astonishingly — /finally!/ — she says, “
Oh. Ahh. I see… I didn’t know you were there yet; I thought you were just like all the rest. [She smiled her incandescent smile. I memorized the constellations in her face. Like an old skin, so tight, so ill-fitting, peeling away.] And, without words: acceptance of my new, undifferentiated form. Acknowledgement that this can be the new me. Blessings bestowed. I don’t have to chase anymore, or hide it. My wings are ready to aim straight at the heart of the sun; she promises me the wax will not melt.
Like: Now I can do /anything/.
And maybe because — coincidentally? — this is number plus-71, and ’71 is my year. ‘Zounds, when did I turn into the wild-eyed mystic? Bonkers.
“You may not rest now. The bed is too far away.”
[I wish I could pull off a free-jazz outro jam like the ones on /Mercury Falling/, but I can’t. I’m still only human; that shit is god-like. Perchance to dream.]
+70 (wow)
#blogs/dl
10.27.17 .
“Oh, oh… Things I long for.” – Augie March
Wow. It’s just… wow.
Like how, at 46, can my brain and guts and emotions still surprise me, churning out a state I can scarcely remember ever being in before? One that knocks me over to where I’m grasping for the scaffolding, the unseen Matrix of the world as I’d previously assumed it was; wondering why everything is listing sideways and racking in on itself all of the sudden.
Sure, the simplistic answer is, “Duh, Scott, it’s the meds.” But — while I’m probably the least qualified to make this assessment, I’m pretty sure it’s not. a) I’m on a ridiculously low dose; they don’t make a smaller amount. Seventy five pound pre-teens take this much, and I’m over 200, and quite stubborn. b) This didn’t start right away. The timelines don’t match up. After, yes. But other factors seem involved. Instead, if memory serves, its crept in gradually, like sunlight coming in through a window on the first morning after you scraped all the old black paint off overnight. Dawning from almost pure dark. Illuminating. c) Pretty sure I could quit taking them and, while it would likely get mighty squirrelly for a while, I don’t think this wouldn’t go away. Like a word you can’t unlearn, or a spoiler you can’t fool yourself into not knowing when you actually go watch the thing. Even possible it would just intensify.
OK — clarity.
It’s like The OA went from occasionally buzzing over my studio, checking in on me on that one perfect hour of that one ideal day per week (or less — sometimes way less), to setting up a permanent HQ in my heart of hearts, pumping out inspiration and obsession and guts and this overwhelming sense of possibility 22 hours a day.
To the extent that this is mostly good, I’m tempted to do that thing Maron said, where when you finally figure something out in life, the kneejerk reaction is to go, “What took you so long, dummy?!” (eg. heaping on more self criticism instead of giving yourself credit for growth; or simply feeling grateful that a bounce finally went your way.) I am tempted to do that — that would be right out of my standard playbook — but I’m not. And mostly because — as strange and revelatory and odd as this sensation or experience is — it’s not all great. for one, it’s very unfamiliar, like new terrain. That’s unnerving because I’ve been such a creature of predictable routines and habits, these last many years. Sensing so many of my well-worn paths and default answers being up for grabs; having to reconsider things that I’d long assumed were just unerring bedrock; it’s tough work. Destabilizing. Sleep depriving, when the machine’s gotta run that hot that long just to process it all before the next new batch of data hits the RAM.
So yes, it’s frequently great — like, amazing — more highs and wows and woofs in a typical week than I’d thought possible. But also really fucking confusing at times; often too bright, oversaturated, unyielding in its persistent nagging at my consciousness.
For as dull of a drumbeat as the despair had hammered into my soul, at times now — especially when I’m overtired — I’d almost gladly retreat back to passive acceptance for a bit, just to cool my jets. I mean… incandescent is awesome, but sometimes a little dark and quiet go a long ways, too.
Sheesh.
OK. This one should really stay on the private side of my writing membrane. Initiating self-control module in 5, 4, 3, 2… Oh, shit! You missed six!
“There’s no such place.”
+69 (chaos)
#blogs/dl
10.26.17
/”It’s all chaos — be kind.” – Patton Oswalt/
Good morning to you, too, OA. Thanks for not getting me up at two. Four fifteen was still a little early for my taste, but I’m /not/ complaining. Oh no. An hour of Minecraft and coffee helped tamp down the word cannon so that, hopefully, I won’t come across as quite so manically unhinged here today.
Hopefully.
/”Can you turn some of the words into 3D objects?” – The Admiral/
I’d sure like to. I’m falling behind on my early December, biggest-deadline-of-the-year thing yet again. Maybe even way behind — I almost can’t bear to examine the calendar to find out. As has never once failed in [xmas 2000 to xmas 2017 = 34?] approximately 34 sale cycles (and, therefore, making cycles), I am once again past the point of needing any more new greenware. The wet clay cutoff date — as anyone who’s ever taken Ceramics can woefully confirm — is always /way/ sooner in the semester than anyone wants, or anticipated it would seem like now that it’s actually arrived, back in the first half when we were screwing around and making whatever came to mind without much strategy or direction. Oh dear.
I was also 100% sure that I was going to repaint the studio this fall. I walked it back to only doing half — two of the four exterior walls — now, with planning to finish next spring. I diligently made a trip to the big city, bought the fancy paint at the fancy paint store, did my research on how to maximize the chances that I can get it to stick, and waited out the insane heat, then the rains… And now it’s almost freezing overnight, the wood’s still damp most days, and I’m already a week behind on glazing and getting pots headed towards my tiny little bottleneck of a salt kiln. Oh dear.
And The OA keeps sneaking up behind me, when I’m unloading the dishwasher, or driving to work, or taking a back-saving walk on my lunch break, and whispering ideas for the next pot around the corner… What if I threw those tall vases just chunky as fuck and then trimmed feet afterwards? Could I get them two feet tall? What if the pattern of holes was itself part of a larger pattern? Did I try mixing in different sized holes on the same pot? How about taking that perforation idea and last spring’s squared ovals idea and merging them, maybe with — for super duty overkill — black underglaze and glaze over for runny halos?
You see why it’s so hard to stop. You /already know/ — in your bones — why it’s so hard to stop.
It’s the same, for me, with the words. Once they’re going, it’s painful to turn them off. They just keep spinning in my mind all day long, if I truncate that thread too soon. They get in the way.
/The Wiz: Do you feel like you can control your thoughts?/
/Me: Should I?/
/”There’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have.”/
+68 (recording)
#blogs/dl
10.25.17
“/And you keep my old scarf, from that very first week, ’cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me.” – TS/
Oh my god(s)! I forgot! The very first sound in that song, that lo-fi, reverby baby voice saying, “Gorgeous”? It is a dead ringer for a recording I made of Pixel, probably when she was about one and a half, and used as an intro for some silly GarageBand track. “My name’s Maggie Pixel,” she says.
So that new song kicks off and one little processing thread in my head zips back to 2009, sitting on the living room floor, playing with this little blob of cute crazy intention and randomness. That’s a powerful emotion. Like the sweetest punch to the stomach, followed by a winter morning jacuzzi with a smoking hot mug of coffee. Or something.
If I ever get around to hijacking this blog into a podcast — yeah, Kickstarter and Patreon may or may not be open in my browser tabs here — I’ll grab that audio and use it somewhere; maybe in the intro, or as a spacer block between chunks.
Trying not to do it with one I just wrote, but if the time and feel is right — usually later at night does the trick — I’ve been reading this aloud to myself, just to see how that feels. If my wretched voice could pull it off. Maybe only if I start smoking, then wait seven years. Or go huff some more porcelain dust. Or something.
Anyways, not sure if I’m just wildly daydreaming about being Roman Mars; or MK, with his porchside chats on the much-lamented, dearly missed /S&D Podcast/; or Jad and Robert on the incomparable radiolab. But — how can this be true? — /they actually sound kind of good to me/. I can hear the edits that need to go in; the places to pause for effect; the effects I’d add to give it atmosphere and some space to breathe; the bits I’d have to practice, like it’s the eighth grade play again, and I’m running lines on a Sunday afternoon, sprawled out on my parents’ bed — to escape the two house apes who otherwise won’t leave me along — with /Thompson Twins/ on infinite loop on my Walkman; a memorization rubric. Those /Can’t Take It With You/ lines are most certainly still in my brain here, somewhere. I’ve just lost their hyperlinked redirects somewhere along the way; too many patches and software updates and bad sectors on the ol’ spinning platters.
Anyways, speaking of forgetting…
/”I can’t get rid of it, ’cause I remember it all too well… yeah.”/
+ 67 (gorgeous)
#blogs/dl
10.xx.17
————————
/“You make me so happy it turns back to sad…” – TS/
What do you do when there’s suddenly too much beauty in the world?
Too much to handle, to wrap your head around, to process? Like — who would ever want to retreat back to the numbness, the darkness, when the alternative is too much.
/“Too much — yeah. Too much is never enough.” – Billy Idol/
So I listened to this new TS song — oh, about ten times yesterday — then last night, after flipping on the tube (can’t really call it that anymore, since there’s no tubes) to pacify his lonesome whinging (yes, TV is /definitely/ male), I found the Vevo streaming channel. And, naturally, first hit was her. And, naturally, first video was for the new song I’d just been obsessing over all day. (Ding!) And then — it’s probably just a placeholder turned out by some video graphics company while the studio is spending a hundred million dollars on the real one — what do I find? Typography; and /good/ typography. Floating, merging, animated, unspooling, with little drawings like I make with my Apple Pencil these days; all layered to within a tiny fuck of David Carson himself, spelling out all the words I’d been memorizing since seven that morning.
TS + movable type. Mind blown.
Seriously, go look it up. It’s Gorgeous.
/“You should think about the consequence of your magnetic field bein’ a little too strong.”/
So the duet I want to hear now is TS with The Postal Service (aka. the guy from DC4C and that other guy, who’s name I can’t recall, who sent him the music tracks to sing over). Of the three released tracks on /reputation/ — yes, we bought all of them last weekend, Pixel and I — I hear tons of sounds that I first heard on that ‘District Sleeps Alone Tonight’ (oh — actually, it’s called /Give Up/) album.
Also on that album are several male/female duos; I also forget who the other singer is, and she’s great, but not — to my vastly biased view — as great as TS.
All of which you care, and should care, not a damn red cent. But hey, it’s my blog. And don’t forget Rule #2. [Or is it Rule #3 now? Ah, who the fuck cares?]
/”You should take it as a compliment that I’m talking to everyone here but you.”/
Speaking of wish fulfillment, the other day I was imagining yet another thing that I’d like to come true — see? As predicted, now that one good thing has finally happened, I’m getting greedy. So I decided to take a shot at praying. No, not that kind of praying; I think that version is practically worthless. More like a supplication to an entire pantheon of gods — like some good old, my-ancestors-are-Irish-and-Vikings-style pagan shit.
So, OK. But which pantheon? Time to confess that I know virtually nothing about the Irish or the Celts. Vikings/Scandanavians/Norse are certainly in the running, despite being hideously co-opted by those wretched superhero movies of late. (Back in my day, you could make a Loki reference and nobody but the other /Deities & Demigods/ nerds would get it. Now even people in yoga class picture some dude in tights with random horns on his head.) All that modern Thor! crap aside, Odin remains one of the more inscrutable heads of pantheon I know of. So remote and capricious and driven by all-too-human passions; Ravens representing Thought and Memory, if I recall; which is freaking crazy, for a culture that never developed writing, and preyed on those that did. The All Father is like some dark angel who somehow leapt from our collective unconscious to gain control over the spheres that ensnare us. Way more interesting than an old bearded white dude who either smites your enemies and stains the fields with the blood of their children or listens to your repeated requests for a pony for Xmas (or, improbably, both at once).
The Romans are tempting, given their singular place in our civics, our planets, our elements. But I’ve always been more partial to the Greeks. Both for their ‘pride of place’ status (preceding and influencing Rome), and because there’s something about those names that just really does it for me: Zeus, Hera, Ares, Hermes, Hades. (A son named Jacob Ares might have been a good counterweight to a daughter named Maggie Pixel. Yet another middle name to be mortified about come junior high, but — hopefully — cherished as an adult.)
Anyways, so I self-consciously and ridiculously offered up some wishes to the heavens — some mix of a dolmen and the Bifrost Bridge and Olympus. (Thought about making a sacrifice, but setting things on fire in a downtown Starbucks still, even in my weird state of mind, seems like a bad idea.) Pleaded with Hera or Aphrodite or Cerberus or whomever, and waited a few minutes.
Nothing happened.
/”…Unless you wanna come along?/ Ding!“
I dunno, man. I can’t promise I won’t listen to it 20 more times today. The count is already at one, and I suspect I’m heading back there right after this goes up. And I might have five more run throughs of that video in me, too. Oh boy.
/“There’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have.”/
+66 (bad poetry)
#blogs/dl
10.24.17 .
“In the middle of the night, in my dreams…” – TS
you’ve gotta stay calm. or get calm. or,
for fuck’s sake, at least figure out how to pretend
to be calm.
slow down. not so much coffee.
it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
i i i am not a bot
open instead of closed
items, but no agenda
slow, slower, slowest
listen, wait, observe
it’s not what you hear, it’s how you hear it.
it’s not what you hear, it’s how you hear it.
it’s not what you hear, it’s how you hear it.
i i i am not a bot
sincere, but not-so overwrought;
don’t swing for the fences
| exaggerate
| overcommit
don’t run other people down — it’s a bad look, and not very fair
((jesus doesn’t want me for a sunbeam, but he was right about a few things))
meta is bad. just say it or do it;
meta is meta bad: don’t narrate what you’re gonna say
just go do what you’re gonna do,
then show it in the past tense
jokes optional
connect
if you dominate the conversation, it’s not really a conversation
it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
it’s not what you hear, it’s how you hear it.
go
“Let the games begin, let the games begin, let the games begin, let the games begin.”
————————
+65 (devastating)
#blogs/dl
10.22.17
/”You were everything to me and I’m begging you, ‘Please don’t go’.” – TS/
And then sometimes The OA doesn’t show, and it’s… it’s just this side of devastating. You sit at the piano, or the typing machine, or stand at the wheel, clay spinning, with no idea, no sense of rightness or guidance, no place to call home. It all just feels like the same old moves by rote, the same rhetorical or stylistic tricks, the same dreary results. When she doesn’t come, it makes you wonder why you ever even try, even if she was just right here, in you, yesterday.
Because I want to /feel/ that again, to be in that rare space where action and intent are fused together, another temporary strange loop. Where the doubts are pounded down by each successive wave of insight, or turn of phrase, or way of seeing. Where — improbably — everything seems to be in its place; OK; breathing in and out like this moment /is/ the moment, like things will turn out if you just keep writing, singing, throwing.
When she doesn’t come, the fear sets in. Maybe I squandered it last time. Maybe she went away and found someone else. Someone more worth of her gifts; someone less tethered to my kind of mundane concerns. Maybe this isn’t a lull — maybe she’s never coming back, and I’ve had my lifetime’s quota of magic and transcendence, here at the cruddy mid age of forty six. Maybe it’s all my fault.
Like in the movie /Her/, which, spoilers ahead for that, and if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it, and, seriously people, spoilers ahead…
Like in the movie /Her/, where the Muse/goddess/immortal (hmm… yet another female incarnation) has actually been inspiring thousands of other people at the same time; she is so immense that she contains multitudes, and I — or you — are merely one of them. That sense of having a unique destiny dissipates into the reawakened awareness of how little one in seven billion must be, let alone all those who have come before and are yet to come along.
Begging. /’Please don’t go’./
I can see why so many of those billions don’t even try for art. For self expression of any kind more lasting than a chat, or deeper than a shared photograph. “A life without making is too painful, and so I make things.” But a life of making things, then feeling like it might go away, or be taken away, or have been used up… Oh. Maybe more painful than never trying in the first place.
/”You were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter.”/
+55 (oh the vampyre)
#blogs/dl
“With a vampyre’s kiss, I’ve got a vampyre’s heart. Now I don’t roll out of bed ’til after dark. See my teeth so sharp, and my blood so stale. You know I could drink the world and never get my fill.” – A.A. Bondy
Out in my dilapidated roadside shrine before dawn. Not so much working as hunting. Trying to figure out where the next meal is gonna come from, to get me through this day. Am I flush enough to try throwing more vases? Or just more bowls? Should I start loading the bisk, or clean up that mess I left from mixing wadding, like, five weeks ago? Or get my ass in gear starting to put paint on the outside of the studio? Or… none of the above? Maybe it’s time for a nap!
Then (or before) (or both) prowling around the house in the middle of the night. “I love the color of the sky in the middle of the night.” Flailing away at the thoughts that won’t let me sleep until they’ve been tamped down or blown out onto the page. Waiting until at least five am before starting coffee. Sometimes getting up and going back down twice. Ugh…
Two Sleeps isn’t technically insomnia, but it definitely feels weird. I was pretty locked into 10:30 to 6 there for a long time. This reminds me of insomnia, which, blessedly, I haven’t had since the New Baby Haze nine Falls ago. But still, it’s unreliable. Makes me feel even a little more nuts, if that’s possible. Not automatically knowing whether I supposed to be awake or asleep adds a lot of mental overhead. A broken routine = so many more questions.
Ending up with six or seven hours total (out of each 24) is okay, but boy does it make me need a nap after lunch. Boy, do I love a nap after lunch — curtains closed, between the sheets, the whole nine. And that’s usually fine in the TH-SAT half of the week; but a minor trainwreck in the MON-WED half. Can’t really just curl up under my desk with the lights off. It’s not like a clerk job in a library, or a mule job in a warehouse, where you can build a little nest and no one will miss you for a half hour. Not that I’ve ever known anyone who would be so unscrupulous as to do such a thing.
Wondering if this is just a seasonal thing; just another season thing. The weird transition of early autumn, the weather not knowing what the hell it’s going to do from one day to the next. Rewiring my brain. Probably, winter will change it up again; maybe even just the dumb switch off EDT. Maybe my typical dalliance with seasonal affective disorder will tamp down my cortex enough that I’ll go back to just lolling all the way through the night. I’d almost prefer it.
Then again, maybe not. When writing is this fun, it’s kind of hard to just lay there and sleep.
“You see it ain’t my fault, that I am this way. Just a’crying in my box for I miss the day. Lord what I wouldn’t give, for just one drop of red. Now the dew is on the grass and I am late for bed…”
————————
+64 (sunday musing)
#blogs/dl
10.23.17
/”You hear the sound, in this old house, your father’s footsteps creaking down…” – Bill Janovitz/
Here’s the problem: I’m in this deep, enthralling, sometimes ecstatic love affair with The OA/The Muse/creative inspiration/myself/whatever. (cf: /The Mudpie Dilemma/). But pancakes must still be made. Routines adhered to. Paternal obligations met and — come on, Loki, just give me a pass on this one — even, occasionally, exceeded.
Can’t you see I’m driving, indeed.
And that’s not fair to her, The OA, because unlike St. Waits, I’m /not/ at my piano twelve hours a day, steadily working my way towards wherever she may be waiting. I’m at the wheel a mere few hours a week; more at a typing device; more with paper at hand. But still not enough. Like the Raven trapped in its cage, this gets old, and leaves me amongst the unfavored mortals.
(Brief apology for the gendered Muse, as female. Pretty sure there’s the weight of history and myth on that side, and also the current example, in that show. It’s hard for me to imagine a male demigod bringing these ideas, inspirations, moments. But maybe that there is part of the problem. In any case, I hope it doesn’t clang as badly to you as outdated crap like “mankind” or “for the sake of man” does for me. If so, let me know and I’ll workshop it. tldr; I actually mean it as a compliment, but a lot of poor language choices often fall under that banner.)
So, anyways, The OA calls, but mostly I have to ignore it, because: Sunday:
Up early, but not crazy early; a little writing and just as hitting a stride, the rest of the house awakes. Stretch, rush out to finish loading the top shelf of the bisk while Pixel watches her morning shows. Kiln on; good. Make pancakes — mini X’s and O’s. Trim haircut down a little more — soon, I’ll get it down to chemotherapy length, which will feel like, I dunno, something. Chores, bills, chores, chores. Typical Sunday morning around here. Trip to Plavon for lunch, Target, coffee. Sneak in some desperately needed rest while Pixel watches her afternoon shows. Two hours on a Sunday feels evilly excessive, but it could so readily be five or seven. Trying to keep her moving and painting and reading and legoing and all the rest of it, instead. Window A/C out, ’cause the cold is a’comin’. Kiln rousing near a thousand degrees. More chores. Sneaking more rest; catnaps. End of Fall Break, so prep for tomorrow, and the week. Painted toes and fingers; glitter overcoat on top of some sort of stickers? Kids these days. Dinner. Bath. Nearing 1300. Off in a few hours. Music, typing. Looking forward to laying down again.
Here, now. The banalities are sometimes the whole thing. I can look ahead, look behind, daydream, but often it’s just a series of moments, dull, predictable moments, snapping together like listless magnets; not a loud, sharp snap; more like a little click; like the movements of an old, familiar clock.
The OA waits; maybe checks in to see if I’m worthy. I scan my drafts and bits files — good stuff there, maybe, but nothing I can run with right now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe later tonight. She’s not giving me the goods when I’ve spent the day being diligent and responsible and tame instead of wild and selfish and nuts. Her rewards go to the daring, the risk tolerant, the dreamers.
Maybe I’ll be ready to dream more again at two am. If so, it’ll be hard to sleep through it.
/”… The hallway light; my days are nights; we’ll have this song for the rest of our lives.”/
+61 (know)
#blogs/dl
/”All I knew, this morning when I woke, is I know something now, know something now, I didn’t before.” – My imaginary musical girlfriend, TS/
I’m supposed to finish one draft before starting the next one, right? Right? Wait — ‘supposed to”? Keyword. Make sure it’s in the copy of the page.
It’s six thirty two. I’ve got on my pottery blogger garb: ancient flannel shirt, sleeves and collar cut off so long ago I can’t remember them, over t-shirt with peeling vinyl letters from some obscure brand and random sploshes of paint on it. Layers, ’cause I need protection from the Fall. Sweats, roughly the same color. Last year’s slippers, with their gaping tears around each set of toes. No hat, although thinking about it. Sometimes, like tinfoil, my fur lined Russian deal with the egregious ear flaps and dangling chin strap helps me concentrate. Tune out reality to better float through words.
(OK, I convinced myself. Now you’ve gotta imagine me sitting at the dining room table, eating muffins, drinking some of Ron Philbeck’s finest joe*, clad like the planet’s biggest jackass and enjoying it immensely.
*Get it? The name of the potter is as if it’s the brand of today’s coffee. Really, it’s all the same Starbucks generic blonde roast, but when I reach for the mug, almost every time, my lizard brain goes %pottersname%coffee%yum%. So there’s that. [This would be a footnote if I’d figured out how to do them already.])
Both shirts are dark-water-blue, like ‘the color of the sky in the middle of the night’; like gang colors, just to be sure no one mistakes my granola bohemianism for Red State redneckery. (Not that there’s much risk of that. When I’m entrenched in the compound here on our little hill, the only people I see who I’m not related to are the mail woman, when she has an occasional package to bring, and the UPS guy, who already knows I’m nuts, because when he comes ’round the circle drive, he sees me /throwing pottery by hand on a wheel/. “This guy knows it’s 2017, right?,” I can hear him thinking.
‘Course, he also sees me in this ridiculous hat; so the pottery throwing is probably just overkill. Like a hat on a hat, yeah?
Does it matter what I’m wearing as I write this? Or as I throw the mugs that might someday become one of your favorites, before you or it (or, I suppose, both) go crashing to the floor one day and end that sweet little romance? No, not really. But it’s fun a hell to write — I think Natalie would approve. And, like the sound of Michael Simon’s voice, on some unimaginably small scale, literally getting etched into the clay as it spins on my wheel, Everything Counts. This chunk of language is subtly different for the hat; like, for example, I was about to type “because of the hat”, and then landed on the construction “for the hat”. Maybe that was the hat?
[Whew! It’s also super hot on my brain when it’s not like five degrees outside. Hat’s off!]
I like writing at night, before bed. I like writing in the middle of the night, before bed again. I like writing in the morning dark, when I’m the only one up, prowling around and trying not to make noise, excitedly flipping on the switch for the coffee carafe and listening intently to that volcano of possibility. Back when I was young and cared [# Lieutenant_Dan], I would get up, grab coffee and try to be throwing before my vision was even completely clear. Glasses, unwashed face, pumping away at the bar knowing that if I didn’t start right away, yet another ‘weekend potter’ weekend might get amway from me; back when ‘weekend’ meant only two days, like for the rest of you suckers. (Kidding, kidding.)(Sort of.)
Writing at 3am is different, because it is the nadir of my caffeine curve. If /those/ are any good, retrospectively, then shit fire, we’ve got ourselves a barn dance. I’ve often just assumed that because I have liked to write most between, say, nine and eleven in the morning, that those are the only times I can do it. Not true. Just different things for different parts of the day, different states of mind. It can be two things.
Writing three times a day helps me focus. When I am in here, my thoughts don’t go fractal (despite what it must seem from the outside). OK — let’s compromise and say that they don’t go /as/ fractal, or go fractal as easily.
Which can be really disconcerting in the daylight. Similar to throwing pots, when I’m on and it’s all good, there is a narrowness of concentration that seems more like the natural state my mind wants to inhabit, like carving a spear before the fire or drifting off to sleep to the sounds of the drums.
And — true confession time is here again already? — it’s not just here. It might be more like five times a day, lately, including sketchbook and notebooks (plural — I think I’m up to three now). And if FB and Insta chats count, then by the love of Zeus, it’s just beyond calculation. (I’m speaking those to Siri, lately, which is more like tiny phone calls or micro watercooler chats, so I’m not inclined to call those “writing”.
I /adore/ the feeling of being a writer; eg. one who writes. Amateur; learner; ignorant explorer. Not for pay, or tenure, or ad clicks, or the likes, or future speaking gigs. No; mostly because it fuels a much better sense of self than I am used to. It seems like that should cost so much more than just this.
[Huh. If I ‘worked’ on Fridays, like ‘normal’ people, I’d be getting in the car about now. If I switch to working on Fridays, to not miss the early drafts of the Federalist Papers or whatever, I’ll have to be getting in the car right now. Not sure I’d mind that much. Bizarre.]
Seems like a little too much bingeing on words, but words are how I process the world. My visual memory, frankly, is garbage. I remember pots I love from the stories I’ve made up and told myself about them. I can’t even visualize the pots I’ve made, which might help explain my obsessive infatuation with recording everything into Instagram lately.
Also, it’s easy to get trapped in looking forward to the next batch of Likes. I’m still mostly good for the solitary nature of following a craft, but it doesn’t hurt to have atomic bits of human interaction on tap whenever you need a boost (see, I did it again — from ‘me’ to ‘you’ in the same damn sentence!). Reflexive.
Anyways, let’s close that <loop>. <span class=”dropcap”>X</span> Span, spam, Spain. Oh dear, Witt, is this what if feels like when the words start to become part of the problem?
The writing feels like the best path for me to more self knowledge; which I seem to need like air; and where most of the other pathways are strangely closed off to me: meditation, vacation, inebriation. Despite perhaps verging on the manic panic bobanic Titanic gigantic — “A big big love!” — I’d rather be a hyper monkey mind than a saturnine reptile. My days of lying motionless in the bog are, gods willing and the creek and Loki’s tricks and all of that, behind me. Let’s get bananas!
i i i am not a bot
But you might be. If so, please read my robots.txt.
[Oh, computer jokes. MAJORDOMO says what?]
However, peering at all that through the other end of the telescope, all this outputting is seriously putting a dent in my passive input routines. So weird to wake up early and want to do three things, than to wake up late wanting to do no things.
My TV isn’t exactly getting lonely, but it is sitting over there going, “Dude. What the fuck? I thought we had a deal.” Sorry, old friend. My /Minecraft/ garden is overgrown from neglect. Not to fear; I expect I’ll be back with the first snow.
Maybe I should fix that broken B string on my guitar, and try to get at some of this with a finer instrument than a Bluetooth keyboard. (Ha. If I really believed it was finer, I’d be writing you songs instead of… Whatever these are.)
‘Forget Scott’s Keyboard?’ Oh god yes. Predictive? Really, iPad? After all our time together, you don’t know me better than that? What did I abandon the TV for if you’re just going to start some new version of the same old shit? [To be fair, this one’s probably near EOL as a primary machine. It’s almost as old as my kid, who has a plan to be President and punches approximately four grades above her expected reading level. Those new ones with the fancy pen are like ‘a care package for my brain’, but that’s a lot of new bricks to exchange for another new, shiny distraction.
I really can’t tell if this is the work or the fun anymore.
Lorde was talking about synesthesia, which unWikipedia’ed I gather means a cognitive blurring or mixing of the different senses. Maybe similar to HSP; ha… another family curse strikes again. I’d forgotten about the possibility of listening to music, on headphones, in between the Two Sleeps. Powerful magic, there, my friend. (As if you didn’t know.) A couple old songs on loop mode and I was sobbing like I hadn’t done since my dream broke in two or my barn fell. It’s good. ‘Sometimes you have to go outside to let what’s inside get out’.
Like the blue clothes or the RP mug with black glazed panels, these pink Post Its are bonkers. On top of this red-oranges-yellow striped tablecloth, the little folds like a scary span across an EKG, and with the background noise of the fridge’s compressor, the darkness out the windows, the interior skeletal clunk as I rotate my neck in a circle, the sound of these quiet keys…bip blip bip bip bip bip bip. Like the start of a terrific pop song in the making, or… Or. It’s all just too much, and, somehow, like a backchannel conversation that no one else can hear, still always, somehow, never quite enough.
/”Oh no, I’ve said too much. I haven’t said enough.”/
Only real pangs of regret here are where I toe the line too closely; I never want to out the generosity of a friend, or accidentally say something in a way that might cause someone else pain. It’s hard, once we start telling our truth, to know where and how to stop.
And I guess the implied obligation that you read it; any of it; all of it; in real-time or otherwise; in depth or skimming. I /don’t/ expect you to, I really really don’t. I can barely be bothered to read the headlines -some days- most days. [In Obama’s day, it felt like I didn’t have to. Now, it feels like I can’t bear to. Good job, concerned citizen.] But, of course, /I secretly hope you’ll read/ all /of it/; you, and you, and you; and you, most of all; exhaustively, intensively, enthusiastically; mining it like it matters and somehow we’re digging this trench together; hitting every post like a pig to the trough the moment it lands on your feeds; <looping>ing back later, or twice, to see if there’s any rind unexhumed or kernel you might have missed; making a mental note to Google some of these unknown lyrics and glancing references — maybe next weekend, or the weekend after; once things slow down and you can breathe again.
Of course that’s too much to ask, but I admit it’s what I want. That’s the problem: I want too much of everything.
/”And I hope — sometimes you wonder about me.”/
/”Everything counts in large amounts.”/
/”If it’s lonely where you are, come back down. And I won’t tell ’em your Name.”/
/”Come back and tell me why, I’m feeling like I’ve missed you all this time…”/
+63 (incandescent)
#blogs/dl
/”Oh you build it up and wreck it down, and you burn your mansion to the ground.” – Tom Waits/
When The OA comes, she is incandescent. Incandescent is hard to ignore. Worth losing sleep over. Even going hungry for, if my blood sugar wasn’t flighty as a rabid Raven.
I’d gotten in the habit of ignoring incandescence so often that I practically forgot it was there. Days would go by. Now I seem to see it everywhere, or focused in on one particular bandwidth, and it’s blindingly hot. Hard to look away. I do not think this is just the enhanced brain chemistry talking. It’d be easier if it was.
I had a dream last week, or the week before — the days all kind of blur together now that I sometimes have three of them in each twenty four hour cycle. I was piloting a helicopter around a frozen lake; snowed in pines, rocky crags in the distance; remote, like a mining camp in Alaska or the deep Norwegian interior. (Hence, the habitual turn towards darkness.)
Flying practice runs, endless takeoffs and landings. Drills. Pushing the envelope, squeezing the margins iteration by iteration: closer to that copse of trees, narrower through that gap; nearer the edge of the jagged ice and death. As dreams can, this seemed to go on a long time, completely solitary, no breaks or change of scenery. Just flying and pushing the limits, up, around, back down. [I guess this would be a good time to mention that my only uncle and BioDad flew helo search & rescue missions in Vietnam? Or maybe not. Is there ever a good time to drop that in?]
Anyways, as you probably anticipated, in the dream I came too close to that gargantuan, knotted spruce, where the rock jetty graced the beach; clipped it with my tail rotor (or something; I’m just riffing on the vocabulary here) and crashed into a fireball, instantly extinguished as the whole thing, me and all my stupid Dreams, sunk to the bottom of the frozen lake.
That’s a weird one to wake up to. Sharpens the mind to the question of limits, and prudent navigation; not purposefully steering towards a face that could have the power to rearrange your stars. The OA is gracious, but sometimes vengeful.
“These hands had to let it go free and… This love came back to me.”
Thanks, Muse. Sorry about messing up the cardinal (ordinal?) rules of PB Club earlier. Duh… Of course, the first rule is you don’t talk about PB Club. So just increment the rest down one: wade through garbage is two, etc. Try not to miss six.
/”If you live it up, you won’t live it down.”/
+62 (5th movement)
#blogs/dl
/”Under a dark star sail…” – Sting/
I think the fifth movement takes evil back out of the world. Like a theoretical drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere, it recaptures something that never should have been set loose in the first place; some dark angel we allowed to escape over generations, through our collective, selfish ignorance. That last step to the dance returns that specific evil to a container that fits its amorphous intent, and will hold it fast until we forget why we need it to. Again. <loop>
No, I haven’t turned evangelical on you. That’s my analysis/micro-review for the astounding Netflix show, The OA.
[‘Astounding’? Is that the best I can do? Remarkable? Lovely? Ugh. ‘Astounding” is less generic than ‘amazing’, but maybe overkill. I /hate/ how everyone always says everything’s ‘Great’ now, with three exclamation points, so we can all be understood through unadorned text. It’s like grade inflation set loose on all of society. (“We are living in a society!” – George Costanza).
Anyways, there are probably glancing spoilers in there, and I’m now sorry about that. This isn’t what I was imagining writing this morning [timestamp: 6:55am], but The Muse doesn’t wait for you to finish breakfast. (“Can’t you see I’m driving?!?” – Tom Waits) And she doesn’t let you choose which fruits you get from her cornucopia. You should be so lucky as to chance upon the occasional chunk of unripe honeydew, you ungrateful motherfuckers.
Real-world spoiler ahead: if you don’t want to know the meaning of life before you’ve seen the whole thing for yourself, skip ahead to the next post!!! (Probably arriving in your feed in 5, 4, 3, 2…)
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+
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OK, you brave bastards and glorious womenfolk, here it is:
I’m pretty sure The OA is The Muse.
Yep — I know, right? Like: mind blown.
Like Prairie herself isn’t magical or divine, but she’s an incarnation of it, a momentary conduit. Like a musician mid-improvisation, or a writer on a caffeine high, or a potter on that third, on-the-edge-of-control pull.
OK, seriously, since none of you have watched the show I’m talking about, why don’t you all go do your ten hours of S1 homework, and I’ll go stretch and take a shower. I think this’ll get better after I don my ‘guy living in his mother’s basement’/semi-professional pottery blogger garb.
[oh shit. Note to self: call Mom.]
Aww, man… I had it and I lost it. The first rule of Pottery Blog Club is we make you wade through hot garbage; the second rule is when The OA arrives, you humbly acknowledge her presence, but you don’t face her directly. (“Don’t look her in the eye, she’ll break your heart.”) The third rule, I guess, is never stop to go take a shower. “Stupid girl, I should’ve known, should’ve known.”
So when you think the OA appears to you, I suggest that you supplicate yourself, quietly. Breathe. And open your mind and your fingers to wherever she wants them to go, but you don’t actually write about her, and especially not about how she comes and goes, in mysterious ways. Fastest way to lose her is to chase her.
That’s OK. I was going to go into a long, real spoilers block about that show, and how I keep thinking about it; maybe bracing myself to take another run at it. It’s that good; like a favorite novel, you don’t want to loop back through it with an unprepared mind and risk squandering the magic of the last time.
Here’s last night’s pots, so that some people can blissfully skim this thing and have no idea that the text and the images have virtually nothing to do with one another.
Not sure about the bowls, but I showed remarkable restraint to not blast off another post at 9pm, or 3am, or 5am.
Streak broken.
“/Sometimes I see Your face Stars seem to lose their place.”/
+60 (curses)
#blogs/dl
“/This flesh and bone, are just the way that we are tied in…” – Peter Gabriel/
The family curse is strong — I can feel it in my blood. ‘All colors bleed to red.’ Single quotes again. No, Prarie, sorry: so far, it’s not going great. I mean — it /sort of/ is, but it mostly isn’t. The smell of all that cut grass was nice.
Could every choice have been a mistake, if somehow they all led me to here? Or it is that I can only ever hope to connect the dots are far as I’ve come along the path, and since the road behind has never led up or out — often hardly even led through; just painful loops instead — since the road behind is pockmarked with slag and regret, I can’t imagine the future dots showing, retrospectively, someday, that this was a point on the way to somewhere better?
/”Drifting in empty seas, for all my days remaining” — ?/
So, doc: Is this the delusions of grandeur part? Or, as I pause and consider it a moment longer than usual; close my eyes and remember that 4:19am is just one of many perspectives, to ask the question a different way: Am I [a strange loop?] — stop it — am I actually finding new insights? Is this actually any good to anyone? Am I ‘hauling on frozen ropes’ or digging up diamonds?
/”Under the dark star sail.”/
The door to writing was locked shut for so long that, now that I seem to have found my skeleton key, it’s hard not to believe that every flush of an idea must be recorded. That if there’s the small possibility of taking another little nugget from my veins, rounding it off, giving it just the barest polish and then yelling out, “Hey you guys! You won’t believe this, but I think I found another one over here!”, at the top of my lungs, as if my life depended on it. Maybe it does, maybe it does.
Looking at that through the other end of the telescope, what’s the point of self reflection if all it does is illuminate things only you can see? Are we really such isolated motes, circling no greater central fire? Is it more selfish to hold those nuggets up than to hoard them to myself, in fear that they’re only Fool’s Gold? No one likes to be a fool; except, of course, he who is designated to play that role.
Then I leap around in my patterned frock, the bells on my cap jingling merrily, trying to distract us all from the pain and the doom just around every corner.
/”There was only one, I recall. It was all so different then.”/
+ 59 (why)
#blogs/dl
“/Would North be true — for all my days remaining?”/
Maybe he’s right — maybe I am the only person on earth where ten is too much. So somewhere between zero and ten, then? Unfortunately, the canvas is you.
Stars seem to lose their place.
Jesus, when did I forget how to cry? The third heartbreaking disaster? Or the fourth, the fifth? I’m really not sure how it’s come to this, but it’s still so much better than it was. Improbably, after all that looking, it seems like I find it again; or some more worn, road weary, seasoned version of it. Ends up my old self was here all along, hiding in plain sight. Kind of a mind fuck, that one.
“Geez, dummy — what took you so long?” Maron. That guy kills me sometimes.
I went on an extended explanation of how Taylor and I have this very deep, intimate relationship, where she reads my mind and then writes songs, somehow ten years ago, that I listen to over and over again so they can explain to me exactly how I feel. That’s a lot of weight to put on a pop song, but, miraculously, somehow they hold up.
Attraction/Avoidance is definitely the name of the game with music. Every play through now risks shortening the span until I grow sick of it, and it loses its power. A kind dirty would have spared us the hedonic treadmill. I’m mean — seriously? As if it isn’t hard enough already?
I don’t even know which way is North now, but it’s not like I had the slightest fucking clue this summer, or last January, or the summer before, or the January before, either. Been navigating in loops for a long time now. When you can’t keep time by the stars, hard to say how long. Stupid girl, I should’ve known. Ah well… ‘If being wrong’s a crime then I need help here…’ You know the rest. What? You don’t? Oh my god — like different universes.
I liked the fake beat poetry one. Hypnotizing to write, sitting just here in this same spot at the same time yesterday. Could’ve never pictured myself typing these out of glass, so never say never. What was the line about how empowering it is to do something you’d thought was impossible, even a small thing? Damn.
I think I love the dark angel bit. That one sat in the hopper for a while, as even though I’ve danced around the public/private line more than just about anyone I know, when it comes to taking (well earned) shots at religion, I still tend to hold back. Whatevs. “You’ll pay for this in time.”
And back to back Sting and Police callouts makes me feel like the champion of… something. I dunno why. If you can build a culture out of sticks and twine,,,, how’d that go? Oh man, I’m even having trouble quoting myself now.
It’s too late for this. Been too intense of a day, again. When I let myself start, I swore I would hold it until morning; check it for leaks by the light of dawn (or 2:30am, whichever comes first). But hell — that’s no fun. Where’s the thrill in that? It’s not like every single word and suggestion and stray, momentary thought here will outlive me for a thousand years.
Except that, of course, it’s exactly that. /That’s the fun./ A lot less harmful than drinking myself to sleep. Which, for the record, I’ve never done; not even once. Have I mentioned I’m like the boringest, most straight edge person you’ve met? (Well, aside from those vegans.) Caffeine and sugar and blogging, those are my vices. The occasional binge on a video game. Pretty tame for a Thursday night.
I considered trying for the seven in twenty-four, but it would have broke my brain even harder, or opened up cracks for more deadly words to slip out. Plus, I had to mow. But I’m counting this as 4-in-24, which is still a new record by any reckoning. Yeah, /Reckoning/. That was another good album. Nothing as wrenching as /The Soul Cages/, but our love can be two things.
“That’s it; we’re out of time. We’ll try and do better the next time.”
‘Night.
“/Under the skies of Fall; North-Northwest the stones of Pharaoh.”/
+57 (beat)
#blogs/dl
/”De do do do, de da da da, is all I want to say to you.” – The Police/
You know that feeling, when you’re sitting in a mostly empty room with just one or a few other people, and someone else comes in and it’s like everyone can just /sense/ it — even the people with their backs to the door? How weird is that? I mean, I know we’ve got a hundred thousand generations to thank for our preternatural sensitivity to and ability to read faces, but how can we detect another heartbeat or mind from twenty paces, and instinctively know to pause, to check our conversation or run a scan on our proprioception loop or sit up straighter and tuck our hair back behind one ear, or adjust our glasses.
It’s like the stranger has yanked open that nighttime car door in the rain, popped that hallucinatory bubble, brought all the chaos and the noise streaming back in without warning.
And even if we were just midway through a sentence about CSS layouts or God or the Colts, it is such a wretched, deathly feeling to have that fragile thread of connection to another mind severed so abruptly.
[OK, making the turn… Cuz this one was supposed to go up before that other one, and they’re already out of sequence and date stamps and muffins and heck I don’t even know why else.]
[Notice how at the turn I so often resort to the cheap trick of switching from “I” to “we”? It’s a reflexive move at this point, like knowing to spin off the pick. I suspect it works because it sets the hook first, then yanks it. Like selling a used car by starting with the weather and ending up with the optional undercoating package.]
[Oh — it also conveniently diffuses blame for my conclusions, now doesn’t it?]
Anyways. When people I genuinely Like start Sharing what’s going on in here, it is of course glorious; a windfall to my slovenly ego. But also, sometimes just seconds later, it feels like that outsider crashing the party; the “aw fuck, now we’re going to have to start all over again from zero” feeling. If there’s nothing better than being understood, maybe there’s nothing worse than feeling that illusion yanked away unexpectedly, like a branch in mid-air breaking beneath your feet.
And so, arms windmilling and contemplating gravity with a suddenly sharp focus, my inbred reaction is to go weird, fractal, obtuse, dumb, jokey inside reference, opaque bad Beat poetry, so oblique and uncapitalized and wanting for any sort of commonality — like whatever the conceptual opposite of that late night, rain soaked windshield, two people talking in a car thing is. I go out of my way to momentarily make this space as uninviting to the uninvited as possible.
Here’s the most obscure part of a song you probably know, cited in a minor code that you’ve gotta go back through seven thousand words to decrypt. Here’s me stringing together random neurons right there live on the screen. Here’s more crap that HOW IS THIS ABOUT POTTERY? I WAS TOLD THIS WAS ABOUT POTTERY can’t possibly be construed as something to return to. If there was such a thing as a reverse browser bookmark — eg. Never let me come back to this site again, even after I’ve forgotten it exists — those posts would trigger that.
And it is glorious.
“Don’t think me unkind. Words are hard to find.”
I like my All-22. I deeply love my #1 Fan. I want K in A and adolescent Steve and oats to stumble into my booth in the back corner of the not-cool bar and know they’ve always got a special place at the table. That this is for us, and even though, in theory, every table is open to any goddamn schmoe who stumbles by, in practice we own this, and claim it, and manufacture some sort of meaning from it, every time we climb inside and pretend it’s a car. At night. In the rain.
/”No one’s jamming their transmission.”/
+58 (dark angel)
#blogs/dl
10.19.17
/”Dark angels follow me, over a godless sea, falling on empty silence, for all my days remaining.” – Sting/
I’m thinking of things I could do to make a major change. Again. Change jobs, buy a new house, move to Spain and give up pots for paintings. Ludicrous; mordantly hilarious; a predictable reaction to the caged bird feeling stuck.
It’s like every eighteen months I have to devise this elaborate Emergency Escape Plan… pure mid-life crisis fantasy? Or calculated defensive pessimism, just in case I wake up at 4am one day and decide, “Today is the day I’m gonna blow everything up” –? A friend reminded me once that something I said just yesterday seemed like exactly the kind of things I used to say three decades ago, and I think, how the hell can there be a consistent thread there? Like every thought is actually a pre-ordained piece in a larger puzzle, and we think we can see what we’re making from the photo on the box, but it ends up it’s the wrong box; just an Impressionistic illusion in front of us — unshackled and led from out of the cave into the light for the first time — what | if | the | real | box | photo | is | just | black | Courier | text | on | white | and | reads | FREE | WILL | ?
Well, I dunno where that came from, but my red cursor sits here as I wonder on it and goes: blink blink blink. Like, “Yo. What else you got?”
As a love-starved adolescent, I used to literally have disaster daydreams. Big ones, like Mom and Dad eating it on the freeway on the way home, or one of those not-uncommon wildfires coming all the way over the hill and turning the whole house to ash. But also absurdly tiny, personal ones, like what would happen if my DM friend Steve (Hi, Steve!) made my beloved level 13 Magic User, Sorion the Grey, roll the dice on one big mortal saving throw on Friday night and I rolled a six and had to start all over? [Uh huh — AD&D reference. Admit it, you did not see that one coming.]
I always had pretty shitty dice luck.
Or, rather, not “I” — go back up to all those “I’s” above and consider they weren’t necessarily ME. Then, I think, it’s not me that wants those awful things to happen; that sends my mind down those strange alleyways of doubt and wild hope for a phoenix rebirth. It’s that dark angel on my shoulder. [Or, if you prefer more drama, Dark Angel.]
He/she/it is manipulative and sneaky in ways specifically tailored to keep itself invisible to me — whomever “me” is — I mean, I dunno — but in this case, let’s just label it ‘the conscious Self’. [Single quotes because I am still mid-way through my first mug of Emily Murphy coffee and I love callbacks to nobody but me.] [Note: I will genuinely chuckle at this when I re-read it later.]
Yes, yes, sorry. Dark Angel, blah blah blah. I do tend to get sidetracked sometimes.
So: he’s like the Scott Whisperer. Or Aspect X. Or the little guy with the pitchfork, in the Saturday morning cartoons, perched on the left shoulder. (And always on the left — think about that one for a sec.) The dark angel is that thing, or entity, or motivating force that all my recent ancestors would have just wrapped up into the idea of The Devil and conveniently left it at that. (Because why go back to, say, medieval Italian literature, to get all the possible nuance and historical subtext of an idea, when instead you can Americanize it into some kind of plain spoken, salt-of-the-earth simpleton revivalist shit and smugly plow your fields and send your sons off to wars, comfortable in that artificially binary worldview?) (“I hope you know it’s not easy, easy for me.”)
I suppose because it’s a lot easier on the ego and the guilt reflexes to assign blame for that shit to an external source than an internal one. And probably even more convenient or appealing if that source is cosmic, eternal, practically omnipotent; more like a force of nature than something we could be expected to resist with any regularity We all just fall down sometimes because of The Fall. Hey, I’m only human. Don’t blame me; the Dark Angel made me do it.
Well, as a non-believer — or as a believer, instead, in quarks and carbon and genetic expression — I don’t see it that way. Not at all. I try to own that force; to take the responsibility for it. If there’s a Dark Half, he is my dark half. ‘I have seen the enemy and he is me.’ ‘Lord, make me a bird and let me fly far, far away. Away from here.’
‘Single quotes again.’ Day one of my weekend — off to a roaring bonfire of a start.
But check this out: if I lay claim to the Dark Half, that means the Light Half is all me, too. I get to own my inspirations, my higher motives, my occasional (ok, usually very occasional) noble actions. Even a little of the kiln luck, weird breaks luck, dice luck falls to my side of the ledger. Chance favors the prepared mind, and all that shit.
Somehow, no god to steal the credit actually makes it even more appealing to do the right thing.
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I get up at two or three-thirty or five, lately, and have to write out these words. Because they are so much more grounded and hard to come by and less prone to loops here on screen than they were in my head, lying up there staring into the dark. And here’s the thing: it’s not fair to believe that those unwritten words are better than these written ones. That’s the dark angel whispering sweet nothings. The real thing can never compete with the untethered imagination — it is the ultimate unlevel playing field. In my just-waking brain, all the phrases flow together effortlessly; gaps in logic or vocabulary just magically fill themselves in, without even a trace of how they did the trick; stupid ideas get a pass and half-decent ones get blown up into Revelations. They are way too good to be true. They miss the fact that everybody fades at four pm; that each morning’s gloss and sparkle needs each afternoon’s catatonic lapse.
The illusion should never get to fight the reality, straight up. The dark angel wants us to believe that they are the same; that the one we want can simply beat out the one we have, if we imagine it long enough, and intensely enough, that we never actually have to do anything about;;; out it here in the world of coffee and bones. It’s a fight that can never actually be won when one of those combatants is just another sneaky Dream.
/”All colors bleed to red. Sleep on the ocean’s bed.”/
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+54
“So let’s go to bed at two. Count the pages three, not once.” – R.E.M.
So that was /two/ posts yesterday — technically, two overnight, as I wrote both of them between sunset and sunrise. Another first. What in the world is going on with me?
;;
;;
Oh wait; I think I know. I also think I really can’t say. Lots of vagueness and misdirection lately. I’m sorry. I know cryptic is only fun if you’re in on the joke, and I know almost none of you are in on the joke here. (Not that it’s even a joke.) I can’t promise that’s going to end soon, so if this isn’t your thing, you might want to back away for a while. Maybe check back around post +75 or +100? (Which, at this accelerating rate, might be sometime next week. Har har.)
I warned Witt that now that I’ve done seven in a month, and then seven more in a week, clearly the next thing to try is for seven posts in a single day. As if that would be good for anybody, or as if the quantity matters at all. (Particularly with arbitrary lengths and zero standards for how much quality, effort, or insight go into each atomic bit. All totally subjective qualifications, and I’m the entire editorial board. Just me. This might all be hot garbage, but it’s /my/ hot garbage.)
And I seem to be veering closer to that kind of output, which is bonkers, to my /tw@se/-one-post-per-week sensibility. But I’m genuinely concerned that if I made that a goal, 7-in-1, those 24 hours might break my brain. It’s got this gnarly crack running from one lip all the way through the base and half way up the other side as it is; stained with coffee from long use, it even creaks a little if you press on it. I’m gonna keep it in circulation, because I hate to set a favorite item up on the high shelf or behind glass, like it’s a precious heirloom. Also, I can’t really afford another one right now, and I’ve heard that the lease terms are freaking murder.
More seriously, it would definitely prevent me from getting anything else done — and probably whack out my wake/sleep cycle even further — and I /really/ need to get some anything else (almost everything else) done.
By the light of a new day (OK, now that I’ve lain awake most of a night, I guess I should say that now it’s by the light of the next afternoon), yesterday still seems pretty unreal. Like if it transpired that I’d hit my head and hallucinated the entire thing, I wouldn’t be that shocked. Some of my dreams — both the sleeping and waking kind — are pretty fucking weird.
I have a deep, deep, deep — did I say how deep it is? — suspicion of things that seem too good to be true. I guess that goes with the territory when you’re a lapsed optimist. My hard-won lessons of barns falling and babies crying all night and clay dreams unraveling and losing the chance to poison young minds with my view of the magical world of pottery and unbuilt kilns and all the rest — those lessons practically scream from my DNA when random, unexpected good things happen.
(And this to someone marinating in the privileges and luxuries of first world problems. As I’ve said before elsewhere, it’s practically anti-gratitude. Proof that my/our instinctual desires run to fathomless depths.)
So I think: surely something will come along to fuck this up. It’ll probably all get crushed by the next turn of the big wheel in the sky, or the gods of Olympus who skewer our fates for sport. Or, since all of this is based on my limited perceptions and unintended but severe biases and propensity to let my expectations run out way too far ahead of the pack, it seems likely that even if the facts as I know them now run true, they will somehow twist in such a way that what seemed like salvation morphs into some kind of purgatory.
Not sure if I Really mean that or I’m just flailing around melodramatically for attention. [Good alternate tag line for this blog: /Just flailing around melodramatically for attention/.]
Do I /really/ believe that it’s not possible for simply random, good things to happen to me anymore? That seems like defensive pessimism taken an order of magnitude too far — doesn’t it?
OK, so am I gonna tell you what happened? Yes. Now? No. Sorry, dudes; still too soon. It’s a fluid situation; one of those Xeno’s Schrodinger’s Occam’s kind of things, where if I approach it wrongfooted or look at it too closely or try to slice it apart into binary pieces, I risk contaminating the experiment.
And yes; all this turmoil in one half of my life is making it awfully difficult to get moving in the other half this week. Thursday was a mess — just a pathetic little run of cups; Saturday was a mess — aimless wandering in circles, thousands of words on paper, but I did trick myself into starting to load the first bisk, which is usually how it has to go; my conscious mind won’t let go of wet season that easily, but sooner or later that weather’s gotta change. When I’m even a little out of sorts like this, I find so many convenient excuses to procrastinate longer in the house, at screens and keyboards and controllers and notebooks and naps, instead of heading out to that faded blue building and facing my fears.
Let’s go, kid. Time to face some fears. Go go go.
<loop>
/”Gardening at night just never works.”/
+53
/”All I know is pouring rain…” – TS/
So my hypergraphic season continues, I guess. Also my Swiftian season; my mid-autumnal stretching out of the wet clay season; my outdoor painting procrastination season; my Why In The Actual Fuck Does This Text Not Export With Styles Intact But Too Lazy To Go Figure It Out season.
Like seemingly every conversation I wade into, I over killed that ‘season’ riff about two things too many, didn’t I? It’s like I literally can’t help myself.
See? Here’s another one: “It’s like, a simile. Get it?”
Thinking about people I like and admire, whom I’ve known for years or maybe even decades now, but where somehow I never quite brought the, around to wanting a stack of my plates in their cupboard and one of my mugs in their hand first thing every other morning. The self-aggrandizing, juvenile view of that is that there’s something wrong with /them/; that they can’t see the beauty and superiority of what I’m doing enough to value it as I do, and as I want them to. Lately, I’ve been flipping the telescope arms and looking out the proper end: if they’re not jonesing to come buy another one of my mugs, /then that’s on me/.
Somehow, I have not sufficiently made the case that this is something worth doing, an object worth having, a — dare I say — /relationship/ with me that they’re missing out on. “Oh, and this is Scott. He’s /my/ potter.”
Where is that disconnect? Where have I failed? One too many mediocre pots squeezed though the kilns when I was just desperate for item count on the shelves, that made their way into these people’s homes and didn’t make an impact? A story I told that I shouldn’t have, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong way; or a story I didn’t tell and left an opportunity to connect on the table? A question answered badly, with ego or unwitting condescension? A question that was never asked because of some look on my face?
Or just the fact that I ask for Blue State city prices in the Red State countryside?
Most likely, it’s some of all the above, plus dozens of other factors that have nothing to do with me or my wares, plus dozens of other factors that are 100% my fault, but which I’ll never be able to see through my haze of defense mechanisms, bias, ignorance, self doubt and simple, animal greed.
It’s six thirty am on a Saturday. It’s not raining; everything has changed. I’m tired, but I will breathe out some porcelain pots today; or do my best; gods willing and the creek don’t rise.
/”I just wanna know you better, know you better, know you better now. I just wanna know you better, know you, know you!”/
+52
“Everything… has changed.”
Well, OK, clearly not /everything/. But you know those days where you wake up with a pretty good sense of which way things are going to go, and where the day is likely to end up some distance along that mostly proscribed route; because mostly, disappointingly, they always do? And then it does go in that direction, but with some insane detours that you’d not have predicted with a thousand guesses; like: what the hell is happening? And then somehow goes fractal, but coheres back again; and in the process winds up so much farther down the track than you’d imagined possible that if, when you sat there in the dark drinking that first cup of coffee, you’d daydreamed that things might get there, you’d have chided yourself for being a naive fool who should know better than to get his hopes up? Well. Yeah.
It was that kind of day.
So fucking weird, man. I’m wondering if I made it all up. Waiting for the dreaded 3am realization to land, like a hot grenade in a bowl full of ice cream. But — unbelievably for an anti-optimist and battle-hardened cynic like me — I actually, here at nine pm, don’t think it’s going to blow up. Weird.
Second guesses? Yes. /Of course/. I already have doubts; I am the freaking King of Doubts. Things I shouldn’t have said, words I should have given room to breathe, times where I should have know to go quiet and listen&&goddammit, Scott, when will you learn to listen and just listen and listen better? And make eye contact (without being weird about it), and tell less than three stories (where one will suffice), and not be so stupidly earnest about everything (as if it all matters so much) and (as if expressing your innermost truth is some holy quest)?
Probably never. I will probably never learn those things. This is me. And maybe it /is/ a holy quest; fuck if I know.
Like what Gygax said about editing out the part you like best, and Lamott said about the things you think are holding everything together aren’t what’s holding everything together, and Taylor said about Look What You Made Me Do ( ok, that last one doesn’t fit in here at all, but like I said above, I am an incorrigible three-for-one guy, so I must add a third thing; and we just bought the new single for Pixel’s bday on Sunday, and she listened to it like maybe 20 times in one morning, so it’s a wee bit stuck in my RAM ).
Maybe the things you’re trying to fix about yourself are actually the endearingly genuine parts of you that people actually like, and the parts that you think show you in your best light are just your ego reflecting back at itself qualities others could gladly live without.
So yes — scripts are playing through my head: what I’d do differently; how I’d rewrite and edit if it was all an improv scene that we get to try again tomorrow night. Doubts about my wisdom, my clarity, my delivery. Even my intent. Those things are all just smart validation strategy. Fact checking. Ego smoothing. Preparing for the inevitable reversion to the mean.
But… But, but, but… life is not a series of repeat chances or an experiment with multiple layers of undo. That’s the beauty and the tragedy of it, all rolled together. We /are/ in this moment, and so it feels significant. You and me. Later it will be me and someone else, and you and someone else, then maybe us again another day. ‘That’s how it works.’
+++fixtheweb, you jerks
So I say things and you nod and seem to understand — that’s a minor miracle. You say things back that make my neurons fire in unexpected patterns — such fun. If we are lucky, it goes on like this awhile and we find a pattern, a conversational rhythm, a groove in the otherwise sorrowful gully of a day at work, a week of falling ever farther behind, a life sometimes broken into irreparable pieces. When it clicks like that, time melts away a little; we are just two people in a room talking, but somehow that is glorious; better, while it lasts, than a dip in the ocean or a shiny new glaze.
I’m always dismayed later at how much I revealed, caught up in that incautious, intoxicating flow. All the incremental risks I stacked one atop another — well since I just said that, now I can add this, and what if I put this on top of those like so, and now that we’re here, what the hell, let’s do this!
The danger of wondering if the whole tower will collapse under the weight of its own expectations is thrilling. Just you, me, here, now. The near desperation to reveal my /actual/ thoughts to a compatible mind, rather than the synthetic, placeholder thoughts that utility, efficiency and decorum almost always demand instead. Right now, for this minute or ten, let’s throw those /realistic/ things away in favor of just being real. If you accept me for what I am, who knows where this could go?
And so the truth sneaks out of me like water seeking its own level. I sense it does out of you, too. Some of this story you’ve told before, rehearsed dozens of times, because it’s what people do. It is wise to be cautious; guarded. What if I’m putting on an elaborate show? A terrifyingly adept actor, just here to play a false role and then smile and smile until you find out I’m a villain? We’ve all fell for that one a time or two and regretted it.
But other stories of yours, or knowing admissions, shrugs of agreement, inadvertent laughs when I hit one out of the park that, by the normal rules, never should have been swung at in the first place. Those other things you say and do do reveal who you are; they set little fragments of your self out into the space between us, to see what I’ll do with them. If I’m kind, and thoughtful, and perceptive, why not set out another? And another. And another. And then, wow, how did we get here so fast? Who /are/ you and where did you come from and how can you possibly get me where so many others will never have the slightest clue? So so so so, I don’t know, strange. We are, in these particular moments, a strange loop. Not bonded, or fused. Impermanence by necessity and choice. But a brief, new composition; a carefully wrought feather floated up at the sun, knowing full well the cost of getting burned. Worth it.
Or not a feather: tiny droplets of mutual understanding, that start to condense into a new… a new… Yes, I’ve been there, too. Oh, something like that happened to me. That’s how I see it, too. Can you believe him/her/it/them/that? I haven’t seen it, but I think I know what you mean.
What could be better, once you’re sure all the good people are gone for good and they’ll never be replaced, to find a new understanding with another human; to dare to imagine that there may still be more good people out there after all. Out there, all this time, in the dark and the noise. Unbelievable.
Tiny droplets like rain on a windshield, growing into such refraction that you can only see the blurred lights of the outside world; hardly even real anymore, despite the knowledge that simply stepping out of this bubble and you’d be instantly soaked and cold and back in the uncaring expanse.
Droplets on the windshield, a metaphor for trust, like when you’ve been parked in the car at night — talking fun, wild-eyed fancy shit about the universe for way too long — and have to pee or just get home before daybreak because it’s gonna be a long day tomorrow — but desperately don’t want to break the moment, for fear of never finding your way back there again. You, me, here. “Oh my soul, hear me now.”
And you can’t find your way back, my dears. Nobody can. Moments snap together like magnets. They don’t unsnap. It’s just: snap, done, next moment; snap, done, next moment. Snap snap snap.
But tonight, with a little new hope and grateful — genuinely grateful — awe that a day could bring surprises that feel /that/ good for a change, instead of terrifying or wretched; returning home with a faint glimpse of what it’d be like to march into ancient Rome as the victorious army. Like, “We /did/ it.” Tonight, after the debrief and the dinner making and the cleanup and the bath and the bedtime reading and the choice to not go work more in the studio — just too tired — but yes, some good solid fifty layers of ink in a writer’s block instead, downloading, processing, integrating, and then, somehow, how?, typing and typing and typing like my brain is at cone eleven and won’t be held back until we melt this arch into the ground…
Somehow I feel like as long as you take in breaths and keep allowing yourself to care, life just keeps handing you magnets. On a loop? Yes, but maybe not a bad loop.
Snap snap snap. <loop> Snap snap snap. <loop> Snap snap snap. <loop>
Ah.
/”Come back and tell me why, I’m feeling like I missed you all this time.”/
+51
#blogs/dl
10.13.17
“I bet, this time of night you’re still up…” – Yep, you guessed it: TS
You knew this was coming the moment I floated the idea, right? Ha.
Funny how often our sleep cycles are self-fulfilling prophecy. What time of day is this for you? Evening? Mid-morning snack? For me, lately, it’s like the night is split in two, with this weird span of wired brain word activity for about an hour in the middle. ‘Two sleeps’. I dunno, maybe not prophecy — maybe it’s the meds.
Well, I think I should stop there. Just a meta-post to complete the exercise, and so later on I can say that I did. Funny, the things that I can use to prop up my fragile sense of self. This is as close to that unedited, blogging in real-time thing that we’ve talked about as I’ve ever done; most similar to that magic few weeks of tn@se from Penland. Ends up that WordPress was the key the entire time. I can be stupid in my stubborn resistance.
Thanks again for that long call yesterday. Sometimes, I honestly don’t know where I’d be without you. This life is much too big and scary to navigate with only one brain at your disposal. It comes in awfully handy to occasionally borrow a second, more powerful one to help chart the course. Here’s to new maps.
“Every time I don’t, I almost do.”
+50
#blogs/dl
10.12.17
“As I pace back and forth all this time, ’cause I honestly believed in… you.” — Yes, her again.
I hate it that there are throwing days where all I want to do is finish pots — trim, paint, carve, scrape — and finishing days where all I want to do is throw. It seems to happen too often, which makes me worry a bit about my emotional stability. A lot of wanting what you can’t have and having what you don’t want around here lately; feels like a recipe for disaster.
Today was a weird tweener day; caught betwixt the two halves of my life. Transition Thursdays are rough enough. (Pretty sure I covered that in a solipsistic groan last week in the early AM; “Fuck, man, I dunno! It’s my job to write this stuff — I can’t be expected to keep track of which one was which, too!” Ha! So great, in no small part because also so ridiculous. I would make a wretched famous and/or powerful person.)And because I also have to work a rare office Friday tomorrow, today was particularly fucktastic. Sheesh, talk about an unproductive mess. Hard to shift gears and clear my head when I know I’ve just got to shift right back.
Worse still, that means Saturday’s not likely to be much better, and after surrendering all of last weekend for birthday stuff, now I’m getting seriously behind. Ugh, fuck. Again.
Alright, thanks for indulging me in my first ‘bookends’ blogging day in a long time. Girls are on their way home, pots are wrapped up for the night, homemade red sauce is simmering on the stove. I might be a terrible potter but, ultimately, I’m pretty responsible otherwise.
Writing at both the start and end of the day; am I wearing this thing out yet, yo? And who’s to say what might happen in the middle of the night, if I can’t sleep again? If I do three posts in 24 hrs, I think Witt’s brain might melt.
Come to think of it, that’s pretty tempting.
Oh boy.
“This isn’t Hollywood, this is a small town…”
+49
#blogs/dl
“See your face in my mind as I drive away. ‘Cause none of us thought it was gonna end that way.” -TS
Thinking about relationships, and how they end. The sadness and sometimes excruciating longing that they leave in their wake. The also fans, near misses, could have beens; moments that completely failed to snap together like magnets.
There’s a joke I make at the office, every chance I get, which you can probably imagine almost always fails to land well: “Only the good people leave.” It’s pretty subtle, I admit, and takes a deep cynicism and self doubt to actually find funny — because it implicates both me and you as some of the not good people who are still around to have what amounts to an exercise in reverse Survivorship Bias.
It probably also helps if you’ve been around the U. (Or another similar organization) a while; some of these realities take time and seeing the patterns loop back and start from scratch all over again to really sink in.
Here’s to all the good people. Gone from here, but certainly not forgotten. At least, not by me.
Writing these blocks in my studio notebook; the cheapest thing I could find during Back To School Days at Target. (“today’s writers’s block” is a pretty terrific title, if I may say so.)
Flipped the booklet over the other day, after layering another block of ink with words over words over words — a torrent of half thoughts, partial truths, semi-revealed secrets — and saw that it was made in Vietnam, and some part of my brain spit out, “Oh, the country that almost ruined my childhood.” Like it was discovered truth, historic wisdom long-chiseled in stone and just now revealed by a trick of the light or change in the jungle canopy. Where the hell did that come from?
Another buried vein of loss and longing; which outcrops above the dirt line in unexpected spots; which I randomly stumble across on my travels; which makes me wonder if I’m actually headed in the direction that I think my destination lies; which makes me wonder if I’ll be even half as satisfied as I hope once I actually arrive.
So, to those of you I’ve lost over the years, ‘out there in the dark and the noise’: goddammit, I miss you guys. To those of you who’ve kindly sent words to my inbox that remain unreplied: I’m sorry my blogging hypergraphia has nuked my correspondence lately. I know one is not a reasonable substitute for the other. And to those I haven’t lost quite yet, or maybe will never actually find: let’s try not to let go too soon. I know I’m a angry bear sometimes and a terrified sheep at others, and that the vacillating between the two can get exhausting. But I also think, hope, that averaged out over the long haul, I’m worth it.
“People are people and sometimes we change our minds. But it’s killing me to see you go after all this time.”
+48
#blogs/dl
10.11.17
————————
“You make me sad and you make me glad; and now I see that my secret is this love, this love, this love. My secret is this love.” – Orchestral Manouevers in the Dark
It’s good to have a secret. Not like an I embezzled fourteen million dollars from the IMF secret; more like I have this morning’s writing practice in my pocket, and it’s a good one; or today’s my birthday and nobody here knows it; or even something as simple as a TS song running on a loop in your head, complete with images from the video and big emotional swoons during the bridge.
For about a year, my secret has been this one pot, deliberately set high on the Save Shelf — a smallish porcelain vase, but the biggest and riskiest form that I committed this perforated walls idea to in the last cycle. It came out of the kiln, dare I say, pretty much jaw-dropping amazing.
(Aside from my family, I’ve really only shown it to one other person: Witt, when he was here in the flesh. To corroborate; to see if he saw what I thought I was seeing. Short version: he did. (I don’t think he’ll mind my quoting him here: “You really need to pursue this.”))
The form was good, the pattern of holes very well done at leatherhard, but the kicker was my Green 2 Black glaze, and the way it ran and flowed past that pattern, like pichinko pegs or smoothed stones in a rolling creek, changing color and matteness and texture along with that fluidity, so that the surface and color and form all merged into almost the same thing, with no boundaries or interface in between them. Combined with that fairly hypnotic sense of seeing the pot’s form while also seeing all the way through it in some places, halfway inside before you gaze gets blocked in others… well. Let’s just say it’s not often that I’m still almost as smitten with a new thing like this a year after it’s cooled to room temperature as I was the day it came out of the kiln.
So the last week or two, after I settled into the porcelain switch, I’ve been driving towards that pot again. It was the apex of the last cycle; so it takes a while to roll my rock back up to the peak — even in terms of just raw technique, let along wrapping my head around it conceptually.
So that’s what these photos of vases with their insides showing are all about. The conceit is that a vase really only needs to be about half full of water to be functional, so why not riff on the rest of the form? The top half can basically be anything, including breaking the cardinal rule of containment: no holes in the walls, except for very prescribed situations, like the strainer of a teapot, seep holes of a planter, or vents in a silverware strainer. (Berry bowl and collander would also count, but I’ve never actually made a single one of either, so that’s still theoretical for me at this point.)
Thinking about extending it to planters, their rims, above the dirt line? To random oval jar things, like my all time favorite Stuff Holder form? To garlic jars or napkin trays or trivets? Even to like a tall, deep version of a cereal or soup bowl? Maybe that’s too far. We’ll see.
Anyways, it’s good to have a secret. Thanks for taking that one off my hands. Now I get to go find another one.
“This is all… whoa oh.”
+47
#blogs/dl
10.9.17
“It’s the kind of ending you don’t really want to see. ‘Cause it’s tragedy and it’s only gonna bring you down. Now I don’t know what to be without you around.” – TS
Things look a lot different now that I’m dead. Like it’s abundantly clear that just when I think it’s time to start thinking about stopping throwing and stop procrastinating on getting that first batch started into the bisque, it’s probably already overdue. I should have started stopping a while ago.
And like that this group of new porcelain pots, stacked in various stages of drying, under plastic, all over the studio, is actually starting to get pretty good. There may be some in there I’ll actually be excited to push through the kilns. (Or that I would have been, sans the untimely death.)
And like that sometimes new tools are like a lease on life; a re-start with the lenses of perception freshly Windexed; a chance to fall in love again with something quite familiar yet just different enough to feel extraordinary.
I think it’s good to imagine your own death sometimes. Not in a ‘suicidal ideation’ kind of way — I mean in the sense of, “If this day, or this evening’s work session, or this pot was to be my last, how would I feel about that? What would I do differently if I could see it coming? And even though I probably won’t croak for another 40-60 odd years (emphasis on “probably” and “odd”), what do I want to have done and become by then? Which pots would I ideally like to be my last?”
That kind of thing.
“Never wanted this, never want to see you hurt.”
I also really liked that image of death by drowning in a bucket of slip; not sure why I saw that image so vividly or where it came from. Imagining that drying white mask of porcelaneous clay, slowing cracking apart as I fade, fade away.
”’Cause you know it’s never simple, never easy. For a clean break — no one here to save me.”
That idea prompts the typical “do you have your affairs in order” thoughts? You know, the obvious ones, like do the people you love know it? Does someone have your master password? And the less obvious ones, like what the hell would happen to this last batch of greenware? Does anyone else know where I hide the key to the lawnmower? If god is a woman, am I going to be in trouble for a lifetime of lustful musings?
You know, that kind of thing.
The pots left — speaking of having a plan or getting affairs in order — how cool would it be to make a mutual pact with a few other potters; either in the eventual case when one of us ships off to the great kiln shed in the sky, or, more mundanely, explodes a lumbar disc or succumbs to the complications of early onset silicosis; a pact where whoever’s left and still firing takes the unfired, unfinished stuff and gives it one last go. (Hmm… maybe all of this was prompted by lasering in on that Michael Simon interview; the idea of stopping before you’re ready, having things left to say, having pots stopped mid-stream.)
For me, it’d be great to know that if this was the last group of pots I ever made, some of them, the most promising ones, at least, would get shipped off to RP, to tuck into the dry spots in his kiln. Or to MK, to see his vines and blooms over my geometric dominos and new, zany carved lines; hardened to the earth’s magnetic poles from the hallowed ground of NC. And to Witt, to see how they’d look in mid-range electric — his glazes flowing over my deco instead of the other way ‘round this time — or maybe to beg/borrow/steal space in one of the local wood kilns to give them one last hurrah like that.
Fun.
“Every little bump in the road I try to swerve.”
But no; in case you’re worried or something; I’m not dying. At least, not now, and not that I know of. This isn’t a too-subtle declaration of that. My newly-nine-year-old just said the classic kid thing to me last night — “I hope you die after me, someday”, which is precious and heartbreaking in its innocence and a bump you really can’t just swerve to avoid, all in one.
So it goes. So it goes.
“You’re the only thing I know like the back of my hand.”
+46
#blogs/dl
10.8.17
“And all my walls, were tall painted blue. I’ll take ’em down, take ’em down, and open up the door for you.” – Ed Sheeran
Hey, you didn’t come play darts. Ah well; I wasn’t really expecting that you would. Yet another fantasy: end of day darts and shooting the shit with another potter. Maybe never.
The bad news is that, minus your supervision, I tripped on that fat extension cord, fell face first into a bucket of slip, and died right there, sprawled out on my studio floor. So sad.
The good news is that, here in Potters’ Heaven, there are way fewer s-cracks, and the export options from Bear to WordPress for your precious, carefully hewn text, actually make one goddamn bit of sense for a change. Phew! That life business was awful! Good luck with that, suckers.
“Come back and tell me why: I’m feeling like I missed you all this time.”
+45
/”And I got tired of waiting; wondering if you were ever coming around.” – T.S./
So, what kind of day has it been? The kind where I realize, for the hundredth time or the then thousandth hour, that I still suck at throwing tall, narrow cylinders. Especially in porcelain. The kind where I write in the too-early pre-dawn haze and then work in a semi-hallucinative state most of the afternoon. The kind where I realize that if I sacrifice an hour of downtime at night, most days, eightish to nineish PM or so, I can just let the pots go Ina continuous flow; not hard stopping for the arbitrary (or realistic) end of the work week, but rather making whatever I can, finishing whatever I can, keeping the rest lingering under plastic and chipping away at it, as I can; even, shockingly, at the end of a long, hard office Monday, or late after a kids’ bday party and its associated hoohah. Reminds me of that precious few weeks at Penland, when I’d drive back up to the studio in the dark, after my girls were in bed, and take one last shot at that day’s work. Ends up it’s a good time for certain things, like working with all my usual filters off; a higher chance of really just fucking things up, without my normal impulse control, but the occasional breakthrough or glimpse of some future around an unexplored corner might be worth it, in the end.
And so satisfying, in part because it’s so difficult to sustain, so unlike who I’ve grudgingly accepted that I am (or must be). Like living another kind of life, or jonesing on pretending I’m a mini-Michael Kline or something. A night owl who’s also a morning owl. Makes for kind of a grumpy, fucked in the head owl, who ain’t much good at hunting and shouldn’t go sharing his random thoughts on the public Internet.
Ah well.
/”I had more to say. I swear I had more to say. – Michael Simon/
If you haven’t heard that ep of RCR, well, you owe it to yourself; and second, if you have, but you don’t remember the /exact/ phrasing and intonation of that line, I mean, seriously man, you’ve gotta go check it out. It’s an all-timer. I’ve never heard anything more truthful than that.
“/Unfortunately, the canvas is/ you, /and sometimes you’ve gotta reprint it a bit — you know: try things out.” – Marc Maron/
I bet, when I’m sittin’ in my chair by the window, sometimes wonderin’ ’bout you, it just doesn’t add up. I keep waiting for all my efforts to result in someone transcendently /better/ at doing this; or ideas that are unquestionably an improvement on my older ideas; or a wellspring of motivation to appear that erases all the doubt and exhaustion and hesitation. None of those ever come; I got tired of waiting for the person I never showed up to be.
But, like Maron says, the canvas is you. All you can do is keep trying. We each only get one, by my estimation, but I see no limit to the number of times we can recoat or scrape away the old and try again. Every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around. Yeah?
/”We keep quiet ’cause we’re dead if they knew, so close your eyes, escape this town for a little while.”/
+44
#blogs/dl
/”Four thousand five hundred miles away; what would you change if you could?” – Counting Crows/
My brain turned on at four forty and there’s no way it was going back off. And while I am most definitely going out there to chase more pots again today, 4:40 is still a little too early even for me to go wandering out into the dark. So, looks like you poor bastards get yet another blog post.
In that RCR interview, Ben asked Michael if inspiration came from thinking about his work or from actually being in the studio. (I’m paraphrasing from memory here, so if any of this isn’t right, blame me, not them.) Michael said it definitely came from working, and then offered this devastatingly simple guide for how to make progress in your pots:
Set two pots on a table; two of /your/ pots, because if you try to consider the entire history of ceramics it’s just too much. One of those two will almost always feel more like you, more like its pointing in the direction you want to go next. Go make more stuff in that direction.
That’s it!
“/Holding on, the days drag on, stupid girl, I should’ve known, I should’ve known…”/
{Sorry. Every few paragraphs a timer goes off in my head and I have to squeeze in a T.S. lyric. Swear to god, these run through my thoughts on an almost constant loop all day long.}
So, is this great news or what? All you need is two of your pots, a table, the inclination, and some time to think.
Well, okay. To get even within a continent’s distance from the rare territory that someone like Michael Simon reached, I’m going to say you also need some deep personal knowledge; penetrating insight, to see past the clutter and pleasing distractions; and the drive to keep sincerely asking, over and over again, Professor Pilcher’s question: “What is the difference that makes a difference?”
After that Schrodinger’s riff the other day, I’ve been trying to think of a way to cram in an Occam’s Razor bit. Well, how’s this: that exercise above — putting two pots on the table, choosing only one to chase (for now, anyways) — how about if we call that Simon’s Razor? Yeah?
Oh fuck yeah. FILDI.
Caveats: it occurs to me that the hardest thing about doing this might not be making the choice, but later on, understanding why you made that choice. Also that inherent in that choice is turning away from vast swaths of other interesting, perhaps even intoxicating, potential. You can’t love two things exactly as much, in the same way, at the same time. Gotta choose.
So the Razor, while effectively narrowing your focus and aiming you towards higher plateaus, also means accepting all the other paths not taken; living with knowledge of the loss; that going deep means not going broad; that choosing one cardinal direction means leaving eleven others unexplored.
And doing /that/, over and over and over again, pruning away entire branches of your potential family tree to keep going taproot taproot taproot? Doing that, I suspect, is the /really/ hard part; the vastly uncommon skill and habit and, perhaps, even quirky twist of mind and self that most of us just can’t sustain.
I’d bet, as a general rule, all the greats — all our mutual heroes — have done that, one way or another.
Then again, what do I know? Especially at 5:44 on a Friday? Less than you, I’d wager.
Wondering where you are now, and if you’re still asleep or, like me, restless in the early dark, and if you’ll happen to read this later, even if later ends up being a lifetime or two from now.
I hope you liked it. Sorry for the swearing and misdirection; it’s still really early.
/”And I get no answers. I don’t get no change. It’s raining in Baltimore, baby, and everything else is the same.”/
+43
#blogs/dl
/”Come back and tell me why, I’m feeling like I missed you all this time.” – T.S./
Forgive my excess here. For reasons I can’t ken, I feel the need to log four posts in this 24 hour span. It was also a six photo Instagram day. Yow.
Actually, I think I /do/ know the cause, but it’s really unflattering and there’s no way I can just come out and say it. What’s a mystery to me is the underlying cause of the cause, if that makes sense. Probably this is just a band aid on a bullet hole, but you can only use the tools you’ve got.
As usual, I invite you to draw your own conclusions, Doctor.
I was right about today being a beast; started wooly and hungry, went feral there around lunchtime, but then started the graceful turn towards tameness as I settled into the rhythms and routines of the studio half of the week. Fuck. Not for the faint of heart, man.
But, as was pointed out to me, I /get/ to make more, to do it again this week, or to at least try. I often fall into the trap of thinking I /have/ to do it; really, I don’t. It’s a luxury piled atop other luxuries. And nothing tightens me up and makes me an unresponsive, unimaginative, shitty thrower like feeling all that pressure of obligation. Why even bother, if it’s gonna be like that?
I listened to the Michael Simon episode of the Red Clay Rambler podcast again. I think this was the second time, but it might have been the third. I needed something to yank my mind off of rehashing every social interaction from three busy days at the office — it goes at it like scouring the only lifeboat for leaks, even when I beg it to stop. Something to put those compute cycles into the clay. So I went straight to the big guns; it helped.
Damn, there are so many great moments in that interview. Ben did a wonderful job teasing them out, getting into the thick of it. It slowed me down a lot, having to keep wiping the throwing slip off my hands and scribbling down things MS said with a pencil in my notebook (some of which I’m sure I already wrote down the last time, and probably already stuck in one of these blogs at some point). But when I’m listening to one of my heros, and he seems to be getting at core truths… well, that’s a no brainer.
I guess it’d have been smarter to just stop working and sit and listen with my eyes closed. On the other hand, those little bowls and going to have — already do have — a record of the end waves of Michael and Ben’s voices etched into them as they spun past. Maybe, in just the right light at just the right time of just the right day, to just the right person in just the right frame of mind, it’ll even show. That’d be swell.
Oh, and I drank the last of my coffee out of the one little cup of his I have, on permanent, incredibly generous loan from the ever present Witt. It was, well, damn near perfect.
/”…and let me know that it’s not all in my mind.”/
+42
#blogs/dl
10.5.17.
“Do you remember when… We used to sing?” – Van Morrison
THURSDAY is an odd beast, stuck midway between Wednesday there and Friday here. Half of one life and half of the other sometimes adds up to not enough of either.
The morning needs the sequence of unpacking and synthesizing — some transition so I don’t carry the burdens from one place into the other — but if Friday is to have any half-dry pots to finish, they need to get started soon. My dark half reels at commands of GETTING SERIOUS and KNUCKLING DOWN and REALLY RUNNING OUT OF THE GATE HARD.
{“THANK YOU!” And the crowd goes wild…}
But I mean, don’t get me wrong — halfway is lifetimes better than the old zero sum game; or losing every match by a score of five to two. Or one. Or none. That was more like feudalism than a life.
But still. I know what I need to make next, and it’s going to be hard. Navigating these crowded maps is confusing. Difficult. Fucking Thursday.
And also… Thank the gods it’s finally Thursday.
“Na na na, na na na na, na na na na, b-gah!”
+41
#blogs/dl
10.4.17
/“I get directions and pretend I’m somewhere else.” – Ryan Adams/
Sometimes I get stuck, like on a single segment of a line. A slight curve in space, leading somewhere unseen, maybe, or seen, yet hinting at boundaries that probably exist (but might not). Sometimes, a single beautiful bit of a line is enough to bring the whole thing to a standstill. Breath catches, eyes go blank as I think, “now how can i possibly catch that line?” How to capture a moment in space, draw it into the open air on a random October morning and yet keep it and hold it there, until that lattice of glass and clay cracks or splinters apart, far away and maybe never even reported back home, to me.
How could I do that? What would I give to be able to? And do I actually have anything left to sacrifice?
Sometimes I get stuck, like on a single segment of a line.
“/Gonna take a lot of shit for me… to stay away.”/
+40
#blogs/dl
10.4.17
Junior Bucks said to read Writing Down the Bones. So I am. One small, patient chapter at a time. I love that she keeps using the word “discursive”. Nice coincidence there, considering that the book was written around the time I was finishing high school, and about 25 years before I settled on the title for this blog.
She encourages self-indulgent writing, which is great news for me. Or maybe she cautions against it? I’m not sure — it seems to vary from one mini chapter to the next; but I don’t hold that against her or the book. Like poetry or any other art, it can be two things. Maybe more.
So how indulgent is this, Natalie? Writing — aka “doing my writing practice” — on a pad of perforated, heavy cardstock Guest Checks, front and back, one per morning, right after I finish that day’s chapter of your book and before I clear away breakfast and start running down the day? Too indulgent?
Maybe.
How about fooling myself into thinking — just long enough to make it happen — that my practice should then be churned into blog material? Is this the performance, or a recording of me playing scales, or something else entirely? “This can be whatever you want.”
In any case, so far, it seems to be working. (However I’m defining that term.) Well, I can say for sure that it’s making me write — no, wait, it’s making me interested and even a little excited to write, which is even better than somehow being coerced into it. It is fueling a genuine motivation. Perhaps that will only last as long as the book does; perhaps that’s okay. But for now: words! Fun!
This pad or tablet or receipt book or whatever the hell it is feels like a fillable frame; just fancy and odd enough, and also not too stupid. I’m crossing out the heading “Guest Check”, first thing, and replacing it with one word; trying to grab the one that is top-of-mind in that moment. Or maybe the word that is just below that one, the second, as-yet-unseen item in today’s mental stack. I’m doing that “don’t aim too directly at the bullseye” thing; trying to squeeze my perception down an avenue I’d otherwise miss. Like: what word is almost in my brain — formulating out at the edges of my synapse network — but not quite there yet? What word, if I don’t pause for this half a breath to catch it, will never reach escape velocity from my subconscious? It seems possible that left hidden or revealed, either way it might impact my whole day. Schrodinger’s Thought.
So today’s word was “stability”. Ha. Hilarious.
I keep my hand moving across the whole front, filling in the lines, or at least, I try to. (There is no do, only try.) Flip. On the back side, the gridded chalkboard green and all the BEV | APPET | DES nonsense gives way to perfectly ruled, pale blue lines on a porcelain-white background {come on; give me your white skin}, with a big, all caps serif “THANK YOU!” at the top. This is so dumb, but when I flip it over and see that I can feel the chemicals fire off in my brain; tricked into feeling gratitude for the heroic effort I just expended to filling in a 3” x 7” card with a string of flimsy words. (Is it any less sincere, though, coming from a printer robot on the other side of the world some untold number of months ago, than it would be when paying the check at a restaurant, circled with a little smiley face by the server? In this postmodern era, I’m not sure where the boundaries between authentic human interaction and simulated human interaction are. If the same thing happens in my brain in either case, does it even matter? Can we fool ourselves into feeling appreciated, like imagining a stadium crowd breaking into cheers and holding up (lighters and/or cell phones) as I lift a freshly thrown pot from the wheelhead?)
Yikes.
So everything after the flip is pure DES; vegetables eaten, let’s binge on some sugar!
In today’s bonus section I wrote the first pass at what you read (or skimmed) above:
“I’ll add — perilously — that I think this thing is working — so cool that I accidented my way into it, instead of planned and guilted. All you’ve gotta do is fill one of these cards every morning after your muffin, and before childcare begins. That’s not hard; it’s like wedging my consciousness so it’s ready to get pulled up through the day.
DONE.”
Not bad, really.
Sometimes, later, I type in the good parts here, and tear off the little perforated strip at the bottom; complete with red ink CHECK NO. So lovely how it’s actually embossed into the paper; not just ink, but ink plus metal. This one was NO. 4889-27.
Rip up the card, to hide the evidence, and recycle. Keep the stub for proof: that I wrote, that I was here, that I lived a little.
Ho fatto questo.# +39
9/26/17
#blogs/dl
/“I don’t expect to be treated like a fool no more; I don’t expect to sleep through the night.” – Paul Simon/
Maybe if I believe it enough, I can turn into a Raven and fly away from here. Maybe.
I dunno.
You dreamed I tried to set you up, then brought me jelly doughnuts and whiskey. I started a book about writing and it encouraged me to go weirder, so I am. But I think it meant for first drafts, not last ones.
+
Last porcelain season I was riffing on black brushwork and stumbled onto this sequence of plusses or — it occurred to me later — crosses. Scattered in that one-two offset that I like so much for filling up space. Back forth. Day night. In out. Up down. The dialectic bloppity hoo; you know how it is: the cliches that ain’t true don’t last long.
Then wonderfully washed out and blurred by that flowing honey lava in the kiln, winding its way along fingertip banding twisted horizontally into kaolin rows, rolling off and then pooling on texture and transitions like water over smoothed rocks in a summer streambed.
The glaze takes my intent — a few particular minutes with brush in hand, going down the rows, left right, left right, repeat {trying to remember to leave a hole at the end, for the spirit to get out… trap ‘em in there and it’s just asking for trouble} — and tweaks it, bends it, runs it like a genetic mutation bumping up against the bounds of the felt universe. Lots of goodness to explore, there.
Anyways, yeah. “Crosses”. Gets me thinking about the perils of trying to evolve a personal iconography. Anything I come up with that isn’t simply a rehash of known tropes is more likely to clash with the larger cultural iconography than to dovetail with it. (Which gives some explanation to the pervasiveness of birds, flowers, vines and faces; or, several rungs down the kitsch ladder, peace signs, hearts, smileys and hashtags.)
My best unAmerican reader reminded me that the word “cross” meant intersecting lines long before the Romans got ahold of it. “Cross it out” or “cross your fingers”. So I see maths operators, or simple intersecting lines, leading back to marks made in charcoal on ancestral cave walls in France, but you might see Calvary and serious portent. Commentary. “Content.”
And look — what you or Bob or Susan might see in it is not /my/ responsibility. I mean, I can’t account for everything. But while it’d be super easy for me to just ignore those possible, unintended interpretations, it seems obvious (and undeniable) that I’ll make better pots if I at least /consider/ them.
Just as I try to take ownership for Every Little Detail of Every Single Pot, I need to try to own, to the extent I can, what these surface marks say, and why. Especially when it comes to symbols, icons, glyphs — or even stray marks that could be seen as such. The average person can’t “read” the curve of a handle or the texture of a glaze worth a damn, but they know a cross or a letter P or a #7 when they see one. And nobody wants to wake up some morning and realize that the “starburst” symbol they’ve been painting for years looks like a swastika to half the people in Europe.
So, here in the American “Heartland”, these considerations leave me looking over my shoulder, but I try not to let them stop me. Smart to consider; dumb to get stuck on. Find a way to make it yours. Find a way to allow for an alternate or even contrary interpretation that doesn’t kill your intent. Then accept a certain amount of fuzziness and surrender is required to do or say or make anything and put it out into the world. You do what you can; not what you can’t.
No matter what I do, someone will interpret these as capital-C Crosses, and therefore freighted with religious meaning. /Why are you distorting a holy symbol? I love how you got the real message of peace and salvation into your work!/ And then we’re off to the races. Unintended messages = unintended consequences. Fortunately, to date, those consequences mostly mean weathering this sort of embarrassment with a stoic grin and a friendly-yet-non-commital nod; I’ve endured worse. But you never know. In the Instagram era, anything could happen, and probably for the better.
“Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls, runs his hands through his thinning brown hair…”
+38
{Sept 20, 2017}
#blogs/dl
/”I thought someone would notice, I thought somebody would say something, if I was missing — can you see me? – Counting Crows/
I almost don’t even know who this person is anymore. So many repetitions of that Swift lyric about wanting to be my old self again but still trying to find it, then I find it and it’s like: who the fuck /is/ this person?
It’s crazy: waking up before six each morning, raring to go. Ideas for the blog, pots on the brain, genuine anticipation of something coming up in the day that I’m looking forward to. Then going back out to the studio several nights a week, say from eight to nine fifteen, to bash up scraps in the evening’s cool, or finish adding deco to the forms finished hours earlier, in the afternoon heat; or pip out pips and divot out divots and tidy up bats and clean off tools and think about prepping for the next day, because I’m actually kind of looking forward to the next day.
It’s about as ridiculous as that mustache that I threatened to wear for a whole week after dispelling the beard idea.*
(* Ends up The Admiral is an even worse negotiator than “Amnesty Don”. She said I could keep the mustache for a week if I’d shave the beard, probably thinking there’s no way in hell I’d actually leave the house looking like Cop #3 from an 80’s movie. And she was right — I wouldn’t and I didn’t, because I’m still a vain coward who definitely doesn’t want /that/ much attention. But making the threat for a few days (while ensconced at the pottery compound) was worth it, just to see my family squirm. Ha. You gotta take your fun where you can find it.)
After shaving it all off, it’s strange to just have a civilized face again; to reach up and not feel it there. To catch myself in a mirror and think there’s something missing. (Maybe the whole thing was a semi-subconscious symbolic ritual thing?) This — the status of my facial hair — is an absurdly small thing to care about or pay attention to, and yet… I spend so much time deliberating over hairline trails of throwing slip, the placement and character of each dot or stray mark of a brush — that kind of trained sensitivity and patterns of observation just naturally bleed over into other things. How far off center the pre-cut line in my bagel was made my some unseen machine. When one line in an email is in a different font. How the wind just shifted from the west to the south for a moment. Amongst the millions of other daily inputs that I completely miss — because, of course, our consciousness is so subjective and so astonishingly narrow — all these things register and get time on my mainframe; grinding, calculating, error checking, outputting. I can’t just turn it off because I step away from the studio. It’s seeped into to interface layer between software and hardware at this point; arguably, it now /is/ the soul of the new machine. And so the feel of my fingertips on my chin, or food going into my mouth past bare lips, or sun on uncovered skin are as noticeable now as an S-crack in a base or a popped bubble in a coating of slip.
I guess it’s a good reminder that I’m still alive; that I can be both me now and me then without needing to step into the same river twice; that there are sensations worth lingering over that don’t come down the too-familiar path of pain receptors and frustration.
Wow, Prozac+Porcelain is a heady combination.
“Which one am I again?”
Oh dear. After a solid, virtually uninterrupted four day week of flying high and free, it’s gonna be hard to cram my Raven back into his cage. Not sure if that temporary freedom is worth the painful transition, but I guess you could say that about life in general. It’s cages within cages, arbitrary degrees of relative freedom, mostly illusion, probably just a simulation.
So, there’s that.
/“C’mon gimme your white skin, c’mon gimme your white skin, c’mon gimme your white skin.”/
+37
{Sept 06, 2017}
#blogs/dl.
/“I just think that you write something that you would enjoy reading, like you’re writing the book that does not exist that you wish you could read, and then you hope that almost coincidentally other people feel the same way.” – Chuck Klosterman/
I woke up at 5am the other day with a near-complete vision for how I could shoehorn the old /tw@se/ archive into some kind of book. Most of that was just pre-dawn delusion — fooled once again by the Fake Awake. But some actually seems not-too-crazy by the light of day.
So I’m picturing something halfway between a cloth cover trade paperback, like those Penguin classics or a tasteful 537th reissue of Catch-22, and a midsize glossy coffee table photo book. Maybe square, just because.
(
In my semi-dreaming hallucination, that seemed like it would mess with the standard formula — like really stick it to The Man, with his rectangles and “normal” paper sizes! (I probably self-aggrandize more in that half-awake state than any other time, which is saying a lot.) More awake, I realize that Instagram has squarified almost everything to where that’s probably already well past cool and into being the new normal, and I’m probably just reflexively glomming onto that. (Sometimes, I think the hallmark of middle age is getting trapped in thought loops where something that would have actually been cool when you were 25 still seems that way at 45, and being almost completely ignorant of that mistake, while the world is already two decades farther on. That, and the back pain, I guess.) Oh — and that Blurb book demo that The Admiral printed for me, back when I retired the blog, was square — hold on a sec; lemme dig it out and send a photo of it to the global hive mind — and I really liked that, both for the outside format — it’s shape, sitting there on a table — and for the inside layout options that arise from filling in squares instead of rectangles. Size? Who knows? 9” x 9”? 11” x 11”? 13” x 13”?
)
In terms of style, in my vision it was closer to the 3rd generation template than the earlier ones. (And I am now rethinking my choice to leave the early years in their original style and layout. Ugh.) I guess that style is also pretty derivative — kind of the faux-Apple house style — but no one says I have to reinvent the form. In fact, trying to do so is probably a /terrible/ idea. I think about the dozens of things I learned about printing sale postcards over the years, many of them crucial things, all of them only learned the hard way (aka. by really fucking them up). Bleed and trim, DPI and print resolution, ICC, embedded color profiles, “rich black” hex codes, postal regulations, web previews, and on and on. Surely the learning curve and subsequent disasters would be even steeper and costlier for a book; which is essentially hundreds of postcards all in one print job, plus lots more text. Ugh.
Why repeat every novice mistake in the pursuit of something new or edgy when /the content/ is the reason for doing it in the first place? It’s OK to accept a standard frame as a standard frame. It doesn’t all have to be punk rock, dude. Find a template or something. Ask someone who knows, and trade them some pots for their time. Or… something.
So:
A] Crisp black text on lots of whitespace; brownish headers, greyish hairline borders and dashed lines; extremely spare use of red accents. (aka. “Coward Style”: When in doubt, make it shades of grey with a little brown and tiny bits of one primary color. Foolproof.)
(
No idea what to do about link colors — that Cadillac blue from the site? Seems kinda nuts. Or, come to think of it, what to do about links themselves. It’s the one thing that really won’t translate well from one medium to the other. I mean, how do you simulate a hyperlink on paper? Dashed lines that go from the link text to a floating callout containing the thing that was linked to? Maybe, but what if the destination was an entire article, or another blog, or a huge photograph? Ugh.
How about numbered references that lead to footnotes on each page (but where, now, a page is actually a page)? The problem there is the damn thing already /has/ footnotes; some posts were more note than body text! (In my wannabe DFW style; cf. what I wrote above about things that were cool in my 20’s.) Or I guess the notes from the links could lead to a big concordance in the back? Or to a second reference book — a /tw@se/ TLDR; — that, instead of having the contents of the links, instead is full of my current explanations of what those links were, why I chose them, how it was supposed to be a callback or some inbred in-joke or other caffeinated mania. Yes. Crazy.
Embedding hyperlinks into ink on trees is like dancing about physics.
)
B] Vigorously edited. I mean, printed out on plain copier paper, for reference, the seven & 1/2 years of the thing filled two XL binders. And that wasn’t including even a moderate slice through the photos. It /has/ to be cut down; just has to. I mean, shit, so much of it was just top of mind garbage and stalling for time and fulfilling the weekly obligation and offhand musing en route to obfuscating what I really wanted to say but felt I couldn’t. Like Shane Mickey’s classic description:
“All the same ramblings, of what a day had consisted of, and not, these are the 8 pitchers i made today, the one on the right has a bit to much volume in the belly, the one on the far left is out of proportion and does not have a clean line….. you get the point.”
The book version should at least attempt to skirt that kind of low grade repetition.
C] And, looking back, there’s lots of pretty run-of-the-mill, mediocre photos of pretty run-of-the-mill, mediocre pots — a lot of those should not make the cut. Too much of everything and the occasional gems will just get buried. (Or perhaps I should say “re-buried”, since I did a pretty good job burying them the first time.)
D] Also have to account for any /new/ stuff I’d add. Which, given my propensity for just adding and adding and adding, is pretty likely. OK, who am I kidding? /Guaranteed/.
‘I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.’
E] For example, another idea I saw in that AM vision was some sort of sidebar, once per “chapter” or so, written now, that comments on or clarifies or adds (hopefully) to the old text. (This sounds terrifyingly like footnotes on the footnotes, but in for a penny… FILDI!) I had a great name for these, lying there in the dark, and lost it. Something like “LOOP<BACK”? I dunno. (ps. That means it was probably a /terrible/ name, and I just fantasized how stellar it was. I mean, seriously, “LOOP<BACK”? Ugh! Kill me now.)
F is for] Photos. They would be a quagmire; I mean; jesus. Let’s say the book is 11” square. They’d have to be big and high-res, for the most part, because I’d really love to have full page, full-bleed images scattered through it. For all of that time I was shooting a typical 35mm frame — so, portrait or landscape, but definitely rectangular. (Kids, this was /before camera phones/, and /way before/ camera phones where the default photo option was Square.) So the originals would also have to be big enough to crop something out.
I’m sure I still have all of the source material, because I’m a pretty obsessive digital packrat, but a lot of it in the early days was probably shot at lower than print-resolutions. Those early digital cameras sucked, and so did all the first gen iPad shots. So all that stuff would need massaging, which is a slog, and still might only work if printed at smaller sizes.
(Which isn’t a dealbreaker or anything; it’s just that tiny photos usually drive me nuts — most of the time in magazines and books I’m trying to zoom in with an index finger and thumb as I would on iOS. I so often want to see more detail, or a different detail than the person was focused on. (The truth usually lingers at the margins, or suggested, just out of frame.)
On the other hand, a mosaic or collage can spruce up a bunch of otherwise-not-great images; like the cover of that Blurb book, which The Admiral lovingly yet hastily threw together, it’s the collective impact that counts, in that format, and you can kind of fake it. And there may even be some interest in remixing things out of chronological order, like a whole run of a year’s leatherhard greenware on one page, or all the baby pictures jammed into a “For Those Of You Who Care About Parenting” appendix.
G] Page layouts are a hard nut, too, because I have almost zero experience with that. A twice-yearly sale postcard and CSS blog templates are small potatoes by comparison. I’ve never learned (and scarcely even used) the proper tools: going all the way back to the mid-90’s: Quark, PageMill, Illustrator, InDesign. Hardly even done vectors, aside from my brief spell as a hobbyist Flash animator. Every card or poster I’ve ever done for ink and paper has been straight up Photoshop, raster images, sewn into permanent place. Like hammering with a screwdriver. Simile? Similar? Simian?
I guess, again, that’s where the pros would have to come in, if I wanted it to be good, and that’s another problem. “Straight cash, homie.”
All that caterwaulling aside, I can imagine full pages of edge-to-edge photo spreads offsetting dense pages of text; dashed lines indicating which small photo linked to which annotated big photo. (Remember, Witt, how long I was doing that before you grokked to it? And then, how I baited you into clicking through to every big image just in the hopes of finding another easter egg? /So mean!/ But you’ve gotta admit: some of those combos and switcheroos were pretty good. Almost worth all the extra clicking.)
I guess now, in 2017, almost three full years after I closed the door on that writing project (or phase or habit or blog — or whatever you want to call it), it is starting to feel apart from me enough that I can see its virtues. Separate enough that I might be able to start sorting its wheat from its chaff; with more of a detached, editorial eye. And hopefully with less swooping and confounding regret. Seems like the couple times I tried to take a pass at it previously, it was just too soon. Wouldn’t really do to get tearstains all over the galleys, now would it?
I can imagine, today, what would be good about it in the different, more substantial, more /invested/ format of a book. It’s okay for it to be good in different ways; a re-purposed or re-considered thing. It’s not like the book would erase the web site. It’s not like the web site is a prerequisite to getting something from the book.
I can imagine, sort of, how a new reader might discover and enjoy the compacted, sifted, annotated paper version better and more easily than the unadulterated, self-indulgent, sprawling digital mass. I can imagine how an old reader might discover and enjoy the same things again in a different light, or new things in the same light, or the nostalgic overlay of contemporary comments and factoid updates. [eg. ‘The barn’s now just a pile hidden under trees and weeds.’ ‘That baby is in 3rd grade, with glasses.’ ‘Still workin’ that same ol’ dayjob.’ ‘I sold the treadle and now throw at a million miles an hour.’ ‘I HAVE NOT YET GIVEN UP!!!’]
I can even imagine — just barely — how, as an object, a book could even be worth its price; at least, to a hilariously small, bespoke audience. What, 22 copies, plus a few for me and a couple more for posterity? You know I’d give away at least 11 of the 22. So that should only leave me a few hundred hours and $1-5000 in the hole for my efforts. Almost as profitable as making pots! Ha.
<loop>
Anyways.
The Admiral thinks I should do it. The Mom thinks I should. So does Pixel. And ‘Aunt’ Nell, who’s smart, and discerning, and wiser than me, and not even biased in my favor by familial ties, like those other three. When all the layers of matriarchy in my life say I should do something, I should probably just do it.
[Note:
This post in no way guarantees that I will ever actually do it. This is not a commitment. Heck, I’m not even adding it as a To Do item! I am a world-class procrastinator. (Over in the /tw@se/ archive, I spotted a photo of my work table with a freshly purchased copy of the book The Now Habit; that was 10 years ago and I still haven’t read it.) Writing this post, ironically, might have brought me one step closer to doing it, or it might have burnt up the impulsive vision that prompted it, and now I’m sated enough to retreat back to not doing anything about it.
We’ll see.]
¶ “I basically write for a different version of myself.”
+36
{Sept 11, 2017}
#blogs/dl.
/“You lived in the present, but that present always contained a past, some image of a ruined paradise.” – Pete Hamill/
i i i am not a bot
Had a dream that I was being incarcerated. Details unclear. One of the other patients/prisoners asked me if I was in for the 1% knowledge boost, and I said, “No. I’m here for the wisdom.” All the others laughed, like I’d just told a great joke.
I think I know why the caged bird stares at me like it wants to peck my fucking eyes out.
i i i am not a bot
“What’s the point of wings if you hardly ever fly?”
+35
{Sept 06, 2017}
#blogs/dl.
/“You need a hug in the morning, too.” – Pix’l/
When she’s older, when I’m older, when the toys have gone or been archived into closets, I’m going to imagine her happily playing with Legos on a sunny September Sunday morning; acting out her wishes and questions, completely engaged in the moment; me in the next room, where I can hear but not be seen, doing my “adult work” while she does her “kid work”; the ideal hour that all the rest of the week works so hard to make happen.
The satisfaction in her joy. The momentary sense that things will work out okay. That I am failing her within acceptable limits.
The oh-so-fleeting sparkle of her innocence. That fragile state of knowing and also not yet knowing. Another childhood, gradually unraveling like a spool of the most precious thread.
“If school is my job, I wish they would pay me.”# +34
{Sept 04, 2017}
#blogs/dl
/“You took various elements, you were precise about each one of them, but you made them fresh by the way you arranged them. The process kept his brain alert and alive. Or so he thought, as the months became years, and the years became decades.” – Pete Hamill/
Well, that last one could have used some editing.
(I mean, all those ridiculous parenthetical asides — those alone would sink any ship before it left the harbor. You’ve gotta /burn/ the ships!)
But but but — it was No. 33, and nothing says ‘almost perfect loop’ like 33.333333333, &etc. You, my die-hard All-22, will recall “my minor obsession with counting things and fake belief in numerology”.
I AM A STRANGE…
OK — stop it. Just stop.
[I think there’s such a thing as a blogging hangover. Like you’ve wrung every drop out of the sponge, vigorously and gladly, but are then left dry and kind of sad looking by comparison. Like you’ve given away too much of what you’d been storing up, and need awhile to casually soak up some more before putting any more out. (Maybe I’m afraid that if I squeeze too hard it’ll make me cry?) Reminds me of why the weekly routine was such a bear sometimes.
Get it? Bear? Yikes, I’ve gotta get busy figuring out how this new rocketship works.
Also, I think there’s something to this tactic of front-loading each post with the word salad detritus routine, to scare off the looky loos and pottery tourists before we get to the real meal. This isn’t a club you can just waltz into; you’ve got to earn your way in.
The first rule of Blog Club is… we make you wade through hot garbage before the fighting starts.
Oh: blogging about blogging. You never get old to me, as a way to prime the pump. But you’ll never get less interesting or insufferable to all the poor humans who think there might be something here worth their time. I just keep stringing you along, dear reader, with the occasional glimmer of fool’s gold amidst the mounds of clinkers and chalk, don’t I?
Come to think of it, it’s sort of like when you click the reading lamp back on in the middle of the night, and the brightness is so intense you think your eyes will never adjust, but just a few minutes later you’re lost in a /New Yorker/ tale about some pop star you’ve never even heard sing, or an exegesis on 100 years of academic infighting over Freud, or a profile of some hypercapitalist asshole who’s literally ruining the world for the rest of us. And then stopping reading, and going back to the dark, seems just as strange and counterintuitive as starting did a half hour before.]
+
“Dear reader, my apology, I’ve… gotten lost before.” – Michael Stipe (before he unexpectedly draped his sweaty t-shirt over my head that one time at the cafe. So weird.)
So I was wide awake — or, as I should call it, Fake Awake — at 2:10 this morning, rather than 3. Brain churning through three different post ideas, spawned in the half-light of those first few hours of dreams. The illusory brilliance, how it all seems to come together and make new sense, if I can just weave the threads together just so.
Starting to think it’s a legit side effect, and that I should flag it as such.
The Wizard says you can get wired and more anxious. I’m wondering if delusions of grandeur* are also on the menu, or if that’s just the “authentic” me. “The authentic me” is a bit of a wildcard, even at the best of times, and can be kind of a narcissistic !.
[* I tried to spell that “dillusions”, like the pickle. Proof that the organ doing the writing ain’t nearly as grand as it might sometimes think.]
[Oh right — another blog /about making pots/, you say. OK, here goes.]
I spent a rare Friday at the office last week, swapped for my usual Wednesday on request, so I had W, TH, SAT in the studio. It reminded me why I very deliberately established a work schedule with all the office days and studio days confined to their separate halves of the week. That hole in the middle of the making cycle is like a bullet in the brain.
I wasn’t strategic enough (or diligent enough) to start some pots on TH that could carry over to SAT, so, in that most rare of circumstances, SAT wasn’t a breathless, semi-panicked rush of chasing plastic. (Like shit and Sissyphean stones, wet pots tend to roll downhill to the last possible moment.) While I occasionally take some pride in finding the enthusiasm to go back out after Pixel is pixelating, to finish up a bit of deco or wrap up some half-completed mess, it mostly sucks to leave it to that last resort. I make terrible, lazy decisions almost any time after 4pm. Same goes for squeezing in some task on Family Day — moving a batch of reclaim clay forward to the next step, or packing up a pot for shipping. While threading the needle can be rewarding (“Look at me!”) that kind of stunt usually costs me more than its worth. Just get it done on Saturday, dude.
{Hi, K from A! Here are those characters you used to like, back in the day. I haven’t forgotten about them completely, and I hope you still like them. They’ve come a long way in 2 1/2 years, but also not so long at all.}
[OK, still not really “about making pots”, but getting closer. The picture is not the frame.]
I trimmed through a bowl, getting too assertive about that vanishing foot. 11/12 ain’t bad. I took a picture of my calendar and posted it to Instagram. I took a picture of my beard, and didn’t. I kept smashing up bits of dried clay, slaking it back to wet earth, grateful for the distraction; for something to do with my stupid, stubborn hands. The floor space recovered by grinding through those boxes of scraps is delicious, but I’m faking myself out. Converting them into five gallon buckets of wet slops, stacked in the corner by the stove, is just kicking that particular can down the road. They’re gonna have to go /somewhere/ when it’s time to bring the firewood in, and that time always comes sooner than I expect.
So strange, amongst all those bits of near randomness, to find artifacts of my former intent, preserved like skeletons buried in the ice. “Oh, there you are, Peter.” A hard, faceted line embedded in a pile of formless shavings; the curve of a thrown rim up against a clump of hardened throwing slip; the ultra-rare perfect shard of my name stamp and date code, lying there face up near the bottom of a box, discarded in 2004 or ’14 or god knows what those four dots actually meant at the time; likely because of some killer spiral crack through its base or careless chip from its rim.
I did white slip on some of the dozen minus one bowls, Simon via Taylor’s Magical 6 Tile Greenware Flashing Slip on others, black underglaze, too, but less than I wanted… can’t put black underglaze on /fucking everything/. Left a few bare clay, which feels wrong and naked and like the bad old days of ∆10 reduction. A reduction of what the pots can be; a reduction of myself.
I placed a clay re-order, despite that mass of porcelain still taunting me, to get my credit from Standard off the books before we all forget about it. They were more than decent about making amends for that 300-odd# of #508 with junk in it; unlike that other place. Even though I aggravatingly had to wire-screen it and pick through that shit, it still /worked/ (far as I can tell) and didn’t cause any problems in the fired clay. So 66.6% in credit seems fair to me. After x years of very happily using their clays, this was the first issue of any kind I’d had, so it’s super reassuring to have them treat me right.
And — not in any way a slight to Standard, although one can never be too sure of one’s own motives — I also ordered one box of three different B-Mix type clays from Laguna, to test. That evergreen hope that there’s some new clay out that that will ride in and solve all my problems, give me the fine trappings of my dreams, cradle me in its protective embrace. Yeah, right. “It’s too late for you and your white horse, to catch me now.”
I did the bare minimum of straightening and junk sorting to reclaim another shelf of my drying rack for actual pots — still all out of sorts from the big shelf revamp this summer. Shit everywhere. Sawed down the old dorm room door panel so it’d fit in the top frame of my bespoke rolling cart — I mean, so ridiculously over-built and heavy duty that you’d laugh while also churning inside with envy. Maybe now I’ll actually move the banker’s boxes from the spring sale — May! — out of the showroom and back into storage, until next time.
There are few things in clay that make me more content than the sight of a full ware rack of bone dry greenware. Like a pile of seasoned firewood in the shed or a five digit number in savings*, it’s like earned kinetic energy; a huge-ass rock that I rolled up the hill myself. Ready to release it when the time is ripe. Proof that I have been working /lately/; but nothing yet left to be done to them. A temporary pause in the otherwise-relentless cycle of obligation. Still full of possibility… it’s unlikely, but they /could/ still exceed my expectations. An injection of confidence and ambition when I walk in early to open up the windows or late to drape a board of work in plastic. I HAVE BEEN MAKING POTS. /I throw, therefore I am./ The luxury of philosophy.
[Aww… that was pretty good! Why do I always doubt myself so badly, those first half dozen paragraphs? A perpetual lack of confidence, that must be re-proven every time, it seems. When will I have my proverbial 1o,ooo hours in? Is that what it takes to be able to just jump in and go for it? Does Wendig still do ten minutes of self-waggling each day? Or is it maybe akin to stretching and warming up; word wedging? You have to believe that this thing before the starting is the starting. Sure, you show your wedging in the final object — for those fans sensitive enough to see it — but nobody buys a ticket to watch the athletes stretch and run wind sprints.]
[OTOH, sometimes my favorite sound in music is the crowded anarchy of an orchestra tuning up. Like watching a bone-wielding paleolithic ape evolve into a sapien doing banking on their iPhone in the span of a couple minutes.]
.* Note: I’m full up on firewood, but it has been a /long/ time since I had five digits in the bank. Like pre-Crash, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
“The challenge for the functional potter is to achieve personal expression within the limits of an established problem. This is a very difficult and noble task.” – Wayne Higby
+33
{Sept 01, 2017}
#blogs/dl.
/“Autumn leaves were falling down like pieces into place, and I can picture it… after all these days.” – Taylor Swift/
The weather turned this week, and it’s like rocket fuel straight into my tank. Like I can breathe again, can aspire a little, can bypass my A/C guilt-debate and get straight to thinking about throwing.
“Time — I think it’s about time.” – Aunt Nell
+IMG – sketch Instagram
It’s so weird to wake up at 3am excited about blogging again. I would say, “I wonder what’s changed?”, but that would be more disingenuous than even I am comfortable with.
- Besides that other reason, getting back a few chunks of laudatory feedback really helps. So encouraging to get proof that I made a connection that mattered, even if just a little; that I made people I care about grin or feel or think something.
“I will go to America. In your name.” – Witt, after Pete Hamill
I know the writing is best when it’s about the writing, which is to say: intrinsically motivated. And I think it mostly is; OK — 50/50 is closer to the truth, on the average day; but let’s not lose sight of the other half of this equation which is the /sharing/. As I said last time, I write plenty that stays home; rooted in hearth and tradition. The words that I send to America, in your name… well, it’s nice to know when those emigrants have arrived, and that they’re in a safer, better place.
- Oh, and duh: reading a good novel, one that pulls me along rather than me having to climb my way up it, really helps, too. Makes me love words on a daily basis, instead of only weekly, or less.
- Music helps: a song in my head in the shower, kicking off the morning in the studio, letting Pix’l DJ while taking her to school. Letting (or making) myself close my eyes and air drum it out, all the way through to the end of the song, so that I really feel it; like sucking the last, sweet-sour little bits off the pit.
(Oh Taylor, now look what they made you do. “And I know it’s long gone, and there’s nothing else I can do…” I always seem to love to old stuff best, and to regret when “my” pop stars make the turn to the new; the image re-image, the big makeover, the new sound. There’s an obligation to feed the culture mill that made them, and the mill grinds best on a persona shift, with all it’s readymade contrast and the gossip of motivations. Even if that’s just bouncing from one pole to it’s obvious opposite, and then later, back again.
And sure, you’re culpable in that choice; we all are, even the not-famous, not-bazillionaires. Every day is a choice between the rose garden or Madison Square. But also, “the world doesn’t just let girls decide what they’re going to be.” And I’m keenly aware, these days, of just how quickly the world sneaks up on you.)
- Switching from Ulysses — no, not /that/ Ulysses — what do you think I am, insane? — to Bear, while momentarily heart-stopping and terrifying, weirdly and unexpectedly also helps. Like a clean sheet of paper and a fresh new pen, sometimes you’ve gotta change your software to escape all those piles of entangled old code and good intentions.
(Funny, though, how I’m gonna keep hitting /Apple-S/ every few paragraphs, reflexively, from twenty years of hard-won, ingrained habit, even though now it literally does nothing.)
(Funny, too, that I switched — or am in the process of deciding to switch right now — because I balked at being shook down for a monthly subscription /for writing software/, but now I’m gonna willingly pay a monthly subscription /for writing software/. Price point counts — always — but so does that feeling of honoring the deal that was made, and of punishing those who do not. When your platform is basically open and has not achieved critical lock in, do not fuck with your users.
And also, the main feature you’re paying for is cross-platform synch, which is arguably (just barely) an ongoing service and therefore worth paying for continuously. But it’s also almost completely useless to me, because I’ve gotta type on my good keyboard; I cannot imagine wanting to write on my iPad or, worse yet, type on a phone-sized piece of glass. As a backup system, that synch is completely redundant for me, too, because I still do backups the old school hard way, with spinning platters and cables and everything. Also, storing every stray captured phrase and draft and quote and note to self in The Cloud — hackable, copyable, sellable, and probably pre-screened by the NSA (and/or worse) — is paranoia-inducing. (If you doubt that this is a reasonable degree of caution, look up an article about how they successfully stripped SSL off of Google’s back haul traffic — for years — until Snowden told us all what was really up.)
(OTOH, almost none of that prevents me from using Evernote like an outboard brain for almost everything else… so: guilty as charged. With, I guess, a dash of “if you’re gonna put all your eggs in one basket, then watch that basket!” as rationalization.)
OK, that’s 4 things. Enough writing about the writing, fer god’s sake.
+IMG – vases Instagram
In the studio, I’m finishing off the dregs of last year’s batch of stoneware. Just two two-part vases wiped out the #508. A run of a dozen small-to-medium bowls ate about 15 lbs. of the Troy’s #621. (I ask myself: am I bowling for dollars, or because I just felt a little too out-of-sorts to go vertical today, and genuinely had a thing I wanted to try again with those thick rims and tapered, vanishing foot? Can it be some of both?)
Either way, I made them, and was proud of myself for the effort; thinking all the while about him, and that lovely old CM article, and the poem about a hole in the earth and a barrel of ink, and that amazing email after I wrote KTD out to the clay world (and, of course, another round of regrets for how I probably botched the reply with my characteristic bombast and overkill. Nothing chases away faster than forced sincerity and multiple drafts of obsequiousness).
(And yes: I get the irony that that’s exactly what I’m doing to you here — well, minus the editing and drafting part — with all these gratuitous interruptions and asides and parens and formatting garbage. It’s so tempting to go grab another coffee and keep this party going, but I know for the sake of all of us I should switch to water and eat a banana instead. Wondering if you’ll be able to tell, from the rest of this, which course I chose?
I intend for it — the zaniness, the swerving, the mania — to be part of the fun… and I confess that sometimes it’s fully half the fun for me, doing it — and/but so I know it’s way more self-indulgent than good, and that I should listen to old dead Gary Gygax, but also, back to that int/ext tension and the battle for the soul of my writing, and some sort of truth to power or integrity of process — god, dare I say, “craft” in this context? — and that I’m chasing you away on one hand and later begging you to stay with the other. I get it. I’m sorry—not sorry.
And how about all these photos lately? My new iPod Touch has made me pretty bonkers for Instagram. I went to make those vases, and after that long, awful run of cracking at the seam where the halves are joined, started taking obsessive notes with each batch. Which is good, as words on paper, but lacks the visual reminder. So I was giddy at realizing I could — quickly and with very little friction — thumb through that archive of images and see the very pots that my notes were referring to; in wet process, as bisqueware set out on the big table for glazing, coming out of the kiln. I’ve documented all this with a camera since the early days of /tw@se/, if not before, but it’s just now becoming truly accessible. The “Insta” part is a really key feature.)
Anyways, I cannot conceive of how it took me 15 months to go through 7 boxes of clay… maybe I had some left when I reordered last summer? I sure hope so, because that’s a mere 21.33#/month, on average. Crikey.
(See the Ceramics World on a pound of clay a day! (Or less!))
Porcelain is next; /ooh, porcelain…/
My notes say the seven boxes of that, sitting patiently on the sledge, have been there since 5/27/16, so it’s a good thing Standard’s clays tend to come a little wet, and magically keep soft in those wrapped bags so long. [He said: having not actually checked, and so with virtual fingers triple-crossed.]
My Photos archive should easily be able to tell me when I last switched clays , but it’s sketchier than I’d expected… I see photos of stoneware this time last year, and we definitely weren’t doing porcelain when Witt was here, and there’s one from last spring, around the time I put on the brick chimney… OK, September 2015 that’s definitely porcelain. Small plates and that set of quirky small bowls for my friend Trox, and I remember going out at night in the dark and the cold to scrubby scrub scrub all those little holes, but the record goes worryingly blank there.
Wait — /Instagram/ to the rescue! See? I knew it would come in handy! February 13, 2016: there it is on a Saturday To Do list. So that was the last time I switched from white clay back to brown. 18 1/2 months ago? Whew… that’s a long time. So I must have gone back-to-back stoneware after that? Yeah, that sounds right. Not firing redux anymore, which is what the majority of the porcelain went to, and needing more taller pots to fill bottom shelf of salt (and also that sucky bloating problem with the #257 in the super hot zone of my kiln). Yeah, OK; I think that rationale adds up to the reality close enough to call it a memory.
Huh.
“Dada, remember when Carter was here, and we had Fruit Loops /and/ pancakes /every/ morning?”
Uhm… sort of? Sorry, honey, but I hardly fucking remember /anything/ these days. Like how we bought Taylor’s /Fearless/ instead of /Speak Now/, or how many firings I did last fall, or what I was going to write about this morning back when it was 3:31 and I didn’t think I’d get back to sleep.*
Good thing you can remember a lot of it for me.
*//////// I totally jinxed it, CG! I knew I shouldn’t say the name of the spell if I wanted it to keep working! When will I ever learn?
+IMG – x’s Instagram
Look at all those beautiful X’s. Are you detecting a running theme here? I sure do like my X’s. All those days I’ll never have to live again. Writing down the bones. Good, Average, Wretched. Clear the dishes, setup the coffee, mark it off. Repeat.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Then do that fifty one more times; then do that fifty one more times; that’ll get you to what, 97? Surely that’ll be enough. Surely. ‘Time — I think it’s all about time.’
oatsiltpony @stearth fuck. no time. never enough time.
oatsiltpony @stearth and always too much too.
Never enough time, and always too much, too.
But seriously, tho’, I’d really like to get those kind of X’s on my pots somehow. Not just the blood red — although that’d be stellar (encapsulated stains? I’m awash in my ignorance). But the can’t-be-faked aspect of making a mark, and then another day making a similar mark, yet different, because it’s not the same river twice, and the pen is at a different angle, if it’s even the same pen, and your mind and heart and guts are all oriented and entwined differently, even if just a little, and then all those add up and repeat and loop, 28, 29, sometimes even can you believe it 31, and these patterns emerge and create the magic of negative space — what an idea, as if space was naturally positive and needed a qualifier to delimit it’s boundaries up against human intention — and then, oh, then, an artificial event horizon that says, “Hey, dummy, it’s time to turn the page”, and we get to do it all over again. So good.
In a medium that is “all about time” — clay, that is — how could you possibly orchestrate that process? Mark an X; spray it; cover it. Another one the next day; and the next; and the next. Bonkers. Or, to quote my one-time studio mate Rick, “That’s just crazy talk!”
Remember when you had some grade school assignment that you were supposed to do all month, like tallying the books you’d so proudly read, [PHOTO ALBUM ON THE COUNTER, YOUR CHEEKS WERE TURNING RED, USED TO BE A LITTLE KID WITH GLASSES IN A KING SIZE BED] or all semester, like a studio sketch book that would have been so good for you if you’d actually done it but for reasons you can no longer imagine — you were probably too busy chasing girls or imagining starting a band or lying on the grass in the quad a 1:30 on a Thursday — {YEAH, YOU CALL ME UP AGAIN JUST TO BREAK ME LIKE A PROMISE. SO CASUALLY CRUEL IN THE NAME OF BEING HONEST, I”M A CRUMPLED UP PIECE OF PAPER LYING HERE AND I REMEMBER IT ALL, ALL, ALL TOO WELL.} — and so you tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to fake it at the end: writing left handed, switching pens, or from ink to pencil, a little cursive here, block printing there, maybe some scribbled notes in the margin and a few drops of Pepsi or some wrinkling to make it look authentic? Yeah, well…
If I tried to do all those X’s like that, but compressed into the time that I’d normally finish a pot, before it could dry on a more typical schedule, I think that same fakery and distain for the organic integrity would shine through. All ceramics are fake, but that’s more fake than I’m interested in perfecting.
Maybe someone will give me a big grant to hire three pre-MFAs and build a Kanenko-sized damp box, and each day we’ll ascribe one X each on hundreds of nearly-identical pots, then build one of those wooden boxy thingies, to hand on the wall and somehow in aggregate give them a gravitas that any one of them would singly lack? Yes, maybe they would. Craven like a raven. This is how good potters morph into mediocre sculptors.
Oh yeah. That part right there? /That’s/ the part I should cut.
So glad I don’t have comments.
+IMG Instagram >> bowl hole
So I should wrap this, or save the rest for another installment, but I’ll finish with what I hope will be a drop into the bucket that Pilcher held out to us seven years ago; the one that said ‘fill with deep, personal stories about your thinking and how you make decisions in your work’ — or, at least, that’s how I remember it now.
I’ve been growing out a beard — a hipstery goatee to be precise. It’s starting to get bushy, and in a surprise echo of my Nordic-Irish roots, has got some red in it, and in a non-surprise, due to my lapsing life force, a respectable bit of grey at the edges, too.
It began as a standard vacation beard; simply a lack of the shaving routine. But at the point where I’d normally have zeroed it out, something said not to. Like with the new software, or following the internal barometer in the studio that tells me what to make next, what style to chase, what ideas are fresh and when some others have gone stale, I felt the need for a small new beginning; even if just an arbitrary external transformation; more chrome than core. My own pop-star-persona reinvention routine.
Something to remind me that I’m aiming to be another person; an outward sign of a subtle yet potentially deep interior change. Proof that I’m trying. A strange thing to present to the world as a badge of honor, but good to tug on or rub while I’m musing — remember not to get stuck in the same loop, remember occasional gratitude, even if you don’t feel it, remember you were over there and now you’re over here, remember you have a choice.
Now I guess fluoxetinian sunsets will be the only ones I can love, but thus far it’s a hell of a lot better than not loving any of them at all. Walking past that almost-daily majesty, studio closed up for the night and key in hand; head down, watching my feet plow through the gravel; so focused on the crush of stone on bone that I miss those glimpses of the blessedly infinite and distant; the reminder of things outside of self. None of this will last forever; and so, even if it’s mostly bad now, that too, then, is weirdly a good thing.
X’s and O’s.
“…but I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to.”
+32
{Aug 29, 2017}
#blogs/dl
/“Maybe I was naive, got lost in your eyes — never really had a chance.” – Taylor Swift/
Ten years ago this week ( @ St. Earth ), only 18 months into my leap into being a full-time potter, I pulled the ripcord. Still falling in that direction, but slowing the descent to a less-terrifying rate, via a parachute I’d not expected to find strapped to my back.
I didn’t come to realize that I needed to Kill The Dream of being a full-time potter until later, and it took even longer to actually kill it, but pulling that cord in 2007 was probably the catalyst.
And, you know… who cares? Ten years, nine, one, a million. It’s all just shorthand or placeholders, arbitrary demarcations on the Wall of Death. Good for reunions and anniversaries; habitual, often required intervals of time when we pay attention to something that might otherwise have just slipped our notice.
I look back at the posts around that post, a decade ago to this week or month, and there are some shocks — things that I was sure had happened more recently; pots that I had no idea I had made that long ago; techniques or styles or habits that I would have guessed had evolved more recently.
We get older, time goes faster, meaning travels along different paths and tends to go fractal.
So after six.five years in an office, building and tending websites, I spent a mere one.five years going to my studio 6.5 days a week, then scurried back for 1.5 more years of full-time office work, before (gratefully) transitioning to .5 time office, .5 time studio; almost every week, for almost every year, since then.
Huh. I don’t know how I feel about that. If I squint and look over my shoulder — the Left Hand of Darkness — I can see my zombie dream still hovering there — like Nearly Headless Nick — despite having tried to dispel it for good (and mostly (or most often) believing that I had). It’s awfully hard sometimes not to dwell on what might have been; a little more luck one way, a little better planning or determination or smarts. It would certainly have been different; possibly even disastrous.
Mostly I regret my imagined quality of potter /I could have been/, today, given double the working life in the studio between then and now. All those reps missed, time lost, ideas not iterated, avenues not explored. I still look with envy at the better half of my “real” potter friends’ lives; how they make as many pots in a month as I make in six; how they tie a day or a week or a season’s worth of work together with continuity, instead of this always stopping, always re-starting shit; how they never go to meetings.
Ha. If even 50% of that 50% is true I’d be amazed. The evergreen fantasy of unearned greener grass.
“…most of the best potters write little, if at all.” – Don Pilcher
I think about /tw@se/, now, too. A lot, just lately. I know I stopped for good reason, and I know it’s made the intervening years immeasurably easier, and I know if I hadn’t my exhaustion with it would probably have devolved into some spiteful, caustic death spiral. But still: now that I can so easy onboard my consciousness onto the decade-wide mobius strip of my own cataloged, illustrated and archived memories, I already, preemptively, regret that that stopping resulted in what is now more gap than substance. Like those pots I wish I’d had time to make, earning my whole keep in the studio, I sort of wish some other incarnation of myself could have or would have kept writing every week since November 16th, 2014. Jesus… that’s close to three years ago, now.
Someday, I’ll look back and wonder: who was I then, in that gap? Will the private photos and FB comments and emails and scribbled notes in studio composition books (not journals) fill it in enough that I won’t hate myself later for allowing the lapse? If not, is it any use to spend even another line dwelling on it, rather than using it as fuel to ensure that the future is fuller than that past?
Do I want this again, and if so, why? “What is the difference that makes a difference?” Where is Don Pilcher now and what is he thinking about this morning? Clary? BP? Darryl? My former-clay-idol, CS? Peggy O.?
All those voices and minds and lives, so starkly absent amongst the clutter and clamor of this virtual space. Like holes in my heart.
“Holding on, the days drag on, stupid girl, I should’ve known, should’ve known.”
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