to those who

22 November, always, even more than a decade after my Executive Director tenure ended and almost a decade since I resigned from the board, is an anniversary – a morbid one, certainly, but more packed with personal meaning than Thanksgiving ever could be.

How much of myself did I give to that gig? (too much and not enough) How much did I gain? (I found my way to writing, fully, through it – so there's that – but I also gained one (maybe two) very deep, very profund regret(s), forks in the road etc) How much did I lose? (everything – but not everything I lost was worth keeping, far from it) ...

I suppose I'm thinking of it in more extistential detail this year than normal: we signed our wills yesterday and I realized that, outside of my wife's family and one very important exception, I have no one to pass anything on to. Being the end of the line in which your last name isn't your own is simultaneously rewarding and confusing.

Current solution: live what I've got while I can and let the rest of it fall where it may. I've pretty much got the "staying alive" part down – soon with cybernetic enhancement! – now I have to figure out what living entails. Been trying to figure that one out for years. So far, no luck – but if I do stumble upon my answer, you'll be the first to know.

Also: that partially completed thing to my left was supposed to be a dog but my 4'33" ran out before I could fur it out.

"(but I don't know) what that something else could be"

Wrote the above in a note to myself in (one of the) WIP(s); I write this rather frequently, actually: an agnostic faith that I might find it or might not (?) – difference being now that it bothers me far less, if it's the latter, than it used to.

(This is what I tell myself.)

Playing GOTHAM KNIGHTS on the Series S and I'm entertained enough: once I read that the combat was more ASSASSIN'S CREED than ARKHAM (I can't counter? What?!) it made sense and I was able to get over the initial reluctance to embrace it. CYBERPUNK 2077 is waiting in the wings. Still playing ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD, though that's much more of a backburner endeavor, more often than not played in handheld mode (that OLED screen on the Switch is GORGEOUS), except when I have to face one of those stupid tests of strength in the shrines; as someone sagely told me on Mastodon: "When fed up, go foraging": I have been foraging with increased frequency – perhaps I should apply that axiom beyond ZELDA and into the WIP…

Important note: in spite of my Racoon Mario getup below, I've yet to actually fly but the day is young and the sun is only now rising.

stable(ized)

Finally got around to buying the requisite bits to stabilize this butcher’s block, which has been in my family for as long as I can remember - in an unstable mess or in pieces.

Thrilled with how it looks in its new home. As is Grogu.

earbliss/20221120

newsletter sunday 0091

It is released / and now, EVERY Sunday is newsletter Sunday, in this, the dawn of our post-Twitter era. Decided it was time to return to a shorter, more frequent iteration, an end-of-the-week ritual sent before starting the next week (Sundays begin the week for me).

Started RRR last night and it is insane and wonderful and I love it, even the anachronistic drumset in the party scene but hey / "turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream..."

The figure on the left side of the Attendance Card below started off as a monster then became a shark and then an angry Pac-Man, maybe, until I said fuck it and made it a dog(child) / landshark / Pac-Man hybrid, sort of.

earbliss/20221119

newsletter weekend

Never ceases to amaze me how my concern and worry over the two weeks as to whether I can put something together out of nothing is proven to be unfounded in a single morning and now I'm pondering shifting NL (back) to shorter and weekly again (sign up here, if so yadda yadda yadda) because if not now when (or why) but now I'm hungry so here's an attendance card. Macro0091 out tomorrow AM.

with derbzball (remnants)

"blind bones"

Latest effort at Lynda Barry's exercises in MAKING COMICS didn't unstick me from my stuckness in The Work (though it did provide a direction for the Etudes – more when I fully flesh out the notion) but it was a fun bit of something different. The rules for "Blind Bones":

1.) Close your eyes and use your yellow marker to draw an entire human skeleton in one minute... 2.) using orange, close your eyes again and draw another skeleton right on top of the yellow one... 3.) Do the same thing using blue" 

Lynda Barry https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/making-comics/

And my results:

Definitely a useful way to distract myself from the day's work – and hopefully, perhaps, new and different ways to see what's in front of me – or behind closed eyes.

first snow