snippy
Been a few weeks since I welded Miggy into existence, so I scrabbled up a few pieces - a shovel handle, an old angle grinder cutoff wheel, a pair of dull old garden shears, and a glockenspiel - and birthed Snippy, a pissed off, antisocial little bird-thing. He’s my most biographical creation yet.
tuning
In keeping with yesterday's clean break with the past and much of the present, I started something new today – and loved the process. Indeed, much of the impetus behind the great split / divide / whatever was a desire to bring my now-quarter-century-long writing practice in tune with the beginner's mind lent by my new practices of cartooning, drawing, and metalwork by banishing most if not all of my previous attachments and intentions: gone are the designs and hopes and dreams on and of a career, the designs on anything; I want to view whatever I write moving forward not as a stepping stone but as a thing that was written – like each day's Informality, like Miggy or Weldo – nothing more than another means of expression and communicating whether I'm heard or not: if I'm to be a tree alone in the forest, I'm going to fall where-, how-, and why-ever I damn well please.
process space
Now that I'm in month four of working in The Shed, I've finally figured out what the space is (beyond the obvious, a Shed in which I work and figure out the right heater-solar panel-grid balance, especially in today's brutal wind): it's a space where process – not result – reigns supreme, the spatial equivalent of my "Working" folder. Over the last few weeks, I've been removing anything finished or completed from the space, be it Weldo Quixote or Miggy the Shovel Creature or comics or finished drawings or scripts or anything so that, with the exception of a few pieces from CW&T and odd antiques and entertainments, The Shed's filled with nothing but the tools I use to make things and the limbs and sinew of various works in progress, a space of freedom from result in which I can alternate between planing a drawer built by my great-grandfather and writing another tale of REDACTED for mi hermano's musical inspirations.
miggy scored a spear
Or he’s in the map room on his quest for the Ark of the Covenant, IDK.
miggy
Semi-hesitant to share this because I'm not sure he's done (is anything, ever?), but here's my latest bit of salvaged metalwork (an old shovel, a beyond-repair typewriter, and a disused section of chainlink fence), Miggy, named as such because he was my first full attempt (Weldo's second iteration being the first partial attempt) at MIG welding (which I far, far prefer to stick). Done or not, I'm rather proud of The Shed's latest tenant. Miggy, everyone, everyone, Miggy.
Weldo got an upgrade (and a reattached arm with philips-head saber).
