nightshed
Exhausting day involving lots of water spraying everywhere - Paintshop sink removal project has begun - but at least I got to see The Shed at night with the lights on because I forgot to turn them off and ohmyfuck I’m so tired but hey we have water again thank you emergency plumber.
Finding my bliss inside The Shed by moving back and forth between seeding a comics story on one end and tearing apart a reel mower on the other – I have designs for / on that reel – which has, from all the bits and bobs I've found as I dig towards the reel, spawned potentially two-three other metalwork pieces. While words remain elusive, the desire / need to transform the woodscrap leanto out back into my outdoor metalshop is anything but.
Recalling boom mic days in clearing snow from solar panels with extended squeegee pole. Shoulders aren’t thrilled.
the (panoramic) shed
No clue how well this will show up, but here’s The Shed, currently.
point being?
One of those days – probably due for one actually, but damn it's been one of those days. Spent all too much time staring at the screen with the Projects splayed across it, kanbans and canvi etc etc, thinking of the right words and failing and then trying to add another extension to my improvised solar panel snow-clearing device and succeeding until I found it still wasn't long enough to make me not have to climb up on a ladder in 40mph freezing wind gusts and wondering, like that one clip from that one SEINFELD episode that's shown up in my Insta feed of late, "What am I doing?" What's the point? Freezing my extremities off (though it's rather cozy in there until it isn't so, to rectify, I step outside and recalibrate my temperature before stepping back in for another 30 minutes of warmth appreciation) in a shed, The Shed, for things that will fall into the obscurity of the internet of people talking at each other, but then I decide that the only point at this point is "fuck it, might as well" because if there's one thing I do know it's that there's no guarantee of anything except none of us getting out alive so there, I've found, after a quarter of a century of doing this to myself, my "creative principle": Fuck it, might as well.
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.
fuck me it's still fucking cold
though I suppose that the upside of this sudden early winter chill is that I get to test out all sorts of heaters to keep myself from freezing in The Shed. And slippers (I have ugged). And shirt jackets (WalMart special FTW). And hats. Current heater combo of electric wall heater set to 60ºF (50º overnight instead of 45º) with an infared heater under my desk set to 68º (small fan heater wasn't enough) when I'm working has done the trick. Four extra solar panels would be nice, but as I mentioned in the last piece I wrote about this (two days ago – clearly this topic is at the forefront), AC Sun Gods operate on their own multiversal schedule and I anticipate them showing up at random odd times; nonetheless, I don't have to plug into the grid for very long in the evening and early morning and the battery stack is up to the task throughout the day. And it's also warmer than The Paintshop ever was, if I'm being honest with myself – though given my memory I can't be certain.
leave a message and beep
It's been a week since I stopped taking my phone with me to The Shed. Usually took it not out of some need to check in on socials or things like that (though I did let a search for new music distract me into countless little rabbit holes; I've since stopped listening to music while I work – hence the decided lack of EarBliss)) but because I was worried about missing allegedly essential texts or calls regarding absolutely urgent lifethings. But not only have those texts and calls, with the deaths of my mother and maternal grandfather (12 years of various stages of caretaking take their toll), ceased – but I realized that (most) people contact me these days only when they need or want something from me. They can wait. Living my life on my terms can't – not after 20+ years of facilitating the lives of others.