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.

clean slate

Following yesterday's successful execution of a really shit draft of something really cool and the requisite making of distance between shit and un-shittifying, I returned to another thing I'd been playing with for a few years and, after staring at the same words and the same stuck spot, felt the magic wave a middle finger at me as it skipped town. So I've decided to do something I've never done before and – with the exceptions of current commitments to other people (hi Uzi, hi Jess), my daily Informalities and the ongoing adventures of A.A. Void, and this space and the newsletter – make a clean break with my current project slate AND with all of the past, failed fragments and notions to which I'd normally turn in these times of void. Time to start a new day creatively and prepare and till a new field for whatever seeds may spring; I suppose starting my notebooks over with a new 0001 after 37 volumes and 15+ years this week wasn't just a fresh start at numbering but a herald of the creative Galactus that landed today.

nowhere -> somewhere(ish)

After yesterday's mental kerfuffle of nowhere, managed – as is usually the case after one of those days (as Nick Cave reminds us, "When something's not coming, it's coming") – to get somewhere. Somewhere, yes, but more specifically that somewhere where I can dig deep into small, tiny pieces and rip and tear them apart until they become something new that works.

Been doing these mid-day daily text things again for a week now and I'm not quite sure if I want to continue doing this as part of a new way forward or if it's a remnant of the old to which I'm clinging like a dog clings to the last strip of their beheaded and desqueaky-ed toy.

For now, though I'll return to the clarity of yesterday's "creative principle": Fuck it, might as well.

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.

I've become mildly obsessed with figuring out how to use a hand plane and what, if anything, among my wooden dalliances might make use of it. If nothing else, a useful way to think through the roadblocks in the (narrative) WIP(s) for which I’ve a notion of how to move forward that I want to explore this week. Not sure how it'll work out, but it might give me room to breathe on both – and leave open room for seeding two potential other things.

Two years of daily Attendance Cards.

Convinced that one of the reasons I keep shaving my head is I really don’t like drawing hair for the Attendance Cards.

One of those creative days in which I'm glad that I have solar in The Shed and haven't wasted any energy resources other than my own mental capacity in my project slate’s journey to fuckall nowhere.

Suppose I should take bringing something out of the purgatory file (again) because I want to know what happens to be a positive – if somewhat maddening – sign.

reanimation

This whole slowing down – this whole letting myself slow down – thing is wonderful, yesterday being the first (non-hospitalized – and even that's been almost eight) morning in more than 10 years that I said to hell with it and took the day off. Might become a regular Sunday thing, especially since the NL is now monthly (releasing next Sunday) and I'm hoping NuSanctum yields more work / make during the week.

Perhaps I can owe figuring out how to move forward with the post-ink therapy reanimation of a project I long thought dead (method being the same as my usual method of reanimation: start a new document, put it next to the old one in an infinite project canvas, copy and paste and rewrite in(to) the new from the perspective of now, junk everything else) to this slow down and day off? If so, more please.

Moving things out piecemeal to NuSanctum, though most of today will be spent prepping the cardboard and rubble from yesterday's mini-heatdome desk assembly session for the recycle bin.