#45

Strictly unimpressed by "comics" that are just hand-drawn memes. That is a concession for artist and humorist both. If you make shit like that, it is like making sprite comics, or political cartoons. Truly. There is nothing wrong with you, but the future won't give the tenth part of a fuck about your buried and forgotten nega-creativity. 

Plus you suck now, today. Make a fucking layout. Take a long moment, and pretend your audience isn't a writhing pile of crabs and lobsters.

What's that? "You don't even make comics, Joseph! Fuck you. You draw like an idiot." Well, that's as may be. I suck too, but opinions are free.

*

The window of my room faces west. My childhood apartment room's window faced north. I'm one of those people that can work and look out the window in equal measure, and for that I count myself lucky. One informs the other in a magnificent flow.

I love to work. With my hands, with my eyes, with my mind, feet, tongue, whatever. And I love to be absolutely still and do nothing at all, not so much as think. Churning dynamo, bright blank. If I can be both of these things in a day, then I don't know what more to ask from life.

As states, the two have an astonishing amount in common. When I am hardest at work, typing most furiously or managing a knife with all the skill I have managed to accumulate or tending to a stovetop's worth of six-quart pots, there is a stillness and quiet at my center, where my breath whispers down to a liquid--I run all to nothing, just a fluidity behind a machine which manipulates the world of tools and symbols in front of it with gestures of an absoluteness and a surety that becomes transcendental. Doing and thinking are one, and then narrow to a vanishing-point. You can't stay there for very long; there simply isn't enough to do, or something goes wrong, or your body cries out for something and brings you back.

When I have stilled and quieted every nerve and every need to move a muscle and relaxed my physical vision and my conscious stream into a diffuseness, I lift off. The body once again is gone, only rather than transforming into fluid it becomes instead a socket, something vestigial to be slipped back into at another moment--after the wild untethering reaches its conclusion, either organically as embodiment reasserts itself, some insight or dream draws me back into analysis, or because someone, like my mom, is snapping their fingers in my face or yelling for attention. Or some other environmental interruption, like sudden rain or approaching enemies. The body always has its say--till it doesn't, eh?

Both states have much about them that relegates and perhaps even deprives the senses. Both alter embodiment and psychic activity. One transports literally and the other does not. One has practical applications in terms of being-in-the-world, especially socially, and the other perhaps does as well, but to assert such is to enter treacherous ground and philosophical obscurity. Although, the sort of soft-headed all-encompassing bullshitosophy that delights in absorbing and perverting liminality and currently informs so much talk and thought and decision in the world today does demonstrate more of a tolerance for claims that thought alone is sufficient cause to justify existence and propagation of further existence, if only to make a quick dollar out of it.

The latter state has come naturally to me ever since I was a child, but it took me a long time to be able to find work in anything that wasn't writing. Working in kitchens, I realize more and more, was a very lucky find for me. The work is perfect, and feeding people has meaning, a quality I crave like oxygen. 

I also have a prodigious ludic appetite, with its corresponding hyperfocus state. Moments of concentration so absolute that I remember them more as dreams than actual events. I know I am aging because I have come to prefer the thrill of getting up extremely early to go work very hard over kicking back and playing some games.

*

It's my day off. I'm getting this out of the way early so I can work on writing I care about in a different way; not to say this blog is not important to me, but it is not books, after all. I put a deal more effort into those, and I hope it shows. Do me a favor and find out, huh?


--JL