sausagemaking 1o1

leading by example

me:  (cleaning)

twentysomething rando:  "You should really get an Instagram going.  Reach out to people and show them what they can do."

me:  "I'm not an internet creature.  I'd rather just lead by example."

rando:  "But people could see what you do..."

me:  "People can see what I'm doing now.  And maybe they follow suit.  I don't have to campaign."

rando:  "Well I'm glad you're doing it.  I saw you working down there, really going farther than you have to.  The gays really make a mess."

me:  "Yeah, I'm one of the gays.  I'm like, 'You guys could really try to keep it nicer, for the straights.'"

rando:  "I didn't mean any--"

me:  "Leading by example."  (walk off) 

beachcleaning / markmaking

Yesterday was an OCD day.  But the basic model kind.  First I took my OCD out on the beach, digging in the dunegrass for cans, scouring the land of all its impacted water bottle caps, and being generally observable by the lazyass patrons as "That guy is cleaning every corner."  Knocked out two full sized garbage bags of rubbish.  Then I took a break to write a while, beginning the Grand Re-Type (as this phase of the process is known) of PROMISELAND, doing five pages.  No major edits, yet.  Then I went back do it, knocking out another bag and taking on a broader swath of greenspace.  After THAT, I went home and started inking.

Inking when I have OCD is one of those things.  Ink is sacred.  Especially when doing brush stuff.  Fucking up is hard on my psyche.  So I try to get the condition "tamed" before doing anything artistic.  Clearly I succeeded, because the brushes behaved and there weren't any hiccoughs of Intent.  As long as the Intent behind the mark-making is pure, the work is true.  But if there's anything hinky going on in my brain things go sideways.  I was cautious, to be sure; mostly the inking was stark bucketfill, with some minor dry brush; I saved the major detail focus for the very end, placing drop shadows and adding weight to elements of the face.

The only lines which may be placed on a Prepared Drawing--  a drawing that's been through all the stages of development, multiple sketches & careful composition  --are lines that Belong.  Lines which "belong" are lines that either emphasize or complete an element of an image.  An eye, for example, may be almost entirely drawn, but if it needs weight or shading along the edges of the eye's orbit (the folds of the lid, say, or defining the planes of the nose & brow) then those should be placed as they are Noticed.  If you see something absent, affix a light stroke in the absence's vicinity.  Affix it where the light source(s) would place it, quickly and by instinct, as light itself does.

This may sound very casual, but it's true:  action's truth is in its invention.  An absence may not be Seen or Noticed until the other ink is placed and cementing itself in the paper.  Absence must be created, as much as anything...  But be cautious: the aim is not to make work, but make work whole.

Casual, shit, this stuff probably sounds Mystical to anyone who doesn't have wrong with their brain what I do, with mine.  Not every drawing winds up like this.  Only the ones my mind deems important.  Sketches, I could give a toss.  Improvisation isn't alien to me.  But some art, it achieves a higher rank in my mind, and must be executed in a certain way.  That's when the rules of behavior start to creep in.  That's when I know the OCDemon is upon me.  The "rules" I have bolded here are not things I consciously think; they are conclusions extracted from an unconscious, semi-conscious, state of null.  The nullity is one of feeling as much as mind.  I do not sit to ink, when under the influence of obsessive-compulsive disorder, unless I am empty of desire.

Which may or may not be 100% true, sometimes.  Because nobody starts working on something serious or "important" without desire of result.  The archer does not notch or loose an arrow without the truth of intent within them.  But are Truth of Intent and Desire of Result mutually exclusive?  I shouldn't think so.  Nothing is mutually exclusive except in chemistry or higher math.  But then, this is not science. this is OCD.  And OCD is groping in the dark with gloves on and a dulled grasp.  I only know what is right, and I am not always right about what is...

Selah.

philosophy, or what passes for it: three quarters here & three raccoons in a trenchcoat

I'm only about three quarters here.  In relation to the rest of "normative" humanity, or what a Standard Model Human is meant to be.  I mean, I'm present.  I am In The World.  But I'm about a quarter-step back from what "most people" perceive as Reality.  Not in the sense that I hallucinate, or am subject to invasive thoughts--  those things have happened, and are easily recognizable as such  --simply that, I'm not engaged with this bullshit the way everybody else is.

I am pretty sure part of that is due to having experienced survival panic & the threat of death, and having a (very Jungian) crisis of mortality at an extremely formative age that spiraled out into delusion & mental illness & PTSD and finally metastasized as my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which I manifest as in the practice of my art.  I relate to my body, my mind, and my world differently than other people.  And I don't take medication for it.  * Unless one counts the weed, which one truly must.  But putting aside that bad habit, the window I have on consensual reality is pretty One Step Back from everyone around me.

I don't grapple with status or class or race or gender or sexuality the way everyone around me seems to.  I know who I am and I know what that's worth in this world and I've got some pretty nihilistic views about all of it, fundamentally speaking.  I'm pretty materialist.  I've had my three brushes with death and my feelings about death are that it is Full Stop for me.  It's left me with a little permanent fuckedness and I just can't, with nationalism and racism and sexism and all the motherfucking Othering all the time, and how important Othering is to being an American in the 21st century.  Bitch, please.

None of this means a goddamned thing.  None of it could be more important--  to everyone but me.  Because I'm three quarters here.  I do care.  I care about human beings.  And I care about the environment, and life, and all that.  Rah rah.  I love life.  It's incredible and ineffable and every moment is incredible, even the dullest grimiest most gray shit is precious--  yet when it's done it's done and I'm not very worried about the state of my soul.  I know I've done my best the whole time.  I'm not going to peace out with Sins on my conscience.  I don't have the judeo-catholic wiring for any of it, ultimately, because I wasn't raised that way.  I was a gay white kid in the south with reactionary hippy parents reacting to their lace curtain irish world in a shitty not-"segregated"-but-not-integrated southern town.

The world told me what it didn't want me to be:  a pervert or a monster or a murderer, and also not gay, not leftist, not humanist, not interested in women's rights or, shit, i dunno, saving the world?  Like, there's a lot of self-hate involved in just getting through the contradictions we have to eat just to get up in the morning.  I don't have any scales over my eyes about any of it.  I do what I can.  I walk up and down and to and fro in it and when I die, none of it's gonna stick to me, because--

There's this joke I have, with my co-workers.  It's my three raccoons in a trenchcoat.  The top raccoon, that's Mind, me, the dolt steering the entire clumsy enterprise.  There's the second racoon, my Central Nervous System, the one stuck in the middle, completely covered by the coat, the interlocutor between the idiot on top and the poor indentured raccoon on bottom, Body, the feet on the ground and the guts to get around in all this tsimmis.

Mind, brain, and being:  those are the three raccoons in my trenchcoat.  

Sometimes one to two of the raccoons show up to work.  The best days, all three are in attendance.

Those guys are why I'm only three-quarters here.  Because I think about them, individually and in pairs and collectively, about as often as I'm contemplating the futility of caring about any of the shit-shit-shittiness happening because it took me fifty years to remember all the names of all the alpha morons responsible--  

when all I want to do, in this life or any other, is create art & love my husband.

Anyway.  No big existential taffy-pull.  I just realized earlier the best way to phrase all this, as I was walking, and I stopped to move a freshly-emerged cicada to a nearby tree.  He seemed quite content to accept the help and climbed his happy way to tonight's metamorphosis.  Yeah, little fella, you do it.  

So.  I'm only three-quarters here.  I'm a step removed.  I think I've been this way since coming to in the hospital, watching myself be sewn up.  It doesn't bother me.  It just is.  I don't think my top raccoon was in good shape before the crack to the skull; maybe he was four-fifths or five-sixths of a percent Present to begin with.  Now he's Bueller--?  Bueller--? over the hills and far away, on the best of days.

Today could be the best of days, though.  That cicada was pretty cute.  And yoga on the beach was good.  I think I'm healing from the fall at work, and the shit in my lungs is being coughed out a bit at a time, and I feel fundamentally more embodied & sexier than probably ever in my whole life in the South, so that's basically two raccoons out of three to start the day with.  If we get three raccoons in this trenchcoat then hey, Senor Droolcup got his shit together enough to crack a smile and pass the middle raccoon a brush to dip in the ol' inkwell.  What day is better than that, I ask you?

Time to drink this tea and crawl back into bed with my husband.

out of a variety of nowheres

That's where the writing gets done, largely.  The writing and the thinking.

Your Warren Ellises of the world will talk up their gear and their precious rituals for genius and the albums they were given as gifts and the live shows they saw and the meals they ate and the booze they saturated them with and the gardening they struggle over.  They will blog.  They have blogged.  They are blog.

Yet I am blog, and you can too.  Because you do not need the frills & the fripperies of a content hound to triangulate the origins of inspiration.  You can pick up those signals... anywhere, everywhere, and in my case, most readily, in a wide variety of nowheres.

Of late I refer to them as Woods Offices.  I have two Woods Offices--  the first so designated is nice in spring but utterly inaccessible by summer.  It consists of a log thrown across some other fallen logs, by a fence, right next to the Evanston channel trail.  Woods Office number two is technically a River Office, as it's beneath an overpass, but the woods are also right there.  These are places I habitually hang out in the hour(s) before my actual job begins.  I'm a compulsive tidier, so when I head out it's with plastic bags & vinyl gloves at hand, the better to clean the world with.  Usually I average one to two commercial grade trashbags.  This past couple weeks I've pulled gallon cans of paint outta the woods, found a cop's lost maglite, cleaned a burnt-down homeless encampment, et cetera.

I may often be found at the beach, picking up.  You would wrinkle your nose at the things I've picked up.  Just rest assured I do so with a great many precautions & barriers between myself and worldly filth.  The upshot of this compulsive behavior, while distracting, is that it calms me and leads me to Notice all kinds of oddments.  The cleaning has rewards built in, as well.  My new Leatherman multi-tool, for instance, came from a beach clean, as did my new collection of novelty cocaine spoons.

The point I am making here, painfully slowly, is that one may find inspiration in the world, in a wide variety of nowheres.  The cocaine spoons are useless to me, practically & personally, but it's a lovely character note to append somewhere within A HERO OF THE FEVER.  Because...  the sort of personality that would collect coke spoons?  That's something I couldn't have brainstormed.

It takes being in the world.

Warren Ellis might have been able to conjure the cokespoon collector.  Because himself is a poseur and a degenerate who quite enjoyed cocaine.  I also imagine that, though he was once as scrawny and gutter-oriented as myself, he only hung out in curious out-of-the-way overlaps of urbanism & opportunistic nature as a hipster flex in his twenties.  Carousing, like.  Doing his weekend warrior bit with the lads, getting into shit, desperate to pull some bird.  

Whereas I've always been the guy who needs to avoid humans.  And if you need to avoid humans, you explore.  Now I know how to access the Metra rail corridor.  Like, there's a great deal of mapmaking that gets done, just walking around.  Because people take walking for granted.  North American urbanoids rely on their cars for virtually every sojourn and consequently never get to grips with how their city is constructed.  It's very, very useful to know every square inch of the places you live & work.

Anyway, recon:  It's how creation gets done, as much as any of the Art or Craft shit I usually drone on about.  I've written four going on five books by being absolutely nowhere, writing at fucking dumb hours, in conditions of relative-to-absolute dark, cold, and rain-- by being persistent, prepared, and pathological.

Try it.

what's he building in there (not comix)

 

the drawback to this paint on these found materials

is it takes forever for the wood to drink the paint

and you watch the paint change colour & texture

as it dries, thins & solidifies, bonding to the old layer

how it looks when you painted is NEVER how it appears dry

kammerer - pencils

mine eyes have seen the gloryhole

 

what does OCD mean (to me)

a variety of things, but let's concentrate on the making of lines on paper tonight:

 

basically i have to create marks implying patterns. the markmaking itself is the compulsive process expressing itself, and everything you see being drawn isn't "planned"-- there are sketch versions of the regions i'm drawing in this illustration, but there's no visual referents or guidelines for the foliage / moss / tree bark i'm penciling. the faking of the texture itself is the compulsion: i have to, i don't know... put the lines where they are meant to go. which you can only know by expressing the mark? which is some zen bullshit and this is why i try not to talk

dream - 111424: back on the baize circuit

At the Indy (or is it the Highlander?) hoping to cadge a ride.  Dial Jayme Reynolds, who I believe now to be a dealer, and set down to wait.  Perform some scriptwork on Battles, my laptop, trying to stay anonymous.  As I edit, watch old acquaintances delicately brushing paint onto miniatures.  Some kind of crafts night?  Poolside in the main hall, Mark O & MaryAnn have tiny bas relief ovals set on dish easels and are carefully daubing the details in with sable brushes.  At first I'm surprised either has the motor control to do such work, then realize the bas reliefs must all be masked.  Though not with tape or rubber cement; some kind of clay perfectly fills the fine interstices between ivory-white leaves...

Jayme rolls into the parking lot in an old cadilliac & I dash out, hopping in the back seat and plonking my heavy bag down, prepared to do a li'l unpaid therapy to coax a ride (& perhaps a joint) out of him.  Judging by his long face seems he's still experiencing contratemps with Amy-- and he's high, so we only circle a quarter of the lot before he's exiting curbside and in a bar.  "Babysitting ain't never been easy," I console myself, and follow.

Cajoling Jayme out of the Highlander (or is it the Indy?) with Jayme's tiddly ass in tow I must circle back through the main hall of tables.  MaryAnn's soused now, flirty but incoherent.  All the spaces where we were are occupied by a fresh wave of players, most of them taking selfies with booze.  Grown adults playacting as if they exist in whiskey ads, I swear.  "No drinks on the felt, please, no drinks on the felt," I scold, making a rushed circuit of the room.  Half the partiers hear but couldn't care.  Nor do I, on automatic.  Passing table 8, which is at least covered, I continue nursemaiding: "Please, no drinks on the felt.  Please."  And duck behind the counter to grab something from beneath the bar...

what i mean when i talk about obsessive-compulsive disorder

Sometimes mark-making on a piece of paper takes over.  I don't have much control when that happens.  There's no override switch.  Clearly it's psychological.  In this case I know the impulse was driven by malignant loathing.  It's not a real attempt at caricature.  It bears no resemblance to you-know-who.  But what can I do?  The brush was in my hand, and I couldn't stop until my weird fucked-up brain told me I was allowed to stop.  Now there's this fuckin' horror marring a perfectly usable sketchbook.  Makes me want to apologize to the brush I used.  I should mail it to someone and get it out of my house.

Takers?