One foot after the other.

There are so many drawings on the internet.

For most of this year, I didn't look - it was too scary. How can my drawings be more than a drop in the bucket? And I worked slowly - one move at a time, like chess, I'd think to myself. Slowly so as not to step on the toes of the drawing I was dragging into the world.

My brother learned a little about reading palms from a Pakistani friend of his who grew up living above a palm reader's shop. His friend will tell you if you sleep well, or have indigestion, or hidden fears. My brother looks at my hand and tells me I live for the intellectual, not the physical. That I love the ideas behind the craft, much more than the craft itself.

"But I paint. I work construction. I work with my hands all day."
"Yeah, but it's not what you live for."

A chilly thought - how can I spend my life working on something if it's not what I live for? My hands are nobbly, wiry things, the tools of my trade, honed on other people's projects.  But no, he's right, the making isn't what I live for. I like what I see inside my head. I might be the best audience you've ever had for your novel or your artwork. I can get lost inside other people's worlds for days on end.

I spend a lot of time lost in my own worlds too, very real places to me. But it doesn't seem like I live to make my own worlds real, or wouldn't I make more of them? So maybe the craft is just a physical bridge I build to get out of my own head once in a while.

It's a conundrum. What's a life lived alone in your own head? But why make these worlds at all if not for others to enjoy in the privacy of imagination? There a special magic being able to seed a world behind someone's eyes. But is there generosity or aggression behind my urge to make -- do I participate to share, or to impose, to win back psychic territory I had ceded to someone else's vision?

Or maybe there is no limit to the worlds we can see and keep in the mind's eye. Maybe I can scoll through image after image, keeping pieces of all of them, fragments of an expanding visual language. There is simply more to see than there has ever been before. So what does it mean to feel a compulsion to add to the mix of all these makers? If it's a language we're building, maybe it's just natural to want to join the conversation.

"Becoming a Best-Buy manager is a terrible thing to happen to a kid"

From my journal, winter 2010:

Waking up, the voice starts small and clear. "I will draw today." The light outside is blue and waxing. The first pale on the horizon and chatter edges in on the voice - "but first I'll run the dog." And then - "but if I'm sick? My brother! This job today..." The chatter crowds in, the light in my room falls on the back wall. My dog paces in to ask me something quiet and sweet but not about drawing. The house needs cleaning. The bills, the truck, the laundry. The light and chatter mount and by 8:30 the day is much to noisy to stay asleep. There's one thought I have that would quiet the rest down, but all the rest, drawing too. This is how my day before I know it goes from a single, clear, creative thought to a buzz of worry that sends me in a million directions.

Ian said: turning into a best buy manager is a terrible thing to happen to a kid.

This blog is a space for nascent ideas, a catalyst to commit to saying something regardless of whether the thought is fully formed.