SLUMMER DAZE
our new irish friend doesn’t really ‘get’ why we’re forever dragging shit off the street and into the house. but I mean: swiss ball! it’s big and it’s green and it bounces. DIG.
January 2011
10 posts
if.
Bought the notebook three years ago in the middle of a nervous breakdown. It fit so well in my pocket. I remember thinking I could shoplift it. Paid cash instead: too close to home. Numbered the first twenty pages. I had high hopes.
Page one: Words I like: Betwixt. Mentholated. Liminal. Skirr. Extant. Deprecate. Chthonic.
Page two: Blank.
Page three: Scansion lines, sketches for poems. “the grass (sports field) at night / 46th St.” “Navidson — moonlight — inevitability.” “Mortal vs. venial sins (start small/crescendo)” “I fold my father’s gloves [unintelligible].” “ashen eyes — come inside.” None came to fruition.
Pages four through fourteen: Journaling the breakdown. Written at bus stops, in taxis, on borrowed couches. The night I met Kim. Whether to drop Intro Rhetoric (I did). “Homework: Whiskey + Tom Waits.” My proto-crush on Whitney. Two full pages of the panic attack I had at 7:30–ish p.m. Valentine’s Day in a dark corner of the downtown campus. Erratic capitals. Em dashes. “I’m 22, for god’s sake.” Song lyrics, story ideas (“Jim knows. It would be crueler not to tell him”), outlines for mixtapes(!). “Fort McMurray: straight/flat highways — home to you???” “Jessica and the woods and the snow.” “Catholic saints. Dead white men.” Page twelve’s illegible scrawls, jostled by Highway 61. At the bottom of page 14: a date (12/7/07) and time (12:51), an eleven-digit number (24241665-001). I don’t remember why.
Hipster cachet or none, Moleskines are bound very, very well. Three seconds at cotton threads with a utility knife and I’d excised the whole signature. No trace. Fresh start.
Bought the label maker today. A little clichéd, but Staples had it for cheap. Fits with my whole “get the hell organized” resolution for ought-ten, and if I look like a coffeeshop douchebag scribbling on the subway platform, well, fuck you too, buddy. If I don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.
—simon crowley
“One of the biggest misconceptions about creative individuals is that we hate structure, and most of us fall into that self-fulfilling prophecy. We reject the need to take time out to organize our thoughts and needs. It’s also about sacrifice. Being able to work on projects we want often mean we don’t get paid too much. In exchange, we just have to spend less on buying things we don’t need and adjust our lifestyle to fit the business model we have.”
—felix ng, SILNT art director
A resolution for 2011: Show up.
The first rule of doing work that matters: Go to work on a regular basis.
When you’re doing hard work, getting rejected, failing, working it out—this is a dumb time to make a situational decision about whether it’s time for a nap or a day off or a coffee break.
Zig taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don’t allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, “hey, maybe I should check my email for a while, or you know, I could use a nap.” If you do that, the lizard brain is quickly trained to use that escape hatch again and again.
The first five years of my solo business, when the struggle seemed neverending, I never missed a day, never took a nap. (I also committed to ending the day at a certain time and not working on the weekends. It cuts both ways.)
In short: show up.
» via uncertaintimes:
Start that business, finish those projects, write more words, make more art, read more books, do more, see more, live more life. Maybe if more of us do, Tumblr won’t be so incredibly sorry all the time.
Happy New Year. For those of you rocking it, rock on. For those of you getting it going, get it going. 2011 is your year.
(via spaceships)
HEY 2010
this is what I thought of you.
2011 better pick up your game.
