CONTEXT BOOKEND

I remember reading a Calvin and Hobbes anthology some years ago; the ten year anniversary book which included commentary by Watterson beneath each individual strip. He writes of the first ever Calvin and Hobbes comic in which Calvin "catches" Hobbes in a snare with a tuna fish sandwich, he then felt it was important to establish an introduction to the duo, only later realizing that it was an unimportant detail. There was no need to establish a context for their meeting. They just were and always would be, though at one time the odd need to create a "beginning" was there.

Similarly, though I have only the mildest of aspirations for this blog, I feel a comparable pull. I've tried numerous times since my teens to create some kind of public journal, but my own hangups on the look and feel of it, the 20/20 feeling-like-a-fucking-dork-in-rereading-my-own-shit hindsight, and my lack of discipline to acquire the funds to regularly access proper scanning and photo processing equipment needed for transporting my physical works into the digital world, has caused me to delete all traces of previous attempts. In an effort to get going at another try though, I present an excerpted (previously private) section of a journal entry of mine from last year that still seems relevant to my generally anxious disposition. Think of it as the chorus setting the scene. I just received ten rolls of film back from the processor. Listening to bulletins about how shitty the world is on NPR, peering up from my work at the minutiae covering my walls. This collection of nearly three hundred photographs taken over the last three months seems to reveal some kind of manic impossibility within my process. It lacks practicality. A photograph of an unconscious man dying of alcoholism in a Rite-Aid parking lot seems as common a vision as a splendorous meadow, only similar in that they’ll both be outta here soon. I have no idea what to focus on. I’m not sure I needed an all-American road trip and back to tell me that though. It’s always supposed to be some bohemian, transcendental journey, but it’s really just people in a van dividing up gas prices and talking about climate change or how well the weed is hid.

Document the world from its mundane butt-picking-in-the-milk-aisle mediocrity to its warring, sexual and romantic cacophony. Wallpaper the room so maybe people will look at it all and think “fuck, wow.” ...Or maybe I should just redecorate. I’ll set up a desk facing the door (step one: get a desk), tear down all the current decorations and replace them with silver gelatin prints of Yosemite, a stack of dated New Yorker Magazines at my side, full of long past news of no more consequence. Why do I want to overwhelm anyone anyhow? Are they gonna fix anything for me? Am I just trying to meditate? I’ll keep the radio off, the wifi absent, close my eyes and move the dying man with his bleeding liver from the parking lot to a meadow, arms across his chest. Maybe it’s better this way. Lay the fantasy to rest. Arthurian. With something resembling ambition I'm determined to keep this one going for a while. I'll pretend to ignore my mistakes, make due with shitty cell phone photos of my drawings, finally dust off the old writing whose word doc titles make me cringe at the prospect of opening, and hopefully build a compendium from the things I spend my life working on. Who really cares if it's a landfill? Is anyone even reading? It will come shakily and heavily prefaced and it won't matter. If you care, stay tuned, even though you could have probably skipped this post. Sorry. Spoiler alert.