Higher Laws: Compassion Part I

This is an addition to my toilings and manifestos of 2019.

After decades of working and living at night, and completely discarding the morning, I have in recent years become what I always dreaded: a daywalker. I am very conflicted about this. First, and foremost, I longer work in a restaurant, and I no longer work with the general public. This has been a blessing for sure, because I find it much easier to be kind to people now that I am not forced to interact with them for a living. I've been relieved because I don't have quite the opposite schedule to my family. I don't miss being out at night, and I don't miss the late night weirdos either.

Despite all the good things, I still do not feel about the world and the people in it the way that I feel like I should. For instance, I was walking home from dropping off my little boy at school a few days ago. There was a train wailing on the whistle a few blocks down, there were two large excavation vehicles coming down the street, a military helicopter flying around beating the hell out of the air and some lousy jackass laying on his horn. I wanted to scream. After working at night for twenty years, I can tell you, it is never that fucking loud at night. And then there are those people who say that they love the morning, and that the morning is peaceful and promising. This has never, never, never been my experience. The mornings are loud, smelly, aggressive and the ideal time to lose all faith in humanity. I have always believed that those people who get up early tend to instigate economic ruin and start wars.

The January Drawing Challenge

The list that Kimberly sent was something she picked up on Instagram. Being no user of Instagram myself, I was not privy to the exact rules. She simply sent me the list of daily prompts. Admittedly, as I eager jumped to the challenge, I did not read through the list of 31 prompts.

As I began to work through them, I started to see that there was a wintertime trend. I also thought there was a bit of the cliché winter themes: snowman, icicle, your house when it snows, etc. It was not exactly disappointed in this, but some of the prompts were boring. For the penguin prompt, for instance, I drew an old timey penguin martini shaker. For the snowman, I drew a (not so) slenderman snowman. And for ice skates, I drew two women with “Kate” name tags sitting atop blocks of ice. In a way, I liked thinking about my take on the prompts more that the drawings itself.

Trees In Winter

Revisiting Richard Brautigan, Where have all the paperbacks gone?

It's January 2023 because it's always been January 2023. I'm tucked away in our little house in old town Longmont. I want to while away these cold winter days. I've got a half assigned, if not totally arbitrary reading list. I want to reread all these Richard Brautigan books.

At one point I had all these books. Somewhere along the line I lost all these books. I carried a few around, but many of them I lent to people who have not brought them back to me. Perhaps the old owners of the used books have come back either as criminals or ghosts and reclaimed their property. I realized there were a good many of these books that I did not have on my sagging bookshelf.

I'm old. I started looking for these book right here in Longmont at both of the used bookstores in my neighborhood. There were none there. I knew this was going to be the case, but I went in anyway. Any day in a bookstore is a good day.

Revisiting Richard Brautigan, an introduction

I first became acquainted with Richard Brautigan in January of 2003. I have my own ideas about January of 2003. I would tell you because I am here and it was very far away.

I was holed up in a motel room in the frozen, frozen air of Idaho Springs. I have written about this before. I suppose any time I've written about this before it was always about the experience of Idaho Springs at that time and that Richard Brautigan was merely incidental to it.

The truth is, I don't remember 2003 in much clarity. Yes, it was a long time ago, but I was a very different person back then. I was 20 younger, for starters. At the time I was working as a bartender. I partied a great deal. I smoked a lot of weed. I was then, just about opposite of who I am today, but that's life, right?

A Year of Creative Challenges

 

It's January. I don't know how I feel about it. I'm listening to Debussy. We've just come off of 2022, and for me, I just graduated from Front Range with a degree in graphic design. It has been the most fun experience I've had in school, ever. It's probably because graphic design, for me, has been a creative endeavor. And if there is anything I like to be, it's creative. Perhaps I should define that differently: I like to have created.

I'm no stranger to a creative challenge. I suppose my first creative challenge was NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month which I first did in November of 2017. For anyone not in the know, the basis of the challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days which breaks down to 1,667 words a day. It is no easy task. NaNoWriMo offers three such challenges a year. Classic NaNo is in November, but they also have Camp NaNoWriMo in both April and July. I have participated in these since November of 2017 with the exception of 2021.