Whittling away on my poetry / musings book project “circumnavigation, of sorts” / working title being more appropriate to the process than I could’ve imagined…
Digging into so many diaries, journals, notebooks, scrapbooks and what have you to find messages to a future self from various incarnations of someone who might be me.
Gotta say, the scribbles are sometimes quite emotional, sometimes surprising, often times amusing, other times well,… hard to say except noting ‘I was always trying & always making’
this is the important one, For Stanley (so he knows the emotions and adventures of his Papa), For me (for hanging in there in the rough patches), and For Pals (that’s you, for supporting me and listening to my rambles)
Not able to work on poem book today but snapped shots yesterday as part of my “meta-documentation“ / in this case, Shodo-style mantras and reminders + an up-dated blackboard “next steps” list.
its seems *obvious* but to keep in my flow with inertia and momentum, i write everything out
Also keeping a notebook of records listened to in the process. #Circumnavigation
yes, one is hidden because its about ghosts / this part of the bench is quite messy as full of projects to come after the book project (which is happening on the other bench)
time traveller, allegedly, wandering widely to find poems for you
Good night wonders,
I’ve got some ideas in my head for this book project, tentatively called “A Circumnavigation, of Sorts”.
Generally: freeverse poems + letters snippets, a few lists and musings and diaries / also some black and white images (hazy lomo &/or scribbled originals) and other personal archeology and/or cartography.
Thanks for the sweet note. Sometimes I wonder what I do all the archiving for but a lot of the reason is because when the illness started ( #MECFS) In 2013, my “brain broke” and I sort of had to relearn how to do everything from writing into painting whatever so found that making scrapbooks, postcards and later “sort-ganizing” helped rebuild the neural pathways.
Scrapbook: in process, a pleasant way to pass the time, sitting in bed, with scissors, tape, glue and ephemera
When I went to India to the Ayurveda clinic, I can still remember the day the brain started sparking again and then I tried starting to write and paint. Was a little clumsy so I filed everything under “old man punk rock“ :) and made some drawings of the neighborhood and unforgiving oil pastels which quickly attracted a throng of fellas around me who I snapped with a Lomo camera (note: evidenced somewhere here in this archive).
I spend a lot of time in bed still so it’s kind of like playing a video game or puzzle or something for me… finding the right context for all the miscellanea. Imagining about containers in the bath and filling them with stories in all sorts of mediums, both in and out of my fog.
As for the handmade scrapbooks, comes from our mutual love of notebooks etc. – which I don’t keep near as orderly as you do – but now they’ve all sort of come full circle back to me, I’m enjoying transcribing the scribbles, putting checkmarks on the pages that are finished, and organizing on a semi-climate-controlled shelf. All shapes and sizes and formats, eras, all intertwined. Mostly (vaguely at least) inventoried.
Making whole buncha scrapbooks
My own handmade scrap journals are so much fun to make as it gives me that mixed media/interdisciplinary thrill of playing with tools and sharp objects and paper and the finished result is something that very few people understand the endless possibilities.
A page from Nagano to see the wizard
Anyhow, thanks for your kind words, honestly it’s been a really tough summer so far for me, I just can’t seem to bounce up so it’s nice to just be “seen”.
Pages from a journal for no particular trip or reason, just feeling with things that cheered me up
One of these days, I’ll hook you up with a scrap journal of your own if you would like. I know you’re very partial to your own specifications so I might go a little bit off script if that’s all right.
Collection: Scrapbooks, Journals and Notebooks (view 2)
Do you keep travel ephemera and other clippings, oddities, coasters, matchbox, ticket stubs etc.? What do you do with them all?
Scrapbook: assembly / stack of books (binding detail)
[Audio transcript from an updated/location undisclosed recording / Pasted, uncorrected]
Completely unrelated snapshot
Some of the projects I want to make over the next little while:
I want to write a collection of short stories that is just all wacky times, immediately leading up to or following quitting jobs.
Specifically, there is leaving Star Sand Beach Club very quickly and going to Palau and Yap, going directly to the airport and disappearing rather than going to the beach club (in retrospect, seems like the best job ever but for reasons, it just wasn’t.
There is the ATG drug testing, going to Belize incident.
There is the SS Neptune, leaving-to-be-a-schoolteacher-and-getting-karmically-bitten-in-the ass idea.
There is the leaving Kinko’s with a fax at six in the morning and going off to make a film story. That is a pretty good one.
There is the Wirthlin Group phone survey job that was such a nightmare and getting fired from that for not asking personal enough questions, then crashing the office party two days later and mooning the boss in front of everyone and pulling out while the cops pulled in the other way. That was a really good one.
There is Sharpey’s, but I didn’t quit that one, Well I quit but you know with noticing on good terms planning to go back to university of Utah which in retrospect was a colossal mistake. That one was a nice job. The stories aren’t as funny but they’re nice. Although, there was that good incident of getting my car crashed into and taking the insurance claim – this station is called Joyce Collinwood now – taking the insurance settlement money and parting with it and pulling out the dent with a coat hanger.
There is also the Pizza Beast and Pizza Feast incident, that one is a little harder of a story to tell.
There is also the real estate weekly route that me and brothers and I have, where all the papers went into the side yard to make a giant paper of file of pulpy wetness and that was pretty good.
There was also Bob’s story working for that jackass in White Rock that sits by the sea, going in there and me having to play some bodyguard for him. All we wanted was try to get his paycheck. That one wasn’t too bad although not great either, I suppose.
Then there was the job of delivering fliers for the travel company around the campuses in Utah. That one is not bad.
While at University of Utah, geez, I had three jobs there for awhile. “Cinema in your face”, that was a good one, where I delivered the newspapers and fliers to every bar in Salt Lake City – bars, bookshops, coffee shops, etc.
Then I worked for Bing Christensen Land Surveyor. We’d drive up in the hills in a jeep and stand out there in the middle of nowhere until he radios me and tells me that he got the shot and then I stumble down somewhere else.
Teaching WordPerfect classes while sleeping in my van. Well, not simultaneously. During that period, I lived in my van and I also taught the occasional WordPerfect 4.2 or 5.1 or something for DOS classes. But those jobs sort of faded away more than exploded.
Then of course the other really big one I should tell is the story of the job in Japan with the mushroom farm and leaving that day on Mike’s bike and that I have taken up in the trunk of the K car and running away from that horrible job up in the hills with the old ladies.
So if I could bust out ten stories of a thousand or two thousand words each, where it’s really just talking about quitting a job and going someplace rapidly, I think that would be beauty.
While healing and meditating in my backyard, I share some ideas for writing projects i am eager to finish up when i heal my brain back to creativity. Projects include short stories about trips to Palau, Belize, Yap, Escalante Canyon, and an incident in New Mexico.
In my blitzkrieg of personal socialized publishing catchup, i came across a recording spontaneously spieled while riding the bus from North Van to Surrey in Oct. 2005 shortly after relocating to my beloved harbours, trees and parks. I talk about three big writing projects which are moving verrryyyy slowly but are moving (a couple of them anyhow).
* a collection of short stories about quitting jobs (many) in rather creative ways and heading out on adventures – tentatively called “Quitting Jobs” – i often recollect new ones i had forgot about too …
* a novel “Elsewhere” being a first-person narrative about finding a place and meaning for a generation between the cracks in the early 90’s – (loosely based on notes and scribblings from a summer on Dead tour including a hostage incident in New Mexico)
* “The Diamond Merchant” – a (funny) screenplay about the double-life of a owner of a chain of mall jewelry stores and his dubious, international exploits running both ends against the middle – add hoodwinked Nigerian spammers and Russian roulette in Thailand (wait hasn’t that been used?) and chaos ensues.
