make art in order to keep living
For folks feeling super bummed or who can’t see any light right now, I offer the option to reach out for the wackiest creative idea you ever had and go do it. Art saves lives. A practice of weirdness is its own therapy.
Global carbon emissions are still going up. We’re electing even more nut jobs. You and I are free to turn our lives into art. We still get to create something out of nothing as a way to stay alive.
When I think things are bad enough that I don’t want to live, I remember the door I built for myself in this very room. Through the door are the strangest projects I can dream up. Through the door is that Joplinian freedom of nothing left to lose. Through the door is no fucks left to give but a red bloody heart that still moves to a beat, even as it breaks.
We didn’t choose to exist inside tech-capital-fascism. We weren’t the ones who invented a society that reifies the rational as justification for the irrational (and immoral). There is no logical path through that madness. We only get nauseous trying to thread those impossible needles. It’s poetry that captures what’s going on, because it points to the spaces between the lines. It turns out choosing to live between the lines is a way of coloring outside them.
The photo is of a sauna project in our backyard. The morning of Nov 6th my partner put on a toolbelt and said, well, I’m going to keep working on making something beautiful. The tiny door we salvaged on the harbor seven years ago from a fishing boat scheduled for scuttling. The porthole in the door we found hanging at an abandoned cabin six years ago. I don’t know the ages of the ships that contributed the door and the porthole but they weren’t young. The wooden shiplap siding that encloses the sauna’s front porch we pried out of a house and saved under a tarp in the backyard for five years. It is douglas fir that was milled around the turn of the last century, barged to Alaska, and hung in a house for 100 years. The wires are the partially installed control panel for the sauna’s electric heater that we are currently trying to repair. What I’m saying is keep stashing things that may come in handy later on. Keep maintaining and repairing.
Original mixed wood block letter prints by Roy Scholten, who says they are an “XL note to self.” Roy also prints cool birds with lego pieces. His blog is here.