You broke our date and I wasn’t as disappointed as I should’ve been, because I knew you would, and so, prepared accordingly.
The worst is getting exactly what you expect. Market-researched so every inhale and exhale is measured out in precise increments. Why would anyone be happy getting what they want? Give me an ambitious, ugly mutt of a failure every day and twice on Sunday.
This isn’t a list of disappointments. Not exactly.
Towards the end it started feeling like high school. There was a new crop of cool kids running shit and I’d never be let into their clique, if for no other reason than that I left high school over thirty years ago. So now I had to leave. The cycle keeps cycling.
QR menus in restaurants.
I want so badly not to repeat well-worn patterns, but repetition is the only way I know to get anywhere new. Small small increments.
Whenever the plague ends, people will go back to “normal”, forgetting how awful “normal” was. They’ll tell lockdown war stories, exaggerating and romanticizing the highs and lows. Nothing will have been learned or gained. I hope I’m wrong about this.
I made a picture on which I wrote about what happened after a breakup. I let it sit there for a day or two, then partially obscured the text with other marks. But you can still make most of it out. I don’t know whether I want my artwork to communicate this directly through words. It made me uncomfortable to see things spelled out so directly.
My heart’s on the sleeve of a shirt I wore when you didn’t see me.
[I was a guest on the Eager to Know podcast.]