It’s been two weeks since I turned off the news. I’m still here, so there’s that. The not knowing is working so far but who knows for how long? I have to leave the house sometimes and there are people out there and they wanna talk about what’s going on. I try not to be rude about it but I shut down most conversations that stray anywhere near the news.

Ignorance may not be bliss but is a coping mechanism.

In the fall of 2016, I spent a couple months organizing a horse-stable-size garage in back of a bar. It was an immersive project that made the outside world disappear while I was in it. But then, the owner decided he wanted to keep being a hoarder and stopped letting me back there. In short order, the space reverted to a chaotic mess. New crap that he found god knows where filling all available space.

I was banished and returned to the horrorshow of the front page. I need to figure out some way for that not to happen again.

I’ve been making drawings of my place. I’ve been here close to five years now but the previous pictures of these rooms never quite came together. Perhaps the renewed need to turn inward is what makes these new ones work.

It will have to be like a prison sentence. Nothing much visible beyond the walls (maybe not literally, but nearly so).

There’s that great scene in Beetlejuice when the dead couple that doesn’t know they’re dead open the door and try to walk out of the home that is now their tomb to discover a hellscape of killer sandworm monsters and are barely able to make it back inside.

It will be something like that.