The Friday KMR drawings keep changing. Better? Worse? Don’t ask me. But I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself yet and I want to keep going, which are about the only criteria I know to not stop doing a thing.

There are about thirty of them now. Ten or twelve will go up at the bar in September.

I scribbled the quote in a notebook while illustrating Moby Dick. Something about the soul being a useless thing, like a fifth wheel to a wagon. It was Elijah, the mad street prophet warning Ishmael and Queequeg about the man whose ship they’d just signed on to.

I used the scrap of paper with the quote in a collage whose base is a drawing of a pantry on 24th Street I made twenty years ago. Ripping up old stuff gives me a kind of buoyant pep nearly every time I do it. Whether the resulting picture flies or crashes, disposing or attempting to “fix” the old thing never feels like a mistake. I’ve never once regretted it or wished I could undo what I’d done.

The white whale’s been on my mind again because a tape of excerpts I read from that book will come out sometime later this year. More details when it’s official.

We went to listen to a couple bands play in a venue that used to be a Latvian social club according to one of the players. I’d been there once before. Both that show and this one were top drawer. Older people playing music that pushed and pulled genres. Probably not very marketable in any mainstream way but just right for me.

I made a page of all the drawings from The Jungle. Will make them available for sale soon. The book will be out in November. The Sound and the Fury first, in July.