Letter

One of the valuable finds during my epic website spring cleaning was the series of drawings and paintings I made about eight years ago at the Chicago Cultural Center. I spent quite a bit of time there watching people and eavesdropping on conversations.

This was during the very brief window of almost having a literary agent. We discussed a book project that might be part of a kind of franchise based on Wendy MacNaughton’s Meanwhile in San Francisco. The plan was to get a bunch of artist/writers to make books about their cities. They were considering me for Chicago.

For various reasons, it never happened. The agent stopped returning me email soon after. I filed the art and notes away and moved on to something else.

Over the years, I tried periodically to revive this work, to fit it into something knew. Brian Leli published a version as pdf with some accompanying text as part of a thing called Single Cell, which I can no longer find online.

Looking at the stuff now, I see it as prologue to the CTA marker series I made several years later. It’s all part of the same all-encompassing project.

Until I figure out a permanent physical home for this stuff, I’ve made a page on the site for it. I’ve sold a few of the originals, but still have most of them. Drop me a line if you’d like one. It won’t set you back much.

Got my first shot Wednesday. It was at a Costco on Ashland Avenue, in a provisionally curtained-off area next to the customer service counter, just beyond the checkout lanes. The woman who called to confirm my appointment instructed me to enter through the exit doors, but to be careful because they come out fast and furious. Did she mean the volume-discount shoppers? Something else? I was just happy I didn’t have to register for a membership.

Most people are, or will soon be, going through some version of this process (save for the tinfoil hat types, of whom there’s a sizable contingent, as we have found out the last few years). It felt pretty routine to me. The people running this hastily-assembled operation were mostly competent, though the young woman at the registration desk could’ve used a gentler bedside manner—— there’s no call to bark at people to sit down, rather than line up, after giving them no clear instructions. Few of us are mind readers. The pharmacist who gave me my shot was calm and clear, which is all that really mattered. Afterwards, I was sent to another area with chairs, several occupied, and given a pink post-it note with the time fifteen minutes hence, and told to sit. They wanted to make sure there was no severe reaction.

I sat and watched another employee dart about, wiping surfaces, then left when the appointed minute struck. I didn’t feel anything, good or bad. I’d read for weeks about people smiling or weeping for joy at getting the vaccine. Did I miss something? Am I empty inside?

I got some lunch, then called my folks to reassure them it went smoothly. I have allergies, so they worry. Then I went home and went back to the bottomless website redesign k-hole I’d been living in the previous few days. I was a lot more preoccupied with recategorizing jpegs than any virus or physical malady.

The next morning, with the website thing over with and time to reflect on the day before, I tried to muster some hopefulness. It doesn’t come naturally. What’s encouraging is how people I know and the tone and timbre of news reports sound a lot more upbeat than they did a month or two ago. We’ve all been through the ringer. Maybe things will be better.

I’ve never been a ray of sunshine myself, so I have to look for what warmth there may be elsewhere.

I was working on some watercolor illustrations for The Rumpus, when something——the same something that often compels me to take on time-suck high-labor/low-reward tasks like moving many thousands of files from one cloud storage space to another——makes me count up how many pictures I’ve made for that magazine and decide all those pictures should live on the same page.

It takes a couple hours to get this done, but now the portal to that wing of the lunatic asylum has been opened, demanding further action. I take a look at the Illustrations menu page and it becomes clear that it must be redesigned. There’s a small voice screaming for me not to do it, that nobody cares about how some page on an art website is configured, that nobody even uses websites anymore, that it’s all apps all the time these days. I ignore these urgent but reasonable pleas, because reason has little to do with the way I operate.

When the site started seventeen years ago, there wasn’t even an illustration page, but over the years, as I got more and more work making art for others and needing art for my own writing, this page metastasized into a dozen pages with a several hundred images. I’d split the main page thematically before, but now the leftovers spilled across four overstuffed pages.

I’d started rewatching The Larry Sanders Show a few days before this reorg mania overtook me. It became my soundtrack as I coded and coded and coded. Now there’s a sports page and one for Chicago writers and the lit scene. I moved some portraits to the Portrait section. Pet portraits are out of the Illustration ghetto and up there with top-tier categories like Books, Tabletops, and Cityscapes. My reasoning before was that anything not done from direct observation was illustration rather than art. I can’t be that strict about it anymore, especially since diving into collages. This tedious sorting exercise has some value in helping me rethink the way I define my work. At least that’s what I tell myself to justify where these last days disappeared.

It took over four seasons of Shandling’s neurotic brilliance to get to a stopping point I could live with. I say stopping point, because there’s no end to it. I’ll keep futzing, paring, and rethinking as long as the site exists. Whether anyone but me cares about it has little to do with it.

I just have to.