Letter

Tuesday night a thunderstorm really gets going just as I hop off the bus by the Criminal Courts on 26th. I wait it out a few minutes inside the Popeye’s, then walk a couple blocks west, then south, behind the barbed wire of the jail, to meet up with the young woman renting me a car so I can drive to Michigan and pick up my books.

This app-based thing of people lending their houses, cars, tools, what have you, never feels quite legit. It’s pouring rain again when I spot her parked up 28th Street. She’s planning to take a scooter home but she’ll get completely soaked so I offer to drive her home in her own car.

I can’t sleep because my mind won’t stop cycling through the scenarios of how the book will turn out wrong and all the things I have to do after getting the books home even if they turn out right. I doze off near daybreak, then the alarm rings.

I listen to dopey cheeseball Michael McDonald’s autobiography, What a Fool Believes, all the way east to Chelsea, Michigan, then back west to Chicago. About 450 miles roundtrip and McDonald is only up to his thrilling account of recording “Ya Mo B There” as I park in front of my house to unload the 17 boxes of books. It may be the most boring and longest episode of VH1’s Behind the Music ever made. At least I didn’t kill any braincells reading it.

The books turn out well. After the nightmare situation with the last book, I was extra weary, but these will work. If this is my last book, it’s not a bad way to go out.

I spend the following morning signing, numbering, and packing up preorders. The next few months will revolve around getting this thing out to people.

If you’d like one for yourself, now’s as good a time as any. This one will only be available from me directly and at Tangible Books. It cost too much to print to offer wholesale to other stores.

That’s just the way this cookie has crumbled.

Got to catch ex-cabbie/Ethiopian jazz legend Hailu Mergia at Constellation. I loved it.

There’s a new print based on an alley painting available.

I talked to Ben Tanzer about myself for a while. Then I talked to Mallory about a shitty 80s flick called The Believers.

The last day of my Rainbo show is this Saturday. I’ll be there 4-7pm. If you come and want one of the remaining pieces, I’ll give it to you straight off the wall to take home.

It’s always a bittersweet thing to take down art off walls after the exhibit’s over. I’ve lost count which number Rainbo show this is, though my first was in 1997 and I didn’t miss too many years. Putting up art at this bar is the longest-standing tradition I have.

Something feels different about this one. Maybe it’s because I started and stopped regularly working as a bartender there during the past year. There’s a feeling of finality about this show. Like maybe it’s the last one.

At the same time, it’s arguably been my most successful. Half the pieces sold and I’ve gotten a ton of compliments from both friends and strangers. Oddly, I don’t remember being as unsatisfied with a body of work as I am with this one. I learned long ago not to really say what I think of my own work, but the disparity between others’ perception and my own is especially stark in this case.

Likely, there’s a more general restlessness and dissatisfaction at play. The world outside is rapidly going down the shitter and I find little to feel any kind of hope about.

My attitude about art sales and how they impact my equilibrium has always been a strange proposition. On the one hand, I’m glad not to have to drag my crap back home; on the other, it feels completely correct, almost to be expected, that people buy the things I make. As such, there’s little satisfaction involved; it’s the way it’s supposed to be after all.

I’ve never made anything in my life that I wanted to keep for myself. That’s not what these things are for. They’re made to communicate to others. Not, usually, in any direct way, but in the oblique language of art. Taking them back home is evidence that they weren’t good enough to connect to anyone else. That they failed.

Back home it’s only a matter of time till these failures get fed back into the meatgrinder. As I type this, on the wall across from me, are five drawings and prints, a couple going back over thirty years, which are now just background decoration for posters made for a forthcoming book event.

I don’t know how others do it. I bet many have a healthier attitude toward their work and toward the world. I only know how to go forward in this way.

I have no idea when or where the next art show will be. I will drive to pick up my books in Michigan from the printer in a couple days. That, and a couple events in August and September is all I know or can fathom.

Perhaps I’ll see you at the Rainbo this Saturday afternoon. You can tell me how to have a better attitude.

I wrote another book report. Maybe this will be my last. Something made me respond to the publicist’s pitch. I ignore or politely decline most, and, as I wrote here a couple weeks ago, I’m trying to quit the whole racket. Something about this book makes me say yes. I start read and can’t stop. Now I want to read everything else the guy wrote.

I work most of a day on the stencil for my book-release posters. Then dug through the flatfile for old drawings to use as background/setting. Not sure how many I’ll make. There’s still lots of time left. Working on little jobs like this is a lot more satisfying than the hand-off and wait and wait and wait of mass-production situations like book-publication.

I’m in this transition-point frame of mind. Trying to figure out what I want to give my remaining energy to the next few years. No more book reports, maybe no more books. Definitely more one-off projects like posters, paintings, zines, etc. I think smaller and smaller is where I’m headed. It’s the opposite of the expected trajectory but it feels like where I need to be going.

Mallory made me watch Practical Magic, then we talked about it. I’m reading some stuff from the last book in The Frunchroom this Thursday, which means a trip back to Beverly. Come listen if you’re around.