Letter

My portrait-drawing class starts Wednesday. I’m sort of looking forward to it, which is a little surprising. I don’t have the easiest relationship with education, especially on the receiving end. It was often a wrestling match for me to learn, the times I bothered to pay attention. The default attitude was resentment. I felt annoyed and inconvenienced by the hours wasted in classrooms. I didn’t respect most of my teachers and rarely connected with classmates. School was, for the most part, a real drag.

I dropped out of grad school after a semester thirty years ago because, among other realizations, it dawned on me that I didn’t want to be a college professor of art. That is the primary reason to get a master’s in painting aside from having a free couple years to fuck around before starting your adult working life. I thought of higher education in this country largely as a scam. I still mostly do.

I gave private lessons now and then over the years but never taught in a classroom until Frank called and asked if I’d take over two classes for a colleague who had to take a medical leave. It was winter of 2021, full on COVID restrictions, and colleges all over the land feared shuttering for good. This is why I was hired with no prior experience. The place was desperate to stay open so the usual barriers were down.

I had five students in one class and eleven or twelve in the other. About half capacity. Everyone was masked except for the model in the figure-drawing class. They posed unclothed behind what amounted to a giant sneeze-guard. The curriculum was in place so all I had to do mostly was follow it. It was surprisingly easy.

The class that begins Wednesday will be my own. I have materials from previous iterations taught by others but plan to adjust what I teach according to where my students are at. I won’t know that until I meet them. I’m going into this with an open mind. Perhaps I can give the twelve kids who signed up something I rarely got in my own school days.

Most of them will not go into art. They are taking this class as an elective; a break from whatever field they’re training to enter. What I can offer, if I do it right, is a way of looking that they may not be familiar with. Using eyes to look at the world rather than a screen is a dying practice. It will be my job to show them there’s some value in observing those around them using a pencil rather than a lens. It won’t be easy.

I’ll try anyway. We’ll see how it goes.

I read Juan Rulfo’s story, “It’s Because We’re So Poor” into a microphone. Mallory and I talk about The Tenant.

It’s the time of year for resolutions and future hopes but I don’t know how to do those; all I know to do is keep going. I’m not joining a gym or changing my diet or setting a goal of reading X number of books. I’ve never had many thoughts about the future at all. If I have any super power, it’s to stay firmly rooted in the present.

All that said, there are a couple things I’m fairly certain will come to pass. I’ll write some short essays to go in a book surveying my painting and drawing the past thirty-plus years. Odds are no publisher will step forward, so I’ll find a printer and put out the thing myself.

Next week I start teaching a portrait drawing class at a suburban university Wednesday afternoons.

In June I’ll have another show at the bar. It will likely be a mix of painting and collage. I assume I’ll still be bartending there Sundays.

A few weeks ago a regular from the Skylark came in and said he’s opening a bar not far from where I live. He asked me to work there. So maybe that will happen.

I’m not looking forward to the escalation of election coverage. I do naively keep wishing that the monster plaguing this country will be destroyed but have no idea how that will happen. Actuarial tables say his time will be up soon but there may be supernatural forces at work.

I look forward to shelving many more books at the bookstore. When I’m doing that all worldly cares disappear. In 2016 I had a similarly immersive task of organizing a hoarder’s horse stable full of crap. When I went in there and closed the door, nothing but the task at hand remained.

Many people I know will be searching for any available means of escape, I’d wager.

I don’t know what use it is to have hopes or prayers for the future. I just keep trying to put one foot in front of the other.

I wish the same for you. That you can keep doing whatever you’re doing.

Made a map.

A demon comes into the bar. In the fifteen minutes before I make him leave, he alienates every woman by whispering things in their ears, wedging himself between them and their dates, and otherwise making a spectacle of himself.

One asks me if there’s a safe word. She doesn’t want to say the word to make the man go away, but that’s what she means. Like the quit word in an S&M scenario.

The word to best describe this asshole is not a safe one, and, I’ve been told repeatedly, no longer okay to say. That word is whigger.

After he says something filthy and unwelcome to about the fifth woman in the place, I tell him he has to go. He acts outraged and can’t understand what he’s done wrong. The guy who came in with him looks embarrassed and starts apologizing. The demon unleashes a stream of curses my way before stomping out, yelling this bar is bullshit.

Banning words is a tricky thing. If one is used only to demean an oppressed class of people, I understand the intent. But the word I use to describe my bar friend defines someone of a privileged class copying the mannerism and style of a disadvantaged one. Maybe just the sound of the word is enough to doom it.

I run this story by a black friend and he can’t understand what the problem is with my usage. But his is only one opinion and you never know how someone will react.

I hope one day all banned words come back. We have to treat all kinds of people much better than we do before that happens. In the meantime, my Christmas wish is never to see that jagoff at the bar again.

I read the first few pages from Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo into a microphone and talk to Mallory about Little Otik.