Contained a Great Whirl

There’s a new bartender at my brewpub day job who has a similarly lengthy resume of service jobs to mine. He’s 35 and talks about going through a mid-life crisis. He exited a career path in brewing and feels himself going backwards when he pictured not having to consider fork in the road style orientation. Obviously I was just there, attempting one last service gig after telling myself I simply had to leave the industry. Doing a coding bootcamp right before the entry level coding jobs folded in on themselves. It now having been widely revealed that the greater tech industry is a monkey’s paw.

Is 35 a realistic marker of halfway? Certainly time seems to flow in new ways lately, but I can never tell if my personal clock is synced up with the greater experiential average. Time is a measurement but the way that we feel time is individual. Based on hunger level and the amount of sand in your pockets.

I used to think that my individual feelings were an undeniable north star. Maybe because I always felt things strongly, feelings had often transformed the commonplace into deep breath moments. I carried the full Bob Ross pallet of emotional shades. Prussian bleak blue, decision fatigue ochre, secrets of the cosmos crimson. And then somewhere in my adulthood I put away some colors, worried about the mess.

Now, when hanging up the sash I made for my adult merit badges (mortgage, retirement accounts, wife, pet, kids), I have had to both consider my feelings in the truest sense and to learn how to quiet the part of me that is reacting every moment. Inventorying. Commentating.

'I lived so carefully, thinking someone was watching. But the stage was empty; the audience never came.' - Osamu Dazai

I’ve been thinking about this feeling versus discipline debate as I fine tune my art practice this year. I made my first non-stationery piece for a gallery last year, and this year I’m participating in my first group art show (ever or in 15 years depending on your perspective). It’s been a fantastic experience so far and really helped me with the sense of lost progress my co-worker and I talked about. While certain things may not be changing much, I feel blessed to live a life where I get to write, to explore my interiority, to get out all my colors again and paint.

It is funny that in making this piece about my dad, I have at many points thought, this would have been a great opportunity to ask my dad for help. To bond in our shared love for craft. His home improvement hands for tinkering, his love of a well organized space. I wanted to ask him how best to attach this plexiglass to the hinge. I could see him saying “I don’t know,” and leaving it at that, but maybe I could have challenged him, “can you help me figure it out?” He couldn’t resist a friendly challenge. I felt him with me in certain moments, as I lined up the hinge to layer on some epoxy, as I bought the brand of pry bar I remembered him using before ripping out some old bolts, as I considered buying a power tool or two and felt the pull of his brand of choice. Would he recommend a corded or cordless?

Who can say what my father’s interior life was like? People have snippets, probably more than I do. My memories of him were almost solely experiential. Almost always about a project. Which is why he has been so summoned by this installation. Choosing a medicine cabinet takes me back to the bathroom renovations, my wallpaper design vs. his painting experiment, my words instead of his reflection. I can almost remember looking at his reflection through the bathroom mirror, standing side by side. Surely it must have happened, but these moments never stuck, because I was simple observing, rarely feeling like a full participant.

Perhaps he contained a great whirl of interiority too. Or quite simply, my neurotic nature comes mostly from my Mom and Grandma. But when getting something done, one must build a scaffolding from blocks of time spent, and to be structurally sound those blocks cannot be made from a too much feeling. And that intersection is where I find myself these days. Using everything I have learned about myself, how I work, accepting my weaknesses (scheduling! reaching out to people! medium term focus!), and combining it with my deep desire to make things (a children’s book! comics about my grandma! more visual poetry! bigger stained glass birds! a giant vending machine I can be inside of at craft shows). Attempting longer stretches without checking in on how I am feeling.

It may sound backwards to some, but I am maybe built a little different. I don’t lose track of myself, of what my inner child wants. He is quite often dictating what is possible. What I need instead is to maybe set some boundaries for him, to hear him, but keep going. To stay at the studio even though I’m quite hungry, to wake up to write even though I went to bed late, to cook even though I haven’t really left myself much time. The action despite the reason not to do it.

“The obsessive desire to know yourself is itself a pathology. You’re not healed when you wholly understand yourself but when you don’t matter to yourself anymore. You’re healed once you internalize you must fight for something bigger than yourself; you fight for family; you fight for love; you fight for art; you fight for meaning…The real goal of psychoanalysis is paradoxical; it’s precisely to liberate you from yourself; to bring you to the point where you can finally forget about yourself and work for a greater cause.” -Slavoj Zizek

I used to sing the Black Flag song, before every shift, even after I started also chastising myself for it (”Don’t wanna work, boss he’s a jerk.”). To this day when I say goodbye to Mousse I can’t help but say a little mantra “Ok, Mousse, have to go to dumb-ass work. Love you see you soon. Psstpsstpstpst.” I cannot help a little color commentary. Add it to my list of “things I do that I probably can’t stop at this point.”

I’m thinking of getting an art coach, only a handful of years after I FREAKED THE HELL OUT on my sister for suggesting I get one (though she used the term life coach which felt less positive to me at the time). But here I am, with my deeper understanding of not Who I AM, but quite simply what I am like. Asking for help to be better focused, and moving towards the many things I want to make. What could make my inner child happier than that?