“It’s all chaos — be kind.” – Patton Oswalt
Good morning to you, too, OA. Thanks for not getting me up at two. Four fifteen was still a little early for my taste, but I’m not complaining. Oh no. An hour of Minecraft and coffee helped tamp down the word cannon so that, hopefully, I won’t come across as quite so manically unhinged here today.
Hopefully.
“Can you turn some of the words into 3D objects?” – The Admiral
I’d sure like to. I’m falling behind on my early December, biggest-deadline-of-the-year thing. Yet again. Loop, ‘so it goes’, &Etc.
Maybe even way behind — I almost can’t bear to examine the calendar to find out. As has never once failed in [xmas 2000 to xmas 2017 = 34?] approximately 34 sale cycles (and, therefore, making cycles), I am once again past the point of needing any more new greenware. The wet clay cutoff date — as anyone who’s ever taken Ceramics can woefully confirm — is always way sooner in the semester than anyone wants, or anticipated it would seem like now that it’s actually arrived, back in the first half when we were screwing around and making whatever came to mind without much strategy or direction. Oh dear.
I was also 100% sure that I was going to repaint the studio this fall. I walked it back to only doing half — two of the four exterior walls — now, with a plan to finish next spring. So, a few weeks ago (ugh!) I diligently made a trip to the ‘big city’, bought the insanely expensive fancy paint at the insanely expensive fancy paint store [because every gallon of cheap paint I ever bought in this lifetime ended up costing more in labor and heartache than it saved; a couple times, way more]. I did the dull, due diligence research on how to maximize the chances that I can get this liquid gold to actually stick to what’s already there, and waited out the wretched heat, and the rains… and now it’s (already) almost freezing overnight, the wood’s (still) damp most days, and I’m (already) a week behind on glazing and getting pots headed towards my tiny little bottleneck of a salt kiln. Oh dear.
And The OA keeps sneaking up behind me, when I’m unloading the dishwasher, or driving to work, or taking a back-saving walk on my lunch break, and whispering ideas for the next pot around the corner… What if I threw those tall vases just chunky as fuck and then trimmed feet afterwards? Could I get them two feet tall? What if the pattern of holes was itself part of a larger pattern? Did I try mixing in different sized holes on the same pot? How about taking that perforation idea and last spring’s squared ovals idea and merging them, maybe with — for super duty overkill — black underglaze and glaze over for runny halos?
You see why it’s so hard to stop. You already know — in your bones — why it’s so hard to stop.
It’s the same, for me, with the words. Once they’re going, it’s painful to turn them off. They just keep spinning in my mind all day long, if I truncate that thread too soon. They get in the way.
The Wiz: Do you feel like you can control your thoughts?
OKSC: Should I?
Oh, my sweet summer child; yes. Yes, I think you probably should.
“There’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have.”