“Yesterday we broke from the parade.” – Wheat
Spoiler alert: there’s no Pottery Bloggers’ Club. Of all the peeps I came up with, in the Golden Age, pretty much all have quit now, or stopped, yet again for an indeterminate time. Just like I have before; just like I will again. No shame in that, but it does get a little lonely sometimes. We, collectively, made a thing, a spark of beauty in the world, and then we scattered, “like embers taken from the fire.”
So just now it’s only me and Tony C. Weird. Sad.
Of course, that’s not actually true at all. There are dozens of other people still going, too; people I never quite connected with (yet) or whose combination of writing and photography and pots didn’t quite hit it for me. No shame in that; or in my not knowing them and following their exploits like I hope you’re following mine. A quick scan of Fuzzy’s pottery blog hit list says this is true; written in the sky so blue; as blue as your eyes.
In this case, I’m not even sure whose eyes those would be.
Strange.
++ THIS IS WHAT WE CALL A SECTION BREAK. FOR MOST PEOPLE, THAT’D BE ENOUGH TO CALL IT A POST AND EVERYTHING ELSE WOULD BE ANOTHER ONE. IMPROVES YOUR CLICKBAIT AND PENNIES OF COMMISSION I GUESS, OR SOMETHING. IDIOTS. ++
Firing today — finally. First one of the Fall, first one of the cycle, first one of the last ones of the year. Feels good.
Here’s the bad news: my blogging machine is now out in the studio — right here, at the table where I cut and handle and assemble and paint and smooth and refine and dream. Seven and a half years of operational discipline with tw@se — never letting the blog encroach on the making, not even a little — and now with my new brain all that is gone like the wind. Ha! I won’t be surprised if I type half the day away now, in between temp checks and turnups and salting… Instead of glazing up the next load, like I so certainly should do.
Ah well. Can’t have everything, I guess. Can only be in one place at once.
Closing in on a thousand degrees. It was great, yesterday, after waiting out nine hours of rain, that the meteorologists at the NWS nailed it — stopped on cue, just a little 0.00″ mist, and I slammed ’em in there, bolted it up, and turned on the gas. Also great that after a full six months away, without even seeing the interior of the kiln, I had enough of the process packed into hard memory that I could mostly go on instinct; my obsessive notes and checklists more of a safety net than a “what the fuck do I do next?” recipe. {He seems to be overconfident. Especially for the first firing of the cycle. This is likely to end in tears — you heard it here first. -Ed.}
“I know it’s true; it’s written in a sky as blue, as blue as your eyes, as blue as your eyes. If nature’s red in tooth and claw, like winter’s freeze and summer’s thaw…”
Sorry — that line just came out the speakers, because I queued the song up on my still-new-yet-already-beloved-iPod-Touch, and I had to transcribe it. Already had a bit too much coffee for 6:46am on a Thursday. Or any day.
I told Witt yesterday, on one of our two short Potters’ Panic Season calls, that it was weird to be doing all this same stuff with my new brain. Glazing and firing is such a routinized operation; everything kind of has to follow from the previous step, skipping or freelancing are usually disastrous, often the best you can hope for is to not make dumb mistakes — just too many variables to keep track of, at least the way I do it, and too narrow a spectrum that qualifies as “success”. (At least, the way I do it.)
And now, I kind of can’t believe I did all this while I was depressed. No wonder it was so fucking hard. I feel more like I’m just doing it, and less like I’m rolling a hostile boulder up a horribly hostile inclined plane. Afraid that’s gonna jinx it, too; my self-fulfilling prophecy capacity seems nearly as strong as my self-defeating one. Like, last night, for the first time in forever, all I wanted to do was sleep and stay asleep — the one night where it would have been really useful to be up prowling around, to get in an extra gas bump! The diametric opposite of what the previous 82 firings have been, where I desperately wanted to sleep more, but was too anxious and couldn’t get back to sleep after wandering out in the cold and the dark to light that candle.
“I lit a match and blew his mind…”
Not my favorite new TS lyric, but Pixel loves it… And has been insisting for a few days that I work it into “a blog”. “Let’s do a blog, Dad.” Oh dear. Poor kid doesn’t even know how goofy and wrong this is; she’s growing up thinking we’re normal and the rest of the world is weird.
Living in the country, growing weird.
It’s firing day. I’m keeping all of that. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
“One and one and one is yesterday.”