comeupyoufearfuljesuit.com

In a recent email to a formerly long-lost friend I said that one of my leading sources of creative block was an inability to suspend disbelief. Subsequently, I watched this:

and found it a bit inspiring. In particular, there’s a bit near the end (I promise, I don’t mind if you don’t bother; it is over an hour) where he discusses how he feels about making stuff (“stuff,” by the way, has now expanded to include novels) and says that he has, in his old age, become indifferent to the scope of a particular artifact’s success.

Of course, that’s easy for him to say. As he explains in the video, the fact that his career started with earnest and artist-driven indies means that he was able to quit his day job at a level of notoriety that would have not been sufficient for many artists, and for a while he was even fabulously wealthy out of the deal.

But now he’s not, and he doesn’t seem to mind too much. In fact, he still seems playful and frivolous. Like he’s just going to fuck around, and hope for the best when it’s time to move on. I’m pretty sure that this kind of thinking would be a boon to me.

It might seem strange, on the face of it, to focus on fucking around as a way of getting things done, but if the option is feeling defeated by the act of coming up with worthwhile tasks, I’d say there isn’t much question about which option would be (more or less) “right.”

So I decided that I wasn’t quite as firm in my anti-design beliefs as I may have been leading people to believe, and I was tired of CUYFJ looking like it did. Luckily I have the means to change that, and I did. The big challenge was, of course, not making it look like a rehash of Futility Now. I don’t think that I have enjoyed unmitigated success in this regard, but it could have been worse. I also changed my about page so it continues to reflect the current mode of standoffishness displayed by Temboo’s webpage.

As you know, sometimes it’s hard to get good recordings of live performances. There are a wide variety of reasons for this. Many of those reasons are ameliorated by being the best there are in the world.

So I’m transcribing my journal from when I was 17. I’m not totally positive what the value of this exercise is, but I think it has to do with understanding the arcs that I’ve created for myself. I mean, I’ve probably cycled through a substantial number of them over the years, but I suspect (and so far this has been borne out) that none of them will be particularly alien. I think there is an identifiable character that has been consistent throughout the years (except that back then I wrote “by” instead of “by” all the damn time.)

This is, like all important things, a source of serious potential ambivalence. On the one hand, it’s good that my personality is coherent and recognizable. I was not involved in adaptation to norms or the various sorts of selling out that people regret later in life. This is good. On the other hand, sometimes it feels like I’ve been sort of struggling with (or mincing around complaining about) then same things (mainly: “why don’t people loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove me”) for fifteen fucking years, and there are all sorts of associated things that it may or may not have monkeywrenched along the way. This is a bit disheartening.