To Begin



The 21 Balloons is (according to Wikipedia) "about a retired schoolteacher whose ill-fated balloon trip leads him to discover an island full of great wealth and fantastic inventions. The events and ideas are based both on scientific fact and imagination."

I started a new journal on my birthday over a month ago. I'm not sure when the last entry was... I haven't even bound the pages yet. The cover came from a Jonathan Callen installation at the Mattress Factory in 2005. He only needed the pages, so the Factory 14s class I was in learned how to bind books using the discarded covers. I also started my first blog because of that class...

This blog is a test. Maybe if I start, I’ll keep it up. And just maybe, I’ll start writing again.

I do love typing. It allows for much more editing and rearranging. Perfecting. I love to perfect. Sometimes I hate being a perfectionist because it results in unnecessary self inflicted stress, but I won't deny the benefits of never feeling satisfied with "being done."

Is it possible that I'm doing this because technology is unavoidable? I don't think so. I think technology can be avoided. I don't like having all my information "out there." What that means I'm not even entirely sure. Sometimes I get the urge to delete all the information and photos from my Facebook, just because I wonder what has happened to privacy. I'm not an introvert or an extrovert, but both. Why must there be a distinction? Things aren't just one thing or the other.

My writing is almost always separate from my sketchbook drawings. Once I tried to force myself to combine them by only keeping one book. I wanted to be like Frida Kahlo to be honest. It was completely unproductive. I think it’s best to act upon the idea as soon as it strikes, not to sit around and mull over the best way or the best time to do it. And in the past week I’ve been itching to write, just not with a pen. So here I am. Regardless if anyone reads this, I feel it needs to be done. And it will last as long as it needs to, I have no particular goal in mind other than: to write. I was thinking about this opening from Spencer Reece's Two Hospice Essays last night.

I have decided to become a priest. No light decision. Each piece of my sentence is weighted. The wild, oval-flourish of the “I,” the firm, charged, unequivocal “decided,” the blossoming, fleshy “to become,” and finally that stern, indelible object, “a priest” — all yoked together, coming out of my hand, onto a keyboard, displayed on a screen, projected outwards, by lasers, into space. Who invests in such architecture? I hammer my antique sentence on air.

At the start, the oval-flourish of the "I" leads me to imagine a pen on paper yet lasers are involved before the close of the paragraph. The quill and parchment I had pictured have been replaced with the glowing screen of a sleek laptop. I think what intrigues me most is not just the succinct and descriptive writing, but the allusion to the collapse of time and space.

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