So, uh.
This pandemic thing.
How we all doing?
(source: https://gph.is/st/YKKOKrY)
Near the start of The Whole Thing, I and a friend did a daily art challenge, trying to paint something every day. I didn't finish the whole 30 days I'd planned, but it was almost like a New Year's resolution gone right: a spirit of growth, development, learning, change. Directional movement, even within an era of stasis. I got better.
Of course, that kind of energy dissipated as time dragged on. Unbeknownst to me, some large portion of who I am as a person had been being fueled by things like people-watching in the office cafeteria, as if other humans emitted radiation I was converting to power.
My life is incredibly easy; I'm not suffering like so many are; mine isn't a tale of major hardship. Still, I find myself changing in ways I didn't expect.
Not cute.
I've gotten a lot better at my job over time. It's always less stressful to know what you're doing. Even without my former anxieties, the diminution of my life outside work has given work an uninvited prominence. The same story everyone is telling about WFH, I suppose.
Whereas before I had some semblance of a social identity, my existence now threatens to collapse into video call explanations of kludges made by predecessors. It's probably in response to that that I've started feeling this weird desperate energy.
creative restlessness
I've always had this idea in the back of my mind that at some point in my thirties or forties I would have a Spiritual Vision, or fall and hit my head, or become radicalized in some very niche way - and when that point were to come, it would be useful to have a base of creative skills in order to act on an advent of inspiration.
This has been a narrative I've used to gain satisfaction from pursuing a variety of artsy-craftsy nonsense without a clear artistic goal. Preferences and knowledge built up, technical skills developed, general improvement sought... without ever taking it in a real direction.
Now that is suddenly not doing it anymore. I want to make things in order to be able to point and say, look, I have created evidence of the passage of linear time. I want to have things I can send out to the world as proof-of-life. I want to accrue a thick layer of creative grime over myself to protect against work worming into my dreams.
(source: http://gph.is/2mLh0h2)
But I don't, uh, know what I'm doing?
I've dreamed about graphing software interfaces.
I started to try to get back into music again, but it's painful to hear how pitchy my voice has gotten, unpracticed - and more painful still to realize that locked-down in a one-bedroom condo, my partner has no escape from it.
He's a real good sport but there's only so much in the way of interval practice you can ask a person to put up with.
hi lo hi, hi lo lo hi, lo hi hi lo...
So now I'm playing with zines - ordering them online, reading them, making little bad ones and mailing them off, trying to figure out what it is about their energy that feels so full of potential to me right now.
BIG ZINE ENERGY
Because this is HTML and I can, I will share with you some Links on the topic:
The Electric Zine Maker - https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker
Every time you ever do anything you are doing it in a historical context and you can't escape that but you can at least be a little less ignorant - https://westportlibrary.libguides.com/zines
Birdface by Hana Berggren is my favorite contemporary zine/comic I've so far found. https://www.etsy.com/shop/HanaBerggren
There is also a recent Netflix movie called Moxie that is sort of about the topic and it is pretty okay in the genre of Movies About High School. I don't know if it really Captures The Magic the way that Whip It did for roller derby, but it's taking a swing at being the same kind of movie.
ok that's all, tell me what you think zine energy is
(you can find me at https://maya.land/)