I really should have something to say but I’m at a loss. I had nothing going on this week. Nothing at all. At least nothing significant that I can remember. Yet when I look back at my calendar there are things on it. That’s exactly why I keep a calendar. It’s not that I’m so busy with appointments that I have to write them down to keep track of them. As a matter of fact I have very few appointments. I keep a calendar so I can look back and see that I have accomplished some things.
My calendar is actually more like a journal. It’s not filled with stuff I have to do but with things I’ve done. I keep it for times just like these when I’m sitting around and feeling like I’ve accomplished nothing lately. I actually do a lot of work. Drawing, painting, writing, or whatever I have going on but when the work is for myself and not for someone else it’s easy to forget it has any value. Even if it’s just valuable to me. It’s even easy to forget I’ve done anything.
I have the tendency to think only about the next thing I want to do. The last thing I did can leave my mind quickly and I no longer feel its presence. I forget I did it. That’s why I write down what I did during any given day. So I can see it a glance. I especially have a way of forgetting the regular things I do. Like my “Four Talking Boxes” comic strip. One of the things that I did this week was to finish another week’s worth of comics. I’ve published nearly five hundred comics on my web site and that’s quite an accomplishment. But somehow in my mind after I finish my strips for the week it doesn’t count to me as having done anything. After all I always do that. It’s weird.
Another thing I got done this week is that I finished two new prints. Now how does finishing two new prints count as not getting anything done in my mind? I’m not sure. The prints I finished are from a new series I was working on called “Unchain Your Brain”. Usually my prints have sentence/saying/slogan on them but each print says something different. This series is my attempt to make a “Branded” series of prints. They all say the same thing. All of the images are different from one and other but they are some of my oddest images. But that’s kind of the point. I’m looking to unchain my brain with them and come up with new stuff.
I think that’s the strange twist for me this week with the “Unchain Your Brain” prints. The more of them I’ve done the more I’ve been seeing them as a message to myself rather than as a message to everybody else. That’s not usually the case. So finishing these particular prints seemed less important and easier to forget about than others. Weird. I’m going to have to start posting stuff again to let other people see.
I got a couple of pages drawn in my inkbook this week. That’s what I call my sketchbook in which I draw only in ink with no great forethought before drawing. It’s how I come up with my odd imagery. I draw six to ten small drawings on a single five and a half by eight and a half inch page. It doesn’t take a long time to draw a single page, a little over an hour, but it takes me a year to fill a hundred page sketchbook. That means I get about eight pages, or fifty to one hundred small drawings, done a month. I’ve been doing that for thirteen years so I have quite a collection of drawing to mine for ideas. But, once again, that’s something I’ve managed to do consistently so I don’t think much about getting it done and therefore on a night like tonight they don’t count towards my feeling of well being. Though I did them it doesn’t feel like it.
One other thing I finished this week was the photo I made of my cousin’s wedding. It’s a present for him. That’s the thing I do for friends and family as their wedding present. I take pictures and I cut and arrange said pictures into one big picture that hopefully tells the story of the wedding. It takes a lone time to make one. People seem to like them. But tonight it feels like I didn’t finish anything. Why is that? I think it was because I considered it a forgone conclusion that I’d finish it. From the moment I heard about the wedding I knew I’d be making one. And I did. In my mind it was already finished before I even did it. So when I actually finished it it was no big deal. Strange because it took a lot of effort to do.
My paying work gets written down on the calendar too but for some reason that rarely gives me the satisfaction of getting things done. After all it’s stuff that has to be done. If I don’t do it then I won’t get paid and I’d like to be paid. It keeps the lights on. I do like to note the paying work though. When I go and look back at my calendar at least I can see when I’ve earned some money.
One last thing that goes on my calendar is my bicycling. I note the days that I go for a bike ride. There is no real reason for it except to look back and see that I did it. Y’see I can’t even remember what year it was when I started riding regularly again. The keeping of calendar doesn’t go back that far. It could have been 1997 or it could have been 2002. I don’t know. It’s lost in the mist of my memory. I had ridden a bike all through my youth and on again and off again through my young adulthood but it wasn’t until my late twenties that I started to ride regularly. But I can’t remember how regular was regular. I can remember riding another route when I started up but I can’t remember when I switched over to my now regular route. Was their time in between the two routes or did I stop riding the first one and start up the second a while later? I have no idea but I’m pretty sure I’ve been on this current route for at least a decade. And since I’ve been keeping a calendar for the last four years I know exactly when I did ride.
Oh and I’ll have to note that I wrote this blog today. I don’t always remember to do that but I try.
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