A Personal Update

Much has changed, and little has really changed at all.

I'm back in Chicago, living alone this time. Still seeing many of the same people, still a florist, but with lots of changes. It's hard for me not to see myself as a tiny ant, and all these changes as so amazingly unimportant, although the past year has been completely unstable and confusing. I'm in a sort of practical state of mind these days. I have little patience for the standard (Chicago) cast of hustlers, drug dealers and prostitutes of one sort or another. I'm over the novelty of it and believe it or not I find it boring at this point. I don't think this is a sign of my continuing detachment as much as it is a sign of RE-attachment to something else. Something more pure, and more exciting anyway. I do admit to being relatively boring these days: working too much, cooking sometimes, drinking a little and fucking not at all. Painting never. But things are turning around. Balances are resetting themselves and life promises to be good, assuming we ever get nights that are above 40 degrees.

I'm trying to work in earnest on this film project, but I feel dwarfed by the idea of it. I often wish I was more passionate or less logical and could just do things. Because I know that if I tried to tackle it I could, it's purely a mental block. Fear of failure, or more likely fear of success. But I've been poking about in some source material. I can't decide if it's important that I translate (and make available) the German texts or just be able to understand them and use them for my own ends. I think the latter is the direction I'm leaning in. I found a cheap (or at least affordable) ticket to Germany that leaves from Philly, so I'm hoping to get to Bremen sometime this year and get a bit of research and taping done(?). It's a scary thing to try to bring an idea out of the ether and take responsibility for it- bring it to life. It's so much easier not to, and I hate myself for being so often so very lazy.

As far as paintings are concerned, the 'domestic' ideas I was talking about in the last post have morphed into something more about categorization in general. I'm fairly fascinated by the way everything human culture is is based on words and abstract ideas that can't be really COMPLETELY defined. Maybe that's why we all feel so lost and confused all the time - it's difficult to stand balanced on a shifting surface. But the domestic (or at least common) objects remain a source of interest because of the blindness that familiarity brings. I tried to define a deck of cards via organization of the cards based upon their characteristics and could come up with no solid results. I have also decided that days and various other demarcations of time are too relative to be considered real, and therefore do not exist in the way that we know them. I wonder how detached I can get before it gets really unhealthy.