The Hero Departs (but is most definitely still alive, a note I'm including because someone said this title freaked them out)
A quick sketch of the Bert…
(Digital)
…as he left the bed as soon as I got in it.
Tonight I decided to have the first fire of the season in my wood-burning fireplace. And everything went terribly awry. The house filled with smoke and the fire department came and it was all fine because the attic wasn’t on fire, and now I need to have someone come back out and check my fireplace… but I found out two things:
I actually do know where my fire extinguisher is (or was; I need a new one now) and how to use it
Fire extinguisher contents taste awful.
Huh. More than two things and here’s the most important:
3. The Bert is awesome.
Because I only found out about the problem at a fortunate time because he told me.
After the fire had been going in the fireplace for a bit, and I was blissfully drawing and listening to yet another Discworld book (Carpe Jugulum), the Bert came to stand at the top of the stairs and complain at me. It wasn't a sad little whine and it wasn’t a bark, but it was definitely insistent. I went to the bottom of the stairs and asked him what he wanted. He turned and looked at the kitchen and then looked at me and made that noise again. So I went upstairs. And found a nice, gray haze of smoke.
The firefighters were very nice when they came to make sure I wasn’t going to burn to death in my sleep later. They promised they wouldn’t judge my pantry (which is how you get into the attic) and told me to give the boy some steak tomorrow.
The Bert is quite unmoved by the praise I've given him already, but he did enjoy the extra treat and I’m sure he’ll be pleased about his upcoming meals. He’s the best boy even if he doesn’t do anything fancy, but it is nice to know someone in this house is paying attention to our welfare.
Fuck Love; Get Your PhD
Based on my favorite piece of graffiti I’ve ever seen in real life and a sink I saw at a doctor’s appointment today.
(Digital)
I can't remember if I was still writing or had just finished writing my dissertation when I saw that beautiful statement written in Sharpie on the bathroom wall in Amsterdam (the bar in St. Paul, not the Dutch metropolis, obvs, because I’m writing about when I was a grad student).
It’s a tremendous piece of advice and an inside joke for all academics who have navigated the weird social currents around doctoral completion. Like anything that has even the tiniest fraction of elitist aura, whether it's the arts, superb racecar driving, or exceptional wealth, getting a PhD can turn one person into an insufferable jackass and another into a apologist who uses self-deprecation to hopefully assuage any incoming fists or the sleeker, yet somehow more crippling, social punishment.
The former specimen, by the way, is found thriving in academia proper, usually annoying the hell out of the smart, kind, and thoughtful folks who love their research and their students. The latter is usually found in different environs, having fled academia for something less… pressurized.
I’m the latter. There’s only so much social stress I can take. But I still love research, I love art, I love history. And I really love architecture. Most people who know me don’t think much about my academic background and they really don’t think about my research. Except for one of my closest friends, who recently told me I can’t be trusted to drive without a copilot because I’m too easily distracted by handsome buildings.
….
I think what I love most about Fuck Love; Get Your PhD, is that everyone can apply it to everything. Broadly (and somewhat nauseatingly) speaking: fuck everything; get anything. Fuck approval; get donuts for dinner. Fuck the government; get wire-cutters. Fuck love every time it’s conditional. Get whatever the fuck you want.
I Don't Think These Shoes Fit
From a dream.
(Digital)
Here in Minnesota, we are currently experiencing the season in which it is too chilly to run the AC and too warm to run the furnace, meaning there is no industrial-level filter cleaning the air in my house. Therefore, I'm currently playing the “Can Allergies Actually Be This Bad, Or Am I dying?” Game.
The prizes suck and are primarily in the shape of pill bottles of various sizes and dimensions. All eligibility varies by the volume and pitch of my wheezing and perpetual coughing.
This dream started with the ill-fitting shoes and escalated until I was covered in my own blood, stumbling around in a forgotten park. While I had managed to fall— and stay — asleep, the discomfort of breathing had followed me.
I can’t wait until actual winter. I know I’ll be complaining about it in February, but right now it can’t come soon enough.
The Wheel of Fortune
Tarot Major Arcana X
(Ink on Paper; see more in the Tarot Gallery)
My favorite book of the Bible is the Book of Ezekiel. It’s a delightful gem of off-kilter occult matrices and fixations that never took root in canon. Aside from Revelation, which is basically a dude wishing he could rewrite Ezekiel but make it weirder, it has the best imagery of the entire Bible.
(Not the best imagery of all of the Biblically-adjacent writings; of all of them, I vote heartily for the Gnostic Gospels because that many layers of reality is just… impressive. Also, I am a big, big fan of the word “archon” for no discernable reason.)
I enjoy the flaming wheel as the Wheel of Fortune primarily for its connection to Ezekiel and the living creatures that make up God’s chariot. But I also like that it reminds me of Event Horizon and Contact, both of which clearly referred to Ezekiel's flaming wheel as a link between man and something beyond (one for better and one for worse).
The spinning wheel of fate does more than mark us intermittently, it moves us through states of being by virtue of altering our (spatial, temporal, and spiritual) course on a continuous, unrelenting basis. That sounds very woo-y, but it’s really just a matter of fact that we’re all hurtling through a chaotic universe bouncing off of one thing after another until one of those things is simply too much and we die as a result of the impact.
That’s not woo; that’s just physics.
I want my Wheel of Fortune to be perpetual. Not in a narrative cycle of up and down, death and rebirth kind of way, but in an every moment is the shattering and rebuilding of an infinite amount of realities kind of way.
The wheel turns, fate burns.
