This one will be referenced in a good portion of my entries. Basically, in my creative life, I have had two huge decades spanning projects. Stories which serve as skeletons for me to hang the muscles and nerves of other artwork on. Most of the art I've made in the last 9 years or so has been related to Timesanner and The Infinite Now. Prior to that from the ages of 17 to 27, all of the writing, art, music I made was related to a fantasy story called The Arriving Sea. The title actually changed constantly, but more often than not that was the name I used for it.
It was a fantasy novel about a boy traveling to an alternate reality where time functioned differently than it does in our reality. I'll keep the details to myself on the off chance that I revisit it someday. The characters and basic premise are still very important to me, even if the manuscript that came out of it would be extremely embarrassing and unpublishable today.
I kept notebooks with details from the world and sketches of its inhabitants. The world grew with me as I matured. When I was 17 it was along the lines of the Chronicles of Narnia, then grew through different drafts into something more mature and much stranger as I aged and experienced more life.
Here is where I'd like to share some illustrations.
It was constantly evolving and the age of the protagonist fluctuated a lot as well. At times he was a young child a la Bastian from The Neverending Story, sometimes he was an older teenager. A few months ago I was fucking around and I re-wrote the first 2 chapters in my current writing voice and the protagonist was in his early 20s.
Looking back on the tale now, I'm struck by how many of its characteristics and themes are still things I explore now. The questioning of the nature of reality, a deep feeling of alienation, fear of your own potential, alternate mechanics for time. The Arriving Sea was definitely written by the same person who came up with Timescanner and The Infinite Now.
It also served as my self-taught education in writing. Sitting down and working and being honest with myself about what worked and what didn't and re-writing it again and again was a good way to learn to string sentences together. But I didn't begin the project with the thought that I would actually write a book.
The Arriving Sea came to me when I was 17. 1995 or thereabouts. At the time I spent hours of every day listening to music and daydreaming. I wasn't on the internet, I was well-liked in school, but relatively shy and tended to choose solitude with my own thoughts over partying or goofing off with my friends. I used to lay on the carpet at my parent's house on my back and place two floor speakers on either side of my head as if they were enormous deafening headphones and I'd close my eyes and let whichever CD I was into take me away into alternate sonic realities.
At this point in time Smashing Pumpkin's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the album I was obsessed with. It was atmosphereic and melodramatic and layered and as a double album with a running time of almost 2 hours, it really allowed me to lose myself completely with no distractions from the outside world for a good chunk of every day. Also, the album artwork was evocative of a children's story. Sort of like an Alice in Wonderland kid's book. I'm sure this also put me in this imagery headspace.
While submerged in this sonic landscape, my imagination illustrated my own story along with the emotion of the music. Not necessarily the lyrics. To be honest, I've listened to The Smashing Punpkin's music countless hours over the years and I couldn't tell you what most of their songs were about. To me, the important part of their music is the atmosphere and sonic texture and raw emotion. And at 17 I'm not sure I had experienced enough of life to even realize that lyrics cold be about something. Vocals were just another instrument in the band. This attitude was essential for enjoying any rock music to come out of the 90s. Not an era known for its great lyricists. More often than not, 90s rock lyrics read like bad teenage confessional poetry and should be ignored to the best of the listener's ability.
Today, being more conscious of lyrics, I am completely unable to write fiction to anything but instrumental lyrics so I can only assume at this point in time at 17 years old I hardly noticed that the lyrics were there.
I started taking notes on the imagery and characters that came to me and I started doing more detailed drawings for art classes and the like.
I wrote my own rock songs alone in my parent's attic on a cheap cherry red unplugged electric guitar that my parent's bought for me on my 16th birthday. (I still have that guitar and still strum it from time to time.) The songs I wrote started to morph from being punk songs about how much I hated my hometown to being expansive psychedelic songs about this alternate world I had created. I recorded demos of these songs on my dad's JC Penney's cassette recorder. Pretty sure those tapes don't exist anymore.
Though I did re-record a handful of the songs over one summer in college. I was living in COlorado Springs and all my friends went away for the summer. I had a job waiting tables and so I stayed in town and was unencumbered by any social obligations for 3 whole months. I bought a cassette 8 track recorder and spent my off hours alone in the room i subletted multi-tracking crude versions of the songs I had written over the previous few years, many of which were about The Arriving Sea.
Embarrassing lyrics, but kinda intriguing in a historic sense if you happen to me.
My Arriving Sea notebooks multiplied and the story got more and more complicated (too complicated one would say if they had any formal education in fiction writing) and my senior year of college I began making art illustrating parts of this story (in an abstract way) I got a little carried away. This was for my senior art major exhibit. Most students made 10 pieces of strong work to show. I had this vision of taking the entire Armstrong Hall and just covering it in art hundreds of pieces filling multiple hallways. I had been really inspired by a retrospective exhibit by local Manitou Springs artist CH Rockey in which every inch of the ARC Gallery was covered in his work and I wanted to do the same. But this was a collection of work he had made over 50 years! I was trying to rival this output over the course of 6 months.
My girlfriend at the time was away studying spider monkeys in Costa Rica that semester and so again I didn't have any social obligations or distractions. I often spent every waking moment 16 hours per day in the printmaking studio or painting studio making work. I wanted the narrative to be complete and this helped motivate me. I wanted the damn story out of my head so I could move on to other things in life. I became possessed. An outside observer might have worried about my sanity. I myself worried about my sanity when at one point during a bout of sleepless manic art creation, I had an entirely convincible encounter with a ghost. (don't worry, I wasn't insane. That ghost was real and I later found out she was seen by many others. More on that another time.)
One could argue that it would have behooved me to make fewer artworks and spend more time on each to get better at my craft. But I had a vision. And that vision involved quantity instead of quality.
After 6 months of manic production of art I was burnt out on visual art entirely and wanted nothing to do with it anymore. But the story of The Arriving Sea was not done with me. Now it demanded that I write out the story as a novel. The only problem was that I had never written fiction before and I wasn't even that big of a reader.
Queue the next 7 years of my life when I would teach myself to string together coherent and sometimes compelling sentences while writing and re-writing this story over and over again.
My girlfriend came back from the jungles of Costa Rica and we moved to Chicago together and then back to the Pacific Northwest together and I tried my best to learn to write. It was really hard to say the least. I re-wrote the first act of that novel a dozen times while teaching myself to write Every time I'd get 1/3 the way into the novel I'd reallize that my prose style had improved to the point that I was embarrassed of the first few chapters and I'd start over again. I didn't make headway into the back half of the story until my marriage started to tank.
While our dating relationship had been ok-ish. When we got married things started to get bad. I am an intensely sensitive person and my wife became increasingly hostile and controlling and demanding and less empathetic. I began to retreat from her out of fear of being verbally abused. The excuse I used for retreating from her was writing The Arriving Sea. She had read excerpts of it and she believed in it. She probably believed in the financial possibilities of the novel more than I did (these were the haydays of Harry Potter and I suspect she saw those dollar signs in what she read.) And so she supported me hiding in my closet typing away on the manuscript seeing it as a way for me to reach my potential as a human and a provider. By that point I was deeply depressed and was only continuing with the charade of writing in order to have an excuse to hide in a closet away from my wife.
To be fair to her, I was a loving caring husband, but I was probably not easy to be with at that point either. I was deeply depressed and entirely unmotivated to find a career or even keep a shitty job. I spent a good deal of that time unemployed putting the financial burden on her. Not ideal. But berating a deeply depressed person with a waning will to go on living into going out and getting a job is not really a winning strategy. It really just makes them more suicidal.
We had a baby together and sometime around my son's birth I finished a rough draft of the story as a whole. I felt like the story tied things up nicely and even if it still needed a ton of revisions, I was happy to have the whole tale written out in words.
Then I found out my wife had been cheating on me and leaving me watching our infant while she went on rendezvous with her lover. We got divorced. I put away the manuscript and never looked at it again just as I put away most things in my life at that point and tried to make a new life from scratch.
With a few exceptions that was the end of my time in the world of The Arriving Sea.
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The next few years after my divorce were a time of freedom, both personally, romantically, socially, idealogically, and artistically. I got to re-invent myself from the ground up and I was only 30 years old.
When it became apparent that my wife and I were going to split up, I rented an art studio and began experimenting with visual art again for the first time since college. I slept at our rental house with our son half of the week and on the floor of my art studio the other half of the week while my ex was at the house.
(I guess I had made a few things just before the marriage ended. Chess Painting, Candles re-painting, The Eggs artbook about the prospect of becoming a father.)
At the studio I tried out a handful of things, but the main output was my series of baseball card sculptures/photographs. I was in the process of taking myself apart and putting myself back together and so I did this in my art as well. I found several boxes of sports cards I had collected as a teen. I was hoping they'd be worth something someday, ut really they were just something for my dad and I to do together. He'd buy me packs to reward me for stuff and we'd go through them together. I have fond memories of that. But the cards never became worth anything. Just the time spent with my dad. there's a lesson in there somewhere about people and experiences over investments.
And I had invested all of my hopes and dreams of the future into my marriage which was now over and so I found my relationship to time changing. No more planning for the future The only safe way to relate to time is to live entirely in the now. Divorced from the past and the future I had I was purely in the now. I took my baseball card collection and cut slits in the cards and pieced them back together into structures. The original idea was to make wall-hanging scuptures out of them. But they were pretty flimsy and delicate, and as I took photos to document them I started to like the photographs better than the structures so now the photos were the artpieces.
Here's some pics. And here's one where I painted over some cards in fun ways. This imagery will bleed into my future in a meaningful way.
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I started dating a free-spirited young woman and we fell dangerously in love for about a year. We wrote new music together, starting with love songs we wrote for each other and branching off into other things. She introduced me to music with quality lyrics and I learned to integrate my newfound ability to write with the songwriting ability of my youth to write a new batch of songs. Some we wrote together and some I wrote on my own. I developed my own idiosyncratic fashion in my circle shirts that I screenprinted for myself as my own super hero costume. I made a website called Ideas By Mail. My new lover and creative partner worked at a used record shop and we practiced music with friends while drinking beer afterhours at the shop. We took home scratched records and I spraypainted them to make a solar system of painted records on one of my walls.
While snooping on my harddrive, my girlfirend found a collection of cover recordings I did re-interpreting every song on the Donnie Darko soundtrack (a movie of isolation, questioning reality, and complicated alternate mechanics of time) She loved the recordings, which were very different from the originals. I had been inspired by the Dump album "That Skinny Motherfucker With The High Voice" (Ira from Yo La Tengo recording ultra-lo-fi covers of Prince songs.) We got the idea to do a live concert on Halloween in the record shop playing these songs. (cool pics of that night) (a few recordings of that night)
She and I broke up and I wrote another batch of heartbreaking breakup songs. Some of the best songwriting I've ever done, but super painful to listen to so I never did anything with them.
I met my best friend Trilety Wade. A deeply loving friend with a bizarre way of looking at everything. She is highly intellectual and knowledgeable about all sorts of very strange subjects and she got me reading again. And she believed deeply in my creativity and writing and my own strange points of view on the world. At the time she was also not having sex with anyone and was extremely verbal about all things sexual. An intriguing combo. And her openness with talking about sex really encouraged me to come out of my shell in that way too to the point where desires were something totally normal and nothing to be ashamed of. As a result of this, and with my newfound embrace of my own sexuality (mildly bi-sexual you might say) I wrote another batch of songs that were pretty highly sexually charged. Including one called How to Construct a Time Machine about remembering a sexual encounter as a method of time travel, and one called Such Experiments about the Large Hadron Collider having the unintended side-effect of making everyone on earth dangerously horny.
I was super proud of these songs as a hot 30 year old and now that I'm aging a bit more I think I'd be self-conscious about singing them in public at this point. I might come across as someone's creepy dad at this point.
When I got a desk job I discovered the internet. Brittany and I had a MySpace page for our "band" and one guy named Shu discovered us on there and was convinced we were a real band. My first internet follower I guess.
Trilety lived in Omaha and we kept in touch over email and I started an online writer's group with Trilety and a friend at the time named Regis Lacher. Regis and I had met at a mutual friend's wedding in Albequerque many years ago and when he moved out to Seattle we met up a handful of times. Regis had a wonderful askew creative brain and when the two of us got together and shared ideas we just clicked. We'd talk a mile a minute riffing off of each other. We talked like a podcast sped up x2 speed just to get out our ideas as fast as they came. We were real life friends, but Regis preferred interacting online to real life and so we emailed back and forth every day all day long while at our desk jobs and became really close even though we lived in the same city and didn't see each other face to face all that often.
Trilety and Regis and I started an online Weird Writers' group and we shared new pieces almost every day. Strange experimental bits and flash fictions. We encouraged each other and would reply with comments almost instantly whenever one of us posted something new.
Some of those bits I wrote were later adapted into Infinite Now episodes.
Regis was an all or nothing person who would do one thing obsessively until he was totally done with it and then he'd jump ship for another thing. One weekend Regis and I took a hypnotherapy course together. I hypnotized Regis to quit his drinking problem. That week Regis quit drinking and picked up a new vice instead: twitter.
Regis told me he wasn't going to do our online writer's group anymore (which I had been calling The Notion Club) and that he was going to do twitter instead. This was late 2011. I had previously made a twitter account but I didn't use it for anything other than following writers I liked. I rarely logged on and never tweeted. The name on my twitter was @TIMESCANNER based on this old Dinosaurs Attack card subtitled "The Time Scanner Disaster!" I dind't know what to do with twitter.
Regis had been on the Something Awful message board FYAD (Fuck You and Die) with some weirdos who had moved their brand of absurd joke/poems to twitter instead. He introduced me to some of them including TPHD, Patricia Lockwood, Kimmy Walters, and Joseph Fink and I saw the creative potential. Regis and I started tweeting every day all day long.
For my part, I was mostly doing absurdist imagery and strange thoughts. Art tweets. Regis had adopted TPHD's schtick of only tweeting in all caps as an aesthetic choice. He had the pyramid from the dollar bill as his avatar. People thought he was a shouting pyramid. He took on a larger than life self-help pyramid persona. He listened to people and gave them advice and he became really important to people in their personal lives. Almost like a cult leader. In general I thought he was adding value and meaning to his followers lives and that was beautiful. But I was also good friends with Regis the person and I knew how deeply troubled he was as a person. I felt like Regis was using his twitter followers in a way. He was helping them with their own lives instead of dealing with the problems in his own life.
2012 was the heyday of absurd joke/poetry twitter. It really was a magical and stupid time. At one point Regis made a tweet that said "DESTROY ALL NON-WEIRD TWITTER," and from that, people started calling what we did "Weird Twitter." People in that "community" hated that term and would get in fights every time that term was used. It was never meant to be a name of a thing we did, it was just meant to encourage normal twitterers to cut loose a little. About the time something is named it's time to try something else. I used all caps less frequently and chose to just be friendly and hang out with friends and be genuine more.
Some Weird Twitterers moved on to more real art forms that actually benefit ourselves and the world a bit more. Patricia Lockwood had a lot of success with her poetry including the amazing "rape joke" poem and her memoir PreistDaddy. Joseph Fink and his friend Jeffrey Cranor moved their absurdist/existential/playfully creepy wordplay from twitter to their Podcast Welcome to Night Vale and I instantly fell in love with it and became their first evangelist. MOUNT ENNUI went to back to med school. I would stay on twitter but wold be decidedly less "weird" from there on out. Just weird to the level my normal thoughts are weird. Not intentionally weird.
Regis was a really difficult friend. We jived on creative things, but as a person he was really difficult. He would say cruel things to Trilety under the guise of "telling you painful truths you needed to hear." He always really looked up to me in an idyllic sort of way and that was nice. But it's weird to have a friend put you on a pedastal. At some point in late 2012 I went through a difficult breakup with a girlfriend I met on twitter and I got a little depressed and needed some help. And Regis suddenly took me off my pedestal and saw me as human. And exactly when I needed a caring friend and some compassion he took to "telling me hard truths" that were in fact not truths at all, just hurtful things because he reallized I was just human afterall. And some of the things he said were unforgiveable and our friendship ended.
About that time Regis decided he was done with twitter and he logged off permanently. All of the followers who he had been so helpful to over the previous year and who saw him as some kind of absurdist loving guru came to me to make sure he was doing ok. The last time I saw Regis face to face was over lunch around this time. Our friend and fellow all caps-tweeter MOUNT ENNUI was in town for the weekend and Regis only made time to meet us for a brief lunch. I have no problem with someone leaving twitter. It's generally a healthy choice to do so. But at that lunch I tried to pass along some messages from his followers who had missed him and he was totally dismissive of them as if they never mattered to him at all. I remember ENNUI asking, "who are these people?" and Regis replying coldly "fake people. They're people who don't exist." Then he explained that he couldn't spend any more time with the two of us because he had errands to do. "I found this tiny axe and I have to go get it sharpened" he said at the brunch table. Out of the inside pocket of his blazer he removed a small rusty axe with a handle no more than 7 inches long. He put the tiny axe back in his pocket and left.
Welcome to Night Vale had accidentally gotten a massive following. Not accidental in the sense that they didn't put in a lot of hard work. They're hardworking dudes and Joseph has a hell of a head on his shoulders for the business side of making art. But accidental in that they got massively popular with teenage girls who made lots of fanart for tumblr and that was pretty far from the demographic they thought they were making the show for, meaning us and our strange friends on twitter. They were kind enough to include us a little bit in the success of their show. They included Regis and some of his writings in their early episode THE PYRAMID, and Trilety wrote a poem for their episode Poetry Day. I was Intern Richard, the intern with beautiful eyes who gets turned into a tree in the episode about the Whispering Forest.
And they were being creatively and financially successful based on a writing style very similar to my own. The same sort of voice I had previously been convinced was kinda unpublishable, suddenly had a valid and profitable outlet. And so I decided to make my own show. It seemed like a good way to use all of my interests, music/audio editing, acting, weird writing. So I started trying to develop a show around the fictional character my twitter persona had developed into THE TIMESCANNER.
I wrote and recorded several different "pilot episodes" of The Timescanner Podcast and none of them were good enough for me. I had one version that was a love and sex advice show where you ask a time traveler about your romance troubles. I was really self-conscious to not seem like I was ripping off my friends at Night Vale, especially since I felt like there was a lot of overlap in our absurdist but sincere style. I was a working single dad this while time and work on it was slow and it took me a few years.
One day I heard about something called "Leap Second." They were adding an extra second to the day because of the uneven cycle of the Earth. I had the day off work and I felt like I should make something cool for this cool idea. And so I wrote and recorded what would be the episode Leap Second and posted it just prior to midnight to listen to as Leap Second occurred. It used the sound design and friends' music that I had kindly asked permission to use in my theoretical podcast show, but it was never intended to be an actual episode. Just something my twitter followers could enjoy at midnight and I intended to delete it the next day.
Before I could delete it I got a DM from Sam Greenspan, producer on 100% Invisible. He said he loved the show and he had been following my tweets for years and could he tell people to listen to the show. I said yes and I did't delete it and decided to just consider it the first episode of the show and move on to making a second episode.
And that's how The Infinite Now got started and took up the next couple years of my life.
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Through The Infinite Now I met a bunch of other audio drama podcasters. Many of whom got inspired by Night Vale. And they became my good friends and my creative community. ars Paradoxica, Greater Boston, Caravan, What's the Frequency etc. I feel like I made friends for life in this group. And I got a chance to voice act on some cool shows. My turn as Douglas "The Devil" Kowalksi in WTF is something I'm especially proud of.
Also, it became clear that most of us weren't going to get super popular and financially successful the way that Night Vale had. At least not without signing up to make your show for weird sketchy venture capitalist podcast prospecting companies like Bright Sessions creator Lauren Shippen did. And my hatred of capitalism wasn't ever going to allow me to take that kind of a route. Each of us had found a small following, and most of us were still losing money on the production of our shows.
The few who were able to make decent money Paul Bae with The Black Tapes, Girl in Space, The Bright Sessions, The End of Time and Other Bothers, basically did so out of their own determination and business smarts and ability to get work in other writing gigs or market themselves. I'm super proud of them and also I don't think I have that in me. The only hope there is if I got a business partner who was good at those sorts of things.
But I think there's a good lesson in there somewhere. If you want to make a profit with your art you need to be a business person. It's actually more important than being a good artist to making a profit. And if you're a good businessperson, your own art is probably the lest profitable place to put those skills to work. That's why you see so few wealthy artists.
The success stories as far as that goes are: George Lucas, Jim Henson, Walt Disney, and that's about it. And Walt wouldn't have have been successful without his brother handling the business side of their ventures.
Does that mean I got to business school? Not sure I could bring myself to do that.
I can't say I was expecting to make money at The Infinite Now, but I can say working on it at a financial loss while not being able to pay my bills as a single working dad was definitely a factor in why I lost steam on the show.
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And so here I am. Post-TIN probably. Kinda lost creatively. Kinda depressed again. Not sure what to do next. A period of wild experimentation in life and art sure would be nice. I expect I'll do some of that when Isaac turns 18 in 3 years. What do I do in the meantime?
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