[de]sein

i’m trying to think of a good analogy to how i’m currently feeling. i think that what comes closest is having a three week long orgasm. my mind and body are tired, weak, spent. about 25% of my brain is still cranking. it’s saying ‘come on, let’s go. on to the next thing. keep moving, jackass.’, but boy does it get shot down quickly by the other 75% that seems to bounce from one thing to another without ever really stopping except to just stare out into space. several times this past week, i worked for over 20 hours at a stretch. i easily put in 100 hours for the week. probably slightly less for the previous two. and this was not design work, sitting at a desk, pushing a pencil. my hands tell the story of how sharp formica is when broken, how a staple gun is in no way concerned with the effect it’s having on the inside of your thumb, how at some point, your fingers just won’t hold things quite as well as they did before you tightened all those clamps and sanded all of those pieces. unless you have been a part of some sort of art or design project, i don’t know if you can understand the emptiness that accompanies a project’s finish. it’s not just the work, the hours, but a part of you is consumed by these very pieces that you are making. you are not just crunching numbers and presenting your work. no, everything has come from your head. you designed it from top to bottom. if it sucks, you suck. if it looks bad, you look bad. but if they love it, they love you. this is why artists go crazy. you just never know. but you just keep doing it. riding the roller coaster of loving and hating until hopefully at some point you can look back and see that it might in fact have been fun and if you were to be truthful with yourself, that you had never felt more alive than when you were creating, sweating, bleeding beautiful objects that were no one’s but your own.

tonight, m.b. was listening to a shins song that i was humming along to and he asked whether i had heard their new album. while i had not heard the album, which i told him, i could tell him exactly where, in a car on s st. about to turn onto 16th, that i had heard an npr review of the record. i realized that this is a common theme in my memory. i can remember exactly where certain events happened, but i cannot tell you when. if you ask me about a piece of text that i have read, if i remember it, i can generally tell you exactly where i was when i read it. or where on the page that paragraph occured. in school, this was particularly maddening. finding myself in a physics or calculus exam, i would need to recall some fact or equation and i could picture in my head the page that it was on, where it occured on the page, and where i was when i noted it, but i generally could not bring the specifics (which is all i really wanted) into focus. there are conversations i remember having in high school that i can tell you exactly where they happened, and generally what was said, but i could not tell you when it occured, unless there were very specific context clues to provide an anchor (who i was dating, what the conversation entailed, etc.).

i wish that i could express this better, and i wish even more that at some point i will find a way to show it visually, or in an object. that would be interesting.