day one, again

there are more days in July than in April.

okay, not by much. five years ago, in April 2015, I blogged every day for a month. it seems so long ago, looking back at those posts. when I was still in grad school and still single and wandering. I'd just come back from roaming around in Kentucky. I was taking lots of pictures of random outdoorsiness. I hadn't even decided about my dissertation topic.

2015 was a difficult year overall. not the only difficult year, but one that stands out. sometimes they seem to come on schedule, years like that. 2005. 2010. 2015.

it's 2020 now. there's still time for this year to be as difficult but it mostly looks like it's going to break the pattern.

now let's make a new pattern. every five years, I'll choose a month and blog every day. Sundays can still be reserved for art. the other days will be about so many other things too.

I'm already feeling the familiar percolating feeling of having ideas for blogposts bubble up out of nowhere. except it's of course not out of nowhere. it's everywhere-- the outdoors, the books, the news and opinions and everything else. not to mention the dozen or so draft posts I have to draw on if I feel like it. some of those might transform into real posts about public intellectuals, about the merits of owning material goods, about the word "community," about twitter threads and genre conventions, or about land and people and persistence. 

we'll see what happens.

for today, as a prologue, I want to note something about the tension I feel about all the free time I have this summer to make art, create things, to play around in various media. in May as the summer was just getting started I thought grand thoughts about all the art and crafts and making I'd get to do in late June and July and early August. I could make some art to put in those semi-useless wooden frames. or I could convert one of the frames into a loom and learn to weave. I could plan and embroider a better boardgame board of hexagons for The Plaid Identity game. I could knit something I've never knit before. sew a pair of trousers I've been meaning to sew for months and months. I could get more plants. I could practice my old violin.

there's still time for some of those things. it's only July 1!

but especially about the less practical art projects on my list, I face a skeptical interior voice of endless questions. do you really need more bits and scraps of art lying around? what would you do with that colored-pencil sketch even if you didn't end up hating it when it was done?

sometimes I manage to ignore that voice. making useless art is still okay. it doesn't matter a ton what happens to it after the making.

some of it will get blogged about. like this zine-esque poem thing:

the words are from a very old scrap of a Better Homes & Gardens magazine, found with some other art scraps in a folder that my mother unearthed from the basement some months ago.

amid the smudges of various oil pastels, the collage of words says

"Sometimes / a Rich imagination / hides at the beautiful hint / of what can make you love. / find importance inside it -- / looped over / expandable / lasting and / binding

"for this / add some red / as needed."

it'll probably get lost in a folder or a box somewhere until I unearth it years from now. it'll mean something new then. but it will still be something I got to make.