I’m afraid this morning page has a bit of a prompt, I wanted to write about how much I love my wife and was thinking that it would be fun to go through Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs as jumping off points for what she gives me. I do worry though that maybe I love her too much. That sounds like a joke, but what I mean is an idea that I shower her with the sort of love that we see in movies because my judgement of her is she likes that sort of stuff, so I want to give her what she wants. Here I’m giving her a love she wants. If what she liked was spiked necklaces, black lip stick and really baggy pants, I would do that stuff to make her happy. I mostly like making her happy, but if she was into that stuff, I probably wouldn’t care about her enough to go through much effort to make her happy. The idea is I shower her with stereotypical love and she feels bad for not reciprocating that. The thing is I don’t like stereotypical love, I like leave me alone love. She’s planned tomorrow to do a bunch of stuff I’d like to do, or at least a museum is scheduled and that’s enough to please me for a day. I got her flowers today which yeah people think that’s cute, but she could care less about flowers as a material object. She cares about the meaning and I’ll get the material object. Well I guess I didn’t have time for ole’ Maslow, maybe I’ll cover it tomorrow or next V-day. I just had a thought that I can safely bring my laptop with me tomorrow because she gave me a sleeve with Calvin and Hobbes on it. Very smart, very cool; just like my wife.
Oof, that took a turn
You can’t tell me what to do, I’ll fly where I want to. There’s nothing to talk about, I’ve exhausted ever single combination possible to make with words, these are the last sentences on earth. I always said I would like my last words to be, “bury me alive.” That way either we’ll already have that business taken care of or everyone around me will feel like they let me down by not fulfilling my last wish. If this was the last sentence of humanity and some how only one sentence could tell our story I think I would say, “We were explorers.” There was no word count so I should have gone with a run on sentence. That’s my point though, if all this came down to one sentence, what would it even be? All that thinking just leads to nihilism, so I have to stop there. Nihilism sucks kids, don’t mess with it, not even once. Honestly the position I take nowadays is that pure reason leads to nihilism. If The Scientific Method became a being and was trying to make rules for us to follow, it would get no where. A very important idea people glance over was Karl Popper showed that science doesn’t prove things. All we can do is disprove theories. In all of our time on earth, not a single thing has been proven. That’s the sort of idea that makes you want to hide under your blanket and cry for God to save you. Good thing I love my wife, what else would be the point. Without her I might move to the woods and explore painting for awhile, but I’d probably stop taking care of myself. Maybe I’ll get type II diabetes and die from a disease she used to cure. That probably won’t happen tomorrow though.
A Piece of Myself
Lot of 2’s in today’s date. Speaking of which, 2 things I learned from BEN(Boss Executive Neighbor) today was that I need to pay attention to the big picture values and the other was that I should be spending more time learning from him. Ok so I showed him my most recent painting and he showed me a painting he did of me. First off, when I arrived he had me planting bulbs and it had just started to rain, so dream job. His critique of my painting was that the values were all the same. My first thought was the values of the inside of the flower that shows the curvature because I struggled with that, but he meant with the whole thing, everything that was in relation to everything else. I’m getting lost in the details thinking about local values and not checking the effect on the other parts. I’m having to describe a good painting vs. a bad painting using only words, but he’s totally right and when I look at my work it suffers from that. You’d think I’d take his offer for free painting lessons right there, but no I told him I’ll think about it. I’ve got everything covered on my own right? What a duffus, we’re pretty honest with our speech and while working I asked what he thinks my flaws are. When we were talking afterwards he flat out told me that’s a flaw. I’m thinking that I want to improve at art and he’s having to convince me to take free advice. In my head I justify going to his house by saying I can miss out on drawing for 1 day every two weeks, but instead I should be thinking that I could be getting free art lessons as often as I want. I’ll probably take him up on his offer, but I’ll get back to him next week.
That recent event everyone is talking about is ground breaking and life will never be the same
I just finished my daily drawing and wanted to get down some of my thoughts while they’re ruminating. I was tired of drawing today, it felt like the work was pilling up and that I’m not cut out to do this. A couple of factors I’d say go into making that feeling. First, I hadn’t drawn since Friday; I’ve been painting. That’s the big one, after that there are things like I’ve been drawing the same style from the same book, I’m sort of coming off this wall I hit last week that’s making me reassess what I’m doing, the painting class last night leaves me tired and I’m meeting the boss neighbor tomorrow. All that extra stuff is extra, I don’t need it and I might cut it out if I can’t manage doing it with drawing. I stuck with the drawing to get through my work today and I feel great, as if I could take on the world, but it’s the other stuff that brings me down. I worry that I can’t get my work down before visiting the BN or how I dropped group therapy because it starts at 1:30. I find it hard to work when I have an appointment later in the day, my mind gets stuck at 1:30 and basically only wants to count down the minutes, this is why I can’t live a normal life. I can’t have schedules because all I think about is the schedule. On the first day of my painting class a guy asked why I paint and the first thing I said was, “It feels good.” Does it always feel good? Hell no, painting is the cause of some of my lowest feelings in life, but I feel like I belong there. I don’t feel like I belong with the people or the environment of art, so I’m cutting out what I feel is unnecessary; instagram probably being on that list. If all I do everyday for the rest of my life is the art work I assign to myself and stare at squirrels, I’m happy. I don’t care what anyone else is doing, they’re all idiots anyway.
Clawing their way to the top
It’s been a long time, but I didn’t do my morning pages yesterday and I think it calls for some restructuring. Winter teases out some laziness as we tend to hibernating. I was considering myself lucky if I got through Winter without gaining a bunch of weight, but I think we’re going to start to see temps rise and I’d like to get back on track. I’m writing my morning pages in the morning like the name intended them to be; a habit I’ve fallen off of for awhile.. I’m going to see what I need to get back on my diet. As a side note, I can see why New Years resolutions fail because at this point in the year I have this, “I don’t care about a month ago” attitude and just want to survive the cold. I thought about sleeping on the floor to readjust myself to temperature and comfort, at the very least I went on my walk without gloves to expose myself a little bit. It’s funny how quickly we go from fighting for warmth to cranking the AC. That’s the root of some problems I tell you what. What I was saying was I’m gonna get my diet straightened out because without planning it I feel like I don’t eat enough all day and then binge at night. I haven’t blown up like in the past, but my biggest complaint is I feel an inconsistency of energy that one would expect. I’ll try to do a bit of a dopamine reset this morning since I’ve got nothing going on until my painting class tonight. That means the only other thing I have to get done today is write this. It’s also raining all day and that’ll be a treat, now I’ve gotta figure out what I’m eating today, hopefully I’ll see you tomorrow morning.
McDonald’s is great
I was talking to my old friend Thunderclap today and boi did he let the truth fly. Get this, he told me that professional philosophers are rarely if ever significant philosophers. I’m sure there’s some sort of grey line and what comes to mind is the idea that often philosophers will have a preface to their book that’s singing the praises of a king or aristocrat that was willing to give them free money. With that money they wrote a book. Is that artist a professional or did they happen to be in a place in society where they’re sitting at a table with a king. I suppose it’s what’s meant by selling your soul. Everyone must answer to at least one master, we’re lucky if we’ve moved past taking orders from our appetite.
I think that last sentence was pretty good if I do say so myself. That was really enjoyable talking to TC today, talking to him is similar to how that old man spoke to me last week. A lot of thoughts flying all over the place and nothing is off limits, you wanna riff about LL Cool J for 8 minutes, or talk about the physical healing powers of praying 5 times a day, I’m down. I suppose that’s why we shouldn’t be co-workers, we don’t get a lot of work done, but I had fun being there. Oh he even reminded me of this Kierkegaard book I have. The book is filled with parables by him and I’m on a huge parable kick right now. Reading the Bible, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and throwing in some Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to keep things grounded. Now that I have a new found respect for Kierkegaard’s style of writing, I want to add that book to my heap. That’s a man I can learn from. Would really love to read some Shakespeare too, but where do you find the time?!
Loosen Rigidity
Rubberband man can’t stand. His bones have turned to gelly and he’s cascading to the ground. Concentric circles forming a rubber volcano. I feel like that last sentence needed a primer to hibachi because I’m thinking of when they stack the onion rings and make it shoot steam. I saw my therapist today. I suppose everything is going well. I told her I’m going to stop going to group therapy and my boss neighbor said he finished my portrait; that will be fun to see. There’s a line I’ve been holding on to for awhile now and figured I should try to flesh it out to let it go, but there’s a larger throbbing on my brain from the idea of living as a good person. A line I read today was sort of a pep talk from Zarathustra to a fool on a hill, “Don’t give up the holy fight, hero.” The question is how to be good. Obviously I’m good by not wronging anyone, that’s not real good, that is what Nietzsche would call a cowardice morality, they do it because they’ve been told it’s wrong without ever decided for themselves what is wrong. I want to play a larger game with the highest stakes imaginable, I’m talking about my life, hell my after-life. We’re given one chip to play, and sooner or later it has to be cashed in. Who the winners and losers are has yet to be revealed.
The line I’ve been holding on to has to do with the individual weary from being “battle and battlefield” of virtues. I hope it explains my past and I’m only able to see what that means because I’ve moved beyond. If I settle on one virtue above everything else and that virtue is proven to be wrong, could a man recover from such devastation?
Who will be at the helm when the winds shift?
I took things easy the last two days and will probably stay easy over the weekend because I was starting to get overwhelmed with everything I have going on. I was still looking to add more before this feeling took hold of me, so it’s good that I was able to have this break otherwise I could have kept going and increased the pace, putting myself into a dangerous situation. I’m back into a good situation now, but it means I need to look around myself at what happened. Whatever I was doing didn’t work, at least for the version of me that I am right now, so I have to first figure out what I was doing, then I can ask why it didn’t work. My first answer is that I was adding too much, that’s very common of me and almost always the cause of a setback. I had lost focus on what I was doing and that led me to take on new objectives.
I was trying to think of an example and was taught why The Odyssey is so important. He has a goal and the story isn’t about the destination, but the journey. Anyway the example from The Odyssey, and I don’t know the text very well, but I believe there is a part where he lands on an island filled with beautiful women. The men are invited in to clean up and feast. They’re having so much fun that years go by and they’ve completely forgot about what they were doing in the first place, that was part of their magical spell. The parallel I’m trying to draw is that I forgot what I was doing, so I started doing other things too. I need to draw. I repeat that to myself and I made it simple so I can remember, but I still forget. It goes to show how easily we can fall asleep at the wheel. I will work to lighten the load and maintain focus on art.
See a drop of water taking up the hole in a piece of mesh
I’m writing this outside because I just remembered to do it. It’s been raining for the last two days, but let up and is surprisingly dry now. The warmth is nice and makes me think that winter is almost over. Soon I’ll be able to go outside again. I do have to worry about allergies. Spring was rough last year, but not as rough as the first year’s fall allergies. Second year fall allergies actually were pretty mild, I like to hope my body will just get used to the location, but we’ve also gotten into a good routine of medicating through allergies. I started taking meds yesterday and I suppose if I have to do it daily for the next two months to have a normal life, I’ll put up with it. My eyes are on fire when I wake up. I better not let my wife see this because she’ll tell me I should use eye drops. Eye drops are such a pain because you have to land it on your eye. Do you know how many times I’ve missed my mouth when taking a pill? Very few, but I screw up eye drops a bunch, at best I have to waste like three seconds to make sure I do it right. I can’t live in the same world as eye drops. I was talking to some new friends about planning a friends vacation. That will be really exciting if it happens. My boss neighbor said he started the painting he’s going to do of me. I had a really exciting idea about it if he lets me keep it with my tiger painting. I don’t think I’ve shown you my tiger painting yet, but it’s pretty cool and I’m already in the works of a fun idea with that.
This is what I deserve
I know, I know, I missed another day. Yesterday was a mistake. I had a good routine for when I would write my morning pages and yesterday was the first day of my portrait painting class. It was the focus of a lot of my attention and this slipped through the cracks. I’m getting weary of myself because I feel very tired as of late and I have to be sure I’m not pushing myself too hard. There are somethings that I’d like to do that lately I haven’t been able to. It’s possible I’ve been struck by allergies recently because I know to expect them around this time of year, I thought it was a little early for pollen to be spreading though with the arrival of my trees last week, that does sort of mark the beginning of spring. Anyway, I’ll be trying to do less so I can do more. The feeling I’ve had lately is I feel so exhausted in the morning that I think I need to go back to bed, but I can’t sleep because I’m fully rested. That’s what makes me think allergies, that I’ve got odd exhaustion.
The painting class went good though, I felt pretty comfortable there and that’s what matters. There are people who are newer to the art form and it’s interesting to be made aware of all the information I had to learn to get to this point that I don’t think about anymore. One guy had a tube of acrylic paint with his oils. Sure acrylic or oil is easy to see, but to someone new it’s just paint. Then there’s brushes, mediums, supports, pallets and this is all before any painting happens. I’ve learned a lot of that stuff, so I can have the opportunity to paint. Now it’s about doing it enough times that with each instance I’ll get a little better and if I do it regularly for decades, I’ll hopefully be in a different sphere.
Chris' Morning Pages 