Final

.At the beginning of this year I had an extremely difficult time losing someone I was never prepared to go without. Although I didn't technically know him, a good portion of my thoughts and writing tended to circulate around that particular event and similar things we must have experienced. Many of my pieces have an edge of art and memory to them. Usually when I have time to read, and I mean really read, I can adopt the writing style of the authors I'm involving myself with. So far this year, Patti Smith has made the biggest impact on what I write about. I'll admit my writing completely pales in comparison, but the subjects touch base in the same ways. My posts "Comfort at the Bottom of a Swimming Pool" and "It's a Small World but Complicated" are Smith influenced in some way or another. An in-class writing activity I really enjoyed was the paint chip poems and the old photograph activity. It reminded me of how much I enjoy character construction and how I must get back into it, whether I utilize it in drawing or my writing. My personal journal contains a lot of my feelings about the end of a day or week. If I have a fear of forgetting something small and sweet that happened, then it'll be put on the page.

A classmate's piece I can distinctly remember is Dakoda's "Boy With Twig" poem. For unknown reasons it filled me with plenty of images of a renaissance peasant boy becoming a renowned entertainer in his village. Magdelaine's "Eight Elvises" was like a song that got stuck in my head even though it isn't even a song...yet. Everyone and their dog knows what books I was obsessed with at the beginning of the year, but recently I finished a book called The Wander Society and it was filled with enough encouragement and adventure to last me the whole summer. A few days ago I began Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, a recommendation from Korah. Around midnight last night I opened up a scavenged copy of On The Road that I found for $4 at Relics on my last day of high school. The Wander Society provided me with a nice book list I'll blaze through this summer if all goes well.

I've never had a writing blog before, but I've had a picture-centric blog for years. I remember I made the blog on David Bowie's birthday, January 8th, and named it after that. Dad to the Bone is just something that was silly and pretty much describes the core of my sense of humor. I knew my class mates would be reading through my blog occasionally, and that wasn't too intimidating for me. Hopefully most of them know that writing is just another creative outlet for what I can't express in painting.

Journaling has always been a huge part of my life. Documenting things/thoughts/people/experiences/dreams in general is something that I have always done and will always do. I even keep a memory box along with a personal journal and have several other friends who do the same. Every time we go out and have a good time somewhere we always find a small memento and say, "this is for the memory box." My journals are full of thoughts, concerns, and feelings I have about people I know and sometimes about people who don't know me. It all depends. 

Straight from my personal journal, no editing: 7 days ago last night marked one week and its just unbelievable still. Waking up is a lot harder. But yesterday Niki took me to the Mudhouse for dinner. It was probably about 10 degrees and we walked from the Moxie to the dinner spot where we sat for a few hours drawing each other. We met this girl who didn't have a place to sit, a theater student at MSU. I simultaneously made and broke the ice all at once. I said something really awkward and I thought it was funny until I saw Niki's face. I can't remember what I'd said but it must've been funny. She sat for a while, left and then Tinnelly came by. Then we hit the Moxie. Niki took a really good picture of me and we waited for seating to start. There were lots of people there. I got the same seat in theater 2 that I saw Snowpiercer in, so that was kind of full circle. They played Heroes before the actual movie and I had a hard time being sad. There was only gratitude and a warm feeling all around. I sang along to all the songs quietly and laughed with everyone else. After the movie, we all sprinted in the cold to the car and yelled. Niki enjoyed the movie and we listened to some of his songs on the way home while laughing.

From a previous post: "He said things like "I was always kind of different from everyone I met," and "working at Burger King was my 5 a.m. punishment for dropping out of high school." and so on. The way Dominique described his reminiscent car trip was something I'll always be able to visualize perfectly in my mind. He said, “It’s like shards of in-congruent memories coming together.” When I think of that sentence I can see myself driving through town with a friend in about 15 years time. We'll pass certain places in town and they'll look completely different, but I'll still be able to make out the small fragments of what it used to be. Maybe when that happens there'll be someone young sitting in the back seat like me.
It's nice to be able to sit in the back seat and relive someone's stories like a phantom. There's no outstanding expectation to say anything meaningful or poignant. You just have to open your notebook and know how to make it look like you're not writing down everything they say."

For me, writing is a back-brace if  I can't find another way to say what I need to. Most of the time I stick to personal journaling and creating art, but a lot of my "critical thinking" when it comes to my art is solved on paper with writing first. When I was a lot younger, I always had a notebook with me. I was always writing fantasy stories and making characters out of everything I saw. Back then, I wanted to be a writer. I don't exactly remember what changed my mind, but naturally I eased into visual art and that's where I have stayed. In the future, I have plans for more characters in my art and I might even make a graphic novel of sorts and I can't do that without creative writing. I just have to find the right inspiration to set that cog into motion.