Periodically I make collage cards, after my dear friend Noam Assayag. Here's one I did today when I couldn't concentrate on anything else.

A lot of which I still can't share because the project isn't out yet, or it died, or there's no context for it, or I fucked up, or I've lost the images. Not all of it is good. But jesus fuck I've made so many different kinds of things. For some reason everything is sorting strangely in my screenshots folder, so I'm seeing things from over the last 6 or 7 years all jumbled together. WELL HERE'S SOME OF THOSE SCREENSHOTS

just a bunch of scraps, not the best stuff because the best stuff still might theoretically come to pass some day

What do we have here?

;]

Warren Ellis, in his newsletter this week, quoted Benjamin Percy (without providing a source):

It's always a shit-stain of a moment when I first hear no. I usually end up listening to John Coltrane in the dark while sucking down a bottle of bourbon and feeling sorry for myself. But then something happens. I somehow go from fuck me to fuck you in my attitude. I've never been the most talented guy in the room, but I'm usually the most stubborn. And that's what's helped me recognize the turn.

Whenever you encounter wreckage, think about the turn. It's waiting up ahead, even if you don't recognize it yet.

— Benjamin Percy

I remember the "no wait, fuck you!" feeling, but I haven't felt it in a long time. I've had a bad habit of internalizing failures or setbacks passively. "Well, fuck me I guess!" In my better moments lately, I've been able to conjure some of that fight. It's not necessarily best to position yourself oppositionally, or at least that's what I've told myself for a long time. I can remember times that having an internal enemy — or a counterexample, someone doing the opposite of what I wanted — was able to ground my approach.

At the very least, so long as you're sure you aren't the villain in a given situation, it's no use directing your negativity toward yourself. I've been watching kaizo Mario speedrunners lately, and GrandPOOBear explained in this video with Tim Rogers that you blame the controller, you blame the kaizo blocks, you blame the game. You don't blame yourself for fucking up. You might know you fucked up, but giving in to that self-demolishing mode isn't going to help you overcome the challenge. Make the failure your enemy, not yourself.

Who is my counterexample now? Well, ha ha, the first person who comes to mind is me. Or at least the me I've been feeding and permitting to take center stage. But that's not all there is to me. This passive, beaten-down, waiting-for-doomsday sadsack isn't all there is to me.

Let's look for the turn.

Or, as KISS says, in their way:

You got to treat yourself like number one
Do you need to be reminded (need to be reminded)
It doesn't matter what you do or say
Just forget the things that you've been told
We can't do it any other way
Everybody's got to rock n roll, yay

If you don't feel good every way you could
Don't sit there broken hearted (sit there broken hearted)
Call all your friends in the neighborhood
And get the party started (get the party started)

David Berman died. We don't need every single person to comment publicly on the death of every single semi-public figure, but I have something small to say about Berman that I'm not even going to finish saying right now. I was just re-reading his book "Actual Air" this week; little poems I like quite a bit. A book I picked up a decade ago based on its title in the old Borders bookstore where I made so many of my burgeoning adulthood's happy accidents, whose spine still glimmers in the edge of my eye. Twenty years older than me. I didn't know that much about him, but his poems were a private pleasure. I had been thinking, "Thank you, David," after reading his poems. I know he didn't hear me, and it seems like it wouldn't have been enough if he had. Still, it's nice to say thank you, out loud if you can, but a little mind-whispered gratitude never hurts.

I have a couple of interviews lined up to read, but a friend highlighted the end of this one, pictured above.

I like this silly music video

Accurate

This whole album rules, great singalong.

Not an accurate summation of the causes of mental illness, of course, but certainly the way it can feel.