March 5, 2022
Today I woke up a little earlier than I was planning. I set my alarm for 9 am, but I ended up waking around 8. I’d been at work until 12:45 am the night before, at the Fox. I’m gonna go there now in a second to watch ‘Nightmare Alley’.
So anyways, today I got up and went for a jog in the first time in a long long while. It’s just been so freezing, and it doesn’t help that I run right along the lake, so the wind just totally whips all the motivation out of me. I went today though. I felt good afterwards, but it sucked in the moment. I normally love running- with music that is. As long as I have music, or even a jogging partner, than I’m good. Oh, and as long as it’s not like running against wind that has the strength of a jet before take off, only this air is not hot but cold. Very very fucking cold.
My ears hurt so bad when I got home. It’s something to do with the combination of those AirPods and the wind. Normally the AirPods don’t bother me, as they’re the ones with the little gummies on the end. When I have to run with them on a cold day, it’s a different story. I don’t know why that is. Something to do with the air pressure? I don’t know. My ears have always been a bit sensitive, though.
So after I got home I had print off a new passport application. I needed Jason to sign it for me. The application requires a guarantor to sign it, and so he’s my guarantor. He was leaving for the airport in a couple hours so I needed to get his signature before he left. I had a pretty frustrating experience trying to get the paper printed. The printer was just giving me a pretty hard time. I realize now that I probably should have started by just restarting everything. Ithink that’s what worked in the end.
After he’d signed it I read on the couch for the rest of the morning. That’s been my routine lately and I really really love it. I wake up, run, then make coffee and just read on the couch until noon. Right now I’m reading ‘My Life In Art’ by Stanislavsky. He was a Russian actor and stage director, the latter being what he’s most known for. It’s a really interesting book. It’s sorta long, but he talks a lot about things that I’ve been wondering and thinking about for the last few months, mainly just topics about art, why we put ourselves through the process, when and where the payoff is, and what we should be aiming for. That’s kinda the thing that this book has helped me with. A few months ago I just could not figure out what the real purpose was. I didn’t know if it actually mattered if the finished thing was any good, or if the DOING of the thing was what mattered at the end of the day. And I don’t mean doing it quickly and then moving on. I mean spending the time to labour over your art, intensely, only to feel at the end that it sucks. And by ‘suck’ I mean that it does not do for your ‘soul’ what you’d intended. More specifically, it doesn’t take the observer, emotionally, to the place you’d intended.
It’s perfectly possible that a piece can fail in this respect, but succeed in an area you hadn’t intended. That seems to happen a lot.
I, however, was sorta plagued by this idea that you strive for a thing, an ideal, or like a feeling, and the finished thing does not articulate or express that feeling, and so you’re left with this question of if it MATTERS that you didn’t reach the goal. Maybe the point was that you TRIED. That’s what I don’t know. At the end of the day is trying and succeeding just as good as trying and failing? If there is a God, are they equally as pleased either way?
So anyways the book has been nice because he really talks about how important it is to go for truth. Truth can be ugly, it can be quiet, loud or whatever. He seems to really feel that the job of the artist is first to find a truth, and from there practise and refine one's abilities in order that they may be able to translate that truth, or rather, through their skills, be a vessel for that truth to emanate and be understood by other humans.
Then I go to the dining room and just work on whatever I gotta work on for 2 hours. I try to do the 2 hours all at once, but some days I gotta break it up into chunks.