While I draw, I like to listen to This American Life.
And for a long time I have been wanting to listen to this episode, but have been unable to.
Not physically unable.
Emotionally and mentally unable.
Because I was who this episode was for, about.
Because I was getting broken-up with.
However, finally, today, I took it on.
The whole episode!!
And revealingly, it wasn’t at all painful to hear.
Listening to it I know I have moved from anguish into empathy.
I can now ‘relate’ to people being broken-up with.
But I am not one of them anymore.
I can listen to Phil Collins sing Against All Odds and not feel like it was written for me, about me.
In fact, listening to Phil Collins talk about why he wrote it made me actually LIKE Phil Collins.
In fact, I now LOVE Phil Collins.

Anyway, there’s a good reason break-ups are called break-ups.
It’s because you get broken up into tiny little fucking bits and pieces.

However, today I know my ‘break’ is over.
I’m now entering the ‘up’.

Schmaltzy wanker that I am.

Today’s good thing is this via this.

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
Kenneth Koch

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Today’s good thing, so far, is This American life, all about Georgia.
Savannah, Georgia, and Venice, Italy should be seen, one immediately after the other.

Here’s a story I wrote while sitting, drawing this drawing, in front of this, the Mercer/Williams house, in Monterey Square.

While I was drawing this a man came up and started talking to me, and after some small talk, got on the subject of God.
He was a big fan of God, and he talked to me for quite a while on the topic, until he he told me he too was an artist and had drawn a comic book, which he then took out of his backpack and showed me.
I told him it looked very good and good luck with it.
Then he told me that he didn’t have a job, that he lived on the street and did odd jobs for people.
I felt like asking him why, if God was so amazing, he didn’t get him a job and his own house.

But I didn’t.

Then hear this!

It really was,

when I looked back over it,

a life made up of a series

of misunderstandings.

Today’s good thing was a listening of this and 2 new IKEA frames.

On the easel.

In the frame.

A Cheap Way Of Buying A Dream What I Want To See Are The Things They Don’t Want You To See.

The gun fires spirographs and planets and fractions and stars.
This is a much smaller drawing than I would usually do, 15x19cm.
I did it smaller simply because I have 2 small frames to fill.
And because my wife isn’t back from IKEA with my big frames yet.

Today’s good thing was listening to This American Life all day.
I finished up with this one on frenemies.
A downside to listening to an American radio programs all day is that I leave the studio thinking in an American accent.