02/17/10
hey!
how you doin?
oh, oh me? oh you know, I'm pretty good.
got some new 100 reasons to be happy, though as usual I haven't totally updated the links for them, so you can either click on each image to bring you to the next reason, or you can click on these links:
i've been a little distracted from regular updates here because I'm thinking of changing the layout of the site so that it would be a little more accessible, and a little easier to update by me. Keep your eyes open for that in, you know, probably a while. But until then, isn't there something a little loveable about the work-in-progress quality of the site now? Don't we all have a couple broken links, permanently "under construction" areas, and completely abandoned ideas, inside? Maybe this messy, difficult to navigate website, is a pretty accurate representation of our hearts.
anyway. I actually don't have too much to say for myself. To be honest, I'm just kind of enjoying life right now. Quiet light through the curtains, photos of my family and friends all around me...
love,
tim
01/31/10
01/26/10
hello! A few new 100 reasons to be happy:
and I'm printing out some new official booklets from the notebook of comics to give to comic book stores. The newest one will include the heartbeat of God, the softness of your face, and other comics. They will also include collectible trading cards of people I love. More info soon.
xoxoxo
tim
*
Sunday morning, making plans:
-give these to people after I'm gone. fiction. typewritten pages, letters, drawings, notebook scraps, photos, hand-drawn maps. everything you would leave behind if you were leaving.
-stories I wish I could tell my students. graphic novel.
-road trip. new york to washington state. the sky in montana. the badlands. sitting in my bed on a Sunday morning, going through travel books where I'd underlined and circled things almost four years ago, whispering aloud, "It's not too late. You will go."
-grandma. lunch.
-camp out on the roof. sleeping bag on a clear summer night, planes overhead to and from LaGuardia and JFK.
-walk Manhattan tip to tip.
-garage sales with mom this spring. postcards, note cards, photos.
01/17/10
we're back. 100 reasons to be happy #52-62 are now up. It's a little bit of a slow start. I wish some of these were more. I wish I could give you more. This is not the big birthday present you've been waiting for. But I suppose we'll have to take small steps.
i wish, possibly more than anything else, that the links at the bottom of the 100 reasons to be happy worked. But they don't, because I'd rather not update every single page. After #52, click on the card to bring up the next one. One of the reasons I've been putting off updating this is that I'd like a more user-friendly way of going about looking at all this stuff. I suppose that will have to wait as well.
one day at a time.
take care all, xoxoxo
tim
*
(For M.S.)
I am hugging you from 2500 miles away. A friend used to give me the best hugs. He'd hold me tightly, and rub his hand across my back firmly. It was the kind of hug a TV father would give, except it was real, and my friend meant it. That is the kind of hug I am giving you from the other side of the country right now.
I have constructed an invisible orb the size of a basketball for you. It radiates warmth. I am putting it on an express train to Washington state, and it should arrive to you even before I am done typing this sentence. You can curl up with it at night, or during the day with the shades drawn. If you close your eyes, you can put it inside you. You can even share it with others. I will start making more once I'm done typing this so that everyone can have one, an invisible ball to put inside themselves to keep them warm.
I wrote a song for you. I didn't know I knew how to write songs, and I didn't know I could sing, but I knew I wanted you to have a song, and the song wanted to be had by you so badly that it willed itself into creation, despite my ineptitude. I have sung it out my bedroom window to a pigeon nearby, and he will teach it to all of his bird friends, who will teach it to all of theirs. The song will spread west, toward you, and by the time you are reading this every bird will be singing it for you.
I am asking the wind to help hold you up. When you don't feel like you can keep standing, you will find the wind is carrying you. You will be able to stay standing longer than you knew you could. Every step the wind will be lifting your legs. You will be able to walk farther than you knew you could. You will know, with the earth on your side the way it is, that you can get through anything.
I wish I could give you something other than these words. A blanket of your favorite-colored fabrics, or the teddy bear you lost when you were seven. Or something useful, whatever that means.
...But just as I think this, I hear the cars going by on the street below. The people talking there. I hear my heat pipes slowly breathing out, and in. Outside, the wind settles over everything with a soft hum. And between the sounds, or below them, I can hear a voice. It says: "We are caring for each of you. Your word-gifts are nice, but do not worry. Much more than a little warmth, than a bird's song or wind's blow, it is the whole universe that is working for all of you. See how the sun is still warm, for you. See how the grass still grows. See how the trees still stand so tall and green for you, even in this cold. Everything continues so that you may do the same."
And I'm in my bedroom, hugging you from very far away.
01/01/10
happy new year! There will be some actual updates to rocketships with paws in the next few weeks. After half a year of focusing on just my writing, it's time to come back to the projects on this website. I'm lookin' forward to it.
xoxo, thanks, and enjoy your new year!
09/15/09
i suppose this delay will be longer than expected! I'm working on writing more now. Big projects that might not see the light of day any time soon! I'll keep you updated, but you might not want to check back here for a little while...
xoxo and thanks all
07/19/09
hello! Apologies for the delays. I have only this comic to give you today. I was walking around and had to buy a new book to draw this comic in. I'm not sure if it means I'm starting a whole new book of comics. I have a lot of things lying around that I'm working on now, but I don't want to put anything up just yet. I think updates might be a little infrequent for a while. I'm allowing myself to explore more, without concern for work that is immediately able to be put up.
(don't forget the final comic in my last notebook!)
i hope you're having a great day! Thanks for everything.
:)
xoxo
tim
07/05/09
hello! No real update today. I am working on projects that might take a while, including the top of the card catalogue of reasons to be happy:
i hope you're enjoying these beautiful days. Thanks for all you do.
tim
*
Sara,
The past few days have been strange. (I wonder what it means that I've been saying this same sentence for years? Is it that I have not faced the reality of my situation, which is that all my days are strange, that strange is my norm? Or is it that I have faith that the true reality of my life is not strange, is something comprehensible and clear? Or, or is it that I'm just stuck in being stuck in circles?)
Anyway, I'm tired of rambling about alienation for the billionth time. You're not in this moment, you're not in this body, you're in some runaway freight train flying through dark storm clouds. We all got it, the audience wasn't sure what to talk about as they left the theater, the actors patted each other on the back and said, "Good show, good show."
I read that people who give thanks are happier, so here we go: I am thankful for the white cat on our porch cringing from fireworks, I am thankful for the blue blanket that smells of the years it's lain on this bed, for this whole old bedroom still waiting for me, for my mother saying, "Home is where you are safe," and I am thankful for tomorrow's new sun on a brand new world--may I see it with my new eyes, feel it with my new hands, the green grass in this overgrown lawn, may I newly smell the coffee in my mug, I pray because I believe in prayer, not necessarily the listener.
The writer you spoke of, how she was embarassed by her books, felt like she'd stood on top a table in a crowded room and screamed and was now awkwardly lowering herself back to the floor, that made me love her. But what she said about masks, how we take off our masks by falling in love, making love, and writing books. That disturbed me in its accuracy.
And taking off my masks, maybe, might be, the purpose I have for my life. I just seem to struggle with it more and more though... like every mask pulled off reveals another beneath. Maybe that is the case ad infinitum, until we remove the last mask to find we never had a face, we are invisible clouds clothing ourselves in order to feel like visible. At that point we diffuse into the rest of the air, finally, finally. My destiny then, maybe, or my dream of my destiny, my hope, my goal, my dream of my life, is to allow myself to be invisible. Not to forget myself, or not to not love what I love, because it is in the specifics of this life that the spiritual takes physical form, those hide-and-go-seek games in our dark streets are God, as is my heart being broken sitting in the window of my bedroom. These are my moments, certainly, and to not claim them would be a lie. Who else's would they be?
(And these skinny girl arms, whose else could these be but mine? This skeletal chest, heartbeat showing faintly, how it would lift her head and let it fall when she rested it there, years ago when someone would do that, is this not my chest, the case where I keep my confusing magic tricks? ...and these closing eyes, weary from the drive home tonight, wind rushing in the window and the sky cut open pink and dark blue, weary from what I saw when I went walking there, stars up close and the faces from my childhood fantasies... couldn't these eyes be nobody's but mine?)
So we are both invisible, ethereal, and corporeal though fragile, reflective in a mirror. We are both God and so, so far away. And I'm not speaking figuratively here, about any of it. If there is a God, it is each of these moments at every single moment, and all the moments that this particular version of the Big Bang didn't create. God is not listening to my prayer, it is the prayer.
(Ah, mystery solved! Good work, gumshoe.)
But you and I have read books, and we have written fictional stories. We know that we can be far more than one person. And maybe that is why all narrative art works--you become someone else for a time, you recognize your invisible no-face, how everyone's specifics, everyone's carride in the rain and boatride at dusk is your own.
Years ago on the Nada Surf online journal, singer Matthew Caws gave a very brief entry that ended with a line something like: "I've come to the sudden realization that life is a fiction."
That has stuck with me for something like eight years. And I think this is why I am so drawn to Bob Dylan's chameleonism. I've come to believe that the person we are is a complete construction, that, well, nearly every aspect of our entire lives and the way we live is a complete construction. That is, if the Big Bang happened all over again, however many years could pass again and it may not look like this. Similarly, I could be born again and however many years could pass again and I may not be like this.
Still... today I read a New York Times article about a professor I did an independent study with in my last semester at Gallatin, Lou Mitsunen Nordstrom. It tells the story of how, at sixty three years old, after something like forty years of practicing Zen, he started seeing a psychoanalyst for severe depression and a feeling of invisibility. The point of the article is that after practicing having no self for so many years, he now realized he has to own the story of his life--and he has, literally, by writing a memoir. He is not just--and here the words and thoughts are my own, as my face twinged a little bit at some of the conclusions drawn in the article--he is not just a body with no self, but also a man with childhood experiences that determined a large part of who he is. I remember saying to him, in his little office, "You are going through a divorce, and I'm going through a break-up. I guess we're both feeling a lot of the same things right now," and he replied, "Well, not to devalue your experience, but I think it's a lot worse when you get to my age." I remember him saying something about how enlightenment isn't getting rid of the way your brain is programmed, but realizing that you can't.
I'm still a little anxious before bed right now. If someone were in love with me, s/he would tell me to stretch before bed, s/he would massage my muscles and put aloe on my sunburns. And I would do the same for her/him. What I've learned in recent years is that you have to take care of yourself the way you would take care of the person you are in love with. You have to love yourself. So I cook veggie burgers and put a sweet potato in the oven for myself, put on Van Morrison's "Into the Music" at sundown. And now, before bed, I will get up to stretch, and breathe in and out slowly, from my belly, and feel myself in my body. And isn't that strange, that the way you lose yourself is by being inside your own body--yes, it's the brain, it's thinking, that separates us from God, from our experience, that's what the apple's Knowledge was, the self-consciousness of and separation from our body.
A couple years ago, I wrote to the author of my favorite fantasy novels when I was in elementary school, Lloyd Alexander. I'd read online that before publishing stories about swords and magic for young readers, he wrote a book or two about men in their twenties going out into the world and finding it a very difficult place--a story, he said, that all young novelists have to tell. (He also wrote the translation of Sartre's Nausea--the plot thickens.) So I wrote him, and he wrote back quickly, in a short note that I think I've lost, and he's passed away since, but I remember his letterhead had a cat with a hat and sword, and he said something like: "Tim, I'm not feeling too well lately so I can't write much, but thank you for your heartfelt letter. There will always be a gap between who we are and the person we dream of being. We must always work to close that gap."
(I'm going to sneak off without saying much more. Love you, and thanks for everything. Come home from Paris already. New York misses you.)
06/28/09
hey! A new, big comic today, and the last one in the notebook. I actually had to go onto the last page, which is made from a slightly thicker and darker paper, because I couldn't fit it on what was left in the book. It's fifteen pages long. I drew most of it yesterday from 8 AM to 9 PM, breaking infrequently to snack or nap. I like it, and I'm glad it'll be the last comic in that notebook.
i guess it's time to move back to other projects...
thanks for coming by. You are really somebody special to me.
xoxo
tim
*
In my dream, former students were driving me in a beat-up sedan through a deep forest, dropping it into neutral as we rolled backwards down a steep hill to the entrance of the water train, a multilevel river submarine. Through the sea-weed affixed windows, young people played cards and caught up on the gossip they'd missed since last they saw each other.
We got out of our car, I from my backseat, and they the front, somehow different students than the ones from a few minutes earlier. I stood solemnly with my hand on the rusted roof of the car, and in the silence of them waiting for me to talk, wondered briefly what places this car had been and will go. "I have to go," I told them, and the whole water train heard me, and I woke up.
...I have been telling friends that I want to have a sleepover soon. I want to play video games till way past the witching hour, and then share lists of people we have crushes on.
I've been wandering through so many scenes lately. I walked home in the rain at 2 AM, my bright orange umbrella held high, and tried to figure out what I was feeling. I ran in the sun, had unexpectedly burst out of walking, to see my sister in the park. I sat in an empty classroom writing an e-mail to a former student, saying:
It as though your life is made of Legos, but over time the world is slowly deconstructed and reconstructed, the heads of people switched onto other bodies. The raw material is the same in the past as in the present, but it is arranged in new and unusual ways. (The truth is that our eyes are new, our hearts and minds are new, but that does not change the fact that it is the world that appears new. Every day, I reconstruct my understanding of the world. (And there in that last sentence is the truth: It is I who deconstructs and reconstructs my Lego world.))
...I always intend to write one focused story here, but I don't know if I have any of those. But maybe, maybe I could pull players from each of these floating moments in my head, maybe that is my story. Maybe my cousin, on her flight to Paris, could meet my acquaintance I hadn't seen in six years, the hipster pizza boy turned hedge funder. Maybe I am their stewardess, handing them cans of soda and trying to think of a job that would not keep me so far from my kids. The letter-writer and the suburban blacksmith, they share a drink and a secret up in First Class. We are all flying to my high school graduation, I've shrunk six years and turned back into the boy I am, no? My dad will take us, secret-swapping blacksmith and all, out to lunch after the ceremony, no?
I asked a colleague what she was doing the night of her high school graduation. A rare dinner out with the family, and then "experimenting with alcohol" before college. She would tell her friends' parents, "I'll be drinking at your party tonight in order to experiment with alcohol before college." Yes, doesn't this friend need to meet my friend who, in a homemade headband already way out of time and place, hugged me twice before leaving? Yes--there's the story! They are next to each other on the subway home, asleep after a late night of dancing in a sweaty club to a tricked out Latin band. But even in this story, where I've shook up the the snowglobe of my memories, they do not know each other. But look at how one's head lowers slowly in her slumber, how it approaches and--yes!--how it lands, so softly, on the head of the other. See how the headband would look so good over the other's hair, slightly browner, if only they were friends who shared clothing. See how their faces show the same soft kindness, the same searching pallor. And though in real life they have never met, have such different stories, and even here they do not know one another, see how their quiet subway dreams are allowed to live so close to each other, maybe crossing the physical divide without hindrance, leaving their dreams with the other when one wakes suddenly just in time for her stop. And how these hand-me-down dreams would be just the ones they needed, how they would now feel less alone.
Yes, I think the real story, the spiritual story, is pulled from the words and faces of the physical world. And where is it reconstructed and performed--in our hearts? In heaven? Can heaven be a place not waiting for us but present right now, the place above our heads and between our chests where our dreams are meeting?
...Maybe, but I lost my script for my part of the story a while ago, and I can't seem to remember even the parts I'm playing. I run to the bathroom so frequently for make-up and costume changes and a suppressed sigh, in such a frenzy and then showing up on stage with no audience, cast or crew. I'm not sure what I'm doing. More and more frequently, I find myself looking to the sky or ceiling and saying, "Line?" The director doesn't reply, but I want him to know I need my understudy.
