Soup on Wednesdays
When a sketchbook practice changes scale. Five narrative mixed media drawings scream back at the world.
My sketchbook is sometimes small but never tiny. Recently it has become so large it is no longer bound in a tablet but pulled from a 42”roll of tan or gray toned recycled sketch paper, about 50” long. It is important for me to identify these drawings as sketchbook pages. This allows them to be raw and free. The work begins without an active inner critic telling me to give up or move on. It allows me to have fun and be more weird than I generally allow myself to be when using a fine art paper or canvas.
The text that is being illustrated is from a morning zoom session spent with a friend who also needs to write and like me sometimes benefits from knowing another writer is writing. This spilled out quickly and has had very few edits. The first line disappeared when I realized I didn’t want to draw an Ogre and didn’t really need an Ogre.
Belief was a soup only served on Wednesdays. Bottomless and unremarkable leaving the eating with equal parts of fear, hatred and vague desires to instead be king.
The young were taken care of. Each holding a unique diagnosis and medication to help them sit on the feed, watching and learning how to cook, how to sex, how to get ahead, how to dance moves and how to become creators while consuming more soup on Wednesdays.
Universal chores included deliveries. Schedules posted on Mondays began with getting up and going elsewhere after tossing dirty dishes out the window, applauding the brutal tone, saluting the winning shatter, celebrating the stick it to the man cacophony before tucking in shirt and slipping on shoes.
Continue to commute and deliver until the tank is empty or the battery dead. Sit in the car and sleep in the car. Tomorrow, barter and steal to get more gas, to relocate to any place you can take a crap.
Take a crap at first discretely then with careless abandon. Scream fuck numerous times each day until all other words are forgotten. Forgetting its Wednesday, forgetting the soup and all about the children screaming Fuck Fuckity Fuck Fuck.
Fuckity Fuck it!