A Paperweight of a Teenager Sitting in the Airport
I’m currently sitting in a seat at an airport in Burbank with very grey, nasty greenish-brown colors everywhere you look awaiting the arrival of my shitty Avelo airlines plane that is soon going to whisk me back to college. I just put down my Kurt Vonnegut (as interesting as it is) and got the urge to write about how I’m going to buy a sketchbook as soon as I get back (after I jumpstart my car, Margaret, the car I base my writer’s identity off of on Substack) and begin a drawing that I am actually going to like for the first time in a very long time. I’ve been spending endless amounts of time lately in a creative dormancy consuming media because I haven’t been inspired enough to create my own. I hate the fact that as much as I used to rebuke the whole idea of needing inspiration, it rings incredibly true for me. I need a spark. And that’s why I’ve been sitting around curating the perfect Pinterest algorithm for myself, saving thought-provoking pins and marveling at them for dozens of minutes at a time, why I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls and counting the references to 90’s and 2000’s pop culture that I understand and the ones I don’t understand, why I’ve been actually reading books instead of dreaming of reading about them. Why I’ve been actually writing instead of dreaming about writing.
While I’m not going to halt my participation in any of the things I’ve just listed, I’m finally going to put the damn phone down, close the damn laptop and draw. Inspiration actually has struck me. I forgot how much I liked typography within my art. I forgot how much I liked figurative subject matter and blended soft colors mixed with harsh dark values. So, as I said before, as soon as I get Margaret the 2010 Ford Taurus to start after I get off the plane and into the Jolly Giant Commons parking lot of Cal Poly Humboldt, I’m going to the art store and picking up a sletchbook with some nice and toothy paper. I think it’s the texture of my current sketchbooks which I’ve had for about a year now that’s turned me off to drawing. That’s why it’s been a year and it’s only a third of the way full. There’s some good stuff in there, but I’m not feeling it. I need to start fresh. And now is the perfect time. I forgot my headphones so I am going to continue reading Slaughterhouse-5. A friend from college recommended it one late night in the middle of a very good existential conversation while he was coming down from shrooms; my boyfriend and I hosted him in my dorm to hang out. We were talking about time and how then is now and the future is now and it’s all happening all at once, non-linearly but in its own multidimensional non-sequence. So far I quite like it.