TASK #37: PAINT YOUR WAGON
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere”. G.K. Chesterton
Recently I woke, sat on the edge of the bed, and…sat on the edge of the bed. I didn’t want to get up, I didn’t want to shave, eat, and I certainly didn’t want to go to work.
That morning the My Life is Shitty box had busted wide open and I was just depressed. I felt like I was worthless…sure, I was “getting by”, but nothing else. I have a decent job, but I am one insignificant cog in a huge machine, and it’s was a job that calls for repetitive competency, not creativity, and it bores the shit out of me.
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I was in a badddddd place. I think that life is made up of boxes, like the Work Box, the Relationship with My Wife Box, the Mom box, The Trump is a Moron Box, whatever, and the boxes are filled up with all sorts of feelings and emotions and good feelings and bad feelings, and of course they aren’t made of concrete–stuff from one box can seep into another, like a crappy day at work can creep into the My Wife Box…you know what I mean.
But that morning the My Life is Shitty box had busted wide open and I was just depressed. I felt like I was worthless…sure, I was “getting by”, but nothing else. I have a decent job, but I am one insignificant cog in a huge machine, and it’s was a job that calls for repetitive competency, not creativity, and it bores the shit out of me.
If you do the same job, over and over, for a number of years, regardless of whether the job is picking up garbage or making burgers or selling cars or repairing washing machines, or in my case, writing pointless e-mails, it’s just getting by….and it will slowly begin to tear away at your soul.
And that’s why I was sitting there on the edge of the bed, having these thoughts, moping and tired.. And worse, I didn’t know how to rescue myself. I couldn’t conceptualize the problem, let alone solve it. So I decided to visualize it–give my depression a form.
So I went into my kid’s room, snagged a big piece of construction paper, took a bunch of crayons and just attacked it. I broke about a dozen crayons– which by the way, have different names than they did when I was a kid–and just scratched out a picture. Not a picture, actually, a sort of massive scrawl–it wasn’t pretty, and it had a lot of black in it, but there it was.
Did I feel better? A little. Enough that I got dressed and went to work and it was bagel Tuesday so I had a bagel with some salmon cream cheese.
I went home that night and looked at my picture. It’s ugly, but it works for me, because I know exactly what it means.
TASK: Get scrawlin’…
I hung my painting in the basement where I could look at it time to time. You can display yours or hide it or destroy it, whatever.
Photos by mic445 and Joe Doe