I’ve been chasing deadlines the last few weeks, or been chased by them – hence the sporadic posting. I’m not going to apologize, although the words every person who’s owned a blog has typed at least a few times are right there at my fingertips, begging to be let out in groveling apology to… who? The internet? My imagined readers? The cyborg gaze of some mysterious bot passing over this part of the web?

‘Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile.’

I’ve been busy with ‘real work’, but what’s that? Work that I get money and/or recognition for. With social media feeds taking over the internet, these drawings and this website have come to feel like making music in my own bedroom – it gets me no money and no recognition. But it’s still work. It’s the first to slip when ‘real work’ takes over, but like the base rhythm to a song, I always come back to it. This kind of unpaid and unrecognized work is the foundation, the spring that never runs dry. Without the sweeping of the porch, and the sudden noticing and ordering of yellow things, nothing else comes easy.

Hold fast to the great thought
and all the world will come to you,
harmless, peaceable, serene. 

Walking around, we stop
for music, for food. 
But if you taste the Way, 
it’s flat, insipid. 
It looks like nothing much,
it tastes like nothing much. 
And yet you can’t get enough of it. 

From Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (the version by Ursula Le Guin)

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Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

I remember the day I drew this tree, a bunch of them were in full bloom in the park. A child stood under one, arranging a posy from fallen blooms carpeting the ground. Tree and child were outlined against the evening light. She was laughing. Adults took pictures with their smartphones.

The all-knowing Internet just told me this cherry blossom of the tropics is the Tecoma tree, tabebuia rosea. I love the Bahasa name for it: pokok kertas tisu, or tissue paper tree.

I have a perfect childhood memory of making flowers out of pink and white tissue paper, secured with wire in the middle. Not the special craft tissue paper that people do Pinterest tutorials with these days, just ordinary blow-your-nose stuff.

I never knew about this tree until a couple of years ago, but every time I see them I feel intensely happy and nostalgic. Yes, they are beautiful, but I think that memory of tissue paper craft flowers also has something to do with it.

~

Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

There’s a saga tree in the park where I go running.

A friend used to tell me that I have to think of myself as a runner, not a jogger. Running is like being a hungry shark, eating up the distance with your killer feet. Jogging… jogging is like, bad running. Jogging is for pandas, or similar soft and chubby animals, who grumble and whine and sometimes can’t get out of bed.

I’m more of a jogger. Which is to say, I hate running. Or rather I hate myself and all the terrible resistance up to the point I actually start running. The running itself is not too bad – my heart rate goes up, and suddenly, for a moment, I no longer hear the chattering of my mind, and am just a pair of feet and lungs.

Anyway, every time I make it to the park, I pick up a saga seed and put it in my pocket to take home. I keep them in a jar on my desk. I like to see it there, those hard little stones of pain and effort, a fistful of bright blood-red. Stone by stone, drop by drop. That’s how to work.

~

Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.