I’ve thrown down many random thoughts and doodles over the past week. I eventually need to return to more organized works, but for now, as I finish unwinding from the Marathon and, for that matter, 2005, I’m finding comfort with this style. As Chuck likes to remind me, this should be fun, stupid, and if you’re not having fun, then you’re doing something wrong . . . or other such silliness. So it’s random doodles and more random words for the moment, at least until something better comes along or I find a way to spend more than ten minutes sitting and creating.

It is strangely therapeutic, this random writing. That’s my technique of late, by the way, which is, not that this should surprise you, the same technique I usually use when I draw. For example, for the unicorn picture below, Doolies asked me to draw her something—a watch the “artist” moment, if you will (even thought I am as far from an artist as I am a writer—good ol’ parenthetical self-deprecation, how I miss thee). I started scribbling random shapes, and after I erased the first ten or so, Doolies stole the pen and drew a shape, which, after a few rotations and manipulations, began to look a bit horse-ish, in that monster type of way. I added my favorite eye, and then added colors and more scribbles, and pushed and pulled the lines until it began to appear. After that, it was a simple job to draw in the background and post it to sewcrates (not a moment too soon, as I drained my precious energies, as usually happens after a burst of “creativity”).

Since Doolies had a hand in it, it is officially her favorite monster—she has a strange affinity for my doodles of monsters, much more than my more realistic doodles. To psychoanalyze her for a moment, I believe the realistic ones scare her because they’re so divorced from reality and yet strangely grounded. This causes her to question my sanity, a dangerous avenue to trot down, since it ends in a bad crazy place. For the doodles that are clearly monsters, however, there is no reality since they’re truly monsters and have no grounding in reality, a much easier answer that doesn’t leave David locked up in a padded room.

My writing lately has been similar (to the monster drawing, not the psychoanalyzing). I throw down words, whatever passes through my head, usually things I see or have seen throughout the day, and once I have a collection of words, I start looking to the form of the words to try to find pleasing shapes. I edit them to try to bring out what I glimpsed, and then usually give up and post the remnants after running out of energy (you see a pattern yet?). The writing feels more like sculpting than writing that way, carving away the extraneous parts, clumping new words and sentences to form that piece of nose that I didn’t realize I was going to need, and, well, just about doing whatever it is I feel like doing at that moment.

I did manage to scribble more notes today, but after rereading them, I decided even for my low standard, there was nothing worth posting. So be it. I leave it to a discussion of technique and a couple of monsters for the day.