Eye Trouble is apparently a sketchblog of some sort.

I’m trying to stick really hard to a schedule where, on Mondays, I hit the ground running, which, actually, I wish I could hit the ground at least galloping on Sundays, just to get a head start. But, you know, one miracle at a time.

Anyway, so, here it is 4:29 PM, and I’m about 1/10th of the way down the apparently notional chore list I’m always daydreaming about someday getting completely done. Although, as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem says (or, at least, how it says when I bend it sideways in a possibly felonious way), there’s almost certainly no such thing as a finishable list.

For example: I had to just go look up the text entity for an umlaut for a lower-case ‘o’. So, that got added to the list, even if it got scratched back off pretty quick. The point being (although it’s a minute little point): it never ends.

Which I suppose, in the long run, is not the worst ever thing.

Anyhow, more portable sketches, ’cause my new old-fashioned sketchbook is just too blank and intimidating, while my dumb old PDA, which does not keep track of my appointments, contacts, or notes, is at least a fun little gadget to mess around with in-between actual work-like activities. These particular things were done on The Pad from VisualIT, which is an extremely basic drawing program, which I like ’cause it never gets in your way when all you wanna do is just doodle. The creators of The Pad, by the way, are obviously not responsible for how I may, from time to time, utterly misuse their product.

Once again, I have no actual real-life time for this blogging junk, so I’m just gonna very fast post a few random sketches from last week’s trip out West. All these things came off my crappy old crash-happy PDA, which was a complete and total waste of money, except that I like Pocket Painter more than I oughta like it, considering that using it means I end up neglecting the nine million felt-tip pens I already own and also the extremely blank and brand-new Moleskine that needs to get scribbled in really soon. (Or, well, okay, I guess the dumb old PDA came in a little handy last year in London, when we needed to know real quick and easy-like how to ride the Tube from one place to another, which we did by checking the cool animated maps in Visual IT’s Tube 2.) Anyway, so that’s why the sketches are tiny and plus have that pixelbrick look of old MacDraw art from long, long ago, which is a look I always liked a ton. Meanwhile, the rest of the day today I’m working on Master Plan Number 99, which I’m sure is the version that this time will once and for all solve the various fun issues that now and then crop up in this so-called artistic lifestyle of mine. And I need to read some more from the book my wife recommended when she saw me struggling a bit with non-creativity. The book being Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, which so far appears to be the greatest book ever written.

Today I’m doing miscellaneous organizational things, so I don’t have time for random thoughts, which is lucky as hell for you and me both. I mean, I did think of twenty things I wanted to ramble on about, but they’ll all have to get written later. Maybe. In the meantime, I found some more completely ancient sketches in a couple of old sketchbooks I used to take to the Day Job. I can’t remember that there was any plan for these things, just sorta tried to scribble out some junk between phones ringing and people shouting and copiers breaking totally down.

Meanwhile, there are tons of birds in the fresh-cut yard, all of ‘em enjoying easy access to worms and, I guess, bugs of various kinds. Finches and sparrows will now and then touch down and steal prey from the much more numerous starlings and robins, which I suppose is sorta like how my so-called art career needs to work. Like, completely forget about joining the flock of big birds, and instead be content kinda darting in and out of the market to grab only weird little random jobs. Or something. Anyway, I very much need to get to work.

So, I agonized for approximately ninety-seven weeks over getting the New Yorker Magazine DVD archive thing, but then a remaindered copy showed up on the Amazon for a pretty cheap price, so I stopped agonizing, or at least agonized slightly less than usual, and went ahead and got it, and it’s a good thing I did, ’cause this thing’s been endless fun ever since. Like, I remember back in college having a subscription for a while, and reading whatever I could read before and in-between classes, and for a long time since then I’ve been slowly disremembering all the interesting stuff, like the story about Elmore Leonard’s researcher and all the various Roz Chast cartoons and everything John McPhee ever wrote about geology or the merchant marines or whatever. So, since about all I’ve got in my memory anymore is just sort of this index card file of notes, instead of full-blown detailed images, films, and texts, it’s kind of nice to know the stuff I can just barely recall, but would like to recall better, isn’t totally lost but is instead just a couple of clicks and search terms away (not that a DVD is much more permanent than paper, in the long run). Anyhow, now I guess instead of worrying about what all I’m forgetting, my headspace can get freed up for more important pursuits…which, what those might be, I’m not sure. Can’t cure malaria or feed the hungry with doodles, I know that. Maybe, though, there’s a way to harness the energy of doodling to power zero-emissions airships or to help run the soy cake factories that’ll be feeding us in the not-too-distant future.

Still, though, I need more junk like I need another hole in the head, so I hope Mad Magazine or Art in America never ever come out with DVD archives, ’cause then I’ll have to get those, too, and where does it ever stop, once you give in to that kind of temptation? Plus, the time to look at stuff isn’t exactly super-abundant.

Dang, obviously, it’s late and I’m making less sense than usual. Gotta work tomorrow on getting stuff together for some sort of portfolio, plus there’s a ton of other work to do, lists of tasks scattered all about, so that’s gonna keep me from sketching for a day or two, but maybe this blog-like thing’ll be like giving myself assignments, ’cause art is work, after all.

Oh, and yeah, my wife and I watched Mr. Soderbergh’s “The Limey” the other night, and when Wilson tells someone that he’s come to L.A. to “do a job of work,” that phrase kinda stuck in my head a little, for no better reason than I like weird phrases.

So, I just went to get a sketchblog license (only $73!) from the International Sketchblog Association, which, lucky for me, is located in the very town where I currently live (it’s over on Cargo Systems Access Road, between Saigon Plaza and the Star Mart), and they told me that my blog is license number 99 million, so I guess I’m pretty proud of that, plus it’s an easy number to remember, so that’s good, on account of how the sharpie fumes have at long last utterly wrecked my memory (thank god). Anyhow, ’cause right now I don’t actually have loads and loads of bonus time, I’m mostly just gonna dump out some old shoeboxes and see if there’s anything bloggable in the resulting piles of post-it notes and miniature golf receipts. Then, who knows, in a week or two this whole thing’ll either be yet another chunk of netsam floating about in the giant trash gyre in the middle of cyberspace, or it’ll be where I stick up more ballpoint doodles of completely random and nonsensical junk.