The World's Smallest Digital Sketchbook Library

I’m not sure what triggered my memory to check The Sketchbook Project’s site for the status of the book of poetry I submitted last year. I think it must have been when I was cleaning up my art desk (an uncharacteristic move, I know) and found the drawer where I’d stowed my first draft of the book, back when the project had been something else, a sort of memoir-esque comic that was too ambitious for me to complete by the deadline.

I was very aware of the deadline, which is why I rebound my sketchbook twice: first with sturdier sketch paper for the comic, then with neon-bright printer paper for my last minute plan change. I’d been given the sketchbook by some beloved friends, and as I am unable to complete any significant task without forcing myself into a procrastination-induced panic, I waited until months after I’d received the gift to put serious work into it.

It was a terrific gift: a little, customizable book I could fill with just about anything and then return to the Brooklyn Art Library, which houses the largest collection of sketchbooks in the world. I was delighted by it, and did a great deal of daydreaming about how to fill it (without making tangible progress, of course). I started getting my ideas on paper in the beginning of 2020, aware of the late summer deadline, but unaware of what 2020 had in store.

I tried my best. I scheduled out my pages, set alarms on my phone to remind myself to work on them, and came up with schemes to create large, artsy-fartsy filler sections. In the end, I just couldn’t do it in the way I’d originally intended. I did my second rebinding and decided to feature some of the poetry I’d written that spring instead so that I’d at least have something to submit.

I was still proud of it, for what it was. I’d worked hard to write a piece of poetry every day during the month of April (National Poetry Month!), and this way, I’d get to kinda-sorta publish some of that work. I took some photos, packaged my book up, and sent it on its way just in time.

Then I forgot about it, because if something isn’t in my direct line of sight, it has a 50% chance of being immediately flushed from my brain, an issue that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. In this case, I knew it would take a while for the sketchbook to be digitally uploaded, and that I’d get a notification when it was, so I felt safe dismissing it from my mind.

A year passed, and the notification never came. Whatever triggered my memory of the book also compelled me to check on its status. Had it really been a year? Or was it only months ago? Time’s been goopier than usual, so it seemed reasonable to me that I’d submitted more recently than I thought, and that my book might still be in line to be uploaded.

When I logged into the site to check, however, I discovered that my book had never even arrived.

It was just gone.

I sat there stunned for a few seconds before I started to cry. Actually, “cry” may be too gentle of a word for what I was doing… I was bawling. My body suddenly felt so heavy that I just folded forward onto my desk and sobbed and keened and blubbered until my cat finally decided to come chew on my hair, snapping me out of it.

I knew I’d probably never physically hold that book again, but the concept that it was missing from the world in a way I’ll never be able to track sent such a thunderbolt of grief through my heart that I felt actual pain.

I have felt that pain several times in the past few years. Loss is Change’s ugly cousin, and it has visited all of us recently. While change comes with the promise of an exchange, a transformation of one thing into another, loss is just… loss. Something is gone. Nothing inherently takes its place, fills that gap. There aren’t answers or explanations, there is only absence.

I’ve been preoccupied with loss lately. I live in fear of it. I fear losing my job, losing my pets, losing my friends and family, losing my mind. In fact, earlier this year, I was so convinced that I was indeed losing my mind that a therapist proctored a series of tests for me, including an intelligence test. I’d been so scattered and sluggish and forgetful that I assumed my brain was physically deteriorating. I scored fine. I scored well, actually, though I know intelligence isn’t really that simple to measure, and that my various privileges inflated my score. But what if I used to have an even better score? What if my cognitive functions are slowly draining away? What if I finally lose it all?

Of course, the truth is that I will lose it all, one way or another. I am impermanent, which is a concept that’s even harder to comprehend than loss. All I have is right now, and that’s always draining away as well. I won’t get the minutes back. They, too, are lost.

Or are they?

I’ve spent a long time thinking of Change and Loss like those cousins - separate yet connected - when I really should be thinking of them as different states of the same phenomenon. It’s all just change, the universal constant that I struggle so eternally with, but sometimes I must take a more active role in the transformation.

For example, while I may never get back my ever-dwindling minutes, it’s not like they never existed. I exchange each moment for a memory. And when I lose those memories? Well, that’s a bit harder to consider. Just because I can’t remember them, however, doesn’t mean they never happened. Maybe the things I forget will be something someone else remembers. Maybe it’s not all about me in these exchanges.

Maybe it all cascades.

On my (hopefully distant) horizon, I see death, the ultimate transformation. I will lose all that I am that day. I can’t conceive of a greater loss than that… It’s impossible to think about the total absence of self. It’s all I’ve ever known (and damn if I haven’t learned A Lot about myself in the past couple years). The change that happens in my final second on Earth is a change I’ll never know.

But maybe other people will, and that’s what I mean by “it all cascades.” I think of a friend’s friend whom I wish I’d known better and his eagerness to say “Yes, Absolutely” to adventure, and how that shapes my own willingness to be bolder and wilder years later. I think of my grandmother when I pass yard sales or crave a late night bowl of ice cream to enjoy with a good book. I think of another friend every time it rains, and about a specific moment we shared, lying in an alley and letting the water soak us so that we could stand up and see our dry silhouettes for a few seconds before the storm faded them away.

I can only hope that, while I’m still here, I’m creating my own cascades. I am here right now. I have changed, I have lost, and yet I also have the power to transfigure at least some of those losses. I mean, even my name has changed since I put this book together. Maybe it’s good that it only exists here, where I can tell you directly that I’m Gordon now, and I was Gordon then, and Gordon made this book, even if the name on the cover says otherwise.

No one that I know will ever see my poetry book again, but you can see it here, hastily captured as it was, in the world’s smallest digital sketchbook library.

Please enjoy my Poems from April.

The Year of the Unicorn - Lesson 4: You Make Your Own Meaning

The worst happens.

That’s the lesson I thought I was learning for a couple months. The phrase came with a sense of peace, though it didn’t seem like it should. I gazed out of my crumbling tower and saw my friends in the windows of their own falling fortresses, the foundations of their lives cracking beneath their feet. Every headline in my newsfeed punched me in the gut, never allowing me to catch my breath between blows. The angry goblin voice in my head that I thought I’d finally muted pushed its way to the front of my brain to scream, “Ha! Told you so! The worst always happens! You are helpless to stop it! Life is just a sequence of random, meaningless cruelties!”

It was hard to argue with that. Doing so felt naive and deluded. I talk a lot about positive psychology and how we can improve our lives by improving our attitudes and expectations. It’s easy for me to proselytize that concept when I’m in a position of privilege, when I already live a life filled with fortune, in which I don’t fear running out of food or being shot at a routine traffic stop or being detained in a concentration camp. Positive thinking isn’t enough to save anyone from poverty, racism, disease (and its associated expenses), or any number of real-world threats to our physical needs.

When faced with the horrors of reality, both on a personal and a global scale, searching for meaning can feel not only pointless, but potentially insulting. How can you justify telling someone with a terminal illness that it’s all part of a divine plan? How dare we assign meaning to the preventable deaths of migrant children or dozens of US mass shooting casualties? Is it foolish to even ponder these individual or national catastrophes with a massive climate disaster on the horizon? What meaning can you glean from the avoidable destruction of the only planet currently capable of sustaining life as we know it?

Even typing that paragraph is enough to tip me toward an existential spiral. Understandable, then, that I’ve been really considering this lesson, letting it marinate in my brain juices. “The worst happens” isn’t a particularly unicorny idea, nor is “Your anxiety was right: everything is awful and we’re all going to die soon, probably.”

The Year of the Unicorn is supposed to be about seeing the world with childlike wonder and contributing our own brand of magic to it. It’s about joy and connection in spite of the hungry darkness pursuing us all. It’s about this bittersweet concept:

You Make Your Own Meaning

There’s this quirky video game called Night in the Woods (NitW) that I fell in love with last year (only last year? Wow, jeez, time is weird and fake). Playing it feels like coming home to a place that I didn’t know was my home, and that’s partly because I so strongly identify with the protagonist. So strongly, in fact, that if I’d found the game any earlier, I probably wouldn’t have been emotionally equipped to handle it.

The main character, Mae, struggles with mental health issues that look a lot like mine (the description of a depersonalization/derealization episode that she experiences is what made me recognize and then forgive myself for a similar experience of my own. No joke.). She’s haunted by the passing of a grandparent that she was exceptionally close to. She climbs things she’s not supposed to climb. She says things like this, which could easily have been part of my previous Year of the Unicorn lesson:

Just because that online test said that your best chance at being happy is a situation where everyone already likes you but they mostly leave you alone except when they're delivering food to you... that doesn't mean you can hide in your room and wait for that to happen. That's how hermits are made, Mae. And they die alone in the middle of winter. Waiting for pizza from friends they don't want to see.

Plus she’s an anthropomorphic cat, so… I was doomed from the start.

I bring up this game and this character for a couple of reasons. First reason being that I dragged my friends into cosplaying it with me at Gen Con this weekend. Check it:

Second reason is because of another quote that stuck with me months after finishing the game:

But when I die, I want it to hurt. When my friends leave, when I have to let go, when this entire town is wiped off the map, I want it to hurt. Bad. I want to lose. I want to get beaten up. I want to hold on until I'm thrown off and everything ends. And you know what? Until that happens, I want to hope again. And I want it to hurt. Because that means it meant something. It means I am something, at least... Pretty amazing to be something, at least...

NitW deals with a lot of issues, ranging from mental illness to economic inequality to organized religion to supernatural murder cults… But I’m getting off track. The point is, hopelessness and the search for meaning are front and center throughout the story, and it’s not always a chipper story.

The terrible events in your story are the irritants in the oyster’s innards, painful parasites or detritus that get coated over with time and effort to make something that’s not just pretty but gentler on the mullosk’s insides. The process of making a pearl of meaning requires effort and hope. And it hurts, but the hurt is what makes it real. The hurt makes way for something softer.

Maybe that’s just a story I’m telling myself to explain the pain away. But even if it is, what of it? If it helps, if it gives me a moment of peace and perspective, then it’s worth it. It’s a gift I can give myself.

Perhaps that’s how meaning works. In the face of the worst tragedies of your life, it may be one more unfair burden on your already bent heart, but it’s up to you to make meaning. Find a glimmer of light in the muck and carry it with you.

While I was digging around for those game quotes, I came across one more gem:

So I believe in a universe that doesn't care and people who do.

Worst case scenario, the thing I feared when I first contemplated the idea that the worst can and does happen, is that there’s no great cosmic reason for these hardships. The horrible randomness of it threatened to drown me. But even in a universe that doesn’t care (and I’m not saying that’s true), there are people who do.

There are people who care for you now. There are people you’ve yet to meet who will care for you. There are people who used to care for you, people who left you for one reason or another, people whose paths diverged from yours, people who are gone. Simply, achingly, impossibly gone. But for a time, they were there, caring for you, shaping your life, creating something with you.

And if nothing else, you always have yourself. You have these resources at your disposal to make a greater meaning out of all of this. Even if that greater meaning is something as simple as: “Life is hard, but jalapeno poppers are cheap.”

Or maybe: “I didn’t get the time I wanted with this place, or this career, or this person, but I’ll carry the good parts of that time forward and be better for it.”

So I’m making meaning for myself in wine-drenched 3 A.M. heart-to-hearts with my besties, in time spent walking my dogs in the sunshine, and in moments alone in the woods appreciating the susurration of the wind through the treetops.

It doesn’t obliterate the evil in this world. It doesn’t eradicate the gnawing grief in my bones. But it’s something to keep my soul alight so that I can live to see (and help create) a sunnier future. Sometimes, at least for this unicorn, that has to be enough.

The Year of the Unicorn - Lesson 2: Change is the Only Constant

Between driving to work one morning and driving home, a stoplight appeared on my route. This shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’ve been navigating the construction zone for months now and have frequently passed under the bar of the stoplight, the light fixtures themselves black-bagged overhead like Scooby-Doo villains waiting to be unmasked. Rationally, I knew the bags would come off and the lights would be put into effect someday.

Despite the months of foreshadowing, however, I nearly slammed on my brakes as I approached the new and very vividly green light over the intersection, suddenly unsure of which color meant “stop.” I lurched through the crossing, grateful that no one had been behind me while I suffered my mini-stroke. It took my heart two blocks to dislodge itself from my throat.

Inexplicably, I was pissed. You think you can just turn on one day and expect me to obey you, stoplight? Is this my life now? Occasionally having to stop at an additional intersection on my commute to and from the office? How dare you impede me?

Change often elicits a strong emotional response from me, even if it’s out of proportion and ultimately fleeting. I’ve given a eulogy for a fried laptop. I felt betrayed by the gas station next to my office when they stopped stocking my favorite flavor of energy drink. Just a couple weeks ago, I endured a wave of sorrow after seeing an old sports bar transition into a Mexican restaurant. I had no connection to that bar. I’d never been inside it. I never intended to go inside it. I am far, far more likely to visit now that enchiladas verdes and margaritas are on the menu. So why did I tear up to see the new paint job?

Change is death and so change is mourned. We grieve the end of the old even when it makes way for something better (like enchiladas verdes and margaritas). We grieve even when the stakes are low. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stage model of grief (flawed as it may be decades after development) applies not only to life-or-death traumas but to smaller life changes as well. Grief is grief.

Which is a bummer of sorts, considering my next Year of the Unicorn lesson is:

Change is the Only Constant

The expression comes from the philosopher Heraclitus, who was kind of a turd (but with a name like that, can we really fault him?). The associated Greek phrase Panta Rhei may also ring a bell, translating to “everything flows” or “life is flux,” or so the internet informs me. It’s the concept that you may step in the same river twice, but is it really the same river? The waters are eternally changing, moment to moment. Our perception of “same” is not really sameness. Life is constant transition.

That concept initially scared me. If all is flux, where is the stability? What river rock can I grab hold of to keep from drowning when even the stones are doomed to erode? Must I spend my life fighting the current? What an exhausting existence!

Heraclitus would agree, calling that desire to cling an unnatural and detrimental impulse. If life is flowing and you as an individual refuse to flow with it, then are you really participating in life?

And then Heraclitus would declare himself the only “woke” person at the party and go sit in a corner to mutter cryptically to himself and weep over the foolishness of man.

Super relatable expression though. Source

So the “natural” way to deal with change is to flow with it, right? But that’s a terrifying thought. That means letting go of that river rock and tumbling downstream. It means being battered against boulders and dragged across the stony riverbed. It means spending some time with your head under the surface, blind and spiraling.

In such a circumstance, your fluidity will save you. Bracing against every impact only results in bruises… Why not move as the river moves? Bend around the obstacles, loosen your limbs and let yourself float downstream.

Which is all nice and romantic in theory, but painful in practice. Lately, I’ve been scrabbling for a handhold as I plunge through the rapids of my life. This is not the river cruise I signed up for. I didn’t add this crap to my vision board. I desperately want to swim upstream, back to familiar vistas and predictable waters.

However, no amount of doggy-paddling can transport me back through time. I’m tired, y’all. The current is strong, and I’m learning to yield to it.

This is not the first dramatic life change I’ve experienced and it probably (hopefully!) won’t be the last. Good things have come from those changes, rough as they were at the time. Change is death and change is life (Heraclitus’s Unity of Opposites and all that): I’ve lost wonderful things, but also gained new treasures. The river has carried me to beautiful vantage points, despite taking me through patches of churning whitewater.

My Year of the Unicorn is all about regaining a sense of wonder toward everything life offers. If the essence of life is change, then that means I need to appreciate change as well, whether it’s a new stoplight or an emptier home. If change is constant, then there will be joy again if my heart is open to it. The trick is to remain receptive, flexible, and optimistic.

Floating ain’t easy, but it does give you a good view of the clouds.