Project 25:365 (May 17-July 3)
Unproductive updates
The month of June was rough. It always is. I lose income, I fight beaurocrats, I suddenly become useless to the people around me. It’s not great.
So, I didn’t produce a lot of creative work last month. I tried, and then I pooped out, preferring sleeplesslly laying in bed and begging for employment when I could get myself upright. Such is the life of an adjunct professor.
Nevertheless, my Mutant thrived.
June 3, 2025
How does anyone accomplish anything ever surrounded by the complexity and beauty of the world and the knowledge it will be gone in a heartbeat?
On the other side of the house, a different vine threatened to rip the siding down. It’s some kind of ivy, and it grew shockingly fast, probably fostered by our abnormally wet June. A few weeks and a zillion yard waste bags later, I think I’ve tamed it. I don’t think I killed it. It remains, haunting me, but I struck with force. It shouldn’t fuck with me again.
That’s destruction, though. I prefer creation.
At the end of May, I spent some time in Wisconsin. I am fascinated by the area around my grandfather’s lake house, an area that has generated enormous entrepreneurship that seems to not have lifted people out of poverty. It is an area where people who are not from there build things to generate wealth, while it remains the poorest place in the state.
I was alone that long weekend in Wisconsin. I have to be alone there to understand it. In my family, too many people have too many opinions and too many memories for me to see the place clearly.
I didn’t name-drop my grandfather. I just said I grew up in the area (which is not technically true). People talked to me, and some of them told me stories that profoundly changed my perspective of the place.
May 30, 2025
No one called me today, my birthday. That’s actually as it should be because I spent it on my own terms, alone but with others.
May 31, 2025
On Broadway in Wisconsin Dells, a few blocks from the River, near “America’s oldest photographic studio” (a dubious claim in a town built by illusion), is the Stroud Bank building. The bank was founded a few decades after Robert Allen built the Dell House on land occupied by Ho-Chunk families who had been there for, conservatively, 2 millennia.
June 1, 2025
The Highway between The Lake and Town is lined with billboards. They are affixed to land surrounding old houses where families have lived for generations. Many of the people in those houses are more economically disadvantaged than their grandparents.
I wrote a story about it.
June is over. I’ll try to be creative again.