is a blog by Brendan
So I’m back online. If I haven’t gotten to your email, I will soon.
Running is the art of deliberately hurting yourself a little more than you really want to be hurt. I went for a run today, a physical self-flagellation in lieu of a mental one. It started raining about half a mile in, big thick drops. It still wasn’t enough.
Yesterday morning, my uncle John got up at some ridiculous hour and ran fifty kilometers. Fifty kilometers. Then he kept walking until he had done fifty miles. Then he went home, had something to eat and went to an unusual retrospective of his work.
Uncle John makes custom birthday cards, and has done so since he was a teenager. A few weeks ago, my aunt Dana started sending letters to friends and family asking to borrow any cards we might have saved. Of course, everybody had saved everything–you don’t get a personal work of art in the mail and throw it away when you’re done.
They got enough cards to fill four rooms full of shelves (and they had leftovers). During the day it was an exhibition for clients; that night, when I got there, it was food and a jazz band and my uncle’s fiftieth birthday party.
It was one of the best gallery shows I’ve ever seen. The sheer volume of work and creativity and originality was humbling and inspiring and it still stuns me a little to think that I own at least a dozen of those original pieces myself.
I think it was my tenth birthday when I got the foldout card. It was a huge battle scene my uncle had drawn and then left half-empty, inviting me to fill in the rest. It was perfect. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I could probably redraw it from memory.
I was a weird little kid, and if I’d been born to different parents I probably would have been a Ritalin poster child.The only things that could get me to sit still for ten minutes were a big fat fantasy book or a chance to draw with my uncle. I didn’t quite get all the genes that give him his talent, or maybe his dedication–he did better stuff at fifteen than I can hope for now–but everything I love about sequential art comes from trading panels with him on “Captain Zero” and “The Adventures of Petey.” That this site exists as more than a blog is due to him.
A dozen cards, a million comic strips. Happy birthday, Uncle John, and thanks for all my presents.
I quit running around finals last term, and I just got back from my first attempt at it since then. It’s been at least a month, and it shows, and the cold air is unkind to my raspy secondhand lungs–but I feel better, and I haven’t slipped as much as I thought. Then again, I also have new shoes, so that could be part of it.
Part of KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act, which went into effect around seventh grade for me) meant that we wrote a lot more in school. I think that’s a good thing. What’s stupid about it, though, is that we were doing the work for nothing. As we got older we started to realize it. I have no doubt that the low scores for our junior KIRIS tests were due not to a lack of ability, but to a lack of caring.
My tracery of KERA results:
And that’s what really gets to me about the whole damn thing. We as a generation have not been taught to separate critiques of work from personal criticism, a desperately important distinction that most of us are forced to learn on our own. I think it hurts a lot of people when they get to college, and it’s not their fault.
Until my lungs feel ticklish like I’m breathing water, until my teeth hurt because they’re drying out, until I can’t bring my arms up to touch my chest, until I forget that I was a lot better at this two years and thirty pounds ago, until I play games with my mind so I won’t slow down, until colors change in my vision, until the rush beats out everything else.
I run. That’s what I do.