Hey friends. This was written from within the Labyrinth, that serpentine puzzle of eventual accomplishment — from a full moon solstice fever dream til now, the final day of June, the year’s six-month peak, last stop on the calendar’s cliff before July falls forward, before the year begins its tumbles toward the next. It began as a smoke signal from somewhere nearer the exit than the outset, though isn’t that a troubling aspect of mazes? That one looks very much like the other, that a wrong turn might lead back to the start? Don’t try too hard with the timeline — it’s summer, what’s one week from the other? Relax and retrace some steps with me as I work my way back out, with any luck landing somewhere we've never yet been.
These pages quilting the balcony of my studio are (were!) the backsides of the Tarot “booklet,” which isn’t a booklet at all but a fold-out broadsheet of all the cards’ descriptions reduced to pithy 100-ish word vignettes that I wrote mostly in the Rose City clubhouse while Dante practiced golf. (It will never not be funny that my son golfs.)
I have made more mistakes in the last two weeks than I have made in — well. A longer time than that. I made some, and then I made some on top of those. I made mistakes attempting to rectify prior mistakes and then I made more. I blundered blindly, I flubbed and fumbled, I ran recklessly ahead arms at arms-length pushing the dominos down. I seem to know what I’m doing wrong a quarter-beat ahead of doing it but haven’t been able to slow down to catch up and (well) just not do it…
Meanwhile, Dante is in California with the grandparents and I am ruefully aware of how the need to provide him with semi-regular meals ensures my own better habits. One cannot survive on LaCroix alone. This is better in all respects than eating beer, which is what I’d almost be guaranteed to be doing if I still did that sort of thing. In truth the urge to drink has been more present recently than it’s been for a long time — that melting escape, the promise of a bar flirt or amplification of a fleeting feel. Instead: La Croix and coffee and the cadence of my printers for company.
TEN IDEAS A DAY (gaffes, miscalculations, poor choices and faux pas)
I waited until the eleventh hour (the last thing on the list!) to actually design and prototype the all-important insert of card descriptions. I had an idea (a fold-out poster of sorts with 81 squares, one for each card, a 9x9 grid) but ideas are not actualities. Folded paper is thick, and big, and text loses legibility beyond a certain size. Compromises were made. But sometimes that word means something else, as in “the integrity of the product was compromised by faulty design.” Like that.
But — I’d promised a hand-printed pull-out, I was going to hand-print the pull-out. To do otherwise would compromise my integrity! Never mind that I have barely silked a screen since 2020 and here I was wanting to print a three-color full-bleed repeating design…
… on the backside of inkjet paper thin enough to fold and fit in my already-ordered boxes…
… using hand-mixed Pantone-matching waterbased ink meant for textile printing and requiring heat-setting …
… with screens not quite big enough for my intended design…
… nor a right-sized squeegee on hand…
… and at no point along the trajectory of this travesty did I stop, accept a sunk cost and adjust either design or methodology accordingly, not even when my first attempt appeared uncentered and I unthinkingly thought To Hell With It, Let’s Go and proceeded to pull some 360 prints, every one of them off-kilter, rough-margined, wrinkled and puckered with globs of ink that oozed through the selvage of the screen, still tacky after hours of dear friend-assistants wielding heat guns on high and an ancient Craiglisted heat lamp squealing a protest moan with every rotation…
… a move meant to keep my 18 year-old wooden Ikea work table from burning any blacker or setting the smoke alarm shrieking again…
Anyway. While the products of this screen printing debacle were undergoing anxious desiccation in my drying closet (neé darkroom) I returned to the presumed comfort of my desktop printshop (wow, just had a visceral memory of Brøderbund’s 1990’s Print Shop aesthetic — IYKYK) to reprint a few 6x6”s that had gotten smashed by the stack cutter only to realize (upon seeing the crispness of their quality) that I had printed all 120 of them on the backside of the paper — and I had no paper left — so now, just to catch you up, it is 11:41pm and I am babysitting my printer as it slowly grinds out 6x6” 2-ups on the only paper available for yesterday’s overnight delivery.
And why, do you ask, am I so desperate to get this all done that I’m tripping over my feet and face to do so? Because I am tired. And I’m tired because I have not taken time off or away, because I have been working to get this out into the world before I rest, before I can rest. But from here, at this bend in the labyrinth, the end feels like it just keeps creeping further away, and that’s in part because of the mistakes I’ve made. That I keep making. This one.
(Post-Script: running the dehumidifier on full blast all night made little difference in the tackiness of the ink and so, after texting me down from near-imminent crackup, dear Mara walked me through designing and printing the 48-page, 3.5” square booklet that was her original idea but that I had to stare into the face of creative death to see the sense of. The odd-broadsheets will serve as guides for the show (OPENING 5-7pm SUNDAY JULY 21st!) and Oranj Studio’s clientele for its duration (JULY THROUGH SEPTEMBER!). Instead of screenprinting the covers Mara talked me into a risograph print, which we did yesterday at the IPRC — now I am praying their stack cutter is back to working order so that I can trim the edges of some 720 sheets of paper and put a fuckin bow on it all.)
But now, and now, it is Sunday and all your Tarot decks are packed and labeled and ready to fly, more than a month since I said they’d be but somehow just in time. I hope you love them. I hope I matched the right print to the right deck, more than most of the time. I hope they become little windows into other worlds, new ways of thinking through whatever moment you’re in. 💋📦🪽
COMICS ABOUT
I really wanted to draw something new for this new-sletter BUT priorities, that will have to wait. This jumble of words and avatars is from the collection of comics I drew for Lettie Jane’s “Deeper Drawing” classes in the spring of 2023.
I was thinking again last night — while packaging prints and numbering boxes and moving more steps closer to the exit (out-come) but still further than I thought I’d be by now (time management! oof) — how wild it is that I have done everything possible to wrap this up earlier and yet it will be July 1st that my show is installed at Oranj (is your calendar marked yet?!) and July 1st that I send these decks into the world — four years after the July 1st that Ben left his body in the creek. And just missing him: his easy laugh and solidity and the way he looked at me and loved Dante and how we communicated, imperfectly but openly, how we tried to make changes within our selves to try and make it easier on the other, living together. I’m trying to get more comfortable in alone-ness but it’s still not what I want — I still desire partnership, a companion, to share. This is a big old house for a middle-aged woman and her cats and her art and her cans of LaCroix. This is a time of transition — but don’t we fool ourselves thinking any time is anything but?
DRAWING CARDS
lol. so. I thought — because I featured the Labyrinth only two ‘sletters ago — I’d pull a card, a random card, and write about that. But out of 81 I pulled this one, and here I am. It’s hard to see around it, outside of it. It fills the frame. So where am I, within it? I pulled another:
The King of Cups, architect of the deep. I see that cave and wave behind him as the center of the Labyrinth, the cresting edge where rock becomes water, where force meets flow. In therapy the other day I said I'm craving finding (or having or enjoying) ease, a time to float, to be carried along. I want to invest a belief & some trust in this metaphor, that the center of the labyrinth might look like this: the momentum just about to break, to spill. It has been so much push and push and push to get here. I pulled another card:
Sometimes the Tarot is so very literal… the Ten of Wands, card of trudging and drudgery and one I’ve always understood to reflect the time-warp sensation of being almost to one’s goal but somehow still in the very muck and middle of the hardest part, a very Daedalian space to be in (the Labyrinth card itself is my own addition to my own edition). The backache on the brink of exhaustion, the admonition to carry on. This one’s come up a lot lately in readings for others, too — I’d hazard we’re all a bit in the space of it, the state of the world and whatnot — & I wrote this to a friend: I'm thinking too about wands and their representation -- the suit begins with the Ace, the sparking match -- a fully weightless thing, a vacuum in fact. And here in the Ten they have all the heft and bulk of big sticks, cut wood -- no longer even a living thing (a branch or tree). Wands often correspond to creative projects -- the lightning of an idea, the fire to begin! But by the end -- whether it's the end of a phase or the entire endeavor -- I know I'm more than ready to get it done, already imagining what might be next. And that's the smoke from the chimney: there are already other fires underway. Laying this one to rest will fuel the next.
So I pulled one more card (what’s next?):
— And in true labyrinthine fashion and with classic Tarot humor it sends me right back to the beginning, the first damn card of this whole strange trip. 🫠
In, and out.
INHALATIONS
Reading Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (paperback), a summer time and world so far from SE Portland in 2024… I am savoring it with little licks from a fast-melting waffle cone.
Just finished listening to Nina Renata Aron’s Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, a “memoir of women, addiction and love" (aren’t most of them?). Nina (I dunno but I feel like I want to be on first-name-basis with her) weaves a history and theory of co-dependency and the origin story of Al-Anon through her account of a long-term relationship with an addict against the backdrop of riot-grrl adolescence, troubled sisterhood, academia and the Bay Area of the late-nineties and early ‘oughts, all of which augmented the recognition I felt, reading. I think her and I are right around the same age — coming of age in a similar time and place with such familiar landmarks — not just the physical spaces (Tower Records, house parties, punk shows) but the vibe of it all, growing up on (under?) the bridge between X and millennial, between an analog world and a digital, decentralized domain. I listened to it while in the trenches of printing and heartache and like the presence of a real friend it too helped me feel less alone.
Lemonade: is it making a comeback or is it just summer sobriety making it more visible on menus? Either way. Good lemonade is good.
Please: taking suggestions for how to meet people (friends? companions? activity partners? a lover? Bueller?) without getting on the apps or getting drunk. Also, I want to dance. But at, like, 5pm.
feel like it’s time for a playlist:
Some songs that have gotten me through the last few weeks… as usual: synth-pop heavy, a little melodramatic, leaning into the sound of the 80’s but not just.
LIFELONGLEARNERSCORNER (this week, the whole room)
Measure twice, cut once, fuck up anyway.
Things have their own timing.
No one knows what will happen tomorrow.
AND SO
If you ordered a deck, it will be sent via USPS Priority Mail on Monday morning … unless you’re a Portlander who specified local-pickup or we’ve already communicated otherwise. If you don’t receive it by mid-week send me an email and we’ll track that shit (unless you live overseas, in which case it will get there when it gets there… lmk if not)!
Now please tap that “like” ♡ at the bottom of this page and make the angels sing!
Love you all. More soon!
I hope it all went well at the post office! 😅 congratulations dear, and thank you, it’s been a joy and honor to witness you usher this epic project into the world. big love on this big big day 💓
Love you endlessly.