Acetylene Eyes first post went up November 15th, 2012.
If I could travel back in time and tell past me that I would still be invested in this project after 5 years, I’m pretty sure past me wouldn’t believe future me.
Literally, I started the project because I was feeling as if I was slowly drowning. I was profoundly unhappy with my life, my circumstances (employment, relationship status), everything was fucked.
Writing had been an integral part of my mechanism for coping with all the ways in which the world has just never made any fucking sense to me. I had several writing assignments that I was facing rapidly approaching deadlines or was already inexcusably delinquent in delivering. I could not write. I would sit and stare at a blank word processor page, the blinking cursor mocking my efforts.
The idea occurred to me: I spent several hours a week perusing Tumblr–why not participate?
Everything else has just involved doing what I already did with a bit more mindfulness and instead of merely like an image–forcing myself to slow down and answer the question of why I like this, who made it, how was it made, when and where it was made (and how those things contributed to and served to contextualize both the on-going process as well as the final product).
Doing this work has led me in a number of completely unexpected, but surprisingly gratifying directions. I’ve not only learned a metric fuck tonne about myself that I’d never realized; this on-going and constantly evolving work has become absolutely indispensable as far as fueling my own creative endeavors.
But really what kept me doing this has been the people I’ve met as a result of doing what I do. Yeah, I get my fair share of hate. But it seems for every ten nasty comments, I do get a message from someone that is humbling, makes me stop and think or changes the way I see something I thought I’d already gotten to the bottom of.
To my followers, thank you for bothering with what I fumblingly do here. I realize I’m manic and scattered and that my grammar is a goddamn atrocity–I always say I’d do this just because but it wouldn’t have been as rewarding without y’all along for the ride.
Anyway, I’ve had a number of ideas about how to bring a more rigorously focused approach to this project’s on-going curatory efforts. It is difficult. Matching the current political tumult of the country in which I live, my life is in a state of near complete upheaval. Plans for a cross country migration that were set in motion around 18 months ago are picking up speed and will reach a point of critical mass within the next six weeks. If I’m staying put, I need to know because beyond a certain point (Jan. 2nd), there’ll be no turning back.
My point is that the next couple of months are probably going to continue to be a bit uneven in frequency and quality of posts. (In some ways I feel I’ve painted myself into a corner; in others, it’s just that I don’t really have the time or resources to do things the way I would prefer to do them.)
I’ve mentioned before that my dream is to find a way to use this project as a means of paying the bills. At best that’s probably a naive hope, at worst entitled as fuck. But seriously, if what I do here resonates for you, consider supporting these efforts via my Patreon account.
I vow to keep doing this as long as I can. But increasingly as demands on my time increase because of external situations and the fact that I am being approached with paid curatorial gigs, it’s not always easy to do what I do here. So really, I do not want to beat a dead horse but even a couple dollars here and there goes a long, long way. I’ll never charge a penny for content. But it is extremely validating to know that people care about and value what I sink so much time and energy into.
May each and every one of you be well and stay well.
Acetylene Eyes 