The Art of Time Travel

With my renewed passion in drawing, otherwise known as "getting back to my roots", came the need to find the tools necessary for the creation of crap. I mean art. Being that we have moved so many times in a reasonably short span of years, there are boxes that have traveled from home to home without having been opened. Most of these boxes contain my collection of books, which is an admirable and heavy collection. We don't own any bookshelves, so unfortunately the books cannot be unpacked. It was these heavy boxes that I decided to rip open and comb through this weekend in search of my set of nice drawing pencils. I went through about 8 different boxes, each weighing a metric shit-ton, before coming across a box labeled "art stuff". Duhhh.

I couldn't have predicted the effect that opening this box would have on me. I liken it to the effect that stepping from a time machine into the past would have. I guess I hadn't realized just how long it had been since the contents of that box had seen daylight.

I was considered a "goth" for the majority of my teenage years (I never cared for the term and still don't). Though my tastes have matured in a lot of ways, I'm still the same person I've always been. This was evidenced in part by the triumphant yell I let out when uncovering this at the top of the pile:



Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.

 I THOUGHT I LOST YORICK! I hadn't realized he was merely hiding in a time machine! I got this guy from some charming, kitchy little Voodoo store down in New Orleans. He now has a prime piece of real estate on top of one of my desk speakers. Also found in the box: a stone box with a gargoyle on top, a small Gollum figurine, a heavy lidded onyx box that smells like incense, and every art supply I've ever owned. Linseed oil, fixative, india ink, my pencils, blank canvases, a hundred tubes of crusty paint, random sketchbooks, a nice black portfolio binder, several embroidered asian boxes containing stamps. I even pulled out my old silver desk lamp, speckled with paint (and subsequently pierced my thumb deeply on the coil of the broken bulb while trying to remove it). Suddenly, despite the looming beginning of the work week, I didn't feel at all like settling down or sleeping. In a flurry of excitement (and blood), I bedecked my desk with everything reminiscent of a more inspired time in my life.

I forced myself to bed at ten, knowing I had to get up at five am, and tossed and turned for hours before finally falling asleep.

I've got a plan. I'm not going to tell you what it is, in case it never comes to fruition, but it's big. Life-changing kinda big. This heavy box, this time machine, could be exactly what I needed to find myself back on the path I wandered off of years ago.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

And also keep them ready to loan to me in case I need to have this thumb removed, okay?