STILL DOODLING IN MARGINS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

I have a notebook as well as a sketchbook. I find myself keeping them separate because in my early days, when I was serious, struggling to become some kind of professional, people who seemed to know more told me, “You have to make up your mind.” The world where they make creativity into money doesn’t like it if you’re an artist and a writer, and if you do them both at the same time . . .

The desire to be a cartoonist isn’t something teachers like. Why don’t you do real art? Real writing, instead of all this sci-fi silliness?

For years I fought off the urge to be a renaissance Chicano, writing, and drawing on the same page, with the same tool, pencil, pen, or even crayon.

In the the happy rebellion of my school daze, doodling in the margins of the notebooks while taking notes in class, trying to commit and master the painful, unnatural act of being a student, I hijacked the educational materials and space to put some of what’s bubbling in my head into some viewable form.

My personal notebooks are where I organize my writer business. I make notes of daily progress, keep track of my simultaneous projects, jot down rough ideas. Serious stuff.

These days, I doodle in the margins of my notebooks.

Unlike what I do in my sketchbooks, these aren’t intended for public consumption. I’m not being a “professional” artist. Damn, it’s liberating.

It’s putting down the burden of art, the way the Maya speak of putting down the burden of time.

At the same time, I find myself reconnecting with drawing, the act of making a mess with some kind of tool, putting the magic in my mind on a flat surface.

In the end, it makes me a better artist–whateverthehell that is.

Sometimes I take pictures of these doodles. Some of them are pretty good. Maybe they’ll somehow make their way into my Work.

CHICANONAUTICA CATCHES PANDEMIC NOSTALGIA FROM GÓMEZ-PEÑA’S MEX FILES

Chicanonautica gets infected at La Bloga:

It’s Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s fault:

Borders mean nothing:

Everything’s performance:

 

See the past, welcome to the future:

 

SCENES FROM MY NEGLECTED SKETCHBOOK

To my shame, I’ve been neglecting my sketchbook lately. It’s not any kind of “creative block”—I’ve just been busy. It’s been that kind of year.

Once upon a time my sketchbook was the main outlet for my runaway creativity. My brain would have exploded with it, but unfortunately, I attained a peculiar form of success with my writing. It demands a lot of my time, so I tend to focus on it. Also, there’s making a living and all that other stuff.

If only I spent more time drawing, I would be a better artist. As things are, I consider myself pretty good, but my skills have a hard time keeping up with my imagination. What I see in my head outshines what I manage to nail to the paper.

It frustrates me.

Another reason I should draw more is the effect it has on my brain. It’s like exercise, food and medicine. I feel and function so much better if I’ve been drawing.

So, I try to keep at it. I keep a small sketchbook on a shelf next to the bed, open to a drawing, usually an unfinished one. I stare at it hoping to get the creative juices sloshing.

What keeps me from getting down and funky with it is that I’m usually busy or just too tired. Also, I get distracted.

I try to make some spontaneous scribbling that I make into a surrealistic composition and part of a morning routine. Too bad my schedule is so wacky. 

Also, I keep having to get up early to rush off and do something.

In a more civilized world, I would get up late and do a slow wake up/breakfast ritual that would last until almost noon. 

Maybe after I retire from the day job . . .

Meanwhile, I’ll be going on another road trip soon. In the back of my sketchbook, I'll take notes for my travelogues. Lately, I've been doing my damnedest to do quick sketches in those notes. It could help.

Someday, I’d like to be a crazy, prolific sketchbook guy again.

Yup, I’m a mad dreamer to the end.

CHICANONAUTICA GOES BACK TO THE UNITED STATES OF ARIZONA

Chicanonautica returns to United States of Arizona, at La Bloga.

It’s a place people keep coming to:

And others want to keep people out:

At any cost:

And La Cultura is being deconstructed:

CREATIVITY AND ME

Unlike a lot of my fellow “creatives” or “creators” (I hate those terms, so pretentious . . . I miss the days when they just called us weirdos) I have no trouble getting down to the business of creativity. No meditative warm-up rituals for me. I just do it. All the time. I even do it in my sleep.

Creativity seems to be my brain’s default setting.

I have no idea how this happened. I don’t remember being any other way. I don’t know how to be any other way. 

Maybe it was because I was the first child of my family’s rock and roll generation. No kids to play with in my toddler years. Just me in a world of big people, talking to a lot of imaginary friends who I no longer remember.

See? Leave me alone and I get creative. It’s a bad habit I got into early. I don’t advise it as a child-rearing or education strategy. Messed up in my socialization, that I’m still working on.

 

 

I’m doing it constantly. The only times I get bored when getting along with society (y’know, school, work, and all that) I’m forced to kick myself out of the creative mind state with its interior monologue and spontaneous daydream scenarios and put the bulk of my brain’s power on all this boring shit that people pay you for or get mad at you if you don’t go along with. I understand that a lot of you live that way. 

My greatest nightmare is to get stuck there.

Lucky for me, I keep sliding back to my home sweet home in the back of my twisted brain.

The trick is to somehow plug this into a way to make a living. That’s another thing I’m still working on.

Maybe I can pull it off before I retire from the day job. Maybe my story collection Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions will be a bestseller and make me rich. Maybe the same will happen with my (as of yet unsold) novel Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin. Wouldn’t it be great if it happened with both of them?

(See how I managed to work a plug into this piece? Always strive to be a professional.)

Meanwhile, I keep my eyes and other sensory apparati wide open, scanning my environment for interesting input–there’s nothing deadlier than a bland, orderly environment.

Nuke the suburbs!

Naw, that’s probably going too far. Beside suburbs decay from the brainpans out, breeding their own brand of creeping weirdness.

“I need to be inspired!” The wannabes whine.

I just scan around, see things like the mummified tarantula that my wife brought home. It’s a male, you can tell because of the small abdomen. I imagine a tarantula version of Playboy full of sexy pictures of females with large, sexy abdomens. I wonder what Amazonian-style roast tarantula tastes like, and could it someday be a kind of fast food . . .

That’s the easy part. Maybe someday these things will show up in a story or some other creative production.

It’s a shame this doesn’t bring me more money.

CHICANONAUTICA PONDERS BHARAT, AZTLÁN, AND OTHER PLACES REAL AND IMAGINARY

Chicanonautica is about places and names, over at
La Bloga.

Like Bharat:

Also known as India:

Shades of Aztlán:

And what about Martians?

WAITING FOR ZYX, PANCHO, AND THE INTERGALACTIC CACTUS CONSPIRACY

Houston? Houston? Do you read?

Okay. Maybe not Houston—my dad warned me to stay out of Texas (but I’ve been there anyway). Maybe . . . Phoenix? West Covina? Ellay? Teotihuacán? 

Once again, just a dazed Chicanonaut in an old eccentric orbit, approaching . . .  What is that planet? Could I have really lived there all my life? 

There? Here?

 

No word on Zyx. Pancho is coming along. Other folks are getting back to me. Gads, I succeeded. I’m a writer. I got away with it

So, once again, I’m waiting. A writer ends up waiting on a lot of stuff. All the time.

The way to deal with it is to not, by any means, to sit around waiting. Keep moving forward. Get distracted. Find something else to do. Something else to think about. Maybe even write something.

I’ve become an expert at this. Or maybe it’s another aspect of the peculiar way I’m twisted.

Is this going to be a soft landing? A splashdown? A huge, smoking crater that was once a major metropolitan sprawl festering in the middle of the burning desert?

Meanwhile, some of the cacti are drying up while others are undergoing a bizarre resurrection . . .

CHICANONAUTICA STEAM MANS THROUGH CENTRAL AMERICA

Chicanonautica reviews another book by Luis Senarens, the Cuban American Jules Verne, at La Bloga.

Wherein, Frank Reade Jr., the original steampunk:

Takes his new steam man to Central America:

Faces giant snakes (among other things):

And finds a lost city:

THE HOTTEST SUMMER EVER IS COMING TO AN END

Here I go, groping for something besides the heat to write about. Gotta admit, it is getting cooler. Dropped down to low triple-digits. That’s the sort of madness that gets you when you live in Phoenix. 

I’m waiting for news from the Writing Front. Something else that will burn away your brain if you let it. Best to get distracted. Hey, what’s that over there? A squirrel? A meteor? A desiccated tarantula? That long, lost monsoon? Are those clouds? Did I just hallucinate a raindrop hitting my arm?

And then, I get an email with an attachment. It’s the final manuscript of my story collection, Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions (I’m starting to think of it as Pancho). This is starting to feel real. Looking it over is an impure pleasure.

Looks like I’ll be able to point to this book when people ask, “What have you been doing with your life?”

Actually, it’s just the tip of my iceberg, what people can see from their own personal Titanics.

It sure has been a long, strange trip.

Then I had a day when I was trying to get back to my mom about a tune she heard while on hold with her doctor, the computers at work were acting funny, I found a lizard that was both desiccated and flattened (I put the corpse in my wallet and carried it around all day), I got a royalty check, Facebook removed some of my content and I couldn’t tell what it was.

Did a certain ex-president just show signs of imminent unraveling? Or is it wishful thinking on my part?

Fortunately, Phoenix was at the outer fringes of Hurricane Hilary’s reach. It clouded over, cooled down to the double digits, and now and then some light sprinkles messed up the windshield of mi troque.

Are my new glasses ready yet? How close to x-ray vision will they get me?

Somehow, things aren’t feeling apocalyptic, but that may just be me.

The day after the hurricane, it dried out and the temp shot up. Back to the new normal.

New normals come more often these days. Like future shock or something.

Finally, my new glasses came. Almost as astounding as the cataract surgery. How many years was I walking around in that fog?

I sent my corrected Pancho to my publisher. Hard not to get excited.

Suddenly we have what will probably be the most bizarre election campaign ever, rearing its hideous head.

Why not? It’s tarantula mating season. There’s weird shit in the air.

And the killer heat is back, with a vengeance.