SMITCHing

I've been teaching an advanced illustration class at a local art college. Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) is a small school with some very talented faculty and students. My friend, Martin French, is the Illustration Department Chair. He invited me to teach the class. You can check out Martin's work at martinfrench.com. The students are smart, enthusiastic, and fun to be with. They need to be more professional, though. Some of them are already working, but everybody needs more skill. They have to want it more, too. There's a couple stars in the class, and a few who have loads of talent, but no discipline. Teaching is going to be a lot like being “dad”.

A blinking cursor. It'll mock you if you're not careful. It invites you to write something for the sake of writing. Maybe that's okay. Sometimes you just have to write. Like snow melting, it starts slow and unremarkably. Soon the words come a little easier, accelerating in a slippery way. They rush past just a little faster than meaning finds comfortable. They tease, promising ideas that dissolve at the slightest touch of attention. Maybe it was the drugs in my youth. The ubiquitous “They” told me this might happen. Legions of carefully contructed synapses—built with such great industry in the first few years of my life—now lie unplugged, coiled, and discarded by a tiny little molecule: THC. Or was it the speedy acid? The truth? It's fatigue, not drugs. Thinking is hard work. You have to peddle fast to keep up with an active mind, and it's remarkable how a tired body will bind an eager consciousness. Maybe I just need to cowboy-up, and muscle through. Write more. ...

My friend killed himself last night. He'd been battling depression for a while now. It's been years since he'd been the person I first met who was so joyful and uplifting. I'm not being trite. He was a big strong man, and he could've physically lifted me, but what really lifted me up was his spirit. He relished doing life. We became friends not long after we met. I was a naive transplant to the Portland metro area from Southern California. It was the early nineties, and I was at the front of a wave of immigrants from SoCal who were returning the favor for the Oregon population's exodus to the south a hundred and fifty years earlier. My wife and I built a house in a tidy suburb. We had bought a pretty hillside lot, about a half acre full of trash trees, majestic Sugar Maples, and soaring Doug Firs. We kept as many as we could, but the builder still had to fell three or four of the 100 foot giants. It immediately turned me into Paul Bunyon. The contractor suggeste...