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March 13, 2000
mark thomas Sometimes I forget why it is I fill my life with so much noise. There is almost always some noise going on. Radio, television, the internet. Today, though, I spent most of the afternoon in silence. There was the ticking clock and the refrigerator and the ice cream truck and the car horns; these are sounds I do not often notice. In high school and college I challenged friends to absorb every sound and sensation around them. My friend Chris and I would walk around the subdivision where I lived and see who could point out a sound that the other had not heard. Later, we would compare what we had heard. Today, though, the silence lets everything in. I stopped hearing things. 10 or 15 years ago I welcomed it all in, but now it feels heavy and not promising. Maybe "it" is the firmament or maybe "it" is just my head. I opened my kitchen drawer full of pens, pencils and markers that I've stolen from various places of employment and started drawing. I make an effort to draw maybe twice a year, and by no account am I a gifted or skilled cartoonist. But since I spend so much time at a computer there is something liberating about taking a pen to paper, littering the pages with failed attempts, coming up with 1 or 2 satisfying drawings out of every 50 tries. In writing or drawing at a computer keyboard I do not end up with pages of failure, because I usually erase anything not in the final draft. I almost said "final product." My drawings generally consist of a bunch of squiggly lines with eyeballs and a smile thrown on top, thus turning virtually any scrawl into a smiling face. O, and that's the story of my life, don't you know. Come to think of it, that is pretty much the way I approach most things: Spew a few reams of worthless crap then clean it up and derive from it whatever meaning I end up saying I intended to give it all along, hoping that no one challenges me on the first round of worthless crap. It is 7:51pm, and I am wondering what happened to this day. I am sitting in the bedroom listening to the whirr of a space heater on the floor and feeling the flow of beer through my blood and brain. I am planning a cheeseburger, vegetables and milk for dinner, followed by an 11:00pm shower. See, I just did it. I just took the 2 paragraphs of worthless crap that occupied this space and simply erased them. No more going back to those sentences to try them again at a later time, they are utterly wiped clean from the database. At any rate, as the sleazehead art student is known to say, let me show you my etchings.
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