Austin Kleon

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Oh no we’re still us

This is one of those rare New Yorker cartoons (by Will McPhail) you clip out and stick on the fridge. I thought about it the other day when I read the obituary for Dean Ford, lead singer of the Marmalade:

I wanted to start over. I wanted a new life. The trouble was, I brought myself with me.

That’s the beginning of a country song, right there. Here’s an old poem of mine to go with it:

It’s like Thoreau wrote in his journal (he could’ve written some country songs):

It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.

The cruelest month

“Summer gets to be an old story.”
—Henry David Thoreau

T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, but in Austin, Texas, it’s September. Summer is winter here, and summer isn’t even officially over until September 22. The cursed sun pays no heed to anything official. You’re not out of the A/C until Halloween at the earliest. September here is just a cruel joke. When Northern Instagram fills with scarves and pumpkin spice lattes, your only solace is shorts in February. (Awful in its own way.) “Hot and sunny every day,” Bill Hicks mocked. “What are you, a fucking lizard? Only reptiles feel that way about this kind of weather.” It’s nothing right or natural. Nothing to be celebrated. Only endured.

Dark Days

Part of the problem with depression is that it’s somewhat beyond description, and almost impossible to fathom for those of us who haven’t experienced it. I’ve been bummed, sad, melancholy, etc., but never actually depressed or suicidal, and I never really began to understand depression until I read William Styron’s 80-page memoir, Darkness Visible:

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description… it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

Styron does his best to describe it for the reader:

The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

I might also recommend Allie Brosh’s comics, “Adventures in Depression” and “Depression Part Two,” collected in her book, Hyperbole and a Half:

Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason.

(I have not read Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, but I loved his book Far From The Tree.)

A few of my friends have written about their experiences, including Mike Monteiro and Clayton Cubitt.

I wish y’all well. Hang in there.

Made to order

I am never more nervous than when I hand my wife a new manuscript, and I am never more relieved than when she says she likes it. She’s my first reader (first everything, really) and if I can write something that she really likes, I feel I’m a success no matter what.

Of course, I’m thrilled when anybody else likes the work. This week I got word that the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee started a book club and made Steal Like An Artist the first book up for discussion.

It’s wonderful but also a tiny bit unnerving how that book, which I wrote when I was 28 years old (I’ll be 35 this June), keeps having such a life of its own. I’d thought of Steal/Show as the Robin Hood duology — first you steal, then you share — and I didn’t see how it could go any further than that. But it’s clear now that I’m writing what is obviously the last book in a trilogy. It’s always more complicated when people have expectations, and it’s always a challenge to tie things up in a satisfying way, but I’m really excited about this book. It feels right to me. And long overdue.

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