Refilling the Soul
Anyone who knows me knows that one of my constant focii (the polite way, it strikes me, of saying “kicks”) is Creativity, its source and nature. Where does it come from? How do we invite and cultivate it? What do we do when it’s gone?
Because that’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time. Back when I was trying to flag a giantess’s attention, I adopted a story-a-day project. Usually that runs for a month, but such was my need and hunger (and momentum, honestly) and it went for two, and I populated my blog with dozens of great one-offs and some promising series. Even now, in the latter day when it’s typical to despise one’s earlier work, I look back at those ideas and I’m impressed, sometimes inspired to some shade or degree. That’s a good thing, liking one’s earlier work, as opposed to burning entire journals and creative notebooks, like I’ve done in my 18” Weber kettle grill. Though now that I think about it, that kind of negative creative process probably doesn’t provide any salutary influence to the food I cook.
I’m writing about this today because I’ve been on an intensive creative streak lately, which has locked me in my home office (not BrE) with generating worlds in Chat GPT4 and Starry AI and newly discovered Perchance, working on a new fold, if not dimension, in creative #SizeFantasy work. And I’ve been fixated on this at the expense of my marriage, yes, I will admit that. For days on end I’ve transitioned smoothly from my work laptop, where I study SEM and build promotional emails for our six conferences and update our online course catalog (that is, our extensive catalog of online courses) based on updated tuition rates and updated application deadline and updated all sorts of tweaky bullshit our program leads come up with on a weekly basis; transitioning smoothly from this to plugging in my monitor and my wireless mouse/keyboard dongle back into my main computer and starting up immediately and hammering on the exhaust coolant fan until it shuts up and opening up Chat GPT4 to any of several salacious, provocatice #SizeErotica series we’re developing, and finding which Gmail account has the most credit with Starry AI to generate improbable porn imagery to supplement these stories, and suddenly it’s 9:30 p.m. and I forgot to make breakfast and every subsequent meal, plus my wife is lonely and twitchy, having caught up on every last movie and series recommendation her friends and sisters have floated past her.
And that makes me feel like a selfish shit. I’ve chosen a hobby, an avocation, a creative discipline that is by its very nature solitary and individualistic (while condemning my own nation for the fetishization of these qualities), so I feel as though I’m perpetually torn between this rabid creative impulse and prioritizing my marriage. This is easy during the prolonged dry spells, when nothing’s going on and I beg for a long walk or even volunteer to withtstand the farmers markets, with the double-wide strollers of breeders clusting together to discuss capitalist bullshit, blocking me from our local apiary or our local Hmong farmers or some jagoff who just discovered woodburning art. (I exaggerate: woodburning has not resurfaced among hipsterism. They’re still making soap and brooms.)
So today the opportunity presented itself… eventually. Let me back up: I’ve been sleep-deprived for several days, pursuing my latest creative project which I won’t talk about yet, I’ll let slowly manifest to the three people who would care about it. I’ve been staying up ridiculously late, going to bed after 3 a.m. after creating false identities and backlogging fallacious records and exploring the parameters of new AI art engines (and thank gods I’m an armchair linguist or I’d never get anywhere with these fuckers), so today, in defiance of a broad, open, schedule-less day yawning before me, I decided I should get out of the house.
Counter-productive? Sure, Paranoia-inducing? To a degree. Healthful in principle? Yes, in principle. Sometimes I commit to “correct thought” even though every fiber of my body desires something else, even something oppositional, because I would rather history record me as siding with the right answer.
And yet, this wasn’t entirely unrelated. I went out into the world, and despite this, I did fun shit and enjoyed myself.
What would have made it truly spiritual would have been to do this on my Vespa. Yes, I have been conducting experiements, and I have taken my beloved GTS to speeds exceeding 80 mph on the highways striating our greater metro. However, one of the drawbacks to shopping with a scooter is that you cannot make substantial purchases at one place, then secure them while you shop at a second place. Therefore I had to take our car, treating it as a portable treasure chest. I drove to United Noodles, which felt quite like transporting to SE Asia, to pick up a shitload of my current favorite ramen, counter-intuitive Japanese beverages, and all possible ingredients one would need to make their own credible spring rolls.
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Then I drove out to a Michael’s, which if you don’t have it is your local corporatist art supply outlet. This is where you can buy blank Día de Muertos skulls to fuck up with your own markers, or garlands of Halloween/autumnal themed fabric leaves or dying flowers or earthtone scraps of fabric (seriously, it’s just lazy), or where you go for the total body of artistic supplies if you want to get into knitting, screen printing, watercolors, or scrapbooking. They should be best known for scrapbooking.
I went to Michael’s because even if I don’t want to buy anything, there’s something there that will inspire me. Today I pored through their miniatures but with negative results. I admired their stone brick walls, but recalled that I could by any variety of miniaturized masonry materials through Temu (brick, cinder block, stone, &c.) for significantly cheaper. It’s not great to support Temu, whose business runs at a tremendous loss and exists only to disrupt Amazon, but… I mean, the enemy of my enemy, and all that shit. If we’re in end-stage capitalism, it kinda behooves us to grab all the trivial, beside-the-point entertainment and distraction we can grab, for rock-bottom prices.
Then I went to World Market, which is better than Pier 1 ever was. When I was young and emotionally vulnerable Pier 1 was where you went for exotic, non-US-originating furnishings and decoration. Walking through was something like a more acceptable version of the British Museum: less cultural rape, more remarketing of artifacts by foreign artists, more reselling of chairs and decorations that whites who don’t travel imagine SE Asian families have in their homes, assuming a higher level of socioeconomic stratum.
Gods, I can’t even talk about my nostalgia without the filter and lens of everything I’ve come to understand about capitalism and international politics. Back then, it felt like a rummage sale by Indiana Jones, and that felt good and exciting, especially for a bullied teen in northern central Wisconsin who just couldn’t fit in with the rednecks, someone who endlessly created 1st edition D&D character templates on his Coleco ADAM word processor, someone who didn’t know how to dress a deer and never appeared on the local news channels for protesting Indigenous fishing rights. Someone who hid in the library to escape the bullies and discovered books on supernatural phenomena, vintage radio humor, and the whole New Wave movement as headed by Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson.
Now I realize how deleterious it was, the illusion of purchasing pilfered goods from exploited populations overseas. World Market kind of ameliorates this stigma, pointing out the proceeds that go to this specific artist or how these goods send money back to this hill tribe in that war-torn nation, as well as some of the ramune and ramen I could find at United Noodles. Today I grabbed a bag of Guinness-flavored thick-cut potato chips. They’re not pretty, but they nailed it on the flavor. But even looking at the rough-hewn dining tables, the collapsible hibachi sets, the Hello Kitty rejuvenating masks and the all-weather lounge furniture, it all made me feel part of something greater. Just like that teen I was, hiding out in the library, where the rednecks would never go, checking out Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Ian Shoales’s I Gotta Go for the third time, World Market helps transport me to the greater world. The furniture, the snacks, even the worldbeat music constantly resonating throughout the shopping experience lift me out of lower central Minnesota and sweep me through South America and Southeast Asia in gentle strokes. It reminds me there are other lands and other contexts, where other values are taken for granted and other priorities are pushed through vinyl billboards and crackly radio, and that I was once there.
These are good exercises, despite how I’m representing them. Poring over competing packages of businessman-marketed nori snacks, critically regarding napkin rings made of industrial ductwork, weighing my desire for a black porcelain hand printed in gold with zodiac symbols, planets, and palmistry versus its unjustifiable capitalist markup… these are all good exercises. Buying the bag of ugly Guinness chips is good for me. Trying out all the scented candles is good for me. Getting a contemporary Hong Kong three-chord romantic techno standard stuck in my head for the drive home is good for me. It’s what pushes my attention away from the jackoff in the black Jeep who drifts into oncoming traffic to jump ahead a few cars, while we’re all waiting for the red light to change, it’s what causes me to focus on the angelic radials falling from the clouds ahead of me, as though summoning souls from an exurb corporate campus. It’s what encourages me to think charitably of the girl DJing for the second time in her life (so she says) on the local college station, after a sequence of inoffensive soundalike ambient droning by Pinegrove and Kitba and other shit beyond my perceptual range, because I’m old and doughy and longing for my own past that never was.
I could have easily spent the day tricking Chat GPT4 into writing increasingly perverse erotica, as I have for the past week. I could have happily spent hours manipulating Starry AI into producing low-angle porn images of giantesses with huge breasts and huge asses, despite how often they ban the workaround terms I’ve discovered. I could have holed up in my home office (AmE, not BrE) with the windows shut and a gray stripey cat whining to be carried into my lap as she refuses to eat her food and her breath gets worse and worse because it’s not just capitalism in the end stages, creating twisted Size porn that no one else will ever read or see and even fewer will be interested in.
Instead, I forced myself to step out and hit two of my favorite international shopping centers, then executed a grocery run for my wife who stayed behind to somehow clean up and contrive this home office to contain her as well, after having years of nowhere to place her own creativity or house her own retreat. I forced myself to go out and be in the world, despite the traffic jams and the construction blocking me from the highway and millenials trying to run me over in crosswalks because they reject the value of social agreements. I sensed that my complacent, senescent soul needed to GTFO and recapture the restorative respite of a SE Asian mall, where English is only lingua franca.
It could only have been better if I could have executed these runs on my scooter. The problem was that I cannot secure the previous destination’s purchases while I go into the second and subsequent locations, so I had to bring out my “safe on wheels” and appear in traffic as an equal rather than a vulnerable body with an engine and two wheels. The scooter would’ve brought me further into SE Asia, where efficiency was prioritized over the vanity of an obscenely, selfishly chunky Western truck or SUV.
And that is what my spirit needed today. And even though I’m not now writing or creating, I can nonetheless see my power bar glowing green and full. I can inundate my poor wife with racing thoughts of munificence, and I can plumb Radio Garden for fresh jams from Cameroon, Bucharest, and Puerto Rico. Maybe tomorrow I’ll open up Daz Studio to illustrate the 3” tall proxy crawling around the 12’ tall Korean BBW model, or resume the Chat GPT4 saga of a 3” tall proxy seducing a sultry TCK and her best friend with a tiny-man fetish, before I drive down to resupply my mom’s meds and change her drapes for the new season and show her how to use the camera and find her photos on her iPhone 14 or whatever.
Part of creativity is hammering away while the iron is hot. Part of it is breaking the fuck away and immersing yourself in the rest of humanity’s diverse and relentless expression.
In Her Shadow,
Aborigen
©2024 Aborigen/Size Riot