August 1962
My life has pretty much consisted of working, parenting and plumbing. Details on the parenting and plumbing later. Just can’t squeeze the time out to do much of anything. Oh, except that I’m trying to “take it easy,” which for me means that I’ve quit caffeine. This is huge. I live off caffeine.
Since I’ve quit caffeine, I’m settling down to a state of calm, or at least “calmer” for me.
Part of being calm means that I spent some time working on a collage while listening to Joy Division. That's my version of a time out. I’m doing a “Year I Was Born” series from 1962 National Geographics. I’ve only found three months so far, so I need to keep hunting for them.
This is the first collage. Here are a few things I feel compelled to share.
1962 National Geographics are pretty paltry pickings. JFK was still alive, and National Geographic was a picture of global bliss. You could either enjoy life in the U.S. and tour it as a happy family in your station wagon, or if you had the resources you could travel the globe and indulge in fetishizing exotic peoples. After JFK was killed, the reality of war and global violence seeped into the content of National Geographic through the sidelines. The magazine could no longer entirely cater to an image of the world as a vacation paradise in a snow globe. So, 1962 may be one of the dullest National Geographic years ever which makes it very hard to work with.
As far as my collage project, it’s not about chronicling world events. It’s a little personal project that I’m doing because I’ve had to rake my life over the coals these past few months, and I’m doing something to commemorate the year I was born and offer some self-reflection for, well, myself. All my collages are personal narratives to a large degree. These will be even more so.
This is what I came up with for the first one, from August 1962. I cut out way more material than I actually used. I only used what worked for what I had to say with scissors and glue. And I wasn’t sure what I had to say. I was driven by the material on hand and the material in my heart and head. It’s not meant to be a masterpiece. It’s a visual poem, a page in a diary or something. It’s just a little project I’m doing for myself to make myself happy and chill the fuck out. I know what it all means. A friend asked me about it tonight, and I told him the significance of the whole thing and felt kind of dumb afterward! Whatever.
Anyway, I’m just making it through the days as they come. Part of today means that it’s time to go to bed because tomorrow’s coming soon. The alarm’s going off at 6 in the morning, and it will be time to start all over again.
Goodnight.