One Summer I Saw This
My memory is terrible. Nothing is recalled easily, only by accident. But sometimes on the way to another set of thoughts I'll accidentally trip over an entire bin of memories and it's like an entire season of my life comes flooding back with a Proustian fullness and reality.
Case in point: At lunch today I had a flash of this summer where I worked on a painting and maintenance crew for a Purdue residence hall. I just scrawled out three pages of notes trying to get it all down before it went away again. In my fugue, I almost ran out of time to draw, but I scribbled out an illustration for a short anecdote.
One of the jobs we had to do early in the summer was strip out the oldest and most unusable mattresses in the dorm. Those plastic-y, uncomfortable, mis-sized dorm mattresses that are the stuff of commencement address cliche, and we had just piles of them heaped up around the loading dock. One in particular fascinated me:
Someone living in the dorm had drawn a naked woman on his mattress in thick permanent marker and then carved a hole in the vicinity of a vagina.
The punchline came when we flipped it over and there was the back of a woman drawn with the same clumsy hand and the foamy hole now in the general area of her butt.
It's just one of those real-life details that strikes the perfect intersection of depressing, funny, low-class and mysterious in such a way that it might be a kind of spirit animal for my entire body of work.
Case in point: At lunch today I had a flash of this summer where I worked on a painting and maintenance crew for a Purdue residence hall. I just scrawled out three pages of notes trying to get it all down before it went away again. In my fugue, I almost ran out of time to draw, but I scribbled out an illustration for a short anecdote.
One of the jobs we had to do early in the summer was strip out the oldest and most unusable mattresses in the dorm. Those plastic-y, uncomfortable, mis-sized dorm mattresses that are the stuff of commencement address cliche, and we had just piles of them heaped up around the loading dock. One in particular fascinated me:
Someone living in the dorm had drawn a naked woman on his mattress in thick permanent marker and then carved a hole in the vicinity of a vagina.
The punchline came when we flipped it over and there was the back of a woman drawn with the same clumsy hand and the foamy hole now in the general area of her butt.
It's just one of those real-life details that strikes the perfect intersection of depressing, funny, low-class and mysterious in such a way that it might be a kind of spirit animal for my entire body of work.