Noon Mul

MARCH 25

Since 2026 began, nothing has been more important to me than living life. Going outside when the sun is out, bundling up for weather that’s not nice, biking river or stream paths, reading books for book club, chatting and listening at a birthday gathering, chewing mouthfuls of red bean pastry wandering new alleyways, feeling emotions big and small, being plagued by regret, plunging amusement when small dogs meet. 

There’s a vast empty plaza with a side “mini hill” lined with cat houses. They’re pretty run down, but the cats must feel comfy in them. Most cat boxes in the city are kind of beat up like that. The idea of making mini high rise apartments for them came to mind. How cute would that be? 

Then I thought, why don’t the cats live in the subway stations? It’s warm there, and surely there are mice. 

~

When I look at my “Projects Spreadsheet” or casual paintings, my dwindling living funds, or think about kind of job I can get, I just shrug. Someone recently said I was the most chill person they’d met in their life– that I was “unusually chill.” But I ask myself, is it chill, or is it apathy? Maybe disillusionment and disassociation. Well I did begin to shift my Creative practice into living creatively. My art wasn’t getting adequate resources or relevant community anyway. For example, sculptural ideas aren’t practical to make. I want to be outdoors. Should I continue organic installations?….so I think…

It only takes a few intense creative sessions before I’m all juiced out. That could be 3 hours 3x a week or 10 hours 2x a week. And if I socialize, I need more recovery time. Actually, with how little I’ve been doing these days, I had this empty time to realize that a lot of nonsense had been going on in my life. Like how much I hustled before with not much to show for it. Except, I will say I did save enough money to fund my experiment of “doing nothing” for 3 months. I must also thank my frugality and research skills for providing me with very cheap/inexpensive rent and survival supplies. 

~

When I look back at my writing, I hate all of it. It’s the sophomoric ramblings in that intellectualizing prose, distant and probing, that we had to gobble up as high literature in school. It would make us serious Professionals in the big smart world. 

I was praised for my ability to mirror this modern soul-less prose, injecting it with my own style of humor and personality. It was not me. It was me catering to that world. It had my ruminations and interior musings on themes, most in modern lit that are topical. (When I write, I am entranced by the mechanisms of writing, like phrasing, how a subject/noun clause leads an idea. Words playing sonically, visually, etymologically. Chewy, soupy, or crisp paragraphs? A sentence rewritten over and over and over eventually deleted. Then I pause–it is so stupid to labor like this, and who will read it, and what new technology will slurp it up, and was it my thought or an extension of this solipsistic culture. Did I dig for calcified gems or grow ideas like a plant? Regardless, it’s all extraction as I highly doubt it was “grown” and nurtured. Why? Because it doesn’t feel…right.) This is all to say, I lost the point of a Creative practice that is separate from living, and in 2026, no– starting in 2024, I wondered how to recover my heart and soul. 

Until I met him. 

He’s a fool in many ways, like laughing for days at a flower, and he is the antidote.