I had a dream last night that I cut off half of my face as an art project. I took a knife, cut all the way around my head, and peeled the skin off of the top half of my face. The person helping me do this (my assistant?) suggested I keep the bloody tissues I was blotting with “because you might be able to sell them.”

Perhaps the most approriate critique I could have given myself…

As in: do something strenuous, even painful, that really affects no-one other than yourself, and try to market the left-overs as art, while all the while claiming that the “real” art took place in the ephemeral action you’ll never truly experience. and the real art object is the story it creates.

I mean, my landlord thinks I am a jackass. He says “why do you play around with this sillyness? You could use those same skills to do something adult like landscaping or make furniture! We could turn my old computer shop into a furniture factory!” My identifiable information about this individual deleted has stopped me mid-sentence to say “wait - are you talking about something *you* were doing? Please stop: it will just annoy me.” Sometimes I feel like I am making art because if I stop then I am not artist. Other times I feel like I am doing it because I said I would. And the most satisfied I have been in quite a while was at the Nebraska Art Farm, after a hard morning of roofing in the sun and a hard afternoon of building a large bird house, when i would sit on the roof with a beer and watch the sun go down and feel warm and tired and done. And I am not sure what that means.