Now that my house and general living arrangements are theoretically stable (for now) (I am never going to trust that this will remain the case) I'm trying to start dealing with all the boxes and bundles and portfolios of things that have been in storage, or that I've been hauling around with me for all these years. It's mostly art and art supplies: tablets of paper, partial reams of paper, fancy decorated paper, carefully-wrapped stacks of prints, half-bound books, book cloth, beads, wire, bits and pieces of hardware, and so on and so forth.
All of it is, basically, junk.
I should probably just throw it away. Only of course I can't stand to do that. There's the whole sunk-cost thing, because this is stuff that I cared about enough to pack away and hang on to, that I was interested in, that I was in the middle of working on, that I was sure I would be able to return to someday and finish. It all meant something.
Does it mean anything now? Massive regrets, mostly. There's hardly anything I've ever made that I don't regret, sometimes very painfully. None of it ever found anywhere to go. Nobody ever wanted it. I never found a buyer or a gallery to take me on. I never found a working group to be part of. I never figured out how to market myself, to become a brand.
And now my life is so full of other obligations, that I don't want, but that are more or less required for my survival (and other people's), that it doesn't seem very likely that I'm going to be doing a lot of dedicated creative anything, any time soon. I'm surrounded by all the no-longer-relevant detritus of the last twenty or thirty years of my life, and going through the boxes feels like sandpaper on a sunburn.
(and I can't breathe a word of this to anyone! because then they dump their own buckets of slime on me! which is not helpful!)
