gawgia

I'm in Atlanta for about a week, doing another workshop thing.

I've decided that these things are the most emotionally exhausting part of my life, which I think means good things about my life if we're talking big picture. It also means that I am not that excited about doing the studio visit workshop circuit and maybe should chill out on it. Every studio visit I do, no matter how nice the person is, I'm usually gritting my teeth waiting for it to end.

Atlanta is nice. The weather here is better than New York and the air is fresher. Everyone keeps trying to say hello to me though, and this I do not like. I think my lack of desire to have casual exchanges with other people is part of why moving to NYC has been so good for me.

My brother was here all last week and he loves talking to random people. We couldn't be more different in this respect. Sometimes I feel jealous of the ease with which he moves through the world. People are always so excited about him, even if they don't know him. And often people will tell him that he's going to be their president someday. I swear this happens; I have seen it. One time, we were on the Venice boardwalk when he was around 8 or 9, and he wanted a popsicle or something, so my mom took us to some stand. My brother picked out a popsicle and the Latino man behind the counter wouldn't take my mom's money. "Him? He doesn't pay." and then he leaned over and said to my brother, "you're going to be President some day."

Other times, these interactions are a little less cliche; when we were in Jamaica for my aunt's wedding when he was three, he would disappear for distressingly long periods of time and then would turn up totally fine in some funny situation. Once, on the resort's restaurant patio, my mom was frantically looking for him and suddenly, over the loudspeaker, the hostess–I guess there was some entertainment portion of the meal–called out, "everybody, Max Dean is in the house!" Another time, my mom found him sitting with a family of German tourists.

Anyway, I'll never be like my brother. That's okay, we are different in a lot of ways. I am practicing turning envy into more productive admiration.

When he was here, I asked him if part of his anxiety–we both suffer from massive cases of great expectations induced self-doubt and self-flagellation–came from not only having our parents expect that he'll do so much in life, but also from random strangers expecting so much from him as well. "Yes, probably," he said. So, in this sense, I guess I am lucky.

But so Atlanta–it's nice here. There are a lot of cute houses. I sort of want one. Not to live in full time, but just to come down to and work for a few weeks at a time. Life here seems pleasant enough that it's not rural and unlivable, but also boring enough that one could get a lot done. Why not just go upstate, you might ask. I feel like anything within driving distance of New York is so burdened by aesthetics and also the possibility that someone else might be in town at the same time and "we should hang!" Also maybe because I could just blend in here entirely, unlike some mostly white town in New York somewhere where I might be vaguely haunted by a paranoid narcissistic worry that people are wondering what I'm doing there. Atlanta seems like the perfect place to peel off one's skin and disappear for a while.  Also the landscape is at once exotic and post-industrial. I am suddenly interested in textures again.

In later August, when I get back to New York, I'm going to sublet DB's studio for about a month. I'm really excited to fuck around for the first time in probably 3 years almost. Everything has been so specific for so long.