There's a Light

In the velvet darkness, of the blackest night...

Whoa. I’m back.

A two-week road trip + Covid during said road trip + low energy post said road trip + a parent in the hospital for Covidish complications + heavy day-job year-end wrap-up = my cascading list of excuses for my two-month hiatus. And a whole lotta hyphens.

But these excuses are NOT the actual backstory at all. I’ll get to that after I show you that I did get something done. Part one should look familiar now in living color. Part two is my totally new drop:

— No mobile version this time, but click here to see bigger. If the page goes blank, refresh your screen. Sigh, technology. —

[Wipes sweat off brow.]

It’s good to be back. The real backstory behind my leave is Resistance. But the flavor of this particular Resistance variety is actually super basic. When you’re already tired, overworked, and anxious, you’d think something creative would be a nice little outlet to wind down. Well, in my case, nope.

The last thing I need when I don’t have any proverbial spoons left is the pressure of facing myself potentially suck at something that means a lot to me. In other words, stints of not drawing have less to do with a lack of time or willpower and more to do with a lack of mental mettle to witness whether or not I can put the ideas in my mind down on paper.

This is typical behavior for a card-carrying perfectionist. This snippet from a NYT article and Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, a clinical assistant professor, sums it up quite succinctly: “…that threat could be the threat of failure, or it could be the threat of letting others down…. This experience can happen to anyone, but people who struggle with perfectionism may be especially prone to it. In perfectionism, we over-identify with our performance. If we unconsciously think we are what we do, then what we have to do becomes much more fraught.” Sing it, sister.

But I did it. The images in my head eventually poured into some rectangles in the way I imagined they could. The pressure’s off. Until, of course, I publish this and, once again, face the blank page with the weight of the next set of images in my head.

T-minus…

Burning Bright, There’s a Guiding Star.

So in this episode, we learn a lot about where Toby lives. I wanted it to be a paradoxical combination of bustling city life with zero bustle. This is a place that seems metro but also like a ghost town — much like Toby’s essence as a living skeleton – not quite a human, teaming with life, but definitely not dead either. Toby heads out for a long walk to a nearby neighborhood/exurb that’s ghosted without a doubt. He strides through like it’s no big thing, as if he’s quite familiar with this territory. He eventually arrives at the crumbling church. Full stop.

The last two frames are based on real-life places in Gary, Indiana.

First: the poured-concrete “Edison Concept” row houses, formerly owned by U.S. Steel execs, but abandoned after the industry collapsed and white folks fled Gary. Over the past four decades, preservation, rehabilitation, grants, low-interest loans, and a whole lot of determination opened these housing units back up to the public. Finis Louise Springer — who passed away earlier this year — was instrumental in tackling Gary’s abandonment crisis head-on: to not just save these buildings, but pass them back to the community as safe, modern, affordable places to live. She was the living embodiment of the never-give-up spirit of Gary, Indiana, which I’ve become, admittedly, obsessed with over the years. You can read more about the Edison homes here (apologies if it’s paywalled).

Second: the City Methodist Church, built in 1926, and home to about 2000 members in its heyday — oh, and partly funded by U.S. Steel — was also abandoned by its white community after the industry collapsed in the ‘70s. But City Methodist is also a current focus of that same never-give-up attitude. Gary has applied for the Brownfields Cleanup Grant through the EPA (asbestos and basement flooding have thwarted efforts toward a proper rehab) to clean up the site and shore up parts of the church into a European-style “ruins garden” and event space. The projected date for cleanup completion is March 2024. And while residents and enthusiasts alike will say, “yeah we’ve been here before” (City Methodist was awarded a grant back in 2017), there’s so much more coming to life in Gary right now, that it feels more stable and solid than ever, especially now that they’re quite literally getting to the root of the problem.

No matter what, or who you are.

In Toby’s world, however, these locations don’t look as promising. In fact, they look worse than ever. Is this a reality or just a figment of his downtrodden ‘tude? Haven’t we all become wrapped up in our negative backstories so tightly that rehabilitation seems futile?

Or is there a light, a light, in the darkness of everybody’s life?

Let the sun and light come streaming into my life.

For some of us, music is the balm (and oft-times the cure) for what ails ya. Toby’s definitely listening to some bangers as he mopes through the landscape of his feels.

So I’ve provided you with a few links to what one of those songs might be. What kind of tuneage do you need in your ear canals as you battle shadows? Choose your own adventure!

• You need a devil-horn-pumpin’, head-bangin’ classic that’ll raise you up because “you've been down too long in the midnight sea.”

• All you want right now is to escape into the electronic fringes of society and “be a ghost tonight, be a ghost tonight.”

• You need to feel like you’re floating over the frazzled nerve center that is your life, “crying in the car, an invalid, I'm off the grid.”

• You want revenge — not in a stabby sort of way, but in an empowered, fist raised, feelin’ like “karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend,” the-best-revenge-is-living-well sort of way.

• You’re melancholy but hopeful. Things aren’t as bad as they seem, and all you can do is sigh to yourself: “I’ve got nothing to do today, but smile.”

In the next episode, we’ll peel back the cyclone fence and take a closer look at the shoddy remains of Toby’s existence. Is it all doom and gloom, or is there a light over at the Frankenstein place?