Okay, so maybe this particular design needs a bit of explanation. I was looking through my old diaries when I found a paragraph that I thought was hilarious. "I never realized until last night I was a pedophiliac. I thought I was dating a thirty four year old but I was really dating a fifteen year old."

(This was written about someone I dated when I lived in Austin. As you can guess, said person was pretty immature.)

I have been skipping ahead to inspire me to work on the current phase of the book. It's a particularly painful and fucked up point in my life. The happy memories? That's the easy stuff. All the cool people that made my day that much more interesting. But those fucked up situations that I could never figure out what possessed me to tolerate? Not such easy stuff to write. Not such easy stuff to admit. So I'm hoping that skipping ahead to when I was clever and sarcastic with a life full of foibles will help me trudge through this rough patch.

In the meanwhile, I've been doing a lot of artwork. I've been doing these bizarre zombie paintings on chipped pieces of the drawing table that got destroyed in the move. It's kind of vindicating. I'm almost done with the first one. It's huge. After I finish the series, Rob is going to put chains through the top and hang them from the ceiling. It's a pretty cool thing.

I also, as you may have noticed, have been tinkering with illustrator. I've come to some thoughts on design. I have a love/hate relationship with design which is starting to calm down. I love looking at really innovative design, in things like ID Magazine and the like, and I like tinkering with it but I hate the formulaicness of it. I hate how there's a "right" and a "wrong" way of doing it. I hate how so many people equate art with design and forget that there's a whole world of painting, sculpture, photography and installations that don't fit into the concise realm of advertising.

I guess I don't really hate design though. I don't not consider it an artform. It is, but I sometimes think that it's closer to algebra than it is to ceramics. It's so logical, it's a puzzle really, and that's so different from the freeform world of the imagination. I really don't know how it ever even got classified in the artworld. I mean it does take talent and it takes creativity. But it's a creativity that exists on a totally opposite side of the brain as so many other forms of art.

And yet, there have been so many artists that were designers and were really innovative. For example, Posada owned a printing press. He was essentially a commercial artist, yet no one that looks at his woodcuts would classify him as that. It fascinates me that someone can have such an organized mind and produce such brilliant artwork. We have a picture on our wall. It's the famous one, I forget who does it, but it's the one with the devil opening the bottle of wine. Copies of it hang on the outside of restaurants everywhere. The man who did it, supposedly, was a commercial artist.

I guess what amazes me is how these people can spend so much of their creative energies doing something that is basically designed to sell a product, that has such a clear notion of a right and a wrong way, and still break through all of that to do something brilliant.

I might never want to be a designer, but it's interesting to test my mind, practice with it, and without any ambition to be what is considered traditionally "good design" I can sort of twist it to fit my own ideas of self expression. Have fun with it. I think the concepts help with my compositions, too, because of the sense of organization that I use, because of getting down to abstract concepts and putting them in a way that conveys some sort of feeling. It still translates well, and that's a positive thing.

I explored Dearborn more. I think I really am going to like living in this little niche of Detroit. It's got a lot of variety to it, and it's not sterile like a lot of the suburbs. There's so much that takes adapting to in this city. Sometimes I'll be sitting in a restaurant and I'll see some blonde woman with hair that looks straight out of "Home Improvement" and I'll want to run out of the room screaming because I can't believe I live here. I can't believe I live someplace so devoid of integration as the Detroit metro area. I can't believe that I live in the most violent city in the country, but above all else I can't believe that I live someplace where you have to have a car to get around.

I think I am going to start making the trek through this giant corporate park in which I live to the bus hub. I can take it to downtown Dearborn where there's lots of stuff to see, or I can take it to downtown Detroit and go to DIA, or I can go downtown and transfer then take it up woodward to ferndale or royal oak. Some of these busses only run once every hour so this might be quite the escapade. But I don't have anything better to do, really. And if I explore, maybe I'll find some bookstores and cafes to put applications in.

But it's this lack of a car thing and being in Detroit that makes it so surreal. I've never lived anywhere where a car was an absolute necessity. Detroit has no real center. Even within the city boundaries of Detroit, there's no real center. The downtown is kind of a ghost town. Not all of it, for example there's some stuff around Greektown, but for the most part there's a lot of desolation. And I guess that's what's so odd, too. I mean in Chicago there was always cool stuff no matter where you went. Even in the poor neighborhoods there was always a certain amount of pride in the area and you could always find something unique in the area. But in Detroit, it's kind of like...it's been left to die. Like some sort of post apocalyptic world where everyone is holed up in abandoned buildings, armed to the teeth, not sure what's out there, or if there are even any survivors.

And then you have the sterility of the suburbs. You have the people that keep moving further and further out, the bigoted condo owners that haven't set foot in the city of Detroit in years.

The segregation is as horrible as it is obvious. But how do you change it? It seems like nobody wants to talk to anyone else, or nobody wants to talk to anyone outside of their own aligned groups. Perhaps this perception will change, this is just from what little contact I've had with the outside world. But it seems like it would require a lot more communication and open mindedness than anyone is willing to offer. It seems like to a certain extent people are oblivious to it. Maybe it comes from living in cities where you could, in any given afternoon, pass through neighborhoods with five or six different nationalities at least, that makes me notice it. And the whole car culture seems to promote the segregation.

The power was out in much of Detroit for a couple of days. Rob and I had gone to dinner with his family. We went to an arabic restaurant, where we had some very good food. His mother's reminder of my "clock running out" notwithstanding (she really wants to be a grandmother, I guess) it was an okay time. We decided to hit the tap room on the way back but rob made a wrong turn and we wound up getting lost in one of the more run down neighborhoods in Detroit. The electricity in this neighborhood was out. There was something really eerie about driving around this neighborhood with absolutely no lights at all, the streets virtually abandoned except for an occasional kid on a bicycle. It was very surreal, too. As much as the post apocalypse sensation is normally around Detroit, it was enhanced by the endless blocks without electricity.

And I guess it's not even that I don't like Detroit. There are things about it that I do like. People are basically pretty real here, there's no shortage of good clubs, restaurants and cafes around here. And I really like Dearborn especially. And I have to say, I've never been so inspired to make films as here. It sounds weird, but there's so many times I'll be out somewhere and get a glimpse of something and it gives me some sort of weird vision of what life would look like as a movie.

I think, all things considered, a lot of Detroit's problems could probably be solved by a decent mass transit system. But that won't ever happen. The auto industry is so prominent here that transit initiatives never pass. It seems so simple: get people out of their cars and onto some sort of rail system, force people to deal with the fact that they're actually in a diverse metro area, and make the whole area easily accessible to everyone...it would work wonders.

I guess I don't mind being here for a long stretch of time. There's still some good opportunities and new experiences here, even if I do have that "stranger in a strange land" sensation.