What the Fever Strips Away
The bottles of NyQuil and Advil sit on my nightstand, quiet reminders of a week that seems to have disappeared. Outside, the world kept moving, but inside this bedroom, the days blurred together.
It started with an airport run.
I picked up two old friends returning home from Canada. Both were coughing heavily in my car. As the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.
By the next day, I was feeling the first symptoms, and forty-eight hours later an over-the-counter test confirmed it: Flu A. The rest of the week was spent in bed with a fever, body aches, and very little interest in doing anything.
When you're forced to lie still for several days, your mind naturally drifts backward. I found myself remembering being a young boy sick in bed. I could hear my mother knocking on the door before coming in with a tray of soft-boiled eggs, toast cut into strips, and cold applesauce. There was something comforting about that memory, and I wondered why illness can call up the past with such clarity.
Eventually, my thoughts turned to the present.
For years I've made my living, or tried to, by sharing my work online. I write essays, make photographs, record audio, and send it all out into the world. I have thousands of readers, many of whom are generous with their encouragement. But encouragement and sustainability are two different things, and I've had to admit that the optional-donation model I've relied upon is no longer working very well.
I don't blame anyone for that. People have their own lives and expenses, and I'm grateful that anyone takes the time to read my work. But there comes a point when you have to look honestly at the numbers and ask whether the time you're putting into something is worth what you're getting back.
Lying in that bed, I began to wonder if I have been spending too much of my creative life trying to make the digital world work.
The internet has given us extraordinary opportunities, but it has also filled the world with an endless supply of content. Photographs, essays, videos, illustrations, music. Now artificial intelligence can produce convincing versions of nearly all of them in seconds. I've been thinking a lot about what remains valuable when almost anything can be produced instantly.
Perhaps the answer is something physical.
My eyes kept drifting toward the corner of the room where my paints, brushes, and wooden easel are stored. I've been painting for years, but lately I've felt a desire to return to it more seriously.
An oil painting is stubbornly physical. It requires a canvas, paint, brushes, time, patience, and the hand of the person making it. It has texture and weight. It takes up space. It cannot be reduced to a few lines of code or produced with a keystroke. And when it is finished, there is only one of it.
That idea has been sitting with me.
A while back, I thought returning to cartooning might fill the creative space I was feeling. It didn't. The muse simply wasn't there. Painting feels different. I don't know exactly where it leads, and for once I'm comfortable not knowing.
The fever has broken now, and I'm beginning to feel like myself again. I'm still irritated that I lost an entire week, but perhaps the week wasn't entirely lost.
Being forced to stop gave me time to look at things I had been too busy to see.
So I'm going to step away for a while. I need some time to think, to paint, and to figure out what comes next.
I don't have any announcements. I don’t even know if painting will be the answer. But for now, the brushes are waiting.
And the canvas is blank.
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