20 june 2021
The weather's been killing me lately. Hundred degree days for the last week have left me totally drained. I'm getting worried that maybe I'm sick, though I'd be hard pressed to know what from. The thirty minutes I spent unmasked in a coffee shop last weekend, the first time in fifteen months? Being less vigilant about hand-washing? I've always been unlucky in this way, but maybe it's just the air quality alerts that come from high temperatures in my part of the world. The heat brings ozone down to ground level and it doesn't treat anybody well.
I'm reading a biography about Henry Darger, the Chicago artist whose work was only discovered after his death. His landlords are the ones who profited from it--he had no living family. He wrote some fifteen thousand pages of a novel, and more of other writings, but the gems of the collection are the paintings. I saw some of them in person at a museum when my partner and I took a trip, unknowingly, to a city where they were on exhibit. They're incredible pieces, huge and fragile, like ancient scrolls. I'm ostensibly reading this book as research for an assignment, but I was interested in this guy anyway. On first glance people have a hard time parsing his work, it's such an odd and detailed fantasy, but anyone who's nurtured a story in the greenhouse of their mind can be a little more forgiving about the wild things that grow there.