So this "blog" is basically full of all these haiku I've written, and that project is a much larger and bizarre project than just writing haiku, which was completely inspired by Han Shan.
First off, Han Shan aka Cold Mountain, was this Chinese hermit in the Tang Dynasty who only came down to beg food and get drunk. He carved his "poems" on cliffs and rocks and trees, and it wasn't until his legend spread and some prefecture or something tried to find him, only to see Han Shan and his sidekick Shih Te disappear into a cave, that the prefecture decided to send people out to collect up whatever poems they could find. So what we have is probably nothing.
Anyways, from this I told myself last year I would write a 1000 haiku. Somewhere along the way, I started saving old 12-pack boxes from beer I bought and drank as well. I have also for years cut pictures from magazines that were the perfect size for this little sketchbook I had, just to fill with random blasts of image which I was originally gonna then have one rap lyric per page typed into it from famous songs (or at least ones I knew of), then leave the book somewhere. Of course, I never finished that, but it left me with hundreds of these same size pictures cut out from magazines. Well what I did was pick four haiku per 12-pack box, and five magazine pictures, I arrange the bullshit, lay it out glue it and then polyurethane that shit. I just started accumulating them (I'm actually up to like fifty-some), then came across a big stack of hearty plank scraps at a couple of jobsites, which is perfect for cutting to a certain length to give the boxes a spine, which I can then put a screw and some scrap speaker wire on and it'll hang - pure bizarre folk art.
Now motherfuckers are telling me I should do an art show with this shit, because they look so fucked up, but I expect art people wouldn't understand, and I wonder if that doesn't compromise my integrity as well. Although I wouldn't mind taking some people's money off their hands.
Han Shan would never do that, but at 32 with two kids and a wife who only works part-time to be home with the kids, I lose more and more moral high ground every week. Stupid world.
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