So, I’ve been having brain drainingly intense bursts of creative psychosis lately. That’s when I lock myself in a small room until my brain stops screaming obscenities at me for one reason or another. I have in the past dealt with these little episodes in a variety of ways, some of them much healthier than others, but none of them beneficial or “organized.”
That’s where the magic brown paper comes in. Craft paper, if you didn’t know, is the kind of cheap, sturdy paper that paper bags are made out of, and usually you buy it in a roll of like, 1900 miles long. There isn’t really a limit to it’s uses. You might also know it as “butcher paper” or “postal paper,” since those are often treated as craft paper. You shouldn’t use craft paper as butcher paper, though. It’s not happy about blood.
I bought a roll around December and have used it for a variety of purposes including wrapping presents in it and trimming them with some decorative Japanese tape I got from Lost Crates. It was very classy and awesome and reminded me of something you would see in Little House on the Prairie.
I’m a sucker from some classic, Little House sheik. It’s just part of who I am.
So, since I bought like 8 light years of the stuff and managed to use maybe 4 foot of it, I’ve been feeling the need to use it for something other than just gathering dust.
Then I remembered that I love to write on the wall… pretty much constantly. I tore off a few feet of paper, and thumbtacked it to the wall. I invented an super-awesome formulae:
I don’t know if you remember the joy you had as a child when you colored on the walls. Maybe you never did. Maybe you’re some sort of repressed stick-in-the-mud from all the way back. Not me… I was a born wall-artist. I still feel compelled nigh unto constantly to reach out with my little sharpie and give all that blank wall space a once over. I can’t help it. It calls to me.
Now… I can indulge myself… because of the awesome thing I did…
I hung giant sheets of paper all over my office walls.
Suddenly, I felt pretty damned liberated. Like some sort of giant weight had been smashing down on my shoulders my entire life, and I could just shrug it off for a while. So, I wrote and drew and wrote and drew until my brain realized that the music my computer was playing had turned me into a emonster, and all the scribbles were somehow very, very dramatic. Still, those scribbles are out of my head and onto the wall, along with a couple of doodles and the like. It makes me feel accomplished in a way, I suppose.
I mean, I can actually point out on the wall where different ideas lead to different ideas.
It’s nice, getting some of that crap out of my head. Of course, I’ve been using it to procrastinate getting to work on things that matter, but I still am enjoying getting some of the tension out of my brain and onto the walls…
Literally.
I suggest everyone give it a try. It doesn’t cost much, and it makes you feel a million times better. Like something you’ve always secretly known was the right thing to do has been let free. Like all those tens of thousands of years of honed cave-man wall drawing instinct are finally being allowed back out into the world.
That’s exactly what it feels like. I think tonight… I might draw myself shooting a deer with a giant stick…
It just seems appropriate.
PS: I also have dry erase circles on the wall. I used to draw stupid things on them all the time, but then I started trying to use them for something serious.
My brain isn’t a big fan of seriousness on the walls.
That’s what soapboxes are for.
Walls are for awesome.