One thing I’ve realized–partly with art, and partly with emotional tribulations–is that while Freud may have been out to lunch on a lot of things, that bit with the subconscious was spot on.

I make only the vaguest of plans on what to do next. Get a job? Well, maybe I should start looking… Get an apartment? Well, maybe next weekend I’ll go look with a friend… 

And then somebody who obviously knows what they’re doing, who apparently lives in my skull, but doesn’t see fit to talk to me, idily flips through the apartment guide and finds a number and calls it, and then finds the next number and calls it, and three hours later I have an apartment. I go up to the art supply store for illo board, with a vague notion of saying “Hey, are you taking applications?” when I check out, and the next thing I know, I’ve found the manager, pled my case, and been hired.

I am not planning this stuff. I am not thinking about it or obsessing over it. I just get a vague notion of something to do…maybe in the future…and then I seem to go and do it. I have no motivation, if that makes sense. I am not thinking, or making careful lists, or anything else. Left to my own devices, I would probably just mope and start and abandon paintings, but apparently I am not being left to my own devices.

Somebody is obviously driving the bus, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s the me that I generally think of when I say “me.”

It’s a little like painting, where I don’t think about where to put brush strokes, I just put them down where they go. Apparently the painting brain decided that the thinking brain wasn’t any damn good at the moment and unobtrusively took over the big important things, like “getting a job” and “getting a place to live.” Thinking brain can mope around on the upper tier of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs all it wants, but painting brain figures that somebody’s gotta make sure we’re fed and don’t die of exposure.*

And have art supplies, of course.

Obviously this makes me sound seriously batshit insane, and I hasten to add that I am not suffering from any overly trendy mental disorders. It’s just…peculiar.

If anything, I’m just glad that somebody in here seems to know what the hell they’re doing.

*Ben would probably bring me dead mice, but you can only make mouseloaf so many days in a row.