Deep in a rabbit hole, I stumbled upon the proverbial one thing leading to another and ended up on Lung Leg’s Wikipedia page. Lung Leg is also known as Elizabeth Carr or Lisa Carr, and this is her fur-lined book titled Futility which features poetry and drawings she made in the mid-1980s and sent to me while I was living in Germany. The blur of time leaves me foggy, but I may have learned about Lung Leg from Nick Zedd and his Cinema of Transgression, or maybe from the Richard Kern video for Sonic Youth titled Death Valley 69, or it could have from someone in passing. I’ll never know.

During that age of Mail art and fanzines, it wasn’t always difficult to find the contact information for people in any of the nascent art scenes that were bubbling up, and it was that kind of searching that led me to Lung Leg, corresponding with Nick Zedd, and exchanging a couple of things with Costes, the French version of G.G. Allin. Through Costes, I learned about the work of Suckdog and a project called Psychodrama titled Something To Offend Everyone featuring the first (and only) projectile shitting I’d ever witnessed (on video).

Back then, the world was far away, exotic, and sometimes dangerous. At the fringe of society, I found others who were recording the filth, decay, and darkness that I felt was hidden behind a facade of fake normalcy. It turned out that while America is a hotbed for innovation where capital chases the fertile minds of genius, a vast underclass of people has failed to prosper. In that malaise, artists and creators find inspiration to document the horrors of their existence. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kehinde Wiley, and Keith Haring, musicians such as Eminem, Kurt Cobain, and NWA, and filmmakers Spike Lee and Harmony Korine were just a few of those who emerged out of poverty with messages that resonated with a wider population. While the likes of Lung Leg, Nick Zedd, Manual DeLanda, Jello Biafra, and Hubert Selby may have failed to capture the popular zeitgeist, they no less managed to inspire many an aspiring fellow creator with their grit, tenacity, and ability to share their truths.

I have been approaching 2,000,000 words written on my blog, so imagine my disappointment when at 1,999,999 (yes, exactly that number by some strange quirk of the universe), I uploaded some images for what was to be my next post and recognized that the blog’s word tracker was counting images as words! When I glanced at the stats prior to digging into my writing session, I saw that I’m already over 2 million words. Now, I suppose I have to consider that I’m not over that giant number after all because some 20,000 photos or more are likely skewing the total number. No matter, the milestone has been met or will be soon enough, and it’s just fine for me at this time to post this point of bragging. By the way, don’t even consider reading the entirety of this blog, as it would take you a staggering amount of time, to the tune of over 133 hours.

Some days later, I return to the draft for this post looking for what else I want to say, and it all feels so arbitrary, aside from the fact that I do intend to change the focus of my writing. There is so much momentum captured here with what I put into my blog posts that there’s a sense of loss knowing what I have to curtail, at least for a while. However, I will not give up posting about our travels, and while I can only reluctantly slow down routine updates, I must. So much of this endeavor has lent riches to memories that would otherwise be pale compared to what the minds of the two of us would have retained.

There are over 3,140 posts spread out here throughout my blog, and while that is likely plenty, it still feels like I’m turning my back on a friend. Over the coming months, I’ll be scouring every one of these missives as I hunt for bits and pieces that must be extracted for my next big project.

Something else I’d like to see happen to these 2 million words is to have them fed into artificial intelligence to spit out a profile analysis describing what it can see and learn about the person who wrote it all. Maybe next year, AI will have matured to that point.

This post has been hanging out as a draft for over a week as I get ready to pass it over to Caroline for the old once-over, a pause during which I’ve grown ambivalent about posting it at all because it really means just about nothing. The bigger accomplishment would be that I love writing, and if I’m fortunate enough to dig in every day, I feel keenly delighted that I’ve committed something from my head and thrown it into the cacophony of other voices who write into the void. I looked with anticipation to the day I saw the word count roll over to 2 million words and only now realize that had I only ever written 100,000 words about Caroline and my life together, I still would have likely written 1,000 times more than the majority of humans ever shares about their life and love.

The sketch was a few-minute doodle drawn by Becca Wasylenko, the Barista at WeBe Coffee.