A learning curve for the socially awkward

Below is a bit of context for the project so far. Written before the 3^rd hangover in 10 days (maybe after the second), before I hopped happily on the wagon, and before I decided – via the explanation below – that this project wouldn’t be about the residents of Dawson, it is a nice glimpse back to where I was in the early days. I'm down to 1 week left and am happy with the project so far. As the Prussian general, Helmuth von Moltke famously said, "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy."

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When I came here my plan was to consider community. Consider Dawson in relation to those other towns and villages that have carried me to this project, this sentence. But community is about, well, people and I have head-on avoided bringing the people of Dawson into the project. What they might give me, or more precisely, what I might take from them is a question of speculation. From a practical perspective, my conundrum is this: I go to a bar to chat with the more pickled locals but almost exclusively I sit in a corner, making ballpoint sketches of my beer. I am the predictable sketchbook nerd in this regard.

In one of the many ironies at play here, I seldom find moments of epiphany or revelation in the universe of the bar. Production – drawing – is my best option and my best defence.

There are conversations to be had if I will engage them. Instead I continue to hold conversations with the land. But the land offers no conversations. The land tells you something and you respond but that response is rhetorical, unwanted even. I am not telling nature anything it doesn’t already know.

The land doesn't require anything from me. Or what it does require it doesn't negotiate.

It is always telling me about myself because I am always looking at it and it never repeats itself. My head is not down in a book while the thing I seek, the flawed brilliance of the drunk, circulates above my head.