Education Without God Makes Crafty Devils "Thing"

Since I write most days, and have done so for over 20 years, I’ve amassed a lot of words, too many words, like way too many words. Most of them deal with the boring minutiae of my day to day, or thrift store encounters. Most of what I write equate to doodles in words, you know…aimless writing. Sometimes things come together to form a proper structure. Sometimes this just randomly happens and other times it’s intentionally. The joy of having a large archive of words, no matter their reason for existing, is that you can always plumb the depths of your doodles to create something new. Being these doodle can be searched with a basic keyword, you can have a loose, theme in no time. Keyword “teaching” or “school” produces dozens of returns. Put those returns into a long list and you have something that is almost cohesive.

The cover made from a recycled thrift store book image.

So yeah, that’s what I did. I took all of my notes and put them into a long and meandering text connected through the keyword of “teaching.” It was a lot of words, initially over 100 pages, a “thing.” I can’t use book here, zine seems somewhat wrong, so thing it is.

I put all of this together a couple years ago, not sure what I wanted to do with it or even sure I wanted people to see it. If the “thing” feel into the wrong hands, I might have to answer some questions I didn’t want to.  I’d start playing around with it, and then feel like I needed to abandon it. This happened a handful of times. A couple months ago, I found the file and started playing around. I started whittling out uninteresting doodles and references to anyone or anything specific. Does it really matter? After making a lot of things like this over the course of years, I knew no one really cared. I knew only a few people would ever read it, and I doubted any of those people would be bothered by my interaction with a student from a decade ago. I’m fascinated by people, and the weirder the interaction, the more I’m drawn to it, and then better chance I’m going to write it down.

Pulling teeth for money. I don't like this part.

Without thinking too much about it, I finished up my mild edits, and ordered 25 printed copies through a self-publishing / printing place. I guess it’s published if it has an ISBN and its printed if it does not. 25 sounded like a good number. I didn’t expect to sell that many, but I know I could definitely mail off that many. When they arrived at my house, they were larger than I had expected. They were magazine sized when I thought they were going to be trade paperback sized. The difference means more postage which means I lose more money. Over the next couple of weeks, I tried to see who was interested in a copy, and then pulled teeth to get them to send me the ten dollars, which barely covered the print and postage. In trying to sell them, I didn’t want to eat the whole cost, just a portion. It was more important they exist than I make money. Surprisingly, a lot of folks came through with the monies, making it a viable thing. I’ve sold more than half and given the rest away. 

They exist, 3-D and all.

Now that I’ve done this once, I know I’m going to do it again. I’ve actually gotten a few ideas lined up for the next few editions. The next one is just going to be broadsides, no reading. The one after that I want to be a large collection of writing and images, a best-of all the garbage I’ve mailed over the years. Maybe one on my Richard C. collections and writings, but that’s way into the future.