I was overwhelmed by the archive project, burrowing deeper and deeper without any sense of progress or perspective. I wondered: Is this whole garbage barge (GARBARGE??) moving at all? Is this accomplishing my goals? How will I know if it is or is not? What is the ‘goal’ of a project that feels like an endless, unchartered sea? If I keep on this route how will I ever finish anything? I needed to re-find the center, or whatever felt like the closest thing to the squelchy heart of the whole endeavor. I was running down the clock of life while researching social network mapping, detangling a whole network of characters and imaginary locations that I was never even a part of.
This was before they started working on the houses connected to ours, starting up their saws first thing in the morning behind our heads. Before I spent a couple weeks splitting my time between my folks’ house and mine, anticipating a longer stretch of back-and-forth than it was ever going to be; before I found my brain slipping into the kind of unreality-ish space it floats through now.
I spent the month of March wrapping up loose ends, finishing the articles I was reading and creating a draft prototype for Imaginary Places. I decided not to research how other people might put a process survey together, or what the correct terminology would even be for this kind of thing. The project felt like its own weird and unique beast that required more intuition than a documented process could provide. I walked through the park and wondered how to create my own measurements. How could I weigh the projected emotional difficulty of a task … in cups of whiskey? In proximity to pain or despair? Like damage in a video game? I wasn’t necessarily seeking a hard quantification in numbers for its own sake, but more for some way to steel myself proportionately in response.
In between the frantic highlighting of a totally normal bitch who would never stress out about her own meaningless and self-imposed deadline, I tried again to research aging support and disability services in my parents’ small town. They were too young to access most of the help available. Another reminder that nobody in my father’s immediate family has made it to retirement age; another reminder that I shouldn’t have to be doing this shit yet; that any help they received would be generations too late to make a real difference in the outcome.
The first week of April, I decided, would be a strictly enforced break from the project. No tagging entries; no reading and highlighting; no scrolling Are.na late at night for an increasing pile of shit to read and discover; no coding or photogrammetry or whatever other trouble I was in at the time. It was the first intentional break I took from my preservation frenzy since I started sometime in 2021.
It was easier to take a break than I thought it would be. I started assembling the balsa wood clock kit that my partner bought for me for Christmas, feeling lightly connected to my grandfather as I sanded the pre-cut pieces. Pap had built several grandfather clocks by hand in his retirement years. I imagined him in his basement, sanding and staining wood in a white t-shirt, ironed slacks, and rubber-soled slippers. My mother always tried to encourage me to spend more time with him down there, sitting on the metal stool next to the workbench, but I was too shy.
I went for walks and played video games. I enjoyed the break so much I decided to extend it for another week, or maybe longer. In the back of my head I worried that this would be the end of the project, that I would enjoy the stopping so much that I would never come back. I was anticipating another failure while trying to be okay with it.