Time is just a bandit trying to steal what's left...

Receiver Coffee opened a new treehouse location, a labyrinth of levels set into the branches of a banyan forest located, oddly, in central Charlottetown.

One afternoon, Tim Chaisson and I were sharing a coffee at the highest level of the forest-café when we both leaned back over the railing too far and fell over the edge.

“Grab the vines, Tim, GRAB THE VINES!”, I yelled.

We grabbed the vines, and we survived, unscathed.

Safe on the ground, I came up with a little rhyme to describe the ordeal, to which Tim exclaimed “That’s a song!”, which he then proceeded to improvise on his guitar.

And then I woke up from my dream.

Having spent the week nursing a cold and watching a lot of TV, including the entire season of The Day of the Jackal, it’s not hard to see the seeds of the dream.

That, and also that Tim’s band, The East Pointers,  released a new single yesterday, Anniversary. Give it a listen: it’s a rousing anthem, well-suited to January doldrums.

Also new in music this week, A Heart That Never Closes, the next in a slow drip of tracks from a collaboration among singer-songwriters Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. The first track was Hold Everything. They are a folk-pop power trio, and I look forward to hearing what comes next (they’re doing a 6-night UK tour in March).

My cold has broken (it packed a wallop, that one: a solid 6 days from start-up to wind-down, complete with a classic mix of cold symptoms), and in my powering back up to REM sleep my dreams have been particularly active. 

In last night’s edition, I finally came to peace with the girl I had an unrequited (never expressed) crush on through much of public school. “We could just be good friends!”, she said. And rather than a come-down, that seemed like the best idea ever. That only took 40 years.

Yesterday I had enough energy to pull my first print on the etching press we have on loan, using a lino block Lisa carved in 2023, along with some Speedball blue-green ink, overprinted on Caligo Safe Wash burnt sienna that we picked up in London last month. 

It was only a technical test, a way to get to know the press. But I like the result:

One of our Australian This Box is for Good collaborators, Simone Tippett, was helpful in getting us this far. We need “rails” to assist in pulling the print through the press, and Simone told us she uses rails made from 1/8” MDF. 

When we went looking for some at Home Depot, there was nothing in evidence, but Ritchie Simpson (yes, that Ritchie Simpson: he is the perfect Home Depot employee) suggested that paint stir sticks might suit. 

It turns out that Home Depot paint stir sticks are exactly 1/8” thick. And they are free, as many as you want to take. So this is what the rig looks like now:

The paint stir sticks are attached to the bed with self-adhesive magnetic tape, so we can move them around.

We’re very excited to have a new press in the studio, and to see what new things we can produce as a result.

Just before the cold hit I pulled out my sketchbook for the first time in 2024, and, sitting in the window of The Gallery, sketched a slice of Victoria Row:

Over Christmas I read The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, and highlighted this:

It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.

That’s my intention for 2025.

Happy New Year.