Email. Or call a good friend. Reading this reminds me that I should instead read poetry. Or write.

Painting is complete as a distraction. I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind. Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them in the mental screen. They pass out into shadow and darkness. All one's mental light, such as it is, becomes concentrated on the task. Time stands respectfully aside, and it is only after many hesitations that luncheon knocks gruffly at the door.

Birds are still very much my hobby

I’ve been devoting a lot of my time in the last five years to musical theater. It’s been my new passion. I’d love to write a musical comedy about Eleanor of Aquitaine and the troubadours. I’ve always thought that would make a wonderful musical, about a troubadour who falls in love with a beautiful queen.

I understand my definition does not meet most people’s definition of disability.

I’m reading an odd collection of books that should not go together, but of course they do. Georgina Kleege: What Blindness Brings To Art; Fred Moten: Black and Blur; Theri Pickens: Black Madness :: Mad Blackness.

When stuck, go to someone else’s show—in a different discipline

Everything. Theatres are ready for disabled audiences, more or less, but they aren’t ready for disabled artists. An example I always give is: theatres don’t always have an accessible toilet backstage, so you can’t pee before the show, or if you do you’re halfway through make-up and you have to run to the front where the audience is. The main issue is physical access, but it is improving.

I do not consider Kinetic Light’s work radical. It is not radical to imagine a disabled audience as primary and to make the work accessible to that audience. It is not radical to situate a work within disability history, culture, and traditions. Non-disabled artists do that all the time.

Do it. It is the hardest thing you will ever do and it will bring you immense joy. You won’t be alone, there is an entire community here for you.