Whatever your interests or obsessions are, you can probably trace them back to just a few unpredictable, incidental experiences in your early life that made you react in a surprising & unforgettable way. You don’t get to choose. For me, I think it was a lot of books & media, but it was also the Kwazy Quilt.

My grandparents across the country had one of these, I must have handled it only a handful of times when I was less than 10 years old, and I don’t remember it being mindblowing at the time — but I do remember it, The revelation struck me out of the blue earlier this year and within a couple hours I had purchased one of my own on eBay.

Something about this puzzle and its packaging spoke directly to me. The shiny plastic, the color palette, the curved geometry, the little raised lip running around the edge of each shape. The crisp, thick typography, and the little colored stripe on the Gabriel logo. 1977 printed as “MCMLXXVII” in Roman numerals. Many seeds were planted in the garden of the mind… and some of them only bloomed many years later.

It’s easy [for me] to dismiss the kind of work I like to do as fairly light. Superficial. It takes sustained, superhuman effort to produce a silly little rectangle of colors and shapes, and then it makes people’s eyes feel good for a minute and then they look away. Who cares? But memories like this remind me that during the Process, there are bigger, hungrier thoughts swimming out of sight below the surface, gently rocking the boat. The seeds in the garden are spiraling upwards toward the sun

We are charging directly into the sun today and attempting a little web development on the old Macbook Pro. Stay tuned.

— A∙