All you have to do is lift your chin up to encounter the most fascinating things in life. What would it take to lift up your chin and talk to the person sitting right next to you. I fear that one day we will forget the very essence of being a human.
I saw on the Samantha Bee show that there's an association between vintage cartoons and minstrelsy, and I can't stop thinking about it now. So I drew some mean looking white person mice in retaliation. These are your suburb mice that are complaining that the Whole Foods line is taking too long.
Sometimes I just start throwing lines on top of lines. Today was such a day, fusing, intermingling, and vomiting lines up onto the page. (I originally titled this "Dreams in Digital" but then I was like "no one has heard Orgy's second album but you. Please abandon this late-1990s alt-rock persona. Live in the now.")
Jury Duty, June 2013
Fifty of us sat in that room, each one staring at a phone or scribbling in a notebook, killing time. The lawyers asked their questions, picking us off one by one like a slow game of dodgeball. I wasn’t chosen, so I drew instead—earbuds, slouched shoulders, the hum of waiting caught in a few quick lines.
Sometimes the quickest drawings hold the deepest truths. During an after-sermon discussion about understanding the love of God, I found myself listening with one ear and drawing with the other. Frank, seated across the room, made a natural model—relaxed posture, thoughtful presence, and a face full of character.
With a pen in hand, I traced his form in a quick contour line, following the folds of his shirt, the tilt of his jaw, the stillness of his hands resting in his lap. Contour drawing asks us to see more than just the surface—it demands patience and presence, a slowing down until the line itself feels like prayer.
Frank became more than a subject; he was a reminder that the love of God is often revealed in ordinary moments and everyday people.
Imperfect Lines, Honest Presence
This sketch is not perfect—and that’s exactly why it’s alive. The bold figure, the dissolving hat, the tilted chair: all of it feels unfinished, fleeting, caught in motion. It’s what the Japanese call wabi-sabi—finding beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete.
But there’s something deeper here too. A quick sketch is not just what the eye records. It’s what the soul permits. To draw without fixing, without polishing, is to admit the world will not hold still for us. Life slips past. The lines break off. And yet, somehow, the essence remains.
When you sketch this way, you are not the master of the moment—you are its guest. The pencil does not carve permanence; it pays attention. The act of drawing becomes an act of being present, of honoring what is already vanishing.
So here’s a challenge: grab a pencil and sketch someone near you in sixty seconds. Do not erase. Do not perfect. Let the lines falter. When you finish, ask yourself: What truth did the imperfection reveal?
Perhaps presence itself is the real art.
A line taken from the current book I’m digesting…
Finally reading the My Neighbor Totoro book my girlfriend got me for my birthday. Slowly getting through but enjoying it immensely!
