Ever get a title stuck in your head but can’t think of anything to do with it? That’s my problem with The Twelve Days of Bigfoot. It strikes me as an hilarious concept and, while I’m pretty sure it’s not, I’ve decided to dedicate one monthly post to it anyway, and am going to shoehorn in any old thing I want just to make sure I will be happy for no good reason at least one day every month.
In honor of the official First Day of Bigfoot, I’m posting something I wrote in response to this sketchbook project sent to me by my friend Linda Hali Zucker, who is always on the cusp of all that is cool and interesting and stimulating and who will always throw carefully-made plans to the wind in search of a great lobster roll.
Letters From Your Childhood is sponsored by the Brooklyn Art Library, and it hooks up artists and writers via digital sketchbooks. You can get lost on their website, as I recently have, only coming out occasionally for food and water. Okay, ice cream and whiskey.
The project was, and still is, to write a letter to yourself from your childhood. I don’t know exactly what that was supposed to mean, so I just decided to write what it meant to me:
Letter from My Childhood
You will forget the secrets of the universe you rejoiced in at birth.
Your shirts won’t match your pants and your shoes won’t match anything.
You’ll fall in love with the number one and marry young.
You will watch streets burn and hearts explode.
You’ll fall in love with the number two in the cold heat of the desert.
You will believe the mind is a wonderful thing to waste and only full when empty.
You’ll fall in love with the number three and curl into the bottom of it like a fish.
You will take down poetry like dictation, and give it a noogie.
You will shake the dust off your boots and walk backwards into the world.
You will speak the language of trees, coyotes and things that live deep in the dirt.
You will be happy.
At some point, I think the poem will appear in conjunction with a piece of art on the pages of a digital sketchbook, but I really have no idea. I’m just putting it out there to see what happens.
How about you? Do you dare to write a letter to yourself and post it here? How about a post-it note to yourself? A dirty limerick? Go!.
