Surprise Guest Post!
Where my husband, fellow ADHD artist Ashcraft Geiiga McGonigal, announces his new endeavors
Note: This is a guest post from my husband, Ashcraft Geiiga McGonigal, who is embarking on some new creative endeavors. Please enjoy this surprise guest post, and stay tuned for my usually-scheduled weekly essay in a special Thursday edition of Dispatches from Middle America.
Thanks! ~ K.
“Whatever you are doing now is what you would have been doing in Germany when the Nazis came to power.” That’s a sentiment that’s weighed on me as a person with ADHD and religious trauma whose most debilitating symptoms are, respectively, executive dysfunction and anxiety with interacting with groups and organizations. What I’m doing now is usually “being anxious about not doing enough.”
One of the stories of how I came to be is that my older brothers were about to become teenagers and my mom wasn’t done yet, so she prayed for a child and promised that she would dedicate that child to God like Hannah did for Samuel in the Bible.
According to this story, Samuel became a prophet, guiding God’s Chosen People from the lawlessness of Judges to the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel. It was Samuel who secretly anointed Saul’s son’s lover as the future King of Israel.
But first he felt a calling. Samuel heard it as the voice of God when he was 12. I heard nothing. I assumed I'd figure it out once I got started on it. So everything that wasn't it felt like a waste of time. Until I started writing comedy.
It started as nine episodes of a madcap weekly proto-podcast in 2003/2004 with our characters Luke and Joe about to graduate college, and went on hold while we put out a call for representation on the strength of a rewritten version of a few of the episodes as a screenplay. Privately we were told we were the among the last cut before the quarterfinals at Sundance. The consensus from the world of talent agencies was that it was impressive but they didn't want to get burned on a potential one-hit wonder. Except for one: exactly the agent we were hoping would get in touch with us. Then, abruptly, he decided he was more interested in starting his own agency and could no longer afford to take a flyer on unknown talent.
That started an incredible run of bad luck/bad planning. I decided to do a documentary about a friend's band that seemed on the verge of making it big and my first weekend of shooting the friend's problem with addiction screwed up their chance, got him kicked out, and made me feel unwelcome with the band. I tried making live-action movies but my partner in that venture insisted on script details that would be impossible to do on anything resembling the amount of money we could raise. Still, before the partnership ended we won a film festival—completely failing to improve our station in any way whatsoever.
But computer animation was finally getting to be possible for a pair of writer/performers with no skill for drawing, so Willis and I started making the Adventures of Luke and Joe cartoon. I'm proud of it. Over three years we made about five dozen short cartoons, a feature film, and a Mystery Science Theater-style riff of a terrible public domain Italian movie. That last one was yet another near-miss; it was expected to net what would have been for me a life-changing amount of money, but a server literally caught fire rather than permit us the visibility. I made $52.50. And won a few more film festivals with other projects.
The last piece of art I put out into the world was Luke and Joe Get Lost in 2010. I put everything I had into making it. I thought it was my big break, at long last. It wasn’t. If in 2010 I’d had what I have now… at least it would have been a more polished product and the lack of traction would have crushed me less.
It took me a long time to make anything at all after that. And when I did, I could only complete it if it was for myself or close friends and family. Being responsible to an audience, even a small one, was exhausting and I no longer knew what I wanted my art to say. I made some efforts to make art to help others tell their own stories, but found myself stymied by both fear and reality of rejection.
And that’s the thing that makes me feel alive: the act of turning something from the nonbeing of thought into the being of a movie I can watch…
…a picture to hang on my wall…
…a loaf of bread I can share with my family…
…a guitar it turns out I can’t play for reasons unrelated to my craftsmanship….
...my identity is wrapped up in the process of creation so much that unless I had something external pushing the project, I found I had nothing to say.
Except I do have something to say. But I’ve always had the cacophony of a thousand shushing voices making it hard to hear in the din of my brain. My own negative self-talk. The countless criticisms of people I loved. You know, the usual menagerie of shrieking personal gibbons that plague artists.
One of those voices is the one that says "You can't just vomit up everything you enjoy doing to a streaming channel. You need a theme and a format and repeatability."
Might as well tell me I need an eight-figure budget and a cinematographer. So my announcement is that I'm going to begin vomiting up everything I enjoy doing to SEVERAL streaming channels.
When the Nazis were rising, I started making degenerate art.
It will be eclectic, erratic, and weird. Here are a few projects I am currently working on:
Starting in August and continuing through the rest of 2022 I'll be releasing an album of original songs, entitled “Jeremiads and Amosies.” This was actually what my big announcement was going to be today. I had session in the studio on Monday and I’d hoped to have something to share with you today, but the last two days have been madness and left me barely enough time to craft this message, which is TECHNICALLY still on the day I said it would be.
So in response to getting less done than I anticipated, I am promising more:
In September, there will be a podcast: Understanding Understanding the Times. My evangelical high school issued a textbook called Understanding the Times to juniors and seniors for a class that pitted the Harvard Classics in rhetorical combat with David A. Noebel, a pastor and close associate of the John Birch Society. The book's purpose, it says, is to prevent young Christians from wasting their parents money by going to college and being "seduced" by "secular humanism," and goes on to explain with truncated quotes and weird confessions how the three worldviews in America (Biblical Christianity, Secular Humanism, and Marxism/Leninism are the ONLY THREE) differ in areas like biology and law. It's packed with wacky, very closely held beliefs and embarrassingly poor scholarship, as befitting a book that thanks Duane Gish in the acknowledgements. It will be an eye-opening look at the bonkers place right wing politics comes from.
And in August, September, and until the collapse of civilization there will be jokes, rants, making and repairing things, culture jams, and whatever other creative junk I happen to be working on. Starting THIS VERY WEEKEND. If Kelly asks I'll even do more guest posts on this Substack (but this is the last one I'm asking for).
You'll find something you enjoy. Or you won't. I am unattached to this outcome.
And if you're disappointed that this is what I teased for two weeks: I'm okay with that. Trying to meet my imagination of your expectations was what froze me this long to begin with.
If you’re interested, new stuff will definitely be appearing on my Twitter, and on YouTube.