A Temporary Change of Pace

visit allysongonzalez.com/un-blog today!

EDIT on 12/26/22: I decided on Christmas that I would reignite the Substack flame and give it another go, however I’m going to leave this post intact as it still carries a lot of weight. I still encourage you to check out Un Blog on my website, as I’ll be updating that more often but you won’t receive a notification when I do - only when I post here. I’ll be sure to always link back from here to new posts on Un Blog.

I’ve been told more than once that I’m really good at knowing when to leave a party before it takes a turn, so you could say that’s what I’m doing here. I started this project to test the hypothesis of what would happen if I intersected my love for comics and my love for food? While I’ve spent almost half my life drawing hot dogs, I’ve never given my love of food the center stage in my creative life. I’ve considered food blogging many times before, so at the top of this year I decided to give it a try. I have so many stunning photos of food, from tasting menus to food trucks and everything in between, that I figured it would be an easy slam dunk to profess my love for artisanal snacks and fun restaurants on Substack.

It didn’t take long before I (re)learned a very important lesson: putting something you do for fun on a schedule takes all the fun out of it

Suddenly something I love without second guessing my devotion turned into just one more task that migrates week to week with no traction, another addition to the teetering to-do list, just another thing that needs to get done. It only took a few months of experimentation to find that I love talking about food with people, not to people. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my food photos, once I know - you’ll know.

During my research for The Rest Residency, I’ve discovered there’s a very thin line that exists between doing something you enjoy for self-serving relaxation and public consumption. What’s interesting is the task is still completed under either circumstance, the only difference is the pressure a person puts on themselves throughout the making process. Pressure leads to stress, over time compounding into anxiety, which makes the body ache for relaxation. Rest is another form of hydration, if you’re thirsty - your body’s deficit is signaling you to drink water. We know water to be a staple of life, so we accept we have to keep drinking water to live. What’s weird is that we don’t do that for rest, even though depriving ourselves of it similarly equates to full body dehydration. Looking at rest with the same eyes as I view my daily goal of drinking 8 glasses of water has changed my entire outlook. I am quite literally re-arranging my whole damn life as we speak to incorporate as much rest and relaxation as I can into my daily routine. It’s been a wild trip figuring out the right combinations of productivity and rest, which fluctuates along with the changing of the seasons. Also I’m not always great at it, I still alternate overdoing it in one department or the other, however I have built in more checks and balances to measure how I’m spending my time (thank you meditation!) and a warning track to register early signs of burn out instead of overextending myself and having to rebound from rock bottom, which I’ve learned I’m awesome at. What I’m not great at is pacing myself, to the shock of no one here.

As most of you know, I am very protective over where and how I share details of my life on the internet. Back in March, when news first broke out that dumbass was going to buy Tw1tter, I instantly deleted my ten year old profile. Last month, an alt 1G account of mine was taken offline without any infringement to app’s rules, suspending my connection to the queer community I have connected with over the last year and a half. All of this reminded me of the crude reality that hosting my work on platforms run by or funded by dirty money completely contests my principals to divest and stay as far away from the far reaching web of yt supremacy as possible. Publishing my work on platforms that I don’t own will always put it at risk of disappearing without warning or repercussion. I’ve been off of F@cebook for over a decade, and I can’t wait for whatever will replace 1G so I can delete those accounts too and completely divest from that asshat’s path of destruction. To best protect my work, I will be exclusively blogging at Un Blog at www.allysongonzalez.com for the forseeable future. You can check out my latest post here if you’re looking for some photos of the sea and the end of our chunk of earth.

Thank you to all the readers who have shared your time with me this year and left lovely feedback on my posts. You can always check out House of Egregious on Soundcloud to listen to my new songs, I posted a few new singles and a Motown mixtape as an EP this summer.

I’m proud of the work I’ve done here, and even prouder of having the confidence to kill my darlings. Ego slaying feels fantastic, highly recommend. It’s the best part of my self-funded art practice - I can come and go as I please, experimenting with no impact to investors. The list of things I want to accomplish in this lifetime is fairly exhaustive, so every time I try something and it doesn’t work out the way I thought it would - it doesn’t feel like a door closing, it feels like I’m opening up my time for artistic opportunities that vibe better with the pulling and pushing tides of changes.

Be well,

Allyson