This Strange Joy #1

Field Notes 

Welcome to the FIRST ISSUE of the Birdcap newsletter. I promise not to overstay my welcome in your inbox—this will be a once-a-month thing, a little dispatch from the road, the studio, or the wreckage of whatever half painted wall that has recently collapsed.

Right now, I’m in Tempe, Arizona. I came out here for an incredible music festival to do a live painting with some of my most talented  contemporaries.   On day one, a sandstorm rolled through and destroyed the wall I was supposed to paint on after about six hours of painting… On Day two, I was struck down by a flu so vicious that following the storm it felt very much like biblical punishment.

I finished the mural—admittedly probably the worst one I’ve ever done—then crawled back into bed like the feverish cave goblin I currently am. All the while  the other artists are out there collaborating on beautiful walls, planning future expeditions, and meeting Brother Ali, who happens to be my favorite rapper of all time.  

I AM FORELORN.

So ok yes—a bit cursed.  But through sand and sinuses I thought I’d better get proactive and start this newsletter from my sickbed at the Sonesta Suites. Maybe that’s a fitting origin story.

Dust Notes

There’s a weirdness in the air, and it’s not just the desert flu wrecking my body in Tempe. It’s something quieter—a kind of cultural tinnitus.— there’s an almost invisible instinct we’ve all developed - it’s to skip, to skim, to move on. I felt it as I was writing this newsletter. Like… Surely no one will read this far in because words are just not that valuable anymore.  They were pretty valuable in the early 90s when I was a boy.  Especially if you were on a commode.  You’d read every ingredient on the shampoo.  Then the internet hit and made information abundant.  Then smart phones made information omnipresent.  And now AI has made it instantaneous.  

I think part of it is that ancient equation that’s been sewn into the backpocket of our jeans:

scarcity = value.

That makes sense if you’re a caveman foraging for food. You don’t want to obsess over every pebble I guess.  But in 2025, where we’re drowning in information, it’s turned into a kind of cognitive auto-immune disorder. A well-meaning logic cancer.

We need ideas, stories, clarity—now more than ever. But because they’re everywhere, we trust them less. It’s hard to read deeply. Words, images, music etc - We treat it all like spam. It’s a sickness from such privilege: that so much opulence has disabled our ability to take in what’s edifies us most.  I think it has made us lonelier.  I want to be engulfed by stories.  By art. But I feel keenly aware that all I value most keeps getting the sticker price lowered daily and that price IS AFFECTING my interest.  

I think this carries over to at least part of a core issue in society at the moment:

Information Overabundance + Institutional Distrust = Epistemological Isolation.

We’re all lonely learners seeking to grow but we’re also having to take in information as a possible poison - if we expand that to society well…

• Democracy relies on shared facts.
  

• Science relies on trust in method.
  

• Culture relies on continuity.

I don’t know the cure big or small, but if you read this far just know I appreciate the effort - if you didn’t, I can empathize.

Ghost Signal

This is the reoccurring bit of the newsletter where I’ll send updates on the new long form graphic novel I’ve started writing.  It’s my first since The Grief Manual—more outward-facing this time, but stitched together with a similar narrative logic. Nervous. Excited.

The comic will be called Ghosts—a fragmented narrative about painted-over murals who linger in the places they once claimed. These spectral characters aren’t part of the present, but they observe it, haunt it, argue with each other about what their world used to mean. They’re the fading remnants of art movements that were imperfect, beautiful, and probably doomed from the start.

The comic is loosely inspired by Robert Browning’s A Grammarian’s Funeral—that mix of reverence, absurdity, and layered voices—and by the structure of Lincoln in the Bardo, where a chorus of the dead tell a fractured story through competing recollections. Ghosts centers around a single procession: six mural spirits carrying the body of the last painted wall through a shifting cityscape.

These six pallbearers are the core voices of the narrative. Each one represents a different kind of philosophy behind public art.  As they carry the coffin, they bicker, reminisce, contradict each other, and drift into poetry. Their march becomes a kind of haunted chorus: a conversation about impermanence, rebellion, erasure, and the brief moments where it all felt like it mattered.

SSP (Shameless Self Promotion)

There’s a Birdcap store—full of prints, shirts, comics, and whatever odd things I make between murals. I’ll drop a link below in case you want to poke around.

👉 birdcap 

PS: If you’re also a sick cave goblin in a hotel somewhere, solidarity.