Chris Freeman
@Lighteningfreeman in his coolest/favorite porch chair.
-Visual-
Chris and I have a mutual friend in Emily Diamond. She had told him about the project and he signed up. The system was working! I was getting to meet different artists then just the ones in my circle because of the interviews.
Shortly after starting our chat I realized we share a similar temperament and interest in books. Fandoms and Madeline Miller books really can bring people together. His answers struck a very familiar chord with what I sometimes experience which made the world feel just a little closer together. Even if just for 20 mintues.
Interviewed 6.4.20
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey: So first and foremost, how are you?
Chris: I'm all right today. Today is a good day. You know, I just try to take it day by day. So today I actually woke up feeling pretty good.
Casey: Awesome. How would you describe your being overall?
Chris: I heard somebody say this the other day, where this whole quarantine thing has really forced us to be present on things where you can distract yourself like going out and doing other things, but when you're stuck in the house for so long, you can't really ignore how you feel. So I have like three good days and like two bad. And then just try to pull myself out of that. So reward yourself for getting out of bed today or reward yourself for taking a shower, all those little victories. Really helpful.
Casey: How, are you quarantining with your family?
Chris: With my wife and two dogs.
Casey: Oh my gosh. And how is everybody?
Chris: Good. Luckily, she can totally function at home work-wise, so she's good. We've gotten closer in funny ways and fought about stupid stuff. And yeah, it's been fun. The dogs are going crazy, but I think the wife and I are doing all right.
Casey: That's great. What have you been doing in quarantine?
Chris: I work on the collage pieces a lot, so I've just been trying to distract myself with that. And then I do motion graphics stuff for my wife's company so that pays the bills, and then I get to do the art stuff during the rest of the day. A lot of Zelda.
Casey: Talk to me a little bit about the motivation to create right now.
Chris: Today is the time to do the thing. So what if there isn't another thing to do? I mean, it's just been about focusing on enjoying the process, which I know I sound cheesy. But when the piece is done, it's done, and so you kind of have two seconds of "I finished", but then you feel like the same person. So to try and enjoy the projects start to finish is far more rewarding. So when it's done, I can just look at it and go like, "I enjoyed that," and put it up. But that's my motivation, is enjoyment.
Casey: So it sounds like it hasn't really changed.
Chris: No, it's just been magnified or intensified. I tell my therapist all the time, which thankfully I can still talk to him via Skype or whatever. We actually had an appointment this morning that he had to cancel because he forgot all the stuff at home. It was amazing. But I tell him, it's like a pressurized thing when you're in such a close space all the time, again with an inability to leave. But when you're in, I relate it to a black hole where it's just pushing everything together. And you have to look at it because it's not going anywhere. You feel the pressure to create, but you also want to make sure you're resting at the same time and there's no format to it—you have to make your own format. And I think that's difficult.
Casey: What has your own format been? Has it been mostly rest or has it been mostly creating?
Chris: It's been more like forgiving myself when it is rest and not being too proud of myself when I work. But rewarding, like looking at myself and going like, "You did something today." Congratulate yourself. Feel good about that, and then just go watch something or do whatever you want. So it's that little balance of reward and not shaming.
Casey: What do you think you're going to take away from this chapter in your life, in the world's life?
Chris: That's been sort of a curveball during the whole thing. I think I'm going to walk away understanding that I make choices. I've lived most of my life just sort of allowing things to happen. And in this time of no distraction, to be brutally honest, seeing the liquor bottles pile up in the kitchen or in the recycling—I was going to actually talk to my therapist about this—but like, you go to the restaurant, have a drink, go to the bar, have a drink, and then you go to a movie and you have a drink, and come home and have a nightcap. And it's like you don't see the repercussions of all that. But for it to all be here, you're like, "Whoa, I didn't choose those." I was just like, "That's normal," and sort of let it happen. And yeah, just to make a choice, don't just do the thing that feels like the thing you always do, go like, "Do I want a drink right now or do I want to go work out?" Not really. But I'll reward myself for showing up, you know, and like tiny changes. That's sort of been the mantra for me.
Casey: Will that get harder when life gets going again?
Chris: I don't think so because—Again, back to the being present thing. Because we don't know anything about what normal is going to be ever again. I have no idea what it's going to look like. This could be the rest of it. The more I educate myself, which has been another strong point in my life during this time. It was already going, but like just audiobook after audiobook and podcast, just filling information. It's really sort of just terrifying. And just trying to figure out what it's going to look like for us to even rebuild. I don't know. I have no idea what the next step is going to look like and I want to try and mentally prepare myself for how to think about things. My other mantra has been like, "It's not what you think, it's how you think." And to be able to listen to the way other people outside of your own field understand things will allow you to solve problems with something completely unrelated. But because you've trained your brain to function in a certain way, you can come at the new problem with a totally unforeseen solution in order to go like, "Oh yeah, no, we should do that," where, you know, sort of nobody else really sees that path.
Casey: I haven't thought about the fact that this could be forever.
Chris: Yeah.
Casey: That's a new thought. That's terrifying.
Chris: Sorry.
Casey: No, it's great, yet again, awareness. What audiobooks have you been listening to? What are you learning about right now?
Chris: I just finished this book on scale. I can get my phone and say the full title, but it's like this really long thing. Have you heard of fractals? Like how your lungs are like the size of a football, but if you took all the capillaries in it you could circle the earth twice. Fractals explains that and why that phenomenon could happen, like a fourth dimension of our universe. And this scientist, think he was a social scientist, and then he got together with a biologist, and sort of cross-examined that phenomenon and realized that that phenomenon is why the smallest mammal is the shrew—that mathematically they can't get smaller than that. And the blue whale is the biggest because mathematically it can't get bigger than that, and that somehow mathematically also applies to our cities and the cities are the new organism on our planet. It was like 18 hours of just that. I finally finished it two days ago and I was like, "I did it. I got through it." Because it was super head-y. But some of the turns you'd get to, just like, it blew my mind. And it was pretty simple, but it blew my mind.
