10 Thought on The Disruption Generator

I posted the first component of what would become The Disruption Generator, an oracular experiment that utilized a random word generator to create its eventual one hundred twenty parts, on December 17th, 2017. I diligently posted five new components every week, Mondays through Fridays, for six months on the website for We The Hallowed before releasing the book that it had always been meant to be.

It had to be a book, not only because I had always conceived of it as a book but also because I had no experience making anything else. I’ve never really wanted to make anything else though, if I’m being completely honest.

For some reason it makes me think of this Charles Fort quote and I’m not entirely sure why:

A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.

I guess I hit book-making-time and never looked back.

It’s hard to express exactly how strange it is to reflect back on the creation of The Disruption Generator, five years on. The project was intentionally alien, as it was an active experiment to find a creative third mind with the expressed intention to create an oracle, but the world now feels like a different place and I feel like a different person so marking the occasion feels far more like I’m eulogizing a friend I no longer know than celebrating an artistic achievement of my own making.

The seed of The Disruption Generator was desperation. It was my first project with We The Hallowed and my introduction to not only Keats but also the community around the site so I wanted to make good on the generous invitation to come and play. I never expected that it would foster one of my most valued friendships and five years of fulfilling artistic collaboration. I honestly can’t imagine finding another place that feels this much like home for myself and my work.

My son was an infant when I began, less than a year old, and the drawings I made were a way for me to let off steam from the days of being a stay-at-home dad. Orion needed so much attention then, suffering through painful acid reflux that kept my wife and I awake most nights and needed constant physical therapy from his neck not developing correctly in the womb. The only time I had to myself was when he was napping and that was when I worked on that day’s component. I needed sleep but I needed this more.

Orion is now halfway through first grade and teaches me more about art in one day than I thought I had learned in the six months I worked on The Disruption Generator. I had thoroughly believed I was working instinctually but can now look back and see that I was still too heavily influenced by my own expectations of success to find the unbridled creativity my son finds without exerting even the slightest bit of effort.

I was on such a different path artistically, back before I began this experiment, focusing almost entirely on absurdist storybooks and comics. There was always a small kernel of the esoteric in my work but it had always been left to those willing to dig through the subtext to find it. It was liberating to finally do something that displayed a magical belief system so proudly but I also didn’t expect to find out how limiting it was as well.

The Disruption Generator is my most popular release, outselling and outreaching most of my other work by almost ten to one, and that popularity empowered me to keep digging in that vein of my creative urges with things like The Impossible Game, BOTTOMLESS BAG, The Tethered Elements, and the first three volumes of No Gods But My Own. I never would have felt like I could honestly, earnestly express my ideas without the support of the community that grew around this work and I’ll be forever grateful for that.

One of the most gratifying experiences in my life has been watching people use The Disruption Generator in new and interesting ways. People have dissected it, reconfigured it, studied it, and created poetry inspired by it. It’s probably the first time I ever truly felt like something that I made did not belong to me and had found a life all its own.

There is resentment though, too. I never felt like I was actively creating The Disruption Generator. The work was far more like channeling than anything else since I wasn’t deciding on the content or trajectory of the totality of the thing. That distance and the success that The Disruption Generator was seeing built an unexpected animosity in that my other twenty comic and art releases were all but eclipsed in the shadow of this newest project. Those books were entirely ME while The Disruption Generator only required me to transcribe it and my ego came out rather bruised as a result. It still stings a bit at times but not nearly as much as it did then, when the wound was fresh and the callouses had yet to develop.

I am also left with a regret that I am far too stubborn to rectify. I had a friend who worked at a print shop. When the art was finished for The Disruption Generator he offered to print a couple decks for me. I had three printed: one for me, another for him, and the last for Keats. He had me on his podcast and I thought we had a pretty good friendship developing so we agreed to do a comic book together. This led us to clash eventually and my regret is that I haven’t talked to him since and tried to bury the hatchet in some way. It happened in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic, when the overwhelming stress of parenting during such confusing and dire times took its toll on my patience and grace, and I don’t think he deserved the anger I had for our particular situation. The deck he printed for me is long gone, gifted to another friend that I haven’t heard from in a long, long time.

I’ve been toying with the idea of making a definitive hardcover edition of The Disruption Generator, with a collection of essays and interviews that came after the initial release, but I’m apprehensive.

There is something to be said about letting a work live its own life, free of the feelings the creator has about it. I also wonder if something like an anniversary edition would take something that feels alive and vital and transform it into a sort of tomb for a time that has already passed.

10.

I am thankful for everyone who still utilizes The Disruption Generator and have nice things to say about it. I’m proud of it and feel nothing but gratitude for the interesting things that came from its creation.

It never felt like a coincidence that the first component was DECODE. It was an important piece in a puzzle I’ve always tried to solve but probably never will.

I’m pretty sure that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.