The Captivating, Voyeuristic Pleasure of Watching Me Fail - Screenprinting Pt. 7

Things go very bad in this one.

Note: For reasons I explain toward the end, this will be my last screenprinting post until my class is complete, at which time I'll do a full recap of the preceding weeks. Now enjoy the shitshow, fam!

Let’s start things off on Tuesday, shall we? Why’d I ask, you have no say in the matter!

Per usual, I had to go to the office before work. But this was no ordinary day at the office! We had our monthly birthday lunch for all the babies born in the month of March, and on the menu today was pizza, yum yum yum.

When free food is offered, my tribal instincts always kick in and I eat way more than I normally would. I’m a grown ass-man with a job and a salary, I can afford to eat as much fucking pizza as I want whenever I want. But whenever FREE pizza is offered I lose control.

Back when I was in second grade our class had a pizza lunch as a special treat. I can’t remember the occasion, maybe it was for reading the most books back when schools cared that you could read. My friend Anthony and I had a competition to see who could eat the most slices, and the class looked at us in a mix of disgust and fascination (a look I learned to get used to!) as we each tapped out at seven slices.

Nobody was happy that we did that, especially ourselves, and my teacher Mrs. Meyers alluded to some of the students “acting like pigs” when addressing the class. Big shout-out to Mrs. Meyers, who is no doubt alive and reading this Substack despite being teaching us patriotic songs she learned in college during WWII.

Luckily, my boss didn’t announce that I acted like a pig to my coworkers when lunch adjourned, and I waddled back to my desk to rub my distended belly the rest of the day like an adorable cherub. At around 3:00 PM a coworker barged into our room to announc that there were cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery in the kitchen for St. Patrick’s day!

Magnolia’s cupcakes were made famous by the hit HBO show Sexual City, which I’ve never watched but it sounds horny. They have a ton of icing on them which is really the only reason I bother with cupcakes.

Sexual City

I never learned anything about St. Patrick’s day, but I assume it’s a special holiday to celebrate eating green stuff. To observe this beautiful tradition, the icing on each cupcake was green-colored, and they were accompanied by Mountain Dew to drink. I'm not joking. I knew better than to take a cupcake; I took two, and a Diet Mountain Dew to wash it all down. I'm so sorry.

I struck up a conversation about icing with one of my coworkers, and he said he didn't care for it. He took a knife and slid the inch-tall heap of thick icing from his cupcake onto my plate. Just what I needed!

I walked back to my desk to finish the day’s work, all the while taking small bites of icing, as small bites aren’t as many calories as big bites. Eventually, the reality of what I was doing struck me, and I frowned in shame at my giant disgusting plate with icing smeared all over it. I slid it into the garbage bin next to my desk. I spent the rest of the day wondering if my coworkers would find it gross if I dug it out of the trash to eat just a little bit more.

At the end of the day, I forced myself to make the miserable walk from my office in Midtown to the studio in Chelsea, shuffling at a snail's pace with the distracted tourists and office goons.

My Tuesday class went okay by my standards. I printed one color, gray.

As far as I could tell, gray went off without a hitch. I even audibly said “BANG-ON!” after I pulled each print, since my registration was indeed bang-on. Do people still say “bang-on”? I got some looks.

There was still an hour left in class, and I wanted to get my yellow layer done. I was convinced it would work fine, despite it not being opaque enough when I used normal poster ink on my last print. Well…

Fuck.

I’m great at not learning my lesson, it might be my strongest skill. However, I quit while I was ahead and washed my screen out. I’d be back tomorrow to hit it with fabric ink, which I was sure would cover up the other colors based on my last print.

I cleaned up my little work area and lugged my big fat belly home on the subway, forming an action plan for the following evening.

I worked from home on Wednesday, and I counted down the minutes till my shift was over. If someone were to give me a last minute project I would set up a Zoom call to make sure they saw me cry on camera. I posted in the office-wide chat that I would be doing that if the situation arose, so I didn't hear a peep! I closed my laptop right at six and put it straight into the dishwasher to clean it off for work the next day.

If I hustled my buns I would be in Chelsea printing my masterpiece right on time. However, hustling isn’t in my buns, so I stopped by the hip coffee shop near the train on my way there. I don’t normally go there on weekday evenings. There was a friendly barista working who I was unfamiliar with. I asked for a latte, and as always I forgot to specify that I wanted oat milk. Luckily, he asked, “Is whole milk okay?” I answered “No, and thank you for asking.” I stopped myself from adding the detail that if we’d gone with whole milk my delicate GI tract would make me commit GG Allin-level atrocities on the train.

While I waited for him to make my drink, I noticed that the music he was playing was actually good. What I normally hear in public spaces is usually not to my somewhat obscure tastes, because I am very cool. I discreetly opened Shazam to find out what he was playing, and it was an album by Ryuichi Sakamoto I was unfamiliar with. He’s one of my favorites, but he was insanely prolific.

I wanted to ask the barista if he was going to see Yasuaki Shimizu at National Sawdust in Williamsburg the following evening, a show I was going to and was very excited about. I didn’t, since I figured that would be a little creepy since I had Shazammed the song to even tell what was playing. I then wondered how many dudes Shazam music to strike up conversations with cute baristas to try their luck with them. I'm not like them, I'm one of the good ones, I swear!

I hopped on the train to the studio. My first order of business was to mix my yellow fabric ink, which would solve all of my opacity problems from yesterday and I’d be happy for the rest of my life.

After setting up my screen registration I went to the ink mixing area and grabbed the big bucket of yellow fabric ink from the shelf. I pried the caked-on lid off and it was completely empty. Why someone would put an empty ink bucket on the shelf like that is a mystery to me, but whatever gets your rocks off I guess.

I told the TA that they were out of yellow, and they came back with a fresh bucket, lugging it with both hands. I took it and man, that son of a bitch was heavy. The lid was sealed by a thick plastic ring like you’d find on a jug of milk. I found the tab to peel it off and I couldn’t pry it away. I briefly considered grabbing a razor blade to try to cut the seal, but I’ve learned from experience that prying things with a blade always ends up with me getting seriously injured and having to clean up a lot of blood. I decided to brute force it with my delicate, soft hands. How hard could it be?

The answer is very fucking hard. By the time I got it open enough to pour out ink, my arms were in burning pain and my hands were stained bright yellow. I had made a bit of a mess, but I had gotten enough ink from the bucket to make my print. I sealed the lid again and put it back on the shelf. Fuck that bucket.

I went back to my screen setup, pulled a few test prints on newsprint and they looked great. I then switched to one of my prints on the expensive paper and…

I was crushed. The fabric ink was the only thing that could possibly cover up the layers below, and it wasn’t enough. It looked like shit.

I should probably say the rest of the post isn’t going to be very funny, because I didn’t and still don’t find it very funny. I had spent weeks of work on these, and it just wasn’t going to work. I’d never get good enough for this fucking hobby, and never finish this print that I was so excited to make. And if I can’t make a print like this, am I good at anything else?

I wanted to rip the print in two, but was aware that this would make me look ilke a petulant baby. Instead, I destroyed the rest of the print run using the fabric ink.

Totally ruined. Worse yet, I realized in my manic self-destruction that I had screwed up my project set-up. The shoulder went behind the wall, it made zero visual sense.

Even if the printing had gone off without a hitch, it was doomed from the outset. I know a botched print run happens to almost everyone who tries screenprinting, but my free time is extremely fucking valuable. I’ve wanted to draw a new comic for months. I have a podcast that I co-host and edit. I have a full-time fucking job and have to work late sporadically. And I never fucking relax. I missed all those self-care TikToks, sorry Gen Z.

That doesn’t take into consideration how much of my self-worth I have wrapped up in my artwork. It’s everything to me, and if I don’t live up to my own standards I feel humiliated and ashamed. In my day job, being a perfectionist is a valuable asset, but in my own art making practice it leads to self-immolation. Also that was $60 worth of fucking paper!

I cleaned off my screen and set it into the reclamation tub to remove the botched stencil. I knew that I had enough weeks left in the class to try again, but what was the point? What the hell was this stupid drawing anyway? Why a cat? Why a phone? Why fruit? Who cares?

My girlfriend talked me off the ledge while I was leaving the studio, and even tried coming up with potential solutions. It made me feel a bit better, even though they wouldn’t work. But I figured I should try again. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t.

When I got home I spent about three hours fixing my setup file in Photoshop. I looked at the time and it was 3:00 AM, and I had to work the next day.

This wasn’t healthy. I decided to give myself a break and take the rest of the week off. Even the thought of a break took a lot of weight off of my shoulders.

And I saw Yasuaki Shimizu perform the next night and he was fucking great.

Tote I bought at the show, next to my hand-painted shirt by Lixero

As I said at the beginning, I’m not going to do another post about screenprinting until the class is over and I’ve gotten this print as close to finished as it will ever get. This experience became pretty draining and stressful for me, and I should concentrate on doing my best at a relaxed pace. Apologies for ending on a bit of a bummer, but please know in your heart of hearts that this is all your fault.

Till next time!