This is a science fiction themed entry in that it explores what might have been in an alternate universe if I was unemployed at the time that I drew on this sketchbook page and still had time to do sklogs with kids and a house.
I never made a sklog out of this sketchbook page but if I had and still didn't care about wasting time and ruining sketchbook pages with illegible notes that gave me pain to write because handwritten notes can not be edited except through photoshop (which I have done and it is incredibly fulfilling to do that) but also gave me joy because handwritten notes and limited space on a tiny sketchbook page make you feel brave and risky and the exhilaration of the inexorable permanence of what you put down makes up for the pain of knowing you could have been funnier or more insightful or that if you did get something funny on the page that it could have been legible - then I would have written an incredibly powerful few spidery sentences that would have meandered unpredictably around the doodles of my daughter and her visions of houses as expressed by my peremptorily commissioned pen while exposing the grand illusion that has fueled the American housing market. It sends a chill down my spine and tears to my eyes just to think of what those sentences might have sounded like if Patrick Stewart or Jon Hamm or even Jeff Bridges would have read them. Ooh they would have been good. They would have somehow expressed the constant nagging repairs to toilets and sinks and doors and light switches and sprinklers and window screens and the miles and miles of cords that electronic devices require and syncing and wifi-ing and hidden fuse boxes that the repair guy asks you about that you have to admit you have no idea where it is because you just turn everything off and on until it works and painting and painting because you don't have a landlord to fix everything and forbid you from using plugs or re-painting the rooms and who you can just demand that they talk to noisy neighbors and who has to worry about the housing market while you don't care. All the new home technology is designed by urban apartment dwellers who loathe landlords and everyone in the suburbs and don't mind vexing landlords and homeowners with their devices that are neat but barely worth the pain of installation and upkeep much like the xeriscaped lawns also devised by apartment dwellers that parents don't want their kids to play on because of the rocks and prefer grass that is unnatural and requires vast amounts of carbon stomping effort to maintain. The only good things about a house are basements and backyards, where just for a few short sweet moments you can actually live the king of your own little castle dream that the home market sells you, the places hidden from neighbors (unless you have no basement or visually secluded backyard, in which case you better have a great attic) where you can breathe free of judgement and install your model trains and game centers and your maps and comfortably ugly furniture or drink a beer on a lawn chair or wander out to look at the sky in your boxers, but even those precious gems of home ownership carry the seeds of modern anxiety, the security risks of backyard basement windows, necessitating home security systems that are even more annoying than regular fun home electronics or dogs, which are even more annoying than almost anything except for relatives and door to door solicitors. Solicitors are the only thing that make the dogs worth it. The loud baying has a salutary effect on the brevity and aggressiveness of any sales pitch.
And now we come full circle, where I would have, might have cleverly compared the baying of the dogs to the constraints of the medium, the handwritten notes on the tiny sketchbook pages, imposing a salutary limit to the final, inevitable comparison of my own ranting, intolerably lengthened by the storage capacity of the Google-provided page, to the mindless and aggressively unending chatter of the door to door salesman, with nothing but the slow dawn of his sense of futility to force his much welcomed slinking departure from someone else's stage
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