I never wanted this.

Okay, let me be a little more specific: this wasn’t exactly my plan.

This sordid tale starts years ago, in 2012. A crush who I spent a weekend with offhandedly suggested getting on Instagram, which he was on. The fledgling app was not even two years old and I resisted: I didn’t need another social media presence, wasn’t three enough (RIP Vine)? Besides, my strength was in my words, not in my photographs. He eventually rejected me, I didn’t take it well (wow big surprise), and I started my Instagram account to spite him. No, I don’t know how that works either but it made perfect sense at the time.

I had just paused my retail career for a year to work on my artistic resume. I did everything creative I could get my hands on: designed sets, started a novel, and started my blog about, ostensibly, the journey from having a steady (if mundane) job to kickstarting one’s creative life. Taking photos with my iphone4 and posting them didn’t really seem like it would factor into my overarching creative path, but during this time I took a staged photo with my friend Jennie Kay at Disneyland, our deadpan faces registering nothing as we stood among the happy parkgoers and under a massive canopy of, of course, balloons. The photo was well received and a theme was born: “I’ll make art that makes fun of social media!”

This is hardly an original idea. People have been making fun of social media since it existed, so I used my dull lifeless brand of humor to execute this too. “Oh I can get cheap props at the Dollar Tree a couple blocks away? Well 100 of these stuck to my head would look hilarious!” “What if it was a bouquet of flowers, but toilet plungers?” and other floppy, flaccid ideas I’ve indulged over the years. Honestly sticking stuff to my head is my happy place. There’s something so soothing, so calming, when the last layer of frosting or peanut butter or Nutella is smeared over my ears and eyes and I’m sensorily cut off from my surroundings. When I take these types of photos, I’ve learned to freeze the material first, lest the furnace of my lumpy, deeply troubled noggin thaw it and start melting it off, the Nutella sloughing off in sheets as my cat prances underneath my chair, mocking me.

Once in a while an idea will strike a chord with people, get a lot of attention (and yes, “likes”), and I’ll take note…to a point. My medium is social media, and most of my art is extremely online, so do I as an artist have an obligation to follow what my audience seems to appreciate the most? I would be lying through my teeth if I didn’t acknowledge the validation that appreciation of my art gives me. But that’s only a small component of a much bigger picture which motivates this rusty engine forward. I’m ultimately the worst judge of predicting what people will like and what they won’t, and my own worst enemy when it comes to second guessing myself into obscurity.

One big rock rattling around in my brain is my advanced age. Yes yes I know a popular quote I’ve immortalized is “You are not too old and it is not too late”, but honestly I am, and it is. I often find it really weird that I have TikTok teens following me, a decrepit octogenarian. Is there something undignified about an almost-50-year-old adult human saying things are “lit” and “fire”? (Sidenote: I say these with a straight, deadpan delivery at work all the time, and my 20-something coworkers think it is a HOOT or at least pretend to which is all my heart desires).

Another rock rattling around is the risk of getting it wrong. Occasionally, I have gotten it so wrong, I have made mistakes. I have centered myself in messages that were said about other communities, I have misattributed quotes, I have made assumptions about the ways in which people process trauma. A year ago, after a particularly sloppy misattribution, I started paying someone to thoroughly research quotes for me when I’m not sure who said it. Yes, I live and I learn and I apologize and I do better. But there will always be someone out for my neck; there will always be people who like to recreationally cancel other people, and there will always be people who weaponize their audience against others. I tried to play that game and it wasn’t a good fit. I forget that the larger my audience is, the louder my voice carries, and Jesus those balloons are shouting at people sometimes. So here’s to getting it right.

So there’s the massive part of what my artistic output has become. Those balloons, whew. I remember getting a few of them for the first time about three years ago. No, it wasn’t a witty tweet or thoughtful mental health quote. No no, they spelled out “I just pooped at work” and the caption was “Doo what scares you the most.” I still use those ones from the first two shoots in my current photos, you can tell because I used to cut their poor little valve tails off. Over time, I accumulated more and they spelled out longer and more elaborate quotes. I loved making them, but wasn’t very efficient at it: doing one would take me the better part of a day. Now I have it down to a science and even can create two in a day if I prepare all the materials in advance.

I’ve always been a fan of typographic artists: at museums, I make a beeline to check out Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger’s work. I never thought my work would be seen by so many eyes, and in person I might be self deprecating or bashful about the work I make, but the truth is that I’m having the time of my life. I love stumbling on a quote or turn of a phrase that resonates with me, stops me in my tracks, or gives me goosebumps. I love riding around on my bike and wall-scouting, taking photos of compelling surfaces to work with, thinking of the different combinations of colors I could make. I love traipsing in the forest with my LED letters, spotting the perfect location and strong branch to hold the letters. In the spring and summer I long for the days I can go to a park with my flowers and spell out a quote, and then daydrink with a friend. And I’m thrilled and humbled when someone reaches out to tell me that a quote or other art piece came at the exact right time for them, especially because you know what? It probably came into my life at the exact right time too.

This past year changed everything. The algorithm was in my favor, and a few photos got “out there”, to make a humble understatement. I was suddenly faced with a much larger audience, and things got weird. I get recognized when I go outside a bit (even with my mask on, horrifyingly). I’m at that stage where old platonic acquaintances now claim they’ve slept with/dated me. This sounds really fun, but it’s not!

And the stuff. My God, the stuff these companies send me. Boxes of wine. Cases of CBD infused soda. A too-extravagant skin care kit (I don’t even have that much skin to use it on). Loungewear for the end of the world. It’s all wonderfully specific and weird and I imagine these offices with people huddled around saying “Yes, that 47-year old queer person in Portland who spells things in balloons and is only occasionally funny, yes let’s send him the pinata filled with booze singles stat.” Where is my Just For Men sponsorship? Any dermatology clinics need a shoutout? No really. I’m not kidding. I will suck your dick on IG Live for botox.

And let me be clear: I am not complaining. I am so filled with gratitude that my art has taken off. I am beyond privileged to even still have a day job after the year that 2020 was. So now my focus for 2021 shifts to “how can I help others, better?”

I’m casually having a related conversation with a coworker while opening the store one day at my retail day job. This coworker, Natalie, is also a close friend, and I was confiding some artistic aspirations to her, some hypotheticals of how my job could be better balanced with my increasingly- demanding artistic life, and my inevitable collab with the toilet plunger company. She turned to me. “Well, have you asked Marcie?”

“Our boss? No way.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, those conversations never go well. It’ll sound like I don’t want to be here, it’ll sound like I don’t like my job.”

“I think you should talk to Marcie, you might be surprised.”

“Okay well first of all her name isn’t Marcie, that’s a name I invented as her alias for this piece.”

“Well yeah, my name isn’t Natalie either, but you’re avoiding the subject.”

“We’re not really having this conversation are we?”

“I mean, it did happen a lot like this. Just with our actual names.”

I ask a couple other coworker’s advice, it’s unanimous. I realize that I’ve been thinking this for a while, maybe months. I ask my boss for some time to chat on the next day we work together. I go into her office, we make small talk. Inexplicably, I tear up (but also very explicably, I cry at the drop of a hat and my tears are always just below the surface). I take a deep breath.

“So I’ve been thinking…”