I’m now convinced I can’t do anything without making a mountain of mistakes. I’m coming to accept it. Maybe I should just let go of trying to be perfect and see that there’s a kind of charm to all the little fuck-ups, and do the best I can. I mean, that’s all I can do.

My To-do list is getting smaller. Making it shorter feels good, but I still have a lot of time-consuming tasks ahead of me. However, it’s all coming together despite wanting to shoot myself in the head. I’ve made a number of mistakes along the way, but I’m leaving most of them be. Hannah says people won’t even notice them as “mistakes,” but I will. With some of them, people might notice. However, I’ve decided not to fix them.

Why aren’t I going to fix them? I’m running out of ink. I’m running out of paper. I’m lazy and impatient, and these mistakes are not worth the waste of ink, paper, and time. I don’t think. Sure, I’d prefer some things to be a little different, but the book as a whole is fine.

More than how big the mistakes actually are, I’m upset with myself for not catching them. How didn’t I see this or that? I wasn’t even high or tired. I thought I was paying attention. Apparently not. I must be losing part of my mind. If I didn’t catch it on the first pages, how did I miss these things on all eight pages, and more than once?

Being perfect is so overrated, anyway. I used to think it was all that, and I still know people who think it. They think it’s important to do everything with the utmost excellence, make a perfect impression, have a neat and perfect house, look as beautiful as possible, and have a perfect body. It’s SO exhausting to strive for all that. Believe me, I have tried. A lot of times, I still do. But I don’t do it for me, which is the saddest part. I’ve done it for the people who judge me. Why have I cared? Fuck those people.

Okay, enough of that.

Here’s where I left the table last night. I got a lot done yesterday:

I’ve cut all the felt pieces, as you can see, and started to fold pages. I’m also finishing up the colored pencil stuff. There are a few bits of that throughout the book. Almost done with that.

I finished all the rubberstamping, too.

I did most of that on the backside of two of the decorative papers.

I have another two signatures to fold, grommets to push through the felt pieces for Dan’s eyes, and then I’ll stick all those pieces down so they’ll be easier to sew to the pages. All that will take a long time—the sewing, that is.

I’m waiting for a special bookbinding tape from Talas to stick the little pockets on one of the pages. That’s the pocket that will hold the Dan stickers.

As I’m folding the pages, I can already see that the book is going to have to be slightly trimmed on the right edge, which is a bit of a bummer. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that cleanly, so I’m going to make Hannah do that. She’s like kinda a human guillotine with a utility knife.

What’s going to take me a month of time (at least)? The covers and the binding. I’ll be as careful as can be. I just can’t fuck that up.

But before I even start on that, I have to take a break and change course to finish a drawing that I started a while back. It’s called Runaway Cakes. I’m sure you can imagine. It has to be completed before January 15th, when I take off to Los Angeles for the gala event, which is for the Laurel Foundation. I’m dropping my drawing off at my framer because it’s going in my show next year. I don’t know when I’ll be back in LA to pick it up. He’ll have plenty of time to work on it.

So, that’s where I am today.