Chris Schwaar ©

Category: Misc.

  • In Praise of Chairs

    I’m writing you from a chair. A large chair. A very large chair, all my own, taking up the corner of my room nearest the window. My feet are up, as it is a recliner. A very large, brown leather recliner that I bought from a woman named Heather on the internet. She was kind…

  • Life without a skeleton

    There’s nothing really giving my life structure in this season. Sure, I can create my own schedule. I can give myself firm end and start times or specific hours for work. But without any sort of external influences – going in to an office each day, evenings out of the house, Sunday mornings at church,…

  • Interesting people are people with interests

    In March of 2020, right at the start of the Covid-19 U.S. quarantine, a playwright named Lauren Gunderson put on a series of playwrighting masterclasses, hosted live on her Facebook page. I gleaned many journal pages worth of information through those livestreams. One of the things that really stuck with me – like an arrow…

  • Picasso’s Letter

    “Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on only one thing: my paintings, and everything is sacrificed to it – you and everyone else. Myself included.” This is a quote from a letter Pablo Picasso wrote to a lover, discovered through…

  • Characters from Milwaukee

    Standing in a gas station next to a white van, long blonde hair and a beard. A Burley face. Really wide shoulders a tight long sleeve black shirt, with a contracting company printed on the back. But wearing extremely tight feminine jeans, and tall black boots. His body looks like a triangle. Lewis worked at…

  • Griffin’s to-do list

    My housemate, Griffin, has a lot of “gottas” in his life. He is someone who is just comfortable living how he’s living, and not too worried about fixing those small annoyances that drive me crazy. For example… Griffin chair in the living room where he sits 85% of his waking hours, and his bed are…

  • A lack of graphic design in film?

    This evening, I watched a new Netflix movie called The Dig, set in an English village in the months leading up to WW2. Watching it, I noticed a stark lack of any sort of design or imagery within the setting of the story. The only graphic I noticed through the whole movie was a small…

  • Media of the Month | January, 2021

    MOVIES:1. Ratatouille (W). 1/1/21 | 9 2. Knowing. 1/1/21 | 2 3. Castles in the Sky. 1/2/21 | 6 SERIES: The Queens Gambit. 1/5/21 | 9 4. Mulan (2020). 1/7/21 | 5 5. Togo. 1/8/21 | 8 6. Independence Day. 1/10/21 | 6.5 7. Let them all talk. 1/14/21 | 7.5 8. One Night in…

  • Stores + Employees

    Isn’t it interesting that stores seem to attract employees that seem to fit right in? I was at Dick’s Sporting Goods today with my sister, and every employee we saw was decked out in Adidas and Nike active-wear, stocky and ready to run a marathon at a moment’s notice. At Trader Joe’s, the store is…

  • The Action Paradox

    I was driving the other day to pick up Potbelly with two dear friends, when the conversation somehow dropped into the realm of the philosophical. One of them, Ian, said as a passing comment in a response to a story, “youth is always wasted on the young.” There are two key factors when it comes…