The author attributes any amount of creativity to, “bits of adventure followed by mass amounts of the mundane.” For example, Child may spend four months wandering aimlessly through Latin America, saving a life in the Pacific, and follow up with two years of daily commutes and unreasonably long naps (deep reflection). It’s the complete package of audio books, movie rentals, hiking, yoga, and obtaining a doctorate in something particularly boring.
Growing up in the rural Midwest, peculiar encounters were often; always being a moment away from a “chainsaw massacre” (more or less). Anomalies and abnormalities were commonplace and juxtaposed against a serene and silent landscape. Shuffling through woodlands abundant with the remnants of fauna, in the dirt among the relics of natives, produced, it seemed at the time, a live-in horror fantasy.
For the now, he lives in a city and marvels at the beauty of art cinemas and drive-in theatres, poems by Neruda, Ginsberg and Whitman, paintings by Turner and Grimshaw, music by Modest Mouse, Washed Out, and The Decemberists. Child once sold a painting at a fundraising benefit (at the price of a coloring book).