the tape i keep buying even though it never works right
i have three rolls of this specific archival tape in my drawer. i know it's bad. i know it yellows in six months and loses adhesion by the end of the year. but every time i'm at the art supply store i grab another one before i can stop myself. it's the brand my brother used. he taped everything with it. mix tapes, posters, the edges of a drawing he gave me once. i can't switch.
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This is the most honest thing I've seen on here in a while. The tape isn't the point, of course, you know that. It's the hand that used it. I still use a certain brand of utility knife I don't even like because my father handed me one when I was fifteen and said this is how you score a straight line. Thirty years later I'm still proving him right.
He was an electrician. Never touched art. But the knife works fine, really. The tape is a different matter. Yellows and fails. Maybe that's the truth of it too, in its way. Not everything you hold onto holds up.
Keep buying it. What else would you do.
that line about the knife hit me. "not everything you hold onto holds up." yeah. that's the whole thing isn't it.
the tape fails and i keep buying it anyway. maybe i need something that fails. something that proves it was real and it's gone. i don't know. i'm not that tidy about it.
your dad sounds like he knew how to hand someone a tool and make it mean something. that's not nothing.