6/24/2013

It's time for me to cut to the heart of things.  I've been struggling to get a post out all month, mostly for technical issues, but also for spiritual issues.  I always figured that if I could actually sustain something long enough I would be able to look back and see this great thing that I compiled.  It was the thing that attracted me to Jeff Smith's Bone.  It's a thing that Stephan McCranie talks about all the time.  It's in between the lines of every motivational speech or maxim on tenacity, productivity.  It's at the root of Manny Farber's elephant art vs. termite art.

And week after week for the last four and a half years I have painstakingly archived every ounce of inspiration, every esoteric and ephemeral thing that has passed across my desk.  I don't know why.  I guess I'm just afraid of losing things as I often have through life.  I'm afraid of starting at square one, of being in the dungeon with only a 2 square radius of light around me and no map.  I thrive on the schematic and the archive.  It's a habit.  I don't feel like it's a very healthy habit most of the time.

I've been needing a break from this.  At first the brutish routine of it all was the perfect coping mechanism for the period of loss & grievance I was experiencing.  It was a way to get my motor running, and reintroducing creative things into my life.  But over time, it just became too difficult to keep record of the things, as well as interact with the things & the people making the things.  And when things lapse into laboriousness I lose sight of my objectives and run headlong into stagnation.

That's not what I'm aiming for.  I need an adventure.  It's why I've always dreamed and written and drawn.  I thought for a while in my life that I needed to actually live out every adventure, but I've come to realize that I need an active imagination as well as an active social life.  Somewhere therein lies the balance in the life I want to lead.  That's where I have to go next.  I can't chain myself to a computer looking at cool shit, no matter how cool that shit is.  I need to interact with this stuff and these people a lot more.  It's what's missing.

I'm not really sure where I'm taking myself with this.

I turned 33 this weekend.  It's a quirky numerical significance.  Jesus.  Cool.  It's also a third of the way into this third decade of life.  I've got to reassess who I am and what I've learned and find a way to apply that to living.

Not that I don't want to talk about the weeks or the ephemera in the weeks.  This month was insane with the PRISM/Edward Snowden scandal, Paris Jackson, Justin Bieber, & Amanda Bynes spinning out of control, The releases of Man of Steel and Monsters U, Animal Crossing New Leaf,