Offloading Densities of Thought

Let’s just do the rundown: this may not last; I get a head of steam on something and push it to the prototype phase, then move on to the next project – that’s the M.O. My Brain generates projects at an unreasonable pace, and the best I can do is humor it by acting on what seem like the projects that seem Most Likely To Succeed, even though Brain knows very well that there’s way too much paint and not enough house.

The garden thread is meant to keep things In Line and Of A Piece because (1) the Garden is a great metaphor for all things Good / all things Earthly and Grounded; (2) Gardening is a Meditative activity in that it acknowledges Entropy and yet strives to Improve things in spite of decay; and (3) keeping up the yard is One Of Those Things I’ve actually stuck with on a regular basis for a prolonged period of time.

That’s the reason for the pile of discarded blogs in my WP Admin panel. The shirt comes from “Random Blog Generator” (now defunct), a place to store quirky one-off Photoshop projects. “Occupational Wisdom” (now defunct) was a place to upload links to a short-lived podcast series of interviews with people who had interesting jobs. Then there’s this, a legitimate site that I haven’t killed because I’m still a (part-time) painter who legitimately exhibits work from time to time:

Then there was the idea of writing an autobiographical novel in the form of Instant Polaroid pictures (The Annotated Me), which I put so many hundreds of hours into but then hit some sensitive material that I wasn’t sure I wanted to reckon with, and that looked like this:

And that project currently continues as a series of Evernote pages under the heading “Sad Kings Of The World,” a series of autobiographical short stories beginning with one called “Whiteout” where my parents move us to Houston on the spur of the moment and then back again six months later on the spur of the moment and we get lost in a blinding blizzard in St. Louis and have to be rescued. (I have to thank writer Tom Dibble for encouraging me to use that title, which was originally a joke.)

Before all of that, I worked very earnestly for many years as a musician / songwriter. I was in a few moderately successful bands and got a few nibbles on licensing a couple of my songs for use in TV and Independent film, which was the idea. I was trying to be the next Gary Jules, I think. But, no. Here’s one of the songs that nearly turned me into a filthy rich songwriting genius until they found something else to license:

SO, then. The Present:

My employer asked if I knew anything about making websites and I lied and said Of Course I Do, duh. “OK”, they says, “We need a new website for the school” (I work for a very nice filmmaking school). Given carte blanche to make this project happen, I hired a young hip man we nicknamed Bright Dwight to teach me how to build a real and proper, grown-up website using the WordPress.Org interface. After nine months or so, we came up with this, which people seem to like.

By this time I’d built up a pretty decent knowledge of WP, and a pretty good portfolio of half-decent graphic design work. SO, I threw all that into this site, which nobody ever looks at. It’s fine, it was an exercise. Moving forward.

Back, then, to the Garden. Tending to that. Let’s do that. More later.

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