Why?

This morning, I got an email from Mom, something with multiple 'FW: Fwd:'s in the subject line, about a song "written by a 13 years old boy". It had a couple of links, to a ".wmv" file and to a ".txt" file, both of which required downloading. Against my better judgement, and because I'm in a band with a 14 year old boy (and have been since he was 8), I downloaded and watched the ".wmv" file. It was a maudlin video of some British lad, Declan, presumably a creation of Pop Idol, or some such program, asking repeatedly, why certain bad stuff exists in the world.

I replied as follows...

El Corte de Madera

I bought a new bike last week. My previous bike, I'd been nursing along since 1993, finally gave me sound enough reason to pull the plug: I cranked hard to avoid an oncoming bus, on my way across town for an appointment; I felt a jolt and heard the clank of metal on the street. I looped around, up a driveway, onto the sidewalk, and rode back to the source of the sound: a chunk of cog, with about 3 teeth in it, lay on the road! Strangely, this did not stop the bike from operating normally. I carried on, and rode all the way up to the top of Russian Hill, where I'd never actually been before, to meet my clients. Afterward, I saw this plaque about graves, for which the hill is named:"[T]he graves were removed or built over"... Or? Like... we just don't know? This reminds me of a film by one of Deb's friends, Trina Lopez, Second Final Rest, about the removal of all of San Francisco's cemeteries in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, raising questions about just how thorough said removal was. I haven't actually seen the movie yet, but it's playing this coming Wednesday, at the public library main branch. So, maybe I'll go.

Anyway, in the past, when stuff on my bike done broke, I'd just buy another part, or buy a cheap used bike with good parts, and swap stuff out. But missing teeth on the central cog? That's a lot of work, and this bike's put in a good tour of service. Scott told me I could afford a new bike, so I went for it. And this weekend, I put some knobbies on the wheels, and took it down to El Corte de Madera Open Space Preserve, where I used to run a couple loops with my old work friend, Gabe, some dozen years ago or so. I followed the same old path: Fir Trail, to Tafoni, to Resolution, and back up the El Corte de Madera Creek Trail. The video up top is of the last few tenths along Resolution Trail. Here are the sandstone formations in the park:



And here's a madrone tree I stared at for a while, at the vista point:



I've put the slicks back on, now, and I prob'ly won't bomb much single-track any more, it's true--but I like seeing the visual explanation, in that video up top, for why my hands get so numb after racing down a mile or so of that stuff. Also, it's really nice, after such a long time, to have gears and shifters that are indexed properly, and brakes that don't squeak because I put the shoes on crooked--in short, to have a new bike. It'll also be nice to take advantage of the 2 years included service that comes with it. Thanks, Sports Basement! I've already customized it, with my name, and assorted accessories ripped off my old bike, like seats, handlebars, and rack. More good rollin' times await.

No reservations? Maybe some...

I was just biking around town this afternoon, and the memory came flashing into mind, of the time, a few months back, when we saw Anthony Bourdain at Bender's bar, around the corner. Much of the usual Thursday crowd were there for a Sunday afternoon, effecting a masculine contrapunto to the Guerrera-Malenfant baby shower. From our table in a back corner, we spotted Bourdain, at the bar, up by the door. I don't have any faith in my capacity to recognize faces, so I was struck first merely by having recognized his. Then, I was struck by how blue his hair is. They must work hard to keep all yellow wavelengths out of gray TV hair.

I went up and offered, on the table's behalf, to buy him a drink, in such a way that he didn't even need to respond in order to politely decline.

What I wish I'd said was something along the lines of...

Sea Ranch

Check in later for an updated post, with actual Sea Ranch journal writing. Still editing. In the meantime, enjoy my psychedelic kelp videos.

Health care debate!

Moved, I guess, by how the lack of ideas being reported as coming from the conservative side of government, during the current attempt at health care overhaul, resembles the lack of conservative ideas reported way back in the financial bail out days, I got back on my high horse, and decided to prod Dad, again, with assorted liberal rhetoric on the topic, in lieu of any evident "debate". I sent him a link to a Krugman column, asserting that the "public option" was a necessary gambit for reducing costs, and a recent Matt Taibbi piece, from Rolling Stone, wherein he explains why the entire process has been completely bungled by corporate interests, and is doomed, as a result, not to save anyone any money.

Dad responded in kind, sending me a list of 14 conservative talking points, that I don't suppose he wrote himself, since they display a wit that's a bit snarkier than I'd characterize his as being; but he didn't say who wrote them. I imagine these are the points that are just hit on, repeatedly, on conservative talk radio--some of the points themselves are repeated--and, as a result, don't do much to explain anything, only to incite indignation in their target audience.

So I responded, perhaps a little too graciously, "This is the first time any republican thinker has managed to squeeze a cogent argument for some completely different idea to the way health care works in the entire rest of the developed world outside the U.S., into the San Franciscan airspace!", before getting down into the dirty work of actually trying to read the stuff, and then debunk all the poppycock therein. I don't think it's likely I got any sound counterpoints across, but at least I was able to highlight some paradoxes in the conservative grab-bag of horror stories. At the same time, I have to admit that, on both ends of the political spectrum, we share a lot of pessimism over what's likely to come out of the process.

Destroy man!

How did I go nearly 40 years without ever discovering that this is an anagram of my name?

I must amend story to stay modern, in the steady norm--keep the stony dream alive--avoid the stray demon and damn oyster!

God bless the internet. It spares me the need to regret not having spent more time playing with the letters in my name.

This reminds me of my old friend, Anna, who could compose long form anagrams of full sentences or emails, if I recall correctly... Her email name was "apalindrome", which reminds me both of the sample sign Tauba put in the shop window, reading "palindrome is not a palindrome" (and which seems to provoke more commentary from bus stop patrons than any other in the window); and also my favorite failed palindrome:

Edna St. Vincent Millay, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad.
I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.

Narratives and the Narrating Narrators Who Narrate Them

I got up, and forced myself to start reading Errol Morris' Seven Lies About Lying (parts I and II), which have been sitting on two tabs of the browser for, I guess, a week now, waiting for me to get through every little thing that's crossed my sight line since. My interest in that article (besides being kindled by having enjoyed Mr. Morris' previous multi-part essays in the Times, largely about the relationship between truth and photography), was sparked--before laying dormant for a week--by the inclusion of an interview with Ricky Jay, who's a pretty fascinating bloke, enjoying a sort of renaissance, I think, here in the early 21st century. That is to say: I have the impression, based partly on faint memories from my childhood, but mostly on a pictorial of him using playing cards as darts, to pop balloons taped to an otherwise nude bunny, from a December 1977 issue of Playboy that used to live in the bathroom mag rack, that he reached the pinnacle of his celebrity some 30 odd years ago. Lately, he seems to be popping up more often on the pop radar--I was surprised to see him in a "dramatic" role in Gus Van Sant's pseudo-bio flick, Last Days, about the end of Kurt Cobain's life--but it may be only my radar on which he's blipping more frequently, since I was commissioned recently to paint his name on an old vintage magician poster, to be a birthday gift for Mr. Jay, himself (I hope, in posting it here, that the birthday has already come to pass):


I can't help but wonder if someone who collects such vintage posters, as does he, might not be a little appalled to have a perfectly good one defaced in such fashion... I mean, I'm fine with the lettering and all, I just feel like, if it were my name on there, I'd be saying, like, "Why did you have to go and do that to it?" But I don't know the first thing about assessing the value of such old posters; I'm not Ricky Jay, and I don't know him as well as does David Mamet, from whom the commission came (more celebrity name-dropping! Actually, it was just "his people", and they only talked to "my people", i.e. Scott).

The week I was working on that, I swear, I told at least a half dozen people what I was doing, and not one of them had heard of Ricky Jay. Just now, I had to tell Deb who he was, though I swear I must have told her then, too. And I think only one person even recognized David Mamet's name! I mean, c'mon, people! David Mamet?!? I feel like I should just be able to say, "What the fuck?!", and that would be a kinda weak inside joke about the coarse speech patterns of the Western Male, as commonly represented in Mamet scripts. But really: there's no excuse. You should just know this shit. Here, check his wiki. Jesus. Now, Jay, okay, I grant you, he's been a little under the radar for lo these many. You should just read the Errol Morris article, but here, you can check his wiki, too.

Palimpsest

I've been puttering around on the couch this morning, as is my way, using the interwebs in the fashion for which they are seemingly best suited: to reveal, in an ever-lengthening row of tabs, ever more info about whatever caught my passing interest in a previous tab. Thusly, have I increased my vocabulary to include menefreghismo, and its variants. I thought, for a while, maybe I wanted to read Nick Tosches' book, Dino, about Dean Martin. Then, as I was trying to find some online version of a Tosches magazine article I remember fondly (and, I swear, only just now, typing this sentence, long past having scoured New Yorker, Harper's, and McSweeney's archives in vain for a hint, does it dawn on me that it was in Vanity Fair, here, and I recommend it: a stellar description of the fullest use of one's skills and resources to feed a seemingly pointless obsession, as the seasons pass, concluding that "nobody with a decent map needs rainbows"...whatever that means), I somehow stumbled upon mention of a Jack Pendarvis, described as a "Southern Gothic David Sedaris". I thought of my friend, Huw, whom I've mentioned before in his capacity as priestly aspirant, and who, being Southern, and prolificly blogulous, has much to write and link to, of the South and of his experiences carrying it north in his heart. We've been chatting recently (and through him, and his Canadian proximity, I've begun watching some of Little Mosque on the Prairie), and I wonder if he'd be interested in Pendarvis. Then, I thought, I should just see if it's any good myself, before I go recommending it. The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure seems like a good place to start, being as it's a short story collection, and my ability to read actual book-length books has largely atrophied (help me find a less oxymoronic adjective for atrophied, please), despite some recent success with Reason, Faith, and Revolution (approaching halfway!).

Menefreghismo!

I just learned a new word. Mark Dery, writing about Hannibal Lecter, quotes Nick Tosches describing Dean Martin as a menefreghista, one who embodies menefreghismo, who is, as such, a master of the fine art of not giving a fuck.

I'm old enough now to know that menefreghista is not a mantle to which I can aspire. It has to be a skill cultivated from an early age. There might be a lot of nature in with that nurture, too. I think the later in life one begins trying to manifest their menefreghismo, the more bitter a taste it leaves in the mouths of all those around. I s'pose I could try reading that Dino book, to see how Mr. Martinez' well-cultured menefreghismatic ways impacted his near and dear...

Anyway, it's only every so often, for better or worse, that I get a little taste of the menefreghista life, unspoilt by guilt or shame. I just wanted to post this so I could use it as a footnote link from the menefreghismo passage in my birthday post. Carefree livin', FTW! (so to speak).

Sex Movies

When I first built this blog page, I had a different quote up there below the title than what's up there now. It said, quoting Lotus Weinstock, "I used to want to change the world. Now, I just want to leave the room with a little dignity". Lotus was, according to Wikipedia, an LA-based comedian, and Lenny Bruce's last girlfriend, but I'd never heard of her. She was quoted by Justin Bond's character in the John Cameron Mitchell movie, Shortbus, which I highly recommend for anyone who, like me, enjoys movies that temper their unabashed sex-positivity with a whole lotta mindplay.

To that end, one of my favorite movies ever is Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective, which uses the tale of a group of friends entertaining themselves by filming pornography, to explore how the contours of public vs. private intersect with "anarcho-feminist" communal politics and consensus building. I think one of the blurbs on the DVD box (which I have, but not in front of me), says something like, "most boring film ever made with porn in the title".

Story of Enlightenment

Deb and I went, last night, to a monthly dinner conversation organized by a few Saint Gregory's folk, for other such folk living here in the city. There are other similar monthly dinners in the east bay and, I think, Marin. We've never been. My excuse is that I never feel like I have anything smart to say extemporaneously. And I'm antisocial. I haven't fully internalized that doing one's theological musing in communion with other church folk is the best way to dissipate the mists of error.

Amber asked us to go, to keep Colin and her company, in case the whole thing turned out to otherwise be completely socially awkward and unpleasant. The four of us pushed their attendance to a new record, apparently. It wasn't awkward or unpleasant. We made our usual stuffed dates appetizer, with cheese and dates leftover from our recent camping trip, during which it was too Godforsakenly hot to eat cheese and dates. Last night, they went quick.

Every month, there's a group conversation revolving around a pre-selected word. This month the word was Illumination. There were some photographers in attendance, and a theatrical lighting designer conveniently on hand to describe their relationships to light.

A lot of the talk turned, conversely, to cherishing darkness, to the difficulty of finding spaces unpolluted with artificial light; whereupon one woman commented that, at her home in Point Reyes, the isolation, mysterious noises, and threat of wildfire, combined to make the darkness of the woods frightening for her.

One guy brought up Don Cupitt's ideas about Solar Ethics, described as "being giving, always giving, always burning outward".

The woman who was afraid of the dark had, at some point in her life, had some sort of 'ecstatic vision' of the 'light of Jesus', and we all philosophized about what that 'light' was supposed to mean, exactly, and how it manifests itself, so to speak, in our... hearts? lives? I posited that it was a revolutionary understanding of the human potentiality to be divine. Or words to that effect.

The Default Region

I was out for birthday drinks with friends this afternoon and started blabbing my mouth about this here "BLAT!", which has been largely a secret blog since its inception. So, I've given myself a little taste of exactly the sort of anxiety over productivity that I can accuse of stultifying my productivity. One reaction I had to that tonight was, "If I write anything whatsoever, I should prob'ly use it to pad the blog..."

I was thinking, specifically, about a comment I posted on a BoingBoing story this morning. There's been a spate (if two can make a spate) of posts there this weekend about the "default state", or region, of the mind--those areas of gray matter whose electro-chemical activity increases when focus and attention on specific tasks has ceased, i.e. the bits of brain that light up when the mind wanders.

Cory Doctorow's post, this morning, about a UC-Santa Barbara brain researcher's theories on the subject was titled "Wandering minds are active minds". As interesting as I think this is, I'm equally interested by the fact that I've been unable, even now, to summon enough attention to read the post the whole way through, not to mention whatever article it's drawn from. Nonetheless, I was moved to send in a comment:

Speed and Brevity and Depth

Thought, while riding home, loaded: my constant effort in my art, or at least in my writing, is to communicate the speed and brevity characteristic of my thought pattern, in hopes that maybe the pattern... or hints, embedded therein, at the context surrounding each... battery of BLATs (?) will suggest some depth of... interest? Of... well, some depth anyway...

Yeah. Something like that. A thousand points of light in an unfathomable firmament.

Hmph.

(just to keep score, how many more BLATs to a thousand?)

Breaching Separation of Church & State

(or, Traipsing Trepidatiously 'Cross the Personal/Political Divide)

At our church, we have a tradition (I may have mentioned elsewhere), of "concluding the sermon", which entails, after a couple minutes' meditation, parishioners who are so moved, standing up and sharing how the day's homily or scripture passage resonates with something in their lived experience (i.e, not something they read in a paper or saw on TV). An extension of that tradition, more suited for people like me, who shy away from off-the-cuff public parabolizing, is the "SGN Sharing" email group. Of course, some such people like me, prone to embedding hyperlinks in their emails, tend occasionally to conflate "lived experience" with "having visited a website", or "the way I felt after visiting said website".

Case in point: one co-congregant, S, sent around a link to www.bornagainamerican.org (careful: it'll want to start playing a music video when you click on it). S asks, "What does it mean to be a 'born again American'? I'm not sure, but the combination of left-leaning political and social values with overt and specific references to the Bible, its traditions of social and economic justice, and the Biblical term for religious and spiritual rebirth is fascinating."

Another co-congregant, J, who represents the rare conservative reef in SGN's socially progressive sea, linked us to Jonathan Haidt's excellent TED talk, on the "moral roots of liberals and conservatives" (video after jump):

God IS science (is God)

I got an email from Mom, this morning, that included the full text of a story titled "GOD vs. Science", which she prefaced, "this is kinda long, but it's really good!" You can read the whole story here, online. That links not to the original instance--just the highest ranking response to a Google search, sparing me the need of pasting it all below, where enough of it turns up, anyway. Turns out, according to Snopes (one of my favorite resources for, among other things, debunking the occasional panic spam about an internet based apocalypse), this has been going around for quite some time by email; and in some variations, the student in the story turns out--surprise, surprise!--to be Albert Einstein. But before I'd read any of that, I responded to bits of the story, as copied below:

The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art

That's the title of a piece I read about at the SFMOMA last weekend. There was a related installation on another floor, that consisted of a fridge and a wall of shelves full of empties. The piece itself involves serving free beer between 5 and 7pm on Thursdays. I imagine the bartender will want to talk about art or something, I dunno. And I don't know what kind of beer, but the empties in the installation were Anchor Steam.

I sent that paragraph out, as an invitation to the Thursday night boys, and Ian wrote back that, "I remember that this was at Yerba Buena a couple of years back - one of the cool things was that they were getting local celebrities to serve the beer on weekends". I started to write back, but it seemed more like the sort of thing that belonged in this space, rather than on the beer'n'pizza group-list. I wrote:

I know they're having a different guest bartender every week, but I haven't heard who they'll be. If they have a reputation for booking "local celebrities", I imagine I'll have to get there pretty early if I hope to score a seat. It's not that big a bar they have set up.

I don't know how keen I am on the whole thing. I mean, free beer is free beer, yes. And I don't have any problem with visiting art museums, even though they tend to engender in me a bit of despondence over what I've done with my life (which I'm tempted here to deflate as, "Scribbles!? I could have just been scribbling?!?" -- but that demeans both the scribblers and my own despondence). I think by conflating "drinking beer with friends" with "highest form of art", it puts me in mind, not only of art, but both of going to church every week, and of having sex with my wife. High Art/High Church/High Sex: these are all opportunities and encouragements to pay attention, because I'm extremely close to the center of Why I Do Anything/Everything I Do. It could be argued that I'm just as close to it, whenever and wherever I do anything or everything. But when, for instance, I'm drinking beer with friends, my attention isn't necessarily called to how little fucking attention I'm able to muster in any given direction; whereas my enjoyment of art, church, and sex is very much related to how much attention they demand from me. And conversely: my inability to enjoy them correlates to my refusal, conscious or not, to surrender such attention as their appreciation would require. And meanwhile, my attention is persistently called to how much or little of same is being paid. Extrapolating from there... Do I want to have to pay much attention while drinking beer with friends? How much more would I enjoy it if I were paying more attention? What is more? Somehow this ties in with what I'd consider my chronic crisis of passion... How does one diagnose ADD? How does one measure sufficient attention so as to determine a deficit? Are there specific questions? What does the DSM-IV say?

Anyway, I ended up going, but none of my friends came. Robert Bechtle was the bartender. He could never be accused of scribbling. We had a brief conversation about Bechtel Corp. A local newspaper gossip columnist read aloud a list of funny sounding rhyming word pairs, like "hoity-toity" and "hurdy-gurdy", then managed to fit many of them into a re-working of the Gettysburg Address.

I didn't make any friends. I didn't really even talk to anyone, apart from my few words with Mr. Bechtle, whose name is pronounced like Bechtel, despite his distaste for the corporation. I drank a few beers (it was Pacifico), then biked out to Craig's to join the regular crew for Belgians and BBQ. I'll have to review the transcripts to determine if any high art occurred there.

Fast Times at ACSF

Sean Penn is coming back to Shelley's acting class. He was there a couple of years ago, some months before we put on that play. I quit the class after the play, so I don't know what's been going on there since, but rumors indicate that Shelley's daughter is/was dating Emil Hirsch, who starred in the film Sean had just finished shooting last time he came to the class. So, I imagine Shelley's been keeping the lines of communication open, and now -- well, here he is (supposedly) coming back.

Shelley sent email to me and presumably other erstwhile classmates, inviting us to rejoin the class in the run-up to Sean's return. The weekend after I got that email, I went camping, and spent an evening trying to write a scene to perform for the occasion. But I hit a few dead ends, and, as is typical, haven't picked it back up since then.  So... I don't have anything to show for the past couple of years, in which my excuse for not acting is that I want to write my own part and "play myself".

I was talking at work about Sean Penn coming back. I was standing atop a loading dock awning, painting a warehouse wall with Josh and Caitlyn. Josh has been working with me for years, but Caitlyn was new, and didn't know I'd been in an acting class before. She was asking about my involvement. I gave my usual excuse, that I was "accessing tools of personal expression". She asked if I feel like I'm acting in my day-to-day life. I can't remember how I replied, but I'm sure it sidestepped the question in some way. At least, I didn't focus as much on the question as I'm drawn to doing so now... I look at the phrase above, "my usual excuse, that I was 'accessing tools of personal expression'", and I think of how limited my vocabulary is, how rarely I express a new idea, how often I'm having the same conversation or relating the same story to another audience--how often my own original words or ideas come to feel to me like clichés. Even that sounds clichéd, how often I've said, "I've said this so often it feels like a cliché." Sure, maybe I tailor the phrasing to suit the moment, maybe, but regardless: I can see how my life consists of a lot of rehearsing a series of familiar scenes. Thus, as in any acting situation, I face the ever-present danger of losing touch with the meaning of my words, or choosing the wrong meaning, because I've lost understanding of which is right, or if there even is one. The eternal search for meaning... What does meaning even mean? Ugh. And so on.

It's like a life spent practicing telling jokes; which, actually, is my biggest take-away from Sean's first visit: the man is an entertainer. Pretty much all night, 'til 4am, whether with an audience of one or two, or the entire group, he made effective use of his inevitable position at the center of attention to churn out a seemingly endless stream of jokes and stories. I can only remember one--probably even the next morning I could only remember one. This may be one of the things that differentiates me from successful entertainers. Nonetheless, I retained a joke, one joke, and perhaps it's a testament to Sean's entertainment value that I'm asked to repeat it whenever I mention "Sean Penn at my acting class", to anyone who's heard it before. Anyway, Josh, who's heard it before, asked me to retell it for Caitlyn, and volunteered to play my role in the story (it's a joke with roles--there's physical humor):

birthday post

Last night, summer beer, delicious bbq... It was one of those occasional, unanticipated grand evenings of perfect indulgence. I am reminded of the sentence Geoff often repeats when he's having just such an experience: I have reached maximum sufficiency; any more would be a superfluent abundity. I don't know if he "got" that from somewhere, or if he composed it himself (I should ask!); but the level of drunkenness required to trigger its recitation (and to appreciate it) raises mirthful doubts of whether any abundance could ever truly be superfluous.

As I'm prone to do in the throes of such satiety, I lingered too long. People begged off at or near the typical Thursday witching hour of 10pm, and I was left in Craig's living room virtually alone, with Craig and Andy wanting to play video games. I must make note to myself that this is always a good time to leave -- I have some level of psychic resistance to social video gaming, which I'm not yet willing to either explore or overcome. It may help me to bear in mind how much this mental block resembles, in practice, my father's resistance to any technological development, and how elderly he seems as a result -- but whatever! If I'm just simple, well, "'tis a gift to be simple", so nyah, nyah, nyah and shut up!

Anyway, while Andy took a piss, Craig helped set me up a "mii", a video avatar, on Wii Bowling, after that was determined to be the only game suitable for a party of three -- another hint that it's time to leave at this point: I'm pretty sure these two would rather be engaged in a first-person shooter escapade. When it came time to actually pay attention to the process, my feelings of carefree abandon started to attach a lot more weight to the "I-don't-care" end of the Happiness Equation, the other variables for which are slipping my mind*. Minimal effort and focus on entering my name into the system resulted in my inadvertently making a mii named Damp -- which crystallized my attitude about the whole venture, yet paradoxically brought me as much cheer as I anticipate a Wii is ever likely to do. I was further delighted to find, when Andy came back from the toilet, that the mii he'd already created for himself on some previous night, is named Stank! So, it was Damp and Stank, rocking the lanes on league night!

Nbsigns' Secret Blog Arises; Defies Recalcitrant Neglect

I started a blog for the sign shop. I don't imagine I'll update that one any more frequently than I do this one, but whatever -- a bee in the bonnet one day, becomes a blog the next. On that blog, at least, I can hope that, eventually, once I admit it exists, other people at the shop might update it. It might be a good repository of sign shots from day to day, from which the best will be culled for the website. Or so I might imagine. At any rate, I can document my biz-related creative output there, since I don't seem so inclined to do so here.

I set it up on Wordpress. I don't have a clear reason why, other than variety. I got the impression that it's a little less bell 'n' whistley, imperceptibly more refined. At the very least, it's name isn't onomatopoeic of puking. Blat! belongs on Blog-ger -- it's coming out both ends! But New Bohemia posts updates from its "wordpress". It's friggin' professional! Wordpressional! Plus, in the FAQs it said I could import whole blogs from Blogger, should I so desire. I'm sure the reverse is true, but I've already written in excess of my concern for the topic.

So, as a result, I'm thinking maybe a change of tack (or is it tact? Does the phrase originate in ethics, or is it a sailing metaphor?) might be appropriate for this blog; a lowering of sights that might reduce how intimidating it seems to be for me to just tap out a few words and publish. I.e., perhaps I'll just make this more of a diary type thing -- the sort of thing I guess that people typically blog for anyway, right? I mean, I imagine that's what "Livejournal" is. I don't think I know anybody blogging on that -- no, wait: Dave, I think, has a page there... I vaguely recall him posting updates from a trip to Hawaii, or something like that. Oh, see now -- that doesn't bode well. I mean, that's the same sort of thing I was trying to do on the Honeymoon blog: I don't think that was a very studiously updated effort, and it was only 3 weeks...

But see: Livejournal, as I understand, has a reputation for being the home of tortured, depressed adolescents. And I think that might be just who I am, trapped in the broken-down body of a lazy, lower-middle-aged man. Well, anyway, I read Dick Cavett's column about depression, in the Times this past week, and it resonated. Specifically applicable was the coin-op fortune-vendor diagnosis, "Two prime victims of the disease are your libido and your ability to read" (hence, you have the disease). I've had the same three books on my bedside stand for over a year, with minimal desire to finish and no retention of what I've read; and my libido rarely comes up for air from its cozy cave in the briny deep, double entendres be damned -- hence, I have the disease!

I think the cure is to just do things. My two problems with that are (1) I just don't, and (2) if and when I do, I really don't appreciate it much. Somewhere, I've gotten the idea that writing a blog will help with both of these, but the notion has a couple problems of its own: it compounds my resistance to writing with the responsibility to publish; and it diffuses (confuses?) my responsibility to appreciate what I do with the hope that someone else can appreciate it in my stead.

Anyway, now I've got a couple of blogs to both claim and ignore, as befits the occasion. And with them I shall write me either a recipe for psychological disaster, or a roadmap to redemptive wholeness! Or I'll just keep on keeping on, as I have been.

(UPDATE: long about April or May of 2009, Scott, the shop manager, finally discovered, in his interweb meanderings among online occurrences of "nbsigns", the New Bohemia Signs Weblog. Now, everyone at the shop knows about it, too, but since then, not one of us has seen fit to add any postings. Without looking, I think the last post was from about the same time as this one, in July 2008. Anyway, we've done a much, much better job of uploading pictures of our work to a New Bohemia flickr set, which has attracted us some fans and followers, and makes lots more sense as a sign shop web presence, being more visual than verbal).

(UPDATE UPDATE: about a couple months ago, say, June of 2010, I hired a friend, Rani, to help us in "online marketing", and went on a bender of blogging as a result.  So, now there are a lot more posts up over there, but I still haven't been able to convince anyone else in the organization to contribute...  I need to devise some sort of encouragement...)

Niggle Amplitude Exceeding Stagnation Threshold

There comes a point you just can't keep doing nothing.

Fate/circumstance/that-which-blows-past-my-face has in the past week launched a multifaceted attack on my journaling slack. Since I maintain a constant low-level angst about slack, it's hard to say when it began, but I guess it was after I swiped a bunch of material off Jeff's iPod at work -- lotsa stuff, much of which I still haven't and may never listen to. But I'm slowly working my way through it, mostly in the background as I'm out working on location. I grabbed a smorgasbord of stand-up comedy, which makes for a pleasant break from the usual spoken word menu of Fresh Air podcasts, Radio Lab, and This American Life.

Well, but -- speaking of that: there were also included a slew of readings by David Sedaris. And I was listening to Naked last Friday while I painted logos on the side panels of a homeless health services mini-van. He read a story about growing up with OCD symptoms. At some point it reminded me of the story I wrote for an assignment in a class at art school to "describe a ritual". I described the method by which I ate Cheerios every morning. I don't think it was symptomatic of obsession or compulsion; it was just habit, reinforced by repetition every time I ate Cheerios (which, for breakfast, was far more often than not) throughout childhood, up until I left for college and moved in with roommates. Coincidentally, this is the same time in Sedaris' life when his OCD symptoms retreated, although he attributes his relief to starting smoking. My change of habit was just to avoid getting caught being weird. And, of course, the way I was playing with o's in the bowl and on the spoon was nowhere near as weird or 'sick' as the behavior he describes in Naked. Nonetheless, the feedback I got from the teacher about my Cheerios story was that it wasn't "believable". I have to take that as more a comment on my writing style, than on the plausibility of tracing a Union Jack into the cereal bowl, or raising the last spoonful while silently chanting "pyramidpyramidpyramidpyramid..."