Frequency and rules stay the same (daily, 4’33” - though that timing may increase, TBD – sketch featuring myself and nuHerbie in some form of single-panel adventure) but it’s time to move away from stealing Lynda Barry’s name and re-embrace The Informalities, my favorite series title of anything I’ve created. And so it is / shall be / etc etc.
For the past two days, an incessant bang/clang. Pretty sure it's construction on the bridge a little ways down the highway, but can't be sure.
Speaking of construction: Shortened day as I'm also neck-deep in transforming The Paintshop into the pool table room / workout room / Collection haven and have bookshelves to build. Going with two wall-mounted shelves per unit, around the top of the room. Need to save up every bit of space I can find to ensure proper cue-table distance for shooting pool. Once the shelves are up, might have a better idea of what else I need to do with the space.
As for here, I'm in the process of figuring out the best way to have this digital space represent me where I am now, creatively and authentically, without losing that something something about it that makes me want to consistently evolve it so that it remains an omnipresent part of my life.
Need to go buy lumber. And mozzarella for salad. And a new coffee grinder. Fucking burr grinder died on me at 0500 this morning.
First day of school (childless; small humans arrive next Wednesday) for K. Meetings and meetings and meetings and more meetings.
Keep wanting to do more text things here, but nothing coming to me, except this. With the impending workspace move to NuSanctum, my mornings will look a bit different – slower, for one – so maybe I can figure out a way to incorporate something not dissimilar to this in that space. Of course, the other end of that spectrum is as if not more appealing: a switch entirely over to a single page with the day's Attendance Card and have that be it and all, my 4’33” version of a FAR SIDE desk calendar.
On that: I might've reached a point with the internet where I have the least interest in being online since party line days and three channels. Not sure why, other than it bores me – just another pointless routine. Need to make it a wild and different place, eliminate habits of old, find a new way (pretty much the same thing I've been doing for the last year).
Maybe a single Attendance Card is the way to go? Or maybe with this out of my system, I can clear the decks for something different?
A desire to shake things up here though I don't know which things will be shaken. Considered multiple avenues, including simply a homepage featuring a single Attendance Card and occasional edits to the Currently page – though suppose I always could go with the Currently page as the homepage, since it would combine both...
Unsure if this desire is indicative of a switch to more inner processing or a genuine boredom with being online (as I've become generally bored with the internet which is both a reflection of me and of the internet's current state) or something else; I have, I suppose, been doing this blogging thing for a minute or two – but it is, nonethless, a form I've loved and continue to love: along with email newsletters, it's the warhorse of the internet age.
Note: most likely change / shake shake will be no shake / change at all – but I can’t deny that the desire is there.
Apologies for the morning’s disappearing and reappearing posts: I fucked up the dates and my OCD wouldn’t allow me to leave them alone. All good. It’s 04 April. Did you know that? I clearly didn’t.
Trying out a new way to log Inputs - especially movies and books - something less involved than writing small pieces about them, but still useful for both of us. Simple star system, *****+ / ***** being the soul-shaking best, *- / ***** the shitheap worst (though I doubt I’d stick with anything lower than a **) in the title field, poster / cover underneath. Simple, simple - and, if I want to write more, I can write individual pieces when the mood strikes (or write them in the newsletter).
Didn't plan on spending much of this first morning chunk re-doing my reading page into a full-on log of each year's inputs (movies, books, comics, games), but here I am. Blame Cassavetes: SHADOWS was so brilliant I wanted to write more about it than SixWords – but in a different format from my previous postscripts; in other words, needed to separate the words from the log. Think I've found the best way to do it: yearly list which moves to archive (which is just reading until next year) at the start of the next. SHADOWS thing coming in a bit.
In my more morose moments, I wonder why I bother posting here - or, hell, even why I continue to write; in my more lucid ones, I can tell you that, having given up the ambition of ever having a "writing career" and leaving behind the attendant trappings that either bored me or drove me insane (read: the performative cesspit of social media), I feel more free than ever to follow and process my interests and curiosities wherever they may lead and share the results of that processing - or, sometimes, the process of that processing, weeds and all - in this, my tiny little patch of internet garden. This is my home.
A desire, over the coming weeks and months, to bring more of a texty-thinking-out-loud thing back to this space. Journal and half-baked notions – not so much an issue of figuring out what to say, but how to present it here in a way that strikes a balance between (adding another) routine-based posting and the whenever/whatevers that have populated this hermitage for the past few years. Also, a balance between what I keep in my private journals and what I put in this public one: if my exit from social media taught me anything, it's that I hate repeating myself; I want to avoid that in this relationship between public and private.
At the same time, striking that balance is tricky: I've got the start of the day covered with Attendance Cards and, while I've considered tinkering with a single daily post throughout the day again, the writer that I am when I start the post isn't the writer I am by the end of the day: every minute brings new experience and new rhythms – and my efforts to do Codas at the end of each day inevitably fall victim to my utter exhaustion.
But I'll get there. Considering this posting to be my kick in the ass to get me there. It was nice just writing this.
Been a month since I left social media and I don't miss it at all. I take that back: I miss some of the digital people, certainly, and their work – but I don't miss the rest of it, that perpetual feeling of repeating myself (that was the biggest one, especially over the last year), of fragmenting myself, of all the other assorted fuckeries that came along in the 15 years I was “present” on any one of a variety of networks.
No, I'm happy here (and with the newsletter), with doing my own things, with exploring other options for life (especially once The Emptying is complete, which should be today), and with carving out my own little existence and identity here in this new whatever it is. And so I go, on and on.