Sunday, September 30, 2007

Finally getting back to work

I'm so damn busy, I literally need more hours in each day. Finally getting the second drawing started. Not sure where this one is going, but this is the basic image. Hopefully, more will happen once I start putting the paint down. This one is 60x48 on canvas that I stretched and primed myself (more work than you would think!). Time to start slinging paint around. :)



I found some stuff from my senior year of high school. Will have to go through what I have to see if there is anything worth sharing. Will post pics of any interesting images I might find.

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Posted by Erik @ 9/30/2007 08:38:00 PM :: (0) comments

Friday, September 28, 2007

I am not enlightened

I am pissed this morning, so this is going to be a semi-coherent rant, rather than my usual, long-winded diatribe.

Let's get right to it and start with the layoffs our department went through yesterday. Senior management, being the geniuses that they are, decided to eliminate 2 positions within our team of 8 people. One of the associates being expelled is a 64-years old woman who was a cancer within the group. Her personality was such that at one time or another, she had a conflict with every single person in the group save 1. I'm glad to see her going, but here's where the stupid really starts to shine through. She was going to retire in fucking NOVEMBER! She was so happy to be leaving and being paid for the privilege that she was literally dancing in the aisles. What an exhibition of class. Her severance package, which pays 1 week of salary for every year the exiting associate has been with the company between 1-10 years, and 1.5 weeks for every year beyond 10 years of employment, is going to cost the company MORE money than if they had simply waited her out! On top of all that, they let go one of the people on my processing team, a young woman in her mid-20s. She was young and recently married and while she was struggling, she was willing to learn mainframe processing. The same cannot be said for the outgoing senior citizen and another senior (who is also nearing retirement) that was inexplicably spared the axeman's stoke. All of this means more work being done by fewer people and with no plans to replace anyone being laid off, said work will continue indefinitely.

My close friend and direct supervisor's job status is still up in the air, but all indications are that he will remain on staff. If he goes, I will be leaving as well. Honestly, I can't wait to get out of this fucking shithole. The next year cannot go by fast enough for me. I'm sitting here typing this and all I really want to do is walk up to each of my managers, grab them by the collar, and scream, "Fuck you" in each of their sagging, wrinkled faces.

In other news, those of you who chat on your cell phone, put on make-up, or read the paper while driving a motor vehicle are pieces of shit. Get a hands-free device, put your make-up on at home, and read the paper during your break at the office! I drive 3.3 miles, 3.3 fucking miles to work in the morning, and I inevitably see one or all of the above during my trip. I know enough people to know that most (if not all) do not have something so important to talk about that it can't wait until they are done driving. I know enough women to know that most (if not all) can wait to paint on their faces until arriving at work. If you don't think you're beautiful, putting a bunch of clown make-up on isn't going to magically change that. And for fuck's sake, what the fuck could be so interesting in the paper that you have to read the mainstream media's bullshit WHILE YOU DRIVE A FUCKING CAR! I was on the bike this morning and was trying to stop next to this asshole in his Infiniti so that I could give his window a smack, tell him to fold up the business section, and fucking drive. Nothing is more absurd and there is no explanation beyond outright stupidity for reading while driving. How the fuck do you justify that mentally? Such people are total wastes of life. The fact that they are just waiting to take a life makes matters even worse.

So that's what is on my mind this morning. Not very spiritual, not very transcendental, and certainly not very nice. I wanted to type an entire post of expletives and curses, so this is actually the censored version. My spirit may not care about any of this, but my mind is fucking fuming. Hope everyone is having a better day than I am. All of this makes the belief that none of this bullshit really matters all the more concrete for me. I'll get back to transcendence and searching for contentment in this world full of stupid fucking monkeys next time...

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Posted by Erik @ 9/28/2007 08:13:00 AM :: (6) comments

Thursday, September 27, 2007

How I got to here - Part 1

The ball I am currently rolling was set in motion thirteen years ago, when I was a 17 years old malcontent trudging my way through what I perceived to be meaninglessness. At the time, my life was circled around a triumvirate of impotence: anger, insecurity, and fear. I was deeply depressed and detached, my reality more about cessation than potentiality. Suicide was on my mind a great deal of the time, but fear kept any plans I might have had at bay(probably the only time cowardice has worked for me, in the long-term). Instead of killing myself, I started doing my best to kill my options.

If I had to point to a singular, specific event to serve as a summary for where my head was at during that time, I think the day I took my SATs would be the most suitable. I went into the test with absolutely zero interest in succeeding. No preparation, no motivation, and ultimately, no direction. Going to college was not on my list of priorities, and getting into a ‘good’ school meant nothing in my increasingly cloudy thinking. For the first hour or so, I worked studiously through the reading sections. Reading comprehension was always one of my strong points, so I was able to put the car in cruise and breeze my way through the seemingly endless stream of questions. All was going reasonably well, though trouble was on the horizon; I was beginning to get bored.

If I remember correctly, my mind wandered to the point that I started drawing on my scrap paper. This didn’t bode well, since the math section was just ahead and my waning interest, combined with a quiet penchant for self-destructive melodrama, was opening a door for disaster. What happened next seems as pathetic as it does inevitable in hindsight.

I remember having a short break before the math section began. During this break, I recall a feeling of generalized annoyance growing more and more pervasive within me. Looking back, the malaise which I allowed to consume me was already well on its way to derailing my immediate future, so what I did next was no great surprise. When I sat down, calculator and pencil at the ready, I started working through the problems, dragging my way through the first 20 or 30 questions before reaching a tipping point. With total indifference, I began arbitrarily filling in answer bubbles in order of their appearance on the answer sheet, which is to say I began Christmas treeing the math section. What would have taken a couple of hours took me a matter of minutes. I remember being quite satisfied with myself at the time.

With not much else to do, and plenty of time to waste, I did a drawing or two, and waited impatiently for time to be called. I wasn’t driving at the time, so leaving was impossible, which meant that I had to wait for time to expire before I could expect my ride to arrive. Looking back, I can’t believe it never occurred to me that I could be tossing away the next few years of my life, or that I could have picked up my pencil, started erasing, and saved my test score. Nope, I sat there, bored out of my mind, smiling inside at having quietly, passive-aggressively told ‘the Man’ to take his test and shove it up his ass. If I had only known then that the only thing being shoved up anyone’s ass was my head, the day would have certainly gone differently.

I ended up getting a 1070 on the test. Had I been a star athlete or an academic superstar (my GPA was something like 3.5, at the time), that probably would have been enough to get me into one of the larger state schools. As my will would have it, I was not particularly interested in attending any of the state schools, but my self-defeatism had already dismissed any possibility of attending the private, Liberal Arts schools I was truly interested in. The only school I applied to was the University of Florida, who rejected my application for admittance. In all honesty, that’s exactly what I wanted to happen.

The rejection letter landed in the trash before I had finished reading the first paragraph. It was a form letter, so there wasn’t much point in reading any further. The only option I could see was enrolling at St Petersburg Junior College (now St Petersburg College), so I filled out the forms and embarked on a series of gen ed courses which began a listless journey through 3 years of on and off attendance. Along the way, I sacrificed a Florida Academic Scholars scholarship on my altar of disillusionment. In a way, I suppose I was emo before emo was emo and I was determined to make sure I suffered long-term because of it. Ah, those heady days of youth and optimism. :)

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Posted by Erik @ 9/27/2007 10:41:00 AM :: (0) comments

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Creative addicts

The biochemical and psychological causes of addiction have long sparked my curiosity. As someone who doesn't suffer addictive compulsions, it's hard to understand the mental state of someone like Layne Staley or Kurt Cobain, to name two of my favorite, modern rock personalities who were ultimately destroyed by their chemical mistresses. Maybe it’s the allure of the unknown that explains my gravitating toward the creative works of addicted minds. My favorite music artists read like a roll call of chemical dependency, going all the way back to Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Edgar Allen Poe, one of my favorite authors, suffered long running addictions to alcohol and drugs throughout the latter half of his life. Addicted, creative minds exhibit a sort of weakness and fragility that intrigues me. The paradoxical nature of their addictions calls out to me. The same demons they hide from in chemical dependency fuel a creative fire that expresses itself in beautiful works.

Artistic addicts, particularly those addicted to hard drugs, are fascinating because their addictions become the fuel that propels their creative expression, while simultaneously becoming the fire that will ultimately destroy it, often times taking them down in the process. In developing a dependency, they eventually marry the creative process to a consumptive process and thereby doom themselves to an inevitable failing of all processes. What starts as a muse eventually becomes an albatross, and by then it is often too late. Poe had his opium dreams, which inspired his writing. Staley had his heroin-fueled lyrics. While some might wince at me drawing parallels between a mere rock vocalist and a literary luminary like Poe, I think the comparison is fair in that they were both creative souls who lived lives saturated with emotional, and later physical, suffering. The intellectual merit of their work is a subjective judgment and irrelevant to the point I am trying to make.

Art is an expressive act. Inhibitions, fear, pain, unhappiness, intellect, and a million other influences can retard or distract the creative process. Chemicals become a way of stepping outside of that retardation, which can allow the artist to tap into their root inspiration without having to filter as much noise. I see any chemical dependency as a coping mechanism, sometimes necessary, sometimes elective, but always a means of coping with a malady, physical or psychological, real or imagined. Chemicals take the turbulence of physical or psychological pain and still them, bringing still waters to an angry river, if only temporarily. Subsequently, they can be incredibly powerful influences on life's troubled souls.

Speaking specifically of the creative addict, they are typically souls inspired to exorcise the apparitions haunting their mental spaces via words, images, objects, etc. Art becomes a component of their coping, but is often not enough. Like any other addict, the process begins innocently enough. The weekend escape, the eventual dabbling in stronger, different highs. The chemical intake begins freeing them from the mind's imagined limitations, and their work becomes more expressive. What separates the creative addict from other addicts is their ability to take us with them.

When you listen to an Alice in Chains song, you are not hearing about sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. You're hearing the descent of a creative soul into misery and rot. I read a quote that likened Alice in Chains sound, and Layne Staley's lyrics specifically, to "the beauty of decay". And the music is beautiful, just as the decay is obvious. Similarly, Poe's dark lyricism takes the reader on a journey through his inner workings. He was far more poetic in his expressiveness, but his suffering is no less evident. His most famous works are ominous and macabre and at the same time wonderful. His suffering mind did more than wallow idly in misery, it reached out, gave us its hand, and sought to take us on a journey.

The demons that haunt such souls, if left unchallenged, will eventually overcome any means of subduing them. That is the power and the tragedy of the creative addict. They have the means, the motivation, and the muse to take us on a temporary walk in their world. The good ones will move us, or even leave us unsettled, if not outright disturbed. At the same time, they stand as a warning and testament to the dangers in succumbing. The demons they feared and the troubles they muted eventually adapted and overcame them. It was not a question of if, but a matter of when. None of us can run if we're ever going to overcome. Real progress only begins when we finally stop struggling to escape. That’s the most powerful lesson and it transcends the entirety of human experience.





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Posted by Erik @ 9/26/2007 01:42:00 PM :: (0) comments

Monday, September 24, 2007

The endless conundrum

I try very hard to do the right thing. Yes, I am aware that the "right" thing is a subjective concept derived of the individual's personal understanding of what right really means. Yes, I know that always doing the right thing is nearly impossible, as we will all falter at one point or another. Failure is an inherent part of the human condition, after all. But generally, I feel that I succeed in living my version of right, though I am not always certain 'living right' necessarily makes me a more valuable, or more whole person.

Things get complicated when I start exploring the motivations behind my actions. Generally speaking, I do the right thing because I believe it to be the right thing and because I believe living right within is a necessary part of having real worth in the world without. On its face, that probably seems to be pretty clean and dry, but it's not. The problems start when I begin to explore the truths of those actions. Do I do the right thing because what's right is at the core of my conscious, or do I do the right thing simply because I recognize that doing the right thing is better than doing the wrong? What I mean by that is, does my desire for righteousness come from my head or my heart. My only honest answer is that I am not sure.

My mind is sure of what it perceives as living right, to the point that right has become a sort of destination which I am always arriving at, while simultaneously perpetually driving toward; it is definite and clear and I am faithful in where the road is headed. Experience tells me that there is no reason to worry or question, but it is my heart and its direction that raises concerns. My heart, and by heart I mean my ‘gut’ or dandien, recognizes what is essentially right and welcomes it unconditionally, but the welcoming is something of a remorseful, melancholy affair. The ideas I believe to be the core principles of righteousness are basic and ancient, and as such, they are diluted in an increasingly complex and modern world. The core principles still apply, and always will, but with more people on this Earth than ever before, the core principles are being interpreted on a mind-by-mind basis more often than they ever have. As a result, the core principles are under assault from more and more directions all the time.

So my heart is dogged by questions surrounding the value of ‘right acts’. By right acts, I mean things like volunteering, giving to charity, small acts of kindness, and that sort of thing. It seems silly to question the worth of such actions, but in a world where it seems so futile, I think questions are natural, if not certain. Worries that living right may be nothing more than polishing brass on the Titanic plague my heart’s commitment. I have little faith in my species, or at least very little faith that we will ever have a world which is harmonious and balanced. Is my heart in it? That is far less certain. If my heart isn’t in it, and I do not believe any difference will be made, is the act of right just that, an act? Am I pretending for my own self-satisfaction, and not because I genuinely care? These are all legitimate questions for which I do not have concrete answers.

In my experience, there is more ugliness and malignancy in our species, than beauty and kindness. Acts of genuine care and consideration are rare enough to be exceptions proving a rule, while only the most heinous acts of ugliness are singled out from a steady drone of black noise that seems to be forever with us. We save a few thousand lives, and thousands more die in a war. Millions die hideously in wars and genocides, while we save a few thousand refugees from ovens or machetes. We live in a country where food is so plentiful that obesity is a plague, yet some still suffer malnutrition, or even starvation. The duplicity of Man, and the selfishness that drives it, make our species’ general worth questionable. I can glance at a newspaper, or have a five minute conversation, and learn of ill being done in the world. Conversely, I have to go digging, searching, and sifting to find the good.

That reality weighs on my sub-conscious, as much as it constantly presses against my conscious processes as well. With so many people doing so many shitting things, and with some of those being so heinous, can we create acts of goodness that will match these acts of wickedness in scale and magnitude? How do you remove the stain of evil put upon our species by things like the holocaust, or the mass killings brought about by the use of nuclear weapons to close the last great war? How do you hold out hope for a species capable of such things?

And I know that I am not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, person to chase their tail with these questions. Unfortunately, understanding does not make the chase’s cessation any easier. There is goodness out there, of that I am certain, but its quantity and quality, and its subsequent power, are highly debatable. There is no giving up or giving in, but the only alternative is pushing forward in the knowledge that all your personal efforts may end up being for naught. We do get a bit of a reprieve in the form of hope, but then hope can be as much a source of stress as it can be a release.

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Posted by Erik @ 9/24/2007 11:25:00 AM :: (7) comments

Sunday, September 23, 2007

A couple of quotes I crossed paths with in the wee hours

"Of all the creatures, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he's the one that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." - Mark Twain

How do you argue with that? Ties in nicely with another quote I came across from Jane Goodhall: "We have a choice to use the gift of our lives to make the world a better place - or not to bother."

How many people do you know are not even bothering? I think Mark Twain had a point, though I'm feeling a bit down on the majority of our species in general, so I'm predisposed to agreeing with such sentiments. ;)

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Posted by Erik @ 9/23/2007 02:25:00 AM :: (0) comments

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Day 3 1/2

Well, I touched the canvas for about five minutes last night, decided I was in a shit mood for working, then got back in gear this morning. The result is below and while I am not wholly pleased, I'm not outright disappointed. I'm calling it done, though there's more I'd like to do. With the tools I have at hand, and the purpose of the course, there's no good in getting some fine brushes and setting to work on details and intricacies.

I could unfurl a ribbon of pretentious BS about why I chose the colors, how they relate to each other on the canvas, and what I was trying to express, but that's not why I make art and that's certainly not what this particular image is supposed to be about. If you don't get it what I was thinking, I didn't express it well enough with my images. If you get 'it', or your 'it' is something other than my 'it', at least 'it' is in there somewhere, and I will color myself satisfied. :)

The next image is already in the works within the confines of my cerebellum. It will be bigger and more focused than this...which should bring it more in line with the tools I am being required to use, which should in turn make creating the image a less frustrating experience. I've included a picture of my prescribed brushes, to give you an idea of what I'm dealing with. The quarter is for size reference.





Yes, he's serious about the big, black 'brush' which looks more like a tool for dusting hard to reach crevices and corners. I intend to use all of these brushes at least once. We'll see how that goes!

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Now playing: Alice In Chains - Would
via FoxyTunes

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Posted by Erik @ 9/22/2007 05:11:00 PM :: (0) comments

Passin' Me By



Stumbling across this vid brought back some memories. When The Pharcyde first popped onto the hip-hop scene, it was 1992 and I was 15. At the time, mainstream hip-hop was under attack from the 'bitches and guns' sound coming out of California. With the New York rebirth still in its infancy and the South still repped by acts like 2Live Crew, the West was where it was at, and The Pharcyde was an interesting alternative to the Dr Dre/Snoop Dogg uprising. They rapped about ordinary subjects and did it in a playful, free form way. At the time, it was a refreshing change of pace, given how formulaic West coast hip=hop was becoming after Dr. Dre's The Chronic went multiplatinum.

In 1992 Passin' Me By may as well have been the opening theme song for my life. I was highly dysfunctional at the time. Shy, timid, and insecure were all accurate ways to describe my behavior, particularly around girls. My morals/values were more or less set in place by then, and I was fairly certain most of my peers were full of shit, but I lacked the courage to stand alone and truly do my own thing. So I faded into the background when social situations arose. Generally, my life was about playing basketball, drawing, and neurotically picking myself apart, which wasn't truly that far outside of ordinary, but without any sense of perspective, it felt like being on an island. All of this lead to a sort of intellectual and verbal paralysis around girls I was interested in. Again, without any knowledgebase to draw on, I didn't realize how widespread such feelings were amongst my peers.

My insecurities lead to inevitable certainties, such as belieaving that any girl who sparked my interest was inherently superior to me in some way, shape, or form. After all, they were almost universally higher than I in the social order, so there was no reason to believe that they would want to talk to someone on the fringes. I had little or no testicular fortitude; fear ruled my social interactions. More often than not, fear of rejection became self-assured notions that rejection was inevitable, so any thoughts I might have had of actually asking one of these girls out on a date (gasp!) were derailed before they had a chance to become little more than whispers in my mind. Compounding the problem was a phobia of driving that plagued me into my late teens. How that happened I'll never know, and how I got to the point of attending racing schools and riding motorcycles (and eventually partaking in a motorcycle racing school) is a story for another day.

It's such a shame that it took so long for me to realize I was not alone, and that such fears were founded purely in my own internal mythology. Looking back and thinking about the girls who intimidated me then, I realize how foolish it all was. At best, they were just decent, average females, and at worst, they were the type that lived their lives as village bicycles. The point is, there was nothing to be afraid of or intimidated by, but I knew so little about the world at that age, and I had so little guidance on the subject, the realization escaped me. So the girls, all of them, ended up passin' me by without ever having been presented with an alternative.

I'm tempted to feel remorse or regret, but there really isn't any need. While it would have been nice to have a girlfriend or two during my high school years, not having one allowed me time to start exploring other components of life. It was around that time that I first started nibbling on different spiritual and moral philosophies. I began taking art a bit more seriously, primarily because I knew drawing classes would equate to easy A's, thereby saving my high school GPA. I developed a disconnect with society that allowed me to stand back and watch their interactions, and my lack of social obligations gave me the time to consider what it all meant, which allowed me the chance to refine my ideas of who I wanted to be. By the time I graduated high school, I was fairly confident of who I was, if not yet confident around women. I hadn't settled into my own skin, but I had begun the process by developing enough self-awareness to stand on my own against the constant onslaught of conformist energy.

Passin' Me By summed up the way in which I related to women at the time, and continues to do so today, though in a very different context. Now I am content to let women pass me by, as the years between have altered my perceptions and understanding. Once in a great while I will come across someone that brings on those old feelings of inadequacy, but such sensations are almost totally unheard of these days. I've grown more and more comfortable with myself and much more aware of how humans work in the more common reality. It is OK that I am not what most women are looking for, because most women are not what I am looking for. In that way, turnabout has become fair play, so to speak, and a balance has been struck in my understanding. As we mature, we all realize that there is nothing special about most of our fellow humans. They are merely people, with a myriad of talents, abilities, flaws and failings, just as we are. Some will be rich, some will be poor, some will fire our neurological synapses in a way that forces us to stand up and take notice, while most will not. Such is the Way and such is life.

These days, it is more accurate to say that I am willfully letting the world pass me by. It would be inaccurate to say that I lament watching the steady stream of humanity moving perpetually by my niche in the larger fabric of existence. Given the current state of the social order and its divergence from where I want to be as a being, there's really no reason to hold on.

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Now playing: Tool - Right in Two
via FoxyTunes

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Posted by Erik @ 9/22/2007 02:02:00 PM :: (0) comments

Friday, September 21, 2007

Low on fuel

I'm burnt out on writing…had an 11-page mid-term last week, a several page long 'learning log' for the same class, the brain dumps I've posted here, and a few sizeable entries that I chose not to put up. So, I couldn't muster up much beyond what's below. Enjoy...or not. I've been listening to so much Alice in Chains lately, I'm starting to echo Layne Staley's hopeless apathy. ;)

An event in calligraphy
life writ in ink arid and vacuous
intellectual prostitute alley-fucked
for money, for pride, for fame
usual suspects in a line
ready for the proposition -
anything to defile the space
between Heaven and Earth,
between fire and hearth,
between truth and disguise.

We float again on constellation's wing
up, up, and away to cinder sun
smoldering low and infirm,
a celestial ode to the times
counting black grains through glass -
the beast devours youthful innocence
once bright-eyed now blind
to hope and aspiration,
to strength and inspiration,
to love and despise.

Their eager mouths to feed
suckling lust's tattered wounds
through rotten rows enamel -
poisoned mother's milk -
to grow, to multiply, to overwhelm
world-weary walls and
absentee spine dispositions
afeard honor and honesty,
afeard self-respect and modesty,
afeard life-living and demise.

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Posted by Erik @ 9/21/2007 01:18:00 PM :: (0) comments

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Playing with paint

Day 2 with the "drawing" which is going to end up looking very much like a sloppy painting, since I am limited with how much detail/drawing I can do. The brushes I am being forced to use large brushes. The fact that they are bristle and not sable makes a huge difference as well, so keep all of that in mind when judging progress. The whole point of this course is to free up my style and get more expressive, so I'm being forced to use broad brushes and a limited color palette, which means I have to mix my own secondary colors. So far, it's been fun. I'm guessing this took an half hour to put down, as the vinyl was sucking the paint dry before I could really work into it, so you end up loading the brush repeatedly. Hopefully, I will have an interesting image when it's all said and done. Fun so far. :)

Unfortunately, the colors are not as vivid as they appear here. The relatively low-res camera and its overenthusiastic flash are really bringing up the hues, which is nice, but not entirely accurate.

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Posted by Erik @ 9/19/2007 10:38:00 PM :: (2) comments

Monday, September 17, 2007

A wise man once said that love is life's most powerful illusion

I think I may have written about all of this before, but couldn't find anything via search, so I'm writing it again. At some point I'll have to go and see how often I've repeated myself here, as I'm sure much of what I'm writing about will prove to be reruns. There is only so much I can think through and express in written words, after all. Add to that the mind's repetitive, cyclical operating processes and you've got a recipe for repeats. That said, I felt the need to put something down, so here we go…

The original Buddha is said to have argued that life's most dangerous illusion is love. Buddhism as it is practiced seeks to still the mind, so that the spirit might know reality as it is, without the input of internal dialog, or the filter of cognitive thought process. As I've written about before, we do not know Reality, but only our own version of it. In this way, our minds write their own version of the world that is unique to each of us. Love, as Gautama perceived it, is the most dangerous threat to our understanding of reality. When love is in play, our reality becomes a wholly subjective experience. We become convinced that our love is the only love that matters, and that the people we love are of intrinsically higher value than others around us. Even a destructive love will often find itself being perpetuated by the people involved, to their mutual detriment. As an experience, love cannot be defined specifically, and each person's perception of it varies, sometimes wildly.

Buddha would argue that this is definitive proof of love's illusory nature. The argument is that we need to dispel these individualistic illusions in favor of a more honest understanding of our shared truth. If an emotion or perception is not universally understood, it is not a piece of the universal truth our spirits inherently seek and is therefore a subjective conjuration of the mind. A Buddhist seeks to free his spirit from the rotating wheel of reincarnation. To do so, he or she must work their way toward spiritual absolution and purity of understanding as they travel from one life to the next. Obviously, subjective experiences and knowledge are not conducive to the development of total clarity. This state of pure, clear existence is what Buddhists refer to as Nirvana. Spirits who are worthy of Nirvana, but choose to remain in their physical forms as teachers are known as Boddhisatva. Buddha was a Hindu Brahman who became the first Boddhisatva.

To get a basic idea of the original Buddha's travels through life, give Herman Hesse's Siddhartha a read. Wikipedia gives a fair summation of Buddhist principles that is consistent with what I have learned about the faith through the years. Barring a more detailed history, the point of sharing all this is that Buddha is said to have known lust, love, and a myriad of other human emotions and experiences during his time on Earth. After all, Buddha was only ever 'just' a man. Before finding his way to Nirvana during a meditation under one of Nepal's Bodhi trees, he was a son of royalty and unencumbered with want of material things. He knew opulence and comfort, but abandoned it all in the name of his yearning for enlightenment.

He noted that love, and our want of it, was the most massive of all the psychological forces working against our perceptive purification. Love clouds the mind with distraction and creates an incredibly powerful connection to others. Therein lies one of the greatest problems with love as a source of spiritual freedom. Buddhists commune with their spirits by bringing the mind into balance with the body's second center of consciousness, known as dantien (or dandien, depending on who's doing the spelling). This second center of awareness serves as a conduit through which the spirit's truth finds its way into our waking life. I've talked about it here before, I'm sure of it. This second center serves as our intuitive core and works to balance the emotional and cognitive creativity of the mind.

There is said to be a thin line between love and hate, due to the powerful, often unstable, nature of love as it is actually lived. Like the rest of our individualistic realities, love is a manifestation of our physical understanding. The concept of love is tied to the senses and sensuality, all of which can conspire to distract us from the absolute truth of our spiritual existence. After all, the spirit is an eternal energy, so what use has it for the concerns of a mind and body that my last only a few decades of measured time? What is 60, 70, or 80 years on a scale reaching out toward infinity?

Love has its own gravity, its own monolithic presence, even in its absence. People in love, or who believe themselves to be in love, are capable of doing just about anything for one another. Their lives become increasingly insulated to the world outside of their love, and more focused on the world within it. The perceptions of those in love are inherently skewed by this insular focus, so the chances of seeing reality in its absolute purest state is lessened, or eliminated altogether.

Yet, knowing all of this (and seeing the sense in it), I am still compelled to know what it is like to love and be loved at least once in this life. Maybe it is simply a byproduct of my incessant curiosity or simply the allure of the unknown. Whatever it is, it remains one of my mind's many occupants, despite the fact that I understand this thing called love could very well derail my journey and leave me broken. Such is the risk associated with all things of substance in life, but with that great risk comes a chance for wondrous returns.

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Now playing: Alice in Chains - Would?
via FoxyTunes

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Posted by Erik @ 9/17/2007 10:44:00 PM :: (2) comments

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Making art

I think I am going to make an effort to blog the creation of this latest drawing as I go, because that seems to be what many artists do. The subject matter is more loose and the final image is not completed in my mind, just yet, hence the lack of imagery on the canvas. The medium will be acrylic paint (this is a partial sketch in pastel used for layout purposes) and the canvas is a piece of 48x30 vinyl. Dad and I built the frame and stretched the vinyl ourselves. For a first effort, I have to admit we were pretty pleased.


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Now playing: Mad Season - River Of Deceit
via FoxyTunes

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Posted by Erik @ 9/16/2007 02:12:00 PM :: (1) comments

Friday, September 14, 2007

Celibacy ain't easy

Celibacy ain't easy. Voluntary or not, religiously motivated or forced by a lack of opportunity, celibacy can be incredibly difficult to deal with. At times, it is downright nightmarish, as you are forced to float on the ebb and flow of hormonal tides that at times make thinking about anything except sex incredibly difficult. As animals, we are not biochemically programmed for such willful acts of self-denial. By making the choice, or having the choice made for us, we are taking the body out of alignment with the mind. Some would argue that such imbalances are wholly unnecessary, even unhealthy, and would prescribe a regimen of casual sex without reservation. Their position makes sense on a basal, primitive level. In a time and place when there is plenty, it makes no sense to starve. I see things differently, and not just because of some higher moral standard I like to envision myself striving toward.

Succumbing to the physical drive is part of the "I want that, I'll take that" response we see everywhere in nature; animals, children, and plenty of poorly developed adults exhibit the behavior. Honestly, the argument that denying this drive is wholly unnatural makes a great deal of sense to me. It is unnatural to withhold physical pleasure from ourselves, particularly when denying the basal urge in the name of some form of higher understanding or awareness. This is what the body wants, why isn't it what the body should get? Much of our so-called culture has embraced this ideology, but there is a reason that most of our culture is not singing merrily in the streets, praising the bliss of primal existence. The human mind and the human spirit seek more than simple pleasures. Emotionless fucking is enough simply not enough to satiate the mind's hunger for love and the soul's desire for ascension.

Replace sex with any other form of pleasure stimulation and you get the same results. Intoxication, adrenaline highs, body modification, etc and so on, eventually they all fail to bring us lasting, pervasive happiness. Gratification of the body is incapable of sustaining a sense of contentment and well being, because the body is a physical mechanism built around stimulus and response. It is not sentient in and of itself. Our bodies are vehicles in which truly precious cargo is carried. Where the matter that makes up our physical selves is 'dumb' material, the mind is something much more wondrous and complex. The mind is electric and mysterious, in many ways it is a uniquely unfamiliar experience we have every day of our lives. Our mind serves as a literal gap between the formless energy of the spirit and the solid physicality of the body. Our minds are infinitely more powerful, and far less limited, than the case in which it resides. Where the body is subject to the rules of physics, the mind is capable of breaking nearly all bonds put upon it, yet it still is subject to a finite, physical existence. We can consciously imagine infinity, but our minds will not ever know it and this is where our spirits rise to create a balance. On one side, the body, with its temporary reality and all its weaknesses. On the other, our spirits, which are formless and indestructible. Where the body fails, the spirit accels. When the body ends, the spirit continues on unabated. One is nothing more than matter, while the other is boundless energy.

What does all of this have to do with celibacy? It's complicated, for me anyway. Let me make something clear, I most certainly do not, and never have, wanted to be celibate. Entering into that state of being is a byproduct of not being in a relationship, not an expression of religious devotion or moral purification. There is nothing wrong with sex, so long as it is an intimate, multi-faceted thing. I do not engage in casual sex because I do not believe it has any real value in my big picture idea of transcendence. Life is not cheap, my soul is not cheap, my ideals are not cheap, therefore sex is not cheap. I am incapable of separating the act from the feeling of caring deeply for someone, and I refuse to learn how one creates that separation. Putting the body before the mind and spirit is an error at any time in a life, but particularly when sharing your body with someone else.

Man is an intellectualized animal capable of understanding higher concepts like love, honor, respect, dignity, and self-discipline. Giving in to the yearning is akin to surrendering up any want of those ideals for something that may only last minutes. When the endorphin rush settles, and the sweat has dried, we are left alone with our self, as we were before, but diminished for having taken something potentially beautiful and cheapening it for a few moments of pleasure. Eventually, after enough psychological chipping away, all that's left is cheap solitude to comfort the mind and stir the spirit.

So I remain involuntarily, willfully celibate, with the understanding that most people would see such a thing as a foolish waste of time. In a Wal-Mart world, putting value on anything seems almost absurd, but I have always had a soft spoke for absurdity. Or maybe all of that is just an overstated way to explain away the why behind my not getting laid. I'll let you be the judge. :)

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Now playing: Alice In Chains - Over Now
via FoxyTunes

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Posted by Erik @ 9/14/2007 03:46:00 PM :: (0) comments

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Would mother approve?

Sticking to actions that garner mom's seal of approval isn't nearly as limiting as it used to be. We've mainstreamed just about everything, to the point that some girls openly aspire to be porn stars. A significant number of young mothers can't possibly look their kids in the eye and say something like "don't do anything I wouldn't do" with a straight face. What would that entail exactly? No ass-to-mouth? No triple penetration?

Kids of tomorrow are going to have to really push the bounds of acceptable behavior if they are going to properly shock their parents. When I was in middle school, blowjobs were nearly unheard of amongst my circle of pasty, pudgy peers. By the time I graduated high school, sodomy and girlfriend-swapping were part and parcel for some of my friends. The best thing these kids can do as parents is lie to their offspring, because the "don't do what I did" thing doesn't work nearly as well as people like to imagine. We need only look to baby boomers and their 'do as I say, not as I did' strategy for curbing chemical abuse. It certainly didn't slow the drug explosion during the 1980s.

What will kids do to shock and shame their parents in the decades to come? The options are becoming fewer and fewer every day, as the internet is continuously updated with an escalating array of sexual depravities. I picture a teenage girl having an intimate conversation with her mom, detailing her sexual experiences as a sort of half-confession, half-rebellion.

Young Suzy, resentful of the comfortable, quiet, suburban life her parents have provided, seeks to stir things up by having a heart-to-heart with mom about her sexual escapades. At 19, she's a grizzled veteran of the adolescent sex scene. With a tangible sense of anticipation not unlike that experienced by a toddler the night before Christmas, Suzy begins to unleash increasingly vivid descriptions of sex acts that she is certain will shock her poor, hapless mother into a fit of botox-fueled hysteria. She starts slowly, setting the stage for an array of increasingly taboo experiences. Quickly the momentum builds and soon Suzy is literally rattling off stories like an auctioneer at Christie's. Tales of sodomy, threesomes, double penetration, random sex in bathroom stalls, white dragons, bukkake parties, salad tossing, ass-to-mouth, mouth-to-ass, experiments in lesbianism, bisexuality, and on and on. Each detail literally frothing from her frantic maw like foam at the bottom of a waterfall. Finally, after she's puked up the entire contents of her memory and talked herself horse, she looks into her mother's eyes expecting to see shock, dismay, or even horror etched across her surgically enhanced cheeks and lips. Instead, she sees little more than mild concern and, could it be, pride(!).

"Well I hope you're using protection Suzy. In my day, we always used protection. And if you love your father, you won't ever tell him about any of that stuff. Get it out of your system and find a nice boy to marry, but marry for money Suzy, marry for money."

Suzy's mom returns to lazily munching her 100% organic, whole wheat bagel while sipping a triple mocha mucho grande latte. She changes the subject to homework and carries on as if she hadn't heard a thing. Suzy is dumbfounded and finds herself unable to finish her cucumber, bean sprout sandwich with all natural, fat free dressing. She falls silent, staring blank-faced into her half-empty plate, while her mother begins going on about the possibilities of a family trip in the Fall and how badly she needs a pedicure.

Tomorrow's teens will have to go to great lengths in order to surpass the exploratory endeavors of their parents. To this end, I can only imagine we will see a significant increase in sexual encounters involving bodily fluids, bowel movements, BDSM, and fetishism. Hell, BDSM is already so mainstream as to be passe, or even cliché in the modern sexual landscape. Case in point: Larry Wachowski, one of the famous Wachowski brothers (The Matrix Trilogy, V for Vendetta) divorced his wife to be with his favorite dominatrix, "Ilsa Trix" (writing from memory here, but her 'business' name was something similar to that). Subsequently, 'Ilsa' left her transsexual husband to be with Larry. Larry has since become Lana, following a sex change operation of his own. Perfectly healthy, perfectly normal I say.

In a world with that sort of thing going on, how do you shock anyone? Future generations are going to have to push the boundaries far and wide to find something that will truly blow their parents' hair back. It's going to get harder and harder to find something mom doesn't approve of or hasn't tried at one point in time, which means it is going to become increasingly difficult to rebel against oppressive restrictions like "if you're going to drink, you'll drink here at home where we can keep an eye on you" and "you're 14, it's about time to start taking birth control". Obviously, we are headed toward a golden age of sexual and intellectual enlightenment, just as our wisened forebears predicted. I can't wait!

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Posted by Erik @ 9/11/2007 02:07:00 PM :: (4) comments

Sunday, September 09, 2007

There are times when...

fear assails my mind, sending black lightning down the neural network that is my consciousness, my electrical existence, and in many ways, the warden keeping my spirit tethered to the confines of my limited intellectual capabilities. It comes in the deepest hours of the night, when I am alone in bed with only the drone of a fan and the dimly illuminated ceiling to occupy my thoughts. In those moments before sleep brings its fragile reprieve, fear slips in on the back of other thoughts, a trojan virus implanting itself at the forefront of my awareness. Thoughts of distant tomorrows, family, the immediate future, the perpetually empty pillow beside me; all can be conduits for fear to make its way into the maze.

Once it is there, it is incessant. Background noise of mild concern becomes a rolling symphony of worry and I realize that I am in for a long night. When the crescendo begins to change, I have already crossed the Line of Demarcation between settled sleep, and disquieted insomnia. Sleep is such a luxury, losing it to troubled thoughts, and restless questions is a total tragedy. The suffering is magnified by the magnitude of the subject matter, which is usually my duplicitous relationship with solitude. A literal living of solitary existence is impossible in this place without turning one's back on life altogether, but the sense that one is alone in the crowd can be a very real and powerful thing. It empowers, with the proper perspective, as it gives you access to a different position from which to consider society, but it also hinders, in that it constantly threatens to unleash loneliness' beast upon those who embrace it. Nothing is without a cost.

And that is the way it should be. I accept solitude, as it sets me free in more ways than it entangles, but occasionally I fall into those tangles and find myself staring into the darkness of a room I know better than any other place on this Earth. That is when the darkness sends its inky black electricity firing through my brain and solitude becomes a hole in the ground, rather than the sky above it. Once I am in that hole, the questions become imps in my ears, rather than curiosities floating through the air around me. Loneliness, and its related worries, begin pecking at the edges of resolve, even as they start to quietly sing the virtues of acquiescence.

It all becomes so melodramatic, but I remind myself that our hopes and dreams are undermined by such concessions. No beautiful life, big or small, long or short, has ever been lived under the thumb of conformity. Giving up on a dream is the spiritual equivalent of self-mutilation. Giving in to the ugliness that is forever with us only serves to blind us to the beauty that accompanies it. We lose Yin when we stare too deeply into yang, and eventually our vision is distorted beyond repair. What could have been a beautiful life becomes ugly. What was once light becomes heavy, and we bend beneath its pressure until what's left of us is little more than a groveling, broken version of what we could have been.

Our sleep is stolen by unprotected spaces at the joints of our armor, this is where the fears work their way through, like parasites through the skin of our well being. They serve as a reminder that more often than not, we are our own greatest trials. Even when we have found our way, and we are sure of it, a part of us will have to bring everything into question, if for no other reason than to purify our understanding. In this way, fear checks our true intentions. Perhaps this is how we know whether or not we are living true to ourselves. I'm not sure, and I doubt that I ever will be. I know that after decades of questioning, I am still holding fast to a dream, so that brings a certain reassurance, but the potential for such dreams to not ever become realities cannot be ignored, so the fear of not ever having them actualized cannot be cast aside. I carry on in faith, blind to every new moment, just like everyone else, hoping that these dreams do not end up being time wasted.


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Now playing: Okkervil River - For Real
via FoxyTunes

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Posted by Erik @ 9/09/2007 05:54:00 PM :: (5) comments

Saturday, September 08, 2007

It's come to this

People are angry and hurt after Apple discounted the iPhone's retail price by $200. This AP article discusses Apple's plan to offer a $100 rebate to existing owners who paid the original MSRP of $600 to have Apple's latest gadget. Apparently, not everyone who jumped on the iPhone trend train are happy about the price cut, and they let Steve Jobs know about it. Hearing their pain and empathizing, Jobs backed away from his original "tough luck" stance and sought to make peace by offering the $100 discount to existing users. What a magnanimous gesture by Mr. Jobs.

Now, I've always found the "first on the block" thing to be a bit silly. It means nothing, and is of no real significance, short of being able to strut and prance in front of the few people you know who will pay enough attention to your possessions to generate genuine envy. If your sense of self-worth and esteem is rooted in owning a particular gadget or good before anyone else you know, your life is probably sorely lacking in some very fundamental ways. But then, trendiness is all about belonging or being included, so I suppose it's no surprise that it holds such power with the proletariat, who seem more desperate for a sense of belonging all the time.

I ask, why bother belonging? Why bother going out of your way to find your place within a group? People are frivolous and trends change direction more often than the wind, so any acceptance gained is temporary, at best. Buying into trends or obsessing about being an early adopter creates a situation where we are constantly chasing what's new in order to maintain some imagined sense of superiority. In yet one more way, we become hamsters in wheels. The whole thing is asinine, and it allows companies like Apple or Microsoft or Sony to make unreasonable margins on their products, particularly in the first few months of release. Apple is still making money on iPhones selling for $400, but they knew a price point of $600 was doable, and gadget hungry early adopters proved them right, then got resentful about it.

The irony is, some will be more upset because they are no longer part of an elite minority of owners. Soon, thousands of proles will have iPhones as well and the techno-elite will have to find the next exclusive gadget to set them apart from the hapless masses. What they don't realize is that you can't buy special. You can't purchase uniqueness. The things we own should be expressions, not definitions, of who we are. But then, how many people do you know walk around with truly unique visions?

No matter what I own, or what I achieve in this life, I will not ever be anything more, or anything less, than a middle class kid from a Tampa suburb hardly anyone has ever heard of. There is no point in the "hey look at me, I've got this shiny new thing and you don't" mentality, because the few people my shiny new thing would impress are very likely as insignificant as I am. Should I one day stumble upon the cure for cancer or a means of harnessing unlimited energy or bring about world peace, we might have something to talk about. No whiz-bang new toy is going to change my status in the social hierarchy, only my deeds can do that. If my sense of self-worth were dependent on the material goods at my disposal, I would be in some serious trouble.

The idea is propagated everywhere from religion (Buddhism, Taoism, Judeo-Christian faiths, etc) to pop culture (Tyler Durdan's anti-materialism rants in Fight Club), but a large number of people have not, and will not, ever get it. Or maybe these people really do have nothing more to offer, making the accumulation of material things necessary for their esteem. Either way, I just thought the whole thing was ridiculous and felt compelled to rant about it. Otherwise, it was a good weekend. Got some riding in, even test rode a 2008 H-D Street Glide, which was surprisingly nice. I'm halfway through my Organizational Studies mid-term, prepping for my painting and drawing classes to start, and enjoying the gorgeous big, blue sky. Hope y'all are doing the same.

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Posted by Erik @ 9/08/2007 09:27:00 AM :: (0) comments

Thursday, September 06, 2007

That thing which bends time

I have been drawing in some capacity since childhood. It was always something I did, but rarely the focus of any concerted effort on my part. My time was spent playing football and basketball, riding bikes and burning time just hanging around. Art was there, it was an interest, but not the interest. Even now, I would say art's potential as a means of expressing myself is more interesting to me than art in and of itself, if that makes any sense. It would be fair to say that I am not a student of art for art's sake. My knowledge of art and art history are fairly limited. By most standards, I am fairly ignorant where art is concerned. But my ignorance is inconsequential to me, as I am not interested in being an historian or an afficionado. I am aware of and admire the masters for their technical prowess, sense and style, or their scale, but I could not walk into a museum and lead a tour or give a dissertation on any given period or movement. In fact, I probably know just slightly more than any other 'layperson'.

And I'm fine with that. Obviously, I will have to learn some of those names and attain a better understanding of art's evolution through history to be an effective instructor, but history is only as valuable as its application in the present. In the case of art, artists become preoccupied with being new or making a name for themselves as the next big thing. I think of modern art and its historical significance seems highly dubious. Where is the passion of Michelangelo or the inquisitive power of Da Vinci? Where is the introspective, existential energy? It is being spent in pursuit of different, edgy, or some other adjective. As it is in society, so it is in art, the superficial and even the banal win out over substance. Art's greatest power is in its work as social commentary and as a chronicle of the day's sociology. I suppose modern art functions well in this capacity.

The conscious awareness of my love for the creative process came relatively late for me, but I can remember a time when creating art, drawing specifically, used to consume most of my spare time as a matter of course. I did not recognize it at the time, but I was most certainly in love with the act of picture making. During a break from class this evening, I had a conversation with the prof and a couple of other students about passion and its role in life, particularly in careers. At some point, I was reminded of a day in my youth when drawing literally consumed an entire day without me ever being aware of time's passing. What I was drawing is lost to me now, but I do remember laying down in front of a blank sketchbook page and beginning to draw.

It was probably sometime in the late morning when I started, maybe 10 or 11am. As I said, I can't remember the subject matter, or even if I liked the work, but I do remember losing a significant part of the day to graphite and paper. My mind was completely unaware of time. Hours may well have been minutes and I wouldn't have known the difference. By the time I came back to reality the outside world was dark and the house was full of artificial light. I remember feeling vaguely disoriented, but not particularly aware of what had just happened. In sacrificing most of a day to what I considered a pastime then, I set the stage for where I am today. I had no idea at the time, but I had already been fully engaged in my passion for years by that time. Where I would rather be playing football or basketball, my heart was elsewhere. Maybe that made it easier to quit football tryouts in my Freshman year of high school or to refuse a tryout with the East Lake basketball team. Or maybe I was not ever good enough at those things to have had a chance to make either team. At this point, it is irrelevant, as I had already found the thing that allowed me to break free of time's prison.

Given the finite nature of our breath and bodies, what more can any of us ask for?

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Now playing: Janis Joplin - Summertime
via FoxyTunes

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Posted by Erik @ 9/06/2007 10:41:00 PM :: (0) comments

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

As promised, a couple of pics and a bonus...some thoughts

First, the good part:




Now, the thoughts.

Respectability...it is an interesting word to me. I was talking to a girl from the gym about relationships(with all that is going on in the world, THIS topic seems to be all people truly want to talk about). In between my disruptive tangents and exaggerated outbursts of weary cynicism, we mused on the facades most people adorn in order to face the world. None of us are immune, but all of us are capable of transcending our costumes. While I have tried very hard to discard any mask I might be wearing, the very act of saying such a thing convinces some people that I am, in fact, putting on another form of facade. And at times in my life, I certainly have. We all do when we are young, doing so is a classical survival mechanism in adolescence. We shade over the fact that we know diddly-shit about Life with a veil of bravado, or in my case, antisocial, passive aggressive behaviors.

Most of us eventually outgrow, or just grow tired of, youth's sociological dysfunctions. Eventually we come to understand that nearly everyone we have ever known is in some way hiding something (and that wetoo have been hiding things). In that moment, we are free to actively change directions and redefine ourselves, or carry on with our private games of hide-and-seek. Whereas we were previously headed in an undesirable direction, we can now deconstruct our Self, examine the pieces, and discard, replace, or refresh the parts as we see fit. In that moment, we are free to be reborn. After all, very few of us get ourselves right from the start. We make concessions, move toward conformity, suffer hardships, and otherwise falter.

Rarely does a human find their sacred path on the first time into the sun.

We inevitably meander off course, or are pushed astray by life circumstances. How far and how long we are lost ultimately determines our integrity. How willingly we lose our way and remain off the path ultimately says more about our worth than a million words ever will. Our truth is defined by the divide between our words and our actions. When what we say is what we are, chances are good that we are at least living honesty, which makes for a good first step in getting ourselves headed in the right direction.

There's more floating around in my brain on this, but I have either written it out before, or cannot put it into a coherent format. Maybe some other time...

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Now playing: Nirvana - D-7
via FoxyTunes

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Posted by Erik @ 9/05/2007 10:15:00 PM :: (1) comments

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

My first attempt at painting hair

I'm only sharing because I share so little artwork on this page, and I'm fairly happy with the results, given that this is a first attempt. I'm guessing the time involved was a little over two hours, though I did not do everything in one sitting. The medium is Photoshop and the tool was my trusty Wacom 12x12. This is my first attempt at painting hair in a semi-realistic fashion, ever, so I wanted to document it for history. Hopefully, I will have made some serious progress in a year or two. :) There are some substantial problems and obviously, things are not complete, but I'm done with this particular learning exercise.

I'll try to post more as I create more, though my finished work will go to my DeviantArt account, to make things easier to keep organized. Let me know what you think (and be as brutally honest as you feel is necessary...my feelings won't be hurt).

Click the image for a larger view.

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Posted by Erik @ 9/04/2007 08:12:00 PM :: (2) comments

Life by the lake

My brother, his bride, and The Twins were in town this weekend to meet their new nephew (the SIL's sister recently gave birth to her third boy), but we were also taking the opportunity to get together and catch up, since I hadn’t seen Scott in months, and the girls in nearly as long, so I drove South to a town just outside of Lake Placid for a little fam time. Lake Placid, Florida, not to be confused with Lake Placid, New York, is one in a series of lakes in Southern/Central Florida situated a few miles North of Sebring. Surrounding Lake Placid are a group of smaller lakes, including, Lake Henry, Lake June, and Lake Carrie, among others. Lake Carrie is a small "satellite" to June, and is now host to a vacation home belonging to the SIL's parents.

The last time I saw Ava and Evelyn, Evelyn was getting up on all-fours, but failing in her efforts to generate forward motion, while Ava was still figuring out the mechanics of raising herself up on her hands and knees at the same time. A couple of months on and Evelyn is a full-on crawler. She's still working out the kinks in her technique, but her brand of babydom has gone mobile. She is even pulling herself up into a standing position, sometimes with gravity verifying results. Ava is still working out the mechanics of crawling, but has become fairly adept at rolling or military crawling (elbows only) short distances to get where/what she wants.

To say these girls are cute would be like saying that Mother Teresa was nice. They smile, coo, and gesture with their hands, often times in active response to what is going on around them. Evelyn will sit and clap, her near toothless(more on this in a second) smile spreading ear to ear. Ava will watch you intently, a huge smile across her face, and a baby laugh on her lips. I'm not at all ashamed to say that these two babies are the cutest things I have ever seen! Even when Ava’s flatulence is ringing in the air, her cuteness is undiminished. Evelyn’s smile would melt the hardest of hearts…the power of such cuteness cannot be denied!

Of course, things are not always cheesy baby smiles and goofy people faces. The first night we gathered, I arrived at the babies’ bed time, and just after Evelyn had projectile vomited all over her flight weary mother. At the same time, the SIL’s new nephew was screaming bloody murder, as he’s suffering through a bout of colic. The sound of infant cries came on like a wave as the front door of the extended family’s house swept opened. Sunday night we were all at the Lake Carrie house when Evelyn’s eye teeth began their journey through her gums, which meant lots of crying and little sleep for mom and dad. Scott and Laura spent most of the night trying various methods of calming her, none of which seemed to work. She would eventually fall asleep. At times like those, but I am convinced that parenthood is for the brave, the crazy, or the masochistic.

Aside from those few glitches, things went really well. Evelyn loves having the wind through her hair on a boat, and Ava was comfortable enough to nap, despite the noise and some jostling from crossing other boats’ wakes. The sun was out, the water was cool, and we did not have any run-ins with people or wildlife. The babies had a great time, though they did leave mom and dad a little worse for wear. Everyone flies home today, but the immediate family and I are heading up to the bluegrass state for Thanksgiving, so it won’t be long before we get to see the little munchkins again. I fully expect them both to be walking by then, which will be amazing to see. I’ll post some pics from this past weekend after the SIL has some time to recover and get them online.

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Posted by Erik @ 9/04/2007 09:40:00 AM :: (0) comments

Saturday, September 01, 2007

If stupid hurts...

...shouldn't this girl be writhing in agony, rather than feigned ecstasy?



...shouldn't this guy be in the hospital, rather than doing wheelies (down a city street)?


View this on LiveDigital

...shouldn't we all be hurting right now?

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Posted by Erik @ 9/01/2007 01:45:00 AM :: (2) comments