blog.artwells.com

My best friend died last week. I’m still unclear on the details of his death. When I visited, it seemed he wasn’t very clear about it himself. He was quite lucid on several occasions and I got some datum points in short stories: One year, one month, one week and one day sober; A 1.75 liter bottle of gin; Waking up in an ambulance at 2 a.m.; A seizure; A morning drink; A sponsor moving out of town; A lost job and a business buy out; A liver and kidney no longer working.

Before he took the nap during which I had to leave, he asked rhetorically “What if I die today?” I could only remind him that had asked himself that question for as long as I’d known him, and that he had come up with some good answers.

Among Brian’s many excellences and virtue, he was the best storyteller I’ve known. The last story he told me was about a woman he watched on flight. At take off she rubbed her face with lotion. She put on dark sunglasses and headphones. She wrapped much of her face in scarves and then sat motionless. She must have made prior arrangements. Brian imagined, because the stewardess left her completely alone until just before strapping for landing. The traveler unwrapped. She took off her sunglasses and headphones. When she got up to leave, she was the picture of vibrant beauty. That’s the only way to fly, Brian said as he buzzed for the nurse.

Through the fog, confusion and crying of the last week, the memory of a bold and beautiful man emerges. He was complicated and troubled, particularly at the end, but through to the end, he remained the Brian Walker I will always know.

I wrote a little plugin for Six Apart to allow their service to be used by wordpress installs. It was announce at the Mid-Atlantic Wordcamp 2009 today and got to be a big deal right away.

It was a great opportunity to contribute to a couple great organizations. I look forward to more.

My son and I worked on the willow hut yesterday. Today I worked on some inherited spaghetti code.

The winter die-off was woven in with new growth. It was difficult to find which part should be snapped off, which brought to the light, which woven back to hold the thing together. I snipped and pulled and made a mess of it. For a while it even lost much of its shape.

Now the ceiling is higher, though the walls are thinner. The door is a bit too tall and the back wall is still too thin, but this summer promises strong growth.

Flora put this above the door down to the basement, where my office is. This pretty much says it all.

We broke even in March financially, and in its first week, April looks good. I’ve got a part-time job with customerforce along with a few new gigs, and some huge possibilities.

After being in such an ill place professionally, I wish it didn’t take global financial strife to get me to a better place, but it seems that it did. Yay!

Added “Create A Decent WordPress them for your own blog” to the todo list.

I recently had a mention in BusinessWeek. Though it certainly wasn’t a This guy is awesome! You should hire him!, it did send quite a bit of traffic to my site.

This made me aware that my website and resume still suck, even though I’ve been leaning on both rather heavily. So here it is: my new home page and resume.

Spread them around!

Lately I’ve been having strong memories, almost re-experiences, of extremely mundane things. I’ll be walking upstairs from the basement and I will be instantly in a cold morning on a second-story deck of an apartment. I’m in a t-shirt and regretting that. I’m smoking the first cigarette from a large can of cigarettes given to me by a student. I’m thinking about doing my ironing.

I’m out for a walk and noticing something in the gutter. I reach for the camera and I can feel the arches of my feet on the front rung of a chair. I’m pulling on the loose thread of a sweatshirt and listening to someone talk about Aquinas. I forgot my pen but have nothing to write anyway.

I’m brushing my teeth after flossing and then runningrunningrunning down a grassy hill. I’ve just decided that I’m not able to stop and the only way to avoid hitting the pavement at the bottom is to fall now–to make myself hit the ground hard and flat–and I’m laughing about that but only briefly.

I turn from the keyboard and there’s the card table at my old apartment. I’m kneading sourdough and it doesn’t stink enough. It probably won’t make a full rise today and I’ll probably be up all night anyway. Tom Waits is singing and I’m crying about that.

Quick bursts that don’t feel like they stop. I’m there. I never left though there’s nothing much to keep me there.

The day before yesterday I finally spent some time redoing nshrine’s twitter bot.

Just like before, all you need is to start a tweet with “@nshrine” and nshrine will light a candle for you and send you back a link to it. You can let other twitter users know when you light a candle for them, just tweet “@nshrine @artwells you are awesome!”. You’ll get a link an I’ll get a link.

There are more options, directing candles to specific open shrines and choosing colors. Take a look: http://nshrine.com/help/twittercandles.html.

I’m tempted to revisit wingmail’s bot, making it two way. There’re so many good ideas to follow.

I just launched my latest facebook application. Working with goopymart, I built a vibing/messaging application highlighting the great goopiness of goopy’s artwork. Three characters are available at first, but more are available the more you use it. Give it a whirl!

vibe-o-mat

For you technical types, this was a great way to ramp up my skills in FBML, FBJS, the facebook API and the Data Store API. Unlike the nshrine facebook app, the simplicity of this application allowed for the exploration of a lot more technology. I strongly recommend it as an exercise.

I made yet another commitment today to being hopeful. I’m finding less and less of my failures have to do with my circumstances and more and more have to do with me. I’m finally becoming convinced from this that much of my successes are not from good fortune alone or even primarily.

Though I have no job, I’ve never worked harder, never done more. I’m taking on projects and making connection. I’m becoming expert in things that only months ago were opaque boundaries.

Will used to be for me an independent force, something that drove towards roads yet to be built trailing hope. Intent, I felt, lead to power. Now it seems that intent belongs to power. We build the roads we want, perhaps first by wanting, but mostly by bending to the path.

After some somewhat urgent dentistry, I walked through a growing storm. Even though I really can’t take pictures when it gets this dark, I ended up taking a lot of pictures. None of them turned out.

Still, a large number of bad photos is appropriate to now. I’ve been trying to imagine myself as so many things lately that I’ve neglected a bit of who I am. My goals need settling before they can be seen.