Author: artwells

often wrong

Cut The Page

I was listening to the audio book The Greatest Show on Earth on my walk. Dawkins mentions the somewhat familiar fact that Darwin had a copy of Mendel’s theories in his library, but it’s pages remained uncut. If Darwin had read those pages, Dawkins speculates, the history of biology would have changed greatly.

The opposite theme is so much more common. What if some artist hadn’t met another in a cafe? What if he had been on that plane that crashed? What if I hadn’t gone that way on my walk? It’s almost refreshing to know that Darwin was a knife stroke and an idle afternoon away from great progress. The world missed a profound innovation that day he troubled over a letter to a cousin and napped.

I hear these things and see a torn up ad under a bush. I don’t have free time, but I’m in a period of far less structure and pressure, and a whole world of opportunity. I will miss the greatest opportunities, and the least. I just hope that I cut that damned page.

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The End of The Road. Runner.

Post author By artwells
Post date November 21, 2009
5 Comments on The End of The Road. Runner.

I woke up in the middle of the night with this story in my head. This makes me think that my mind is just echoing something, like something I read in SPY magazine, or saw on Saturday Night Live at any rate, it’s stuck in my head, like a tv jingle or a march. Here it is:

Coyote finally realizes he’ll never catch Bird. He stops running entirely and subsists on boiled cactus and flies. Life feels simple, pleasing and he starts noticing the beauty and charm of everyday things he used to run by. This last about three days.

The Road Runner still runs past him every once in a while, slower, closer. He’s not taunting any more. It seems like he’s concerned, like the bird is afraid that Coyote is broken. Coyote felt broken one day.

One day Coyote realizes that the was certain of two things: That hunting Bird was his life and that hunting Bird was over. He decides it’s time to end his life. But how?

He jumps off of cliffs. He drops boulders on himself. He even puts his head in a cannon. This time, though, he survives with an even greater sense of urgency and defeat. He pursues an ending more than Bird. He stops sleeping to plan the next days attempt.

As he’s preparing to throw himself under a truck while wearing a backpack of explosives and nails, he feels someone watching him. He turns to see Bird. This is closer than he’s ever seen him. He’s never seen Bird’s eyes before. He’s never seen Bird stretch out his wings towards him. He’s never seen anyone reach towards him.

Coyote pauses for a moment, only a frame, before lunging. Bird’s neck snaps easily and suddenly. His legs are stringy from a life of running. Though his eyes were too salty, his heart is hot and tender.

The feast lasts all day and Coyote naps several times during it. He is comically bloated with a grin bigger than his face. At last he knows what victory feels like and tasted like. He feels fuller and fuller. The vomiting starts at sundown.

By the next sundown he knows he won’t make it to the cave, nor to the morning. A second, now unwelcomed, victory comes for him. The Bird was poison to him. He keeps thinking of the last beep he heard from it. It was as close to the word ‘No’ he ever heard from the Bird, but not a ‘no’ of fear, or defeat, but of concern.

Bird had known he was poison to Coyote and spent his life protecting Coyote from this death. He has wasted, and then destroyed, his life chasing the only thing that could kill him, and the only thing that ever cared for him. Coyote also realizes that he can’t lift his head from the road.

The rest were headlights and then a surrounding darkness, a familiar song and a final brilliant logo.

business professional

Without A Plan

It’s been a year since I’ve been traditionally employed. Right when I everyone was saying that the worst thing you could do is to quit your job and try to start a business, that’s what I did.

After ten years building up a multi-million dollar website from the ground up, I was confronted with “reorganization”. My employer was forcing nearly everyone with more than a few years experience out. I was given a job way outside my skill set (Windows desktop/server support) and my compensation was slashed. After several weeks of abrasions, sleepless nights, and watching the leadership drill more holes to let the bilge drain, I took the opportunity to go freelance, swimming away from the wreck with no land in sight.

A year later, sleep is welcomed (though I may be too busy to sleep at time). My income has increased to the point that I’ve recovered from the time I spent building business. I no longer bring home the frustrations of watching destruction. I no longer have to fight to do work well. This has been amazing good fortune, though I’m willing to take a lot of credit.

I’m still surprised that the world seems filled with positive, nearly enchanted, people doing good work and investing passion in whatever needs to be done. That my work can be respected so readily, and that quality is valued all around. I never knew what kind of hole I had sunk into. I’m frightened that had my employer not taken that dive, I would have never floated off. I’d still be there, head down, hoping for things to be better this year.

I kept looking for a plan to leave, years ago even when things started going bad. I kept hoping I could find an easy transition that would protect against all the foreseeable dangers. I never knew I wouldn’t need that, at all.

creativity divination streetfinds walking

Decision Shoes

I was trying to get past a difficult decision that would direct my career and could mean serious risk/success. I saw these.

I see a lot of old shoes. I see a lot of old shoes with their laces tied together. They are usually hanging on power/phone lines. There were a lof of power lines here, as can be seen in the background. But the shoes were on the ground.

I started thinking about laces tied together, and how that could limit reach and pace and balance. I thought about how someone probably flung these up, attempting a high step, and failed even here where there were so many power lines. Then they gave up, or were chased off. The old shoes were left in failure. Among too many goals even a simple achievement fails.

A lot of homeless/car campers hang out around here, and the shoes weren’t that bad. I imagined someone who could use them finding them and putting a few more miles on them. The attempted vandalism takes part of a new path.

There’s also the alleged meaning that shoes-on-a-wire may take on that has become meaningless by the frequency of the phenomenon. Tired steps become a tired semaphore.

This substation, or whatever it is, became an alternate context for the symbol. Trying to step high near the transfer of power failed.

Walking by the failure to step over the wire, I had dozens of new approaches to my contemplation. It was the best oracle I’ve found in years and it changed my life by changing my thinking.

I’ve made the decision with a confidence I don’t think I would have had otherwise. I did so not because I’d seen the future, or peered into an arcane perspective, but because my thinking was so suddenly and rapidly expanded past the troubled perplexity I had had a moment before.

This is why I look down.

creativity professional programming writing

Inspiration All Around

I’m attending Wordcamp Portland and am surrounded by sparks of inspiration. The buzz and the tools and the cause are filling my mind with flashing todo items and means to do them.

First on my list is to blog more of course. When this entry is two months old and I haven’t added anything, I’ll feel horrible, but for now, dammit, I want to start writing more. Also, I need to return to the several plug-ins I’ve written, and release them into the wild. At least one of them contains some methods and techniques and fulfills the purpose of the gallery presentation here, and then some and it’s a shame I’ve kept it to myself and unfinished.

Tags wcpdx, wordpress

divination interpretation personal streetfinds walking

Fear Rusted

I saw this while walking through some worries. I have to choose between some good choices. Instead of comparing the various virtues and qualities of the choices, I was compulsively weighing risks, using long passed and irrelevant injuries as measure. Everything was incommensurable and awkward. I started feeling more and more inconfident, almost certain that I would choose the wrong path. I became lost. I saw this.

The reflex to cling to fear and apprehension outlasts not just the injuries, but the fear as well. I gave the barrier a nudge with my foot and kept walking.

interpretation people

Stupid People

I don’t know if it’s a media trend, or a cultural shift, but I seem to be exposed to more of the richness of human stupidity. I don’t mean the general ‘stupid mistakes everyone makes’ stupidity, or the ‘can’t understand it and don’t care’ stupidity. I mean the ‘screaming in your face and calling you wrong about something about which I have no clue’ stupidity.

Opposition to science, misunderstanding agreed upon premises, simple ignorance of simple logic fueled by a head full of hate and loud voice seem to get more play in our culture than cautious doubt or educational exploration. It’s nothing new or unique. Professional wrestling has outsold sport wrestling for decades. Now it’s the same for our news.

But what’s wrong with me is that I call this stupid. I scream that it’s stupid. I point a finger. I get mad. I raise my voice about it.

We can all think of examples of classes of people who were considered inherently stupid. Nobody bothered to educate them — in some cases it becomes illegal to do so. We all applaud those few examples of people who overcome this and become the person who was supposed to be stupid but became known as smart. The applause isn’t just because they became smart. It’s because they not only had to fight the stupidity we all have to fight within ourselves. They had to fight others’ as well.

I’m not saying I’m gonna stop getting all loudly cranky about stupid people. I’m not even planning to stop. But if I were a better person I would.

Nobody ever got smart by being called stupid.

bereavement business family

Working On

It’s been almost two month’s since Brian died. Though I certainly can’t say I’ll ever be over it, I no longer feel that hurt shock when I think of him and remember that he died. I’ll keep a shrine to him. I’ll remember something about our time together every day. I’ll cope well.

I had a brief period where I wasn’t working, much. I got to work on some fun things–my sister’s site, configuring a laptop juuust so, backup strategies. The weight of not working when I should be making money was a bit much. How will we pay for a new roof for the garage? A kitchen window? A new phone?

The “wait” part of “hurry up and wait” is over now, and I’m likely swamped until a planned vacation stops my work. I can be grateful that we got to the beach and I got to relax.

bereavement personal

Brian Walker

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.

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Six Apart, Typepad, WordPress and me

Post author By artwells
Post date May 16, 2009
No Comments on Six Apart, Typepad, WordPress and me

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.