What Stops Me

With a title like that, this ought to be some long deep examination of the essence of Me and what blocks Me from gaining Enlightenment and Joy ... but it's not. Not yet. In truth I'm at work and just postponed completing a required online corporate training during which I decided "mutagenicity" was my new favorite word of the moment, and I thought of the long weekend a-coming and all the things there are to do, and decided to do this, sight unseen, thought unthinked.

Bunches a people had great input on my noodles re females unknown etc. It all boils down, at this minute if not necessarily many others, to: Why don't I fucking RELAX already and quit thinking about life as anything but what it is, i.e. good stuff coming my way in its own time. I worry too much about shit that doesn't matter, shit that hasn't happened, shit that might not.

So. Okay. The long weekend. Connection?

I get this text. Let's go to Paris! My initial reaction is, uh. Wut?

But airfares are only x and so help me I look up Airbnb and find neat stuff. Money? Well, there's a little, 'cause my dad died, but I don't really think of it as mine. Still, I'm intrigued.

No! Forget Paris. Amsterdam Light Festival! Same basic idea but this puts the motivation a little more into view. It's about getting out into the world and seeing great big art. Art that's big and art that's great. Art that's inspiring to those who would create big art, or art anyway, big or small. Especially with lights, omigod. Lights being played by the teeny ubiquitous microcontrollers that are behind so much art these days. I so wanna play with that shit. I started dreaming of using light as art when I first got a tech job in 1981. Way back when I saw how people were able to clock data out of a memory device to drive some dumb thing, and by dumb I mean non-interactive, just doing what it's told, i.e. whatever pattern is in memory, e.g. an LED light display for say a rock concert. This was when the stupid little microcontrollers from National Semi were, along with their development systems, way beyond affordability not to mention my comprehension. But encoding a light display in a memory device looked simple enough.

Yes, 1981, when I was 23, the year I learned to solder, I was thinking of that shit. Did I do anything about it? No. What stopped me?

Something related that stops me going to Amsterdam. So then there's a conversation. Some artist did a thing down at Joshua Tree. Let's go see! I'm like, okay! After all, Paris? Amsterdam? Uh. But Southern California? No prob! Easy! It's all in the timing, see, of when it's brought up. And anyway the thing looks cool and I want to see and get all inspired 'n shit.

Side note: I've noticed that whenever a certain type of Burning Man person sees art like this or some cool new vehicle concept (e.g. the motorized unicycle) they go, Oh, I can hardly wait to see this on the playa! Well, fuck that. This isn't about Burning Man. For some people the Burn is their only exposure to creative oddities and so they naturally want to put them all there. But, uh uh. BMan is not a total collection. It's just a subset. Of global art and creativity, it is nothing but a subset. It is not The Thing Itself, no.

Anyway. Traveling to SoCal is easy. But Europe? Even for a few days, the woman's kids left at home blah blah, that part of me that descends from my grandparents' experience with the Depression followed by the post-war boom and all it's frugal money-saving goes, Ha, no, not a chance, what little dough I have is for my kids, and their kids, and on down the line. For what? I dunno. Buying a house. Investing. Accruing value. For what? I dunno, buying a-- Wait, I said that. What about life? Experience? Inspiration to do things that might in turn take me to Paris on somebody else's dime? What stops me?

One of the best things I ever did was spend three weeks in Mexico with my friend Roger in 1984. He talked me into using student loan money to pay for it. Well? He understood finances. No interest until graduation. Slam dunk. So we did, and never mind that in later years my wife was thoroughly down on how I did such an irresponsible thing, especially when she was writing the checks to pay off my student loan, it was a great experience, and we did a lot of things, and I learned some very valuable stuff about myself.

* * *

And then I stopped writing and did my job and had an evening and here it is past bedtime with nothing that needs doing but either read or write or go to sleep, and I look into that and realize ... I haven't a word. Not one. I can write this crap. I can research electric motor selection for an EV I want to design and build. But tell a story?

What stops me?