Put Cher Post Title Here

I'm in a stage of boringness now. Bear with me. Or don't. Either way, I have to scribble about things. Want to, anyway.

Boringness, meaning I've a few obsessions at this time, a few things taking up my time, and there isn't enough of it. What are they?

Job search. I haven't really started in a serious way. I do not want to leave the company but there are no internal jobs for my specialty at this time. I can do other things. This would be a good time to go do other things. But to do them, I need to establish some trust with a manager who would hire me to do things not in my specialty, things I haven't a lot of depth in. This means network and talk to people and sell myself up for having education and flexibility enough to be a good risk despite a lack of hard experience. I'm having a hard time cranking myself up for this.

House. It's a big pile of stuff to do. Forty nine years old and showing it. But more importantly, home to a collection of people numbering between seven and ten, none of whom have a healthy obsession with cleaning. Plus I've still got piles and piles of Things I'm strangely stopped on getting rid of. Hard to explain. Guess I hate throwing things out.

Example. I have a couple cable modems considered obsolete by my current provider. I put them in a CL ad. Got zero interest. So they should go to e-waste, right? Hold on. They've got interesting circuit boards and whatnot in them. Grist for some kind of found-object three-dimensional art piece. Thus I shall keep them. Indeed I brought home a bunch of boards that I had designed and are now useless, more clutter that Could Be Art but so far isn't.

You may wonder what kind of Art I'm talking about. Well, the installation above included some dead circuit boards. You can almost see them. They weren't very interesting. But I aspire, see. I aspire.

The weekend was spent at an arts festival. Sunya had a large-ish installation. I helped construct it but the vision was all hers. It was held in a small valley in the Mother Lode, surrounded by steep tree-covered hills and full of twenty- and thirty-something neo-hippies practicing acroyoga and mindfulness and fire spinning and some unbelievably terrible music (e.g. trap). It was pretty awesome, actually. A novel could be written about it. But my point is just that off-grid art installations are real. Much sleep is lost making them. I haven't figured out the point yet as something that will make sense to the skeptical reader of blogs, but it's a thing, and I find myself saving stuff because of it.

Writing. No, really. But, news flash: Writing is hard. What I'm really doing is reading an awesomely obscure book I found at B&N. It was put out by the Sacramento Historical Library or some such entity. It's a slim tome detailing the history of saloons in Sacramento between 1848 and 1861. It is by far the most enjoyable thing I'm likely to write about here. Seriously. I'm a man of eclectic interests. But a main thrust of the interest is in the material it provides. I read it and my brain continually shoots off scenes and half-vignettes that may or may not relate to a novel I have in mind. The hard part -- the really, really hard part -- is somehow converting that mental energy into collections of sentences. It's a trick I haven't yet mastered.

I wrote of three things. That'll do. It has been nice out here typing at poolside in the no-longer-hot summer evening air. I had company: Three teenage boys and an artist type who's visiting this week. The bricks are strewn with art stuff -- coils of aluminum wire, paint cans, beer bottles, shoes. You know. The pool itself, which is not large, is mirror-smooth. Background noise is a stereo contention of the neighbor's A/C unit and the freeway.