These Days

What am I thinking of these days?

The temporary job that I like but that will end in the middle of winter. I will then hope that I had been networking and learning and talking and studying and doing all those things you do if you want to continue to have fun in an industry that can be very fun provided you work hard enough and network with sufficient focus. I'm kind of not doing either, because ...

History, lots of history. There's something about the details of The Way Things Were that never stop fascinating me. I have stories burgeoning in my head and brief little snippets of plot and character notes sprouting in my little space of Cloud. Random example, one of the brewers and hoteliers of mid-1850s Sacramento was an unpleasant German man of military bearing who also had the distinction of being the one survivor of the Donner Party who was accused of murder, i.e. deliberately killing someone for her somewhat edible flesh. Everyone believes him guilty, of course, but like O.J. Simpson he was able to slither out from under the gavel. But I'm not writing because ...

Home improvement, lots of home improvement. I'm not big on fixing up houses for their own sake but I am big on having a calm and functional living space, and the one I bought is under constant evolution as its population and usages are under constant evolution as well. It's not that I'm trying to keep up so much as that I have a vision that enables all desirable activity and that vision is a long ways from fruition. My time isn't often all that available for it and besides I have an awful lot of stuff because ...

Storage unit, office, attic, and garage full of things and things and things! My parents and grandparents kept a lot of things, perhaps because their antecedents weren't able to and sentiment became a well-valued luxury after the mid 1930s. I'm guessing on the motivation but there's no guessing on the results, which are that I have a) a lot of stuff that's too just plain interesting to get rid of and too much trouble to sell and b) I carried the mind-set over into my own life and have a lot of my very own crap as well, taking up room, and even more room, not least because ...

Art, public art, found-object art, art projects, art commissions, the fact remains that sometimes the darnedest objects become central components of some really interesting and creative work and this fact makes for even more reason beyond the afore-described genetic ones to keep stuff and find places to put it. Here I take a breath.

A breath.

And there's more. Much more. But it's almost five, and I'd really like to finish this work thing I'm doing before I go home (or to whatever's next).