Apparently, I’m back to not writing again. It is odd how the times that grab me with something to say aren’t when I have time to address the affliction. Possibly it’s lucky for me that I can put it away and not recall it in the times where there’s space to fill. Like now, I should be off to bed, and I could be. But I’m here composing because I thought of this on the way to my room and returned to the computer after it was put to sleep. And it isn’t flowing. And maybe that’s what I worry about most. Writing is hard, at least for me. I find it to be very rewarding, when it goes well. Which isn’t often.

I worry a lot about what I’m writing. I don’t want it to be trite, or (too) melancholy, or just tinged with the reflection of better days gone by. I listen to what others have written for tv and roll my eyes quite often. And I don’t want to be the source for such awful tropes and stilted dialogue. But there’s bad, and bad, I guess. I’m not sure I really have anything to say* that hasn’t been said, and in better ways.

I’ve been watching the commentary on the Firefly tv episodes on DVD. I don’t often pay attention to DVD extras. I think it was “The Lord of the Rings” that did me in. I put the commentary on for a lark when I watched “The Avengers” once after about a dozen times. I really enjoyed it because Joss Whedon gave a lot of what I considered valuable, educational information, not just anecdotes. (Although that was quality also)

After “The Avengers” I was really hungry for more Whedon commentary and found that the “Serenity” commentary did not fail to satisfy. I (virtually) ran out and obtained a copy of “Cabin in the Woods”, which turned out to be a movie I could get behind despite it being of a genre that I usually avoid. Unfortunately I got a copy without commentary there. So I started in on Firefly, and was somewhat disappointed that not all episodes have commentary, but it’s been fairly educational. In all the commentary I’ve found out two basic things. First: some of the dialog they thought was awful turned out surprisingly nice in the way it was delivered by the actors (despite the problems the actors have with wishing they’d delivered it differently). And Second: sometimes expediency dictates the path you have to travel for the overall narrative, even if you don’t like exactly how you get there.

That second one seems like a little of a cop-out, but the example Joss gave was the killing of the alien mothership in “The Avengers” and having all the aliens still in Manhattan falling dead. He didn’t really like it, but needed to get past the ‘mopping up’ phase to resolve the movie in a timely manner. I remember at the time I saw the movie in the theater I knew what was coming and was a little disappointed in that resolution, but I got over it pretty quick.

It is hard to believe, though, that the real groaner dialogue from some of these b-grade tv shows that I’ve been hearing is due solely to the actors portraying their characters woodenly, and the directors letting them get away with it. I have, on occasion, taken some dialogue I really like out of context and just said it plainly in my mind, and it does sound like some of the crap I write, so maybe there is something to that.

Following that train of thought leads me back to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and the issues of Quality that drove Robert Pirsig around the bend, which is where I sit now, stuck in a Gumption Trap with just about anything I’ve been trying to do lately. One of the things I think I learned from Zen and the Art was that to get out of the trap you just start by doing little things. Cleaning up the shop was one of his examples. By putting the tools away and making order it kind of gives you the kick to overcome the inertia in starting a project. I’ve been trying that the last couple weeks in the studio trying to get some momentum to do the things I need to do to get pottery going. Possibly it’s little things like this that will help me to get writing again, which I feel some inexplicable compulsion to be doing, even though I don’t know that I have anything to say. Apparently, I’m not going to find a muse with attitude and a knife to my throat.

* I think I’ve mentioned Lorites before

if [[ $i =~ .*%.* ]] && [[ ${i/\%/} -gt “$crit” ]]
then
echo “Critical: $previous is $i used $timestamp”
exit 2

So, I’m banging my head against a coding problem this morning and I slog on through to the end, it’s a fancy piece of fluff that doesn’t amount to more than 20 lines, but it does what is needed, and yet in the back of my mind I can hear across the ages… Doris Jensen is yelling, “Are you with me?!” from back in high school, telling me I shouldn’t be jumping out of the program at that juncture. The code works, and it’s just a bit of a hack anyway. But I can see the way to finish the code. It just takes storing the result and letting the conditionals finish. And I’ll have to set up an upper limit test for the warning, but I can see it, and it will only take a couple minutes.

The whole thing kind of glows in a golden light, the GOOD CODE. I know it’s right there and can knock it out real fast, but what I’ve got works and won’t fail, but it’s just kind of kludged together. It’s not glowing in the golden light. Maybe it’s glowing a bit in some sort of black light. It’s proud that it will fail critically first, and then warn next because of jumping out of the loop you don’t need an upper boundary for the warning, but you can kind of still see the mustard stain.

In my mind Mrs. Jensen yells again.

At least it’s not obfuscated for the sake of preserving my job. I had a mandate, once, a long time ago to follow some coding rules I didn’t agree with which required rewriting functions with aliases which referenced other functions which were aliases… And, it’s true, I did get laid off from another job because my scripts made me superfluous once others learned how they worked.

But I have learned to look critically at bowls and put them back on the wheel to take that last 1/16th of an inch off the bottom to make it feel lighter, and I cut a new board if I take a little too much off the one I just cut. I wondered for awhile if it’s just because computer nerds are supposed to be lazy, and there’s something gratifying about ‘getting away with it’.

Or maybe it’s that there’s not actual physical material involved. Nobody is ever going to see this code, and I’m not kidding here. It’s a bit of monitoring that may be scrapped for a better system in a few years. I’ve written code for a bank that some friends say may still be in existence fifteen years later. I bet nobody ever looked at the code.

But if they did, they’d see some fine haiku documentation.

I’m sitting here in disbelief, slack jawed and boggling. Nicholas Cage’s rant about The Beatles White Album from the movie “The Rock” is poking around the borders of my consciousness. I’m trying in vain to rationalize this experience away, but this cassette sounds so good! Last week sometime I saw a story about Robert Smith of The Cure playing an acoustic set in Spain during a glitch with the instruments on stage. There were three songs he played, none of which I remember particularly fondly, but they were good and it was very classy how he smoothed over the interruption with something personal. It reminded me that when I switched over from cassettes to CD’s that I only managed to repurchase (don’t get me started on that) a couple of the albums. My favorite tape from the Cure was “Faith”, which was the first to make it to the technologically advanced collection, but the first album that made me a fan was “Standing on a Beach – the Singles”. I don’t think I’ve actually listened to that album in literally 20 years. Thinking about it I hurried online and picked up a used copy for $.01 plus a couple bucks shipping. Unfortunately, the CD is called “Staring at the Sea: the Singles”, and doesn’t include the B-Sides that are on the cassette. It does have a couple bonus songs, but I think it was the missing songs that really got me.

I joked that I needed to dig up a cassette player and try to rip my old cassettes that have been boxed up and sitting in the basement for 10 years. It was really a joke. Really. But I couldn’t shake the thought. I’ve got so much on my plate I don’t have time for a silly diversion. Yet, somehow, here I am at 11:30 headphones plugged in to a partially broken and completely dusty boom box listening to The Cure. And I’m blown away. Maybe it is just that I’m tweaking neurons that are dustier than the stereo and cassettes combined and it’s sparking some additional serotonin, but the technologically ancient, magnetic coated tape sounds so much better than anything I’ve heard in years. But it can’t be, can it? Not that I’m any sort of luddite, or even an audiophile snob, but there’s something to this experience that is more than I’ve been getting from my usual listening habits. For several years I’ve been pondering how I used to buy an album every payday and head home to plug in and just stare at the walls while the music took me away. I’d written it off as something unique to youth or inexperience, and that maturity changed things. But maybe I was wrong, because as I sit here, right now, trying to write as I listen to this tape, with the fire rekindled between my ears, I’m finding it hard to complete a sentence as I keep drifting off. My eyes glaze and I’m carried away with that feeling from my youth.

Sorry, as I wrote that last, the song “New Day” ended and I had to rewind the tape to listen to it again. No kidding. I had to rewind the tape and stop it three or four times to get beyond the start of the song and then listen to the last 45 seconds or so of “Stop Dead” before it started again. No click of the mouse and ‘dit’ I’m back at the start of the song. I remember how much I hated some songs and to skip past it to the next song was murder. Manual song search before AMS (look it up, kids, you won’t believe me) was probably as dangerous as texting in the car. Skipping songs or replaying them was one of the best things about cd’s when they came out. That and not having to listen to blank tape, waiting for the end on the shorter side, which I’m doing now. My first copy of Pink Floyds “Dark Side of the Moon” had the song “Time” swapped to the other side of the album to even the tape run time out. Talk about Sacrilege. Also my Rush “2112” cassette cut the final song in half. It just sort of faded out, the cassette would flip over and it would fade back in and finish.

But I digress.

And I drift away again.

Maybe I need to find me a Walkman.

All things being equal, I’d rather be outside–unless there’s snow, I’ve not yet been able to overcome my aversion to cold. But if it’s not cold, and I could be anywhere outside, I’d pick the ocean every single time. My parents used to take us to California every few summers to go to Disneyland and/or Sea World and during those weeks we always had a day at the beach. Those were the golden moments of my youth, although you wouldn’t know it from the early 8mm movies. The last time I remember visiting the beach with my parents I was almost 16. I remember that day very well. I spent an hour or so standing chest-deep in the troughs of the waves and bobbing up over the top out beyond the breakers. The wave would lift me up off the sand and set me back down, over and over. Near where I was a girl almost my age in a white bikini was doing the same thing. It seems strange to me now that I didn’t try to strike up a conversation, or even really make eye contact, knowing more with hindsight what 16-year-old kids are supposed to be like.

I don’t think I saw the ocean again until I was 23 or so. That year I kind of got fed up with everything and just took off by myself and eventually ended up in Eureka, California. I sat on the beach and watched the sun set. Corny as it sounds, it’s almost as if I could feel the waves unwinding all the knots that were in me. I just sat for a couple hours and watched the waves crash. That was the start of my beachside therapy. Whenever things got bad I’d pick up and run to the beach by myself for a couple days. I went up the coast to Oregon a couple times, just to see new beaches. Frequently I’d be gone four or five days without having a conversation that didn’t include somone counting back change or asking if I would like fries with my order. Mostly, as it was when I was 16, I didn’t mind.

Now that I’m married I’ve found out not everyone likes the beach. I think I’m winning Debbie over, but I don’t think she will ever see what I do in the ocean. She seemed to get a bit of a kick today watching me scramble in the knee-deep surf, grabbing shells and rocks and trying to stay reasonably dry. I didn’t fully succeed. There is something else I realized today that changed. When I was a kid I spent a lot of time and energy trying to find perfect shells. I’d toss out most of the ones that were broken, or had worn down in the surf. My goal was to find matching halves and keep them together, although I rarely succeeded. I hadn’t realized until today that when I find a whole shell, unless it’s really interesting I usually toss it up on the drier sand for someone else. (Uninteresting finds go back into the surf.) There’s something about the shell fragments that I now find really intreguing. I can wax all sorts of philosophical at times and come up with reasons why I’m interested in the little broken things in life, but boiled-down right now in the hotel, after a day at the beach, I think that things just don’t have to be whole and perfect to be beautiful. And finding the beauty in things that are fragmented gives a whole lot more to think about in the long run.

Tonight was glaze night for the class with which I’ve been helping for the winter term. Not many showed up, which seemed like par for the course-it was a strange class. I glazed 10 smallish bowls I had thrown, intending some for the  Empty Bowls charity fundraiser coming up. I tossed out 6 with nasty s-cracks in the bottom. That’s a lot, but maybe I rushed them to dry. John was getting a kiln ready to fire and without many people asking questions we went outside where I watched him finish the kiln load. I’ve been hanging around that kiln shed for the better part of 16 years or so. While John finagled the shelf space, wondering out loud how tightly he should pack it to make sure he had enough of what was still coming down the line for the last few classes, I sat and thought about the friends I had made and how many had come and gone since I came on the scene. John talked about some that had come and gone before me, but who I knew from studio lore. We talked about gardening and cameras, the quality of students and the little things about the studio. It was just one of those slow, pleasant evenings. John thanked me again for coming out and helping for so long. I realized that even when the students are more difficult helping out there is kind of a break for me. I don’t have to worry whether or not I’m getting the things done around the house that need doing, or really worrying about any of my own problems, but I’m there answering questions and hanging out with my friends. My family, really, as John and Diane have become more than just friends. They’ve given me so much in support and advice that I can’t possibly ever repay. I made a little joke about not being able to make stuff again until fall and John asked me to come back over the summer. The short semester starts mid-June and only runs 8 weeks or so, but I think I’ll try to get back.

Dustin showed up and we talked music and John smoked his pipe while the kiln pre-heated. One of the advanced students I don’t know came out and asked a question. A bit later she came back and asked another. I gave her some advice and it occurred to me that I actually do know quite a bit about general ceramic knowledge that I can use to help people. I often forget that I know, and still think of myself as sort of a newb. I’ve heard the quote several times from Malcom Gladwell that it takes 10,000 hours or 10 years of repetition to become an expert at anything, although I haven’t yet read his book. Maybe I’m getting close to that, although I wouldn’t claim to be an expert just yet. I do surprise myself sometimes. Sam Wilson, my drawing professor at the U for the foundation class said something that stuck with me. Maybe I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating. He said you start off in art ripping other people off, because it’s all you can do. He said the secret was to keep ripping people off long enough until you have a body of work and can start ripping yourself off. It was sort of the tongue-in-cheek humor that he seemed to like best, but it did have a point. Lately I’ve been thinking about my early stuff when I was trying hard to be an artist. Maybe there’s something there I should revisit.

I suppose I’ll go out Saturday morning and see how my bowls turned out, have a last Saturday afternoon lunch with Jack and maybe Chuck for a few weeks until the summer semester starts. Maybe by then I’ll think of something I can rip off from my early work.

I think most of us realize we live in a society where you use it up and throw it away. I have a perfectly functional iPhone 3 sitting on my desk beside me that never quite gets its batteries charged. My new (1 year old) iPhone 4 probably doesn’t get the fullest of uses as it is. I probably should have sold the 3, or given it to someone who could use it, but I’m comfortably behind the curve. As my wife could get her a 3gs that would outperform my 3 for $50, and have an OS that could be kept up to date, I opted to leave it behind as a toy for jogging music or gaming. In reality it just sits looking forlorn from the corner of my desk. I might still be using it, but the calendaring functionality for work was going to leave me behind unless I upgraded.

I didn’t grow up during the depression, but my parents were raised in the aftermath and learned frugality. I guess they passed it on to me, although I don’t remember it being emphasized as a core value. I remember tuna fish being too expensive to have every day, it being a favorite meal of mine. I also remember playing a game I made up where I collected the trickle of water from a hose that ran to the floor drain in the basement from the humidifier when the furnace kicked on. I’d save it in old jars (that were too good to throw away) that smelled faintly of pickles and jam, despite the thorough washing. I never got too far, as my mom would eventually find the stash and dump it all out, but it didn’t keep me from running to the basement whenever I noticed the heat coming on.

Which brings me to Saturday night and my weekly laundry chore. Sometime in the final load the motor gave out so the spin cycle wouldn’t go. The washer isn’t too old, slightly pre-dating my marriage of 5 years. With thoughts of the heaping of troubles and technical breakdowns, I sadly proceeded to bed with the sodden load heaped in the machine. I returned to the problem this morning. I’ve fixed washers and dryers before, and it’s usually not something too difficult to troubleshoot. I took off the control panel exposing the electronics and scored the hidden technical sheet. It was only the spin cycle that was failing, so in my mind it had to be a belt or a motor. Pulling off the front of the machine I realized that with the belt intact, the technical advances in washing technology had rendered me impotent in the machine-fixing adventure for today. The spec sheet talked about the transmission and the motor. I broke down and called a couple appliance repair shops and finally found an acceptable deal of a free in-home estimate available in the same day.

The technician was a nice guy and managed to come a couple hours early. I had put everything back in order, so as to not alert him to my monkeying (although it did get that corner of the basement a much-needed cleaning). He quickly opened it up and diagnosed it as the motor. He called for a quote and said there was one available, but that it would be about $370 with the labor. I was somewhat sticker shocked and knew that it was somewhat over half of what I paid for it new. Now I know I’m partially to blame, as in my efforts to finish the laundry and get to bed I often push the load a little heavy, which must have contributed to it’s early demise. I don’t know what I would have been able to save if I had been able to comfortably diagnose the problem and get a motor, but I don’t suppose the labor was too unreasonable. The price was right at the point where I was almost ready to just get a new one, but the frugality kicked in enough that I just had the work done.

It does really kind of chap my hide, built-in planned obsolescence. It’s hard to fathom the number of things this year that, through mechanical breakdown or technological eclipsing, we have needed to buy anew. The printer we had for just a couple years had its power supply die, and since it cost less than a day’s wages to get a better one, we did. Three of the four ballasts in the lights in the garage with less than two hundred hours usage over the last couple years died in December. My current truck has needed far more in repairs in half the time of my last one, prompting me to wonder if I shouldn’t trade it in frequently. The new tv didn’t have enough older connections, so we bought a blu-ray player, because it was cheap and did a better job. I know this smacks a lot of First World Problems, and it’s true, but it about kills me every time I take something functional (or nearly so) and toss it aside. It’s especially painful because I see people who do it more than me without seeming to have a second thought. I’m in a border-line hoarder position, as I’m a tinkerer, and think things like: “The motor and gear system in the scanner on the printer could be really good for some art or automation project!” This has caused me to have a basement full of things that,”just might be good for something”.

Debbie has a couple tables that belonged to previous generations in her family. My own grandmother gave me a chair that used to belong to Mrs. Bliss, one of her friends, and I’m hoping to have it reupholstered sometime soon. But I can’t really see that I own anything (besides a few pieces of art) that would really be something to be left to a future generation that would be less than ephemeral. My desk is recovered cubicle equipment, my tools cheap Chinese steel and plastic, and now even the books are now largely going to ones and zeroes. Maybe I’m just nostalgic for a time that was never mine, or maybe my frugality has gotten the better of me and I don’t acquire heirloom things. I just find the whole concept a bit sad and empty.

I bet someday the sun won’t get up until noon, and it will be all, “Sorry-Sorry, it won’t happen again!” and “I was just a little under the weather.” But we’ll know it was out all night in some dive just feeling sorry for itself and telling the bartender, “I could have been a star.”

There’s a lesson in that for all of us– Change jobs more often.

I saw this video on the Le Container blog, a nice minimalist picture blog that, despite it’s penchant for bicycles, has a lot of inspirational creative muse for me. This big-wave surfing video posted today really struck me and I don’t want to lose it, so I’m reblogging it, which I don’t do often.

http://vimeo.com/31356055

shipsterns from Dave otto on Vimeo.
I also realized tonight that I’m suppressing the writing urge again. When I get those ideas I’ve just been pushing them down real far until someone else finds them, or something. I had a goal for not doing that so much this year, as I’ll eventually write about when the year ends.