The Group Project #3: "Pause, Flash"

I invest way to much emotion and energy complaining about the evils of this western society that I willingly and guiltlessly patronize on a daily basis. It’s not the way this society is run, you see, that I am upset about. It’s our influence on the other varied cultures of the world that others me. More and more you see nations across the globe “westernizing” for one reason or another. I don’t think it’s right for the entire world to look to one culture as a role model and I likewise don’t agree with any country holding itself up in that manner as a representative of model behavior. What makes the world so beautiful is the diversity of it’s people and I just hope that an over-homogenizing and graying out of cultural influence is anywhere on mankind's horizon.

Truth be told, I love consumerism! It fits just right in this country and I take advantage of the opportunity to procure more stuff all the time. I’m in love with the idea of stuff. That’s not to say technology, mind you, but just stuff. I tend to see things that I deem as “must own” all the time. I've also several times in my life now shed great quantities of stuff in an effort to simplify. I love that action and look forward to doing it again in the future.

But in the meantime… ACCUMULATE!

There are a lot of things that I’ve had for huge portions of my life that I’m sure I’ll never want to part with. A stuffed Jack Russell Terrier comes to mind… a bass guitar that I rarely play… several movies I may never watch again, but can’t leave behind. I try to not form to many relationships with items and keep in perspective that all possessions are temporary… but nostalgia is a motherfucker. Memories are strong and can keep you coming back over and over again.

My camera is something I can’t see myself getting rid of anytime soon, either. I’ve only had it a couple of years, but it’s an integral part of my existence. I’ve always loved taking pictures and trying to freeze moments and images and having something at my side at all times that makes it so easy is a luxury I’m not about to give up.

I’ve fancied myself an artist of many mediums over the years and have always romanticized about the idea of creating art that changes the collective mindset. The truth, however, is that I simply think with an artistic point of view and wasn’t able to direct my creative energy in the proper way until I started writing after college. Turns out that words were the medium I had been searching for the whole time. I wasted so much energy talking about doing that I didn’t realize that the doing was in the talking. My camera gives me a whole separate way to emote through art. It’s the moments in life that I am obsessed with and always trying to recreate somehow. So how better to do that then through capturing an image as I see it? I’m not to interested in trying to create something that is necessarily open to intellectual interpretation… I’m simply trying to convey emotion. It’s that authentic emotion that I’ve always been after in all artistic endeavors. Nothing has helped me do that more then this little hunk of plastic and metal and glass that my lover bought for me a couple years back.

The Group Project #2: "I Don't Wanna and You Can't Make Me"

I wonder how much time people really invest in thinking about the meaning of life. Has everyone devised their own truth or could it be that some people actually never give it much thought at all. Man, I think about it all the time. I couldn’t imagine at least making an effort toward ultimate wisdom… to define the underlying message in all of this.
I really think I figured it out several years ago and most of what I think about now when revisiting the subject is how I must be right because no other explanation makes sense. Sometimes I think about ways I can build onto the theory and make it even more elaborate ( that‘s a whole different essay). Sometimes I play devils advocate and try to understand people that are driven by things like success and acclaim and the need to be “something.” As far as I can tell there’s only one point to all of this and it has nothing to do competition. Life is to be lived, not raced.
All you need is love… and love is all you need.
When I first really started pondering the reason for our existence I came up with a very fun little juvenile way of looking at it all. I decided that the meaning of life was the pursuit of meaning… cute, huh? Just a constant life of a constant search. Sounds pretty damn draining in hindsight. I imagine some people live like that. That must be why so many people look so beaten in this life… they are. The world around them has won and they’ve just lagged behind… constantly searching. Now, I’m in no way knocking learning here. I love learning… it could be my favorite pastime. I hope my life sees no end to learning. But learning and searching are very different things. Searching sounds hard and desperate… learning is simply fun.
I wasn’t even searching when I decided that love was where it’s at… it just came to me. I had actually decided to stop searching and just live in the moment for a while and one day I just woke up thinking about how I needed to love things as much as I possibly could. And not just the romantic love we’re all so familiar with, but all of it. Love the air, the food, the sun and the moon. Love the sky and the trees and everyone’s face and love the joy and burden of waking up everyday. Love the most rotten, desperate, woeful times you may have because without them how would we know what really prosperous times were. Love life.
And I do… or at least I do my best to everyday. I try to stay satisfied and content with what’s around me because the whole world is so beautiful. Whatever I get to experience today and tomorrow is a gift and I just try to keep that all in perspective.
All that being said, I’ve never really been one to fantasize about trading lives or experiences with anyone. There was a time in my life where I often thought about how I would like to change or enhance certain parts of my own life (“wouldn’t it be cool if I could”, or “… if I had…”), but I’ve never been interested in abandoning my own experience. I suppose it would be very interesting to get to see the world through someone else’s perspective… but I’m talking the full monty, here. I don’t want to be me living in someone else’s shoes. It’s gotta be all or nothing. I want to feel things the way that person feels them… but then be able to remember my experience in that persons life when I return to my own. I’ll chalk it up as a learning experience. I figure that the more points of view you can relate to and connect with, the better off your overall experience in this life will be.
Contrary to how I usually feel, I am a human being, and that comes with certain emotions that we cannot deny. I do have a small group of people who’s lives I am rather jealous of and wouldn’t mind at least knowing how to get to where they are. Three of my favorite contemporary writers, Chuck Klosterman, Bill Simmons, and Richard Meltzer, all seem to be doing things the way I would love to be doing them. I mean, where do these guys get off, anyway! All they write about is what they think about the most trivial of concepts and I bet they all make a rather comfortable living at it. I could go for that. Just wake up, waddle over to the computer with caffeine in grip, and just start spewing out random thoughts and observations about the things that intrigue me the most. I mean, I guess it’s not to far from what I do in my life now, they just get to do the writing without having to stop to go to some other job that pays the bills… the writing
pays the bills.
But again, I digress. I’ve become wary over the years of using the thing you’re most passionate about to put food on the table. Don’t get me wrong here, I love my job, but it’ll never be my whole life and that’s very much by design. I don’t really like it to effect my whole life very much at all except for the time investment. I’ve tried turning art that I love into a career and all it did was make me hate the art… and that’s just really sad. So it’s a slippery slope.
And I imagine that once the pressures of selling books or meeting deadlines comes into play that it gets a little complicated. Meltzer touches on the difficulties of being an aging writer in one of his more recent book, “Autumn Rhythm.” He talks about how as a young writer under contract with a publisher that words and books would just poor out of him for years. He believed that at that pace that he could publish 30 or so books by the time he was 50 and that he could retire and live prosperously… then he realized that he was 60 and had written 3 books in the last 10 years… he’d fallen off the pace. I’ve read an article where Klosterman talked about how he felt forced to write “Downtown, Owl” (his first fully fictionalized novel) out of an obligation to the craft. He felt that if he didn’t write something that at least vaguely resembled a real book, that he was betraying his art. What a weird emotion that must’ve been to feel.
The book wasn’t very good, and I don’t say to many bad things about Chuck Klosterman. It felt forced and contrived… but what a thing it must’ve been to feel an obligation to the art itself! I don’t know if I want that.
So all in all, I am pretty jealous that some pretty wonderful people get to play with words all day and create things the way I like to create them, but I don’t know if I want to live in their shoes so much. They do a fine job at it and I don’t want to mess that up. And aside from that, wouldn’t that just mean that I had to miss something from my own experience? Fuck that, no way…