Class Ride

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Jeff has a '66 Ranchero. Jeff gives me a ride. Jeff earns my eternal gratitude.

Jeff has a '66 Ranchero. Jeff gives me a ride. Jeff earns my eternal gratitude.

Today I was hanging out with some friends and end up talking with a guy I’ve spoken to a handful of times over the past year or so. I didn’t know much about him except that he does auto body work and has a nice old Ford. Today while we’re talking he says a couple of things about art and I got, “So…you do art work?” He chuckles and says, “Um, yeah. I graduated from [noted art school].” He adds that he’s done some work for the governor and “this boat. I built a boat. It’s over by…” and he gave the general description off of a given highway. I couldn’t picture it, and he says, “You wanna to see it? I was just about to take off.” I agree, we go out to the car, and I realize that I’m going to get a ride in this:

1966 Ford Ranchero

1966 Ford Ranchero

I dig old cars. I dig old hot rods. This car is both (okay, it’s a truck and not a car, but whatever), and he drives it regularly. It has a 289, front disc brakes, and a 5spd manual transmission, plus the uber-groovy Torque Thrust mags. It was awesome. He drove me out to the site where his sculpture is located, and we checked it out. It’s a boat in a water runoff area. The height of the water in relation to the boat is sort of a measure of how well the area is functioning, plus it makes a statement about the intended use of the area and its necessity (the area was formerly just a dumping ground for trash). I would have a pic of that, but the weather was too bad to get a good shot of it.

Anyway, pic a day for today resulted in two pics, but I figured you would’t mind, ’cause that truck is just so cool.

Little Light

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First thing I did this morning. Well, after writing, which is the real first thing I do in the morning.

First thing I did this morning. Well, after writing, which is the real first thing I do in the morning.

I came up with the idea to shoot this while I was doing my morning pages from the Artist’s Way, an exercise I’ve been doing just about every single morning for getting on close to a year now. I usually light a candle while I’m writing, and it seemed like a decent idea. I don’t like the way it turned out. It’s rather dark. I wanted it to have that nice candle-y glow to it. Guess I’ll have to do some research on how to make that happen. For now, here’s a dim view of a candle for ya!

More Fun with Insanity

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I shot this on the way home from work. I was doing about 20mph.

I shot this on the way home from work. I was doing about 20mph.

I took some more photos at work today at lunch, but I like this one better. There was an accident off to the side of the road, and I grabbed the camera off the floor and just shot out the window as I drove by just to see what I would get. It’s not masterpiece, but I like it. Something is obviously happening here.

I’ve officially gone over the deep end, people. I’ve lost my mind completely. Not only am I apparently going to start shooting and posting one picture a day, tonight after work I went to a photography club meeting for the first time. It was a trial, but, unfortunately, I really enjoyed it, meaning that I want to start going again, meaning that I’ll want to shoot more pictures, hang out with more people, enter some contests, try and get some work, have a generally awesome learning experience. This could be serious. I could die of exhaustion in the next two to three months. Drag racing, writing, photography, sculpture, acting…yep, dead soon. However, I’ll be very happy when I go.

That reminds me, I found out I got a speaking part in the zombie movie (8 Wheels of Death – remember that!)! Woohoo! I get to be “Dad” and fight off zombies with a severed roller derby referee’s leg! How much fun is THAT?!?!?! You wish you were me, admit it.

Lunch Break Photography, and Insanity Begins

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Shot out in front of my office while on lunch.

Shot out in front of my office while on lunch.

I am most certainly losing my mind. I have been doing photography for the past two years or so, but last week I bought a photography magazine just for the heck of it, just because it caught my eye while I was looking at car mags and trying to figure out which of those I’d like to do work for.

Then I’m on the web, looking up photography stuff, finding online communities that are sharing their stuff. Then I’m reading about this “One Picture a Day” project that some people have done, and it’s sounding cool.

Right. Sure. I totally need ONE MORE THING to add to my list of projects, and this “one more thing” has to be done every single day!

Anyway, here’s the first nail in my coffin. Pretty nail, isn’t it? I shot it yesterday at lunch. It was raining, and I wanted to take a picture, so I went out in the middle of a break in the drizzle (a break that conveniently occurred right on my lunch hour), and took this photo. Some day I’ll learn how to use Photoshop Elements and tell you long and boring stories about how I “adjusted the levels” or “worked on the saturation a bit.” For now you get, “I took this today.”

I ask, Quinn answers!

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If you’ve read the blog rabidly for some length of time, then you know I’m a fan of Quinn Cummings. She writes a blog called The QC Report, which is both witty and insightful. I have had numerous occasions where I tried valiantly not to spit coffee on the keyboard while laughing at one of her entries. You’d think I’d stop drinking coffee while reading her stuff, but I’m a slow learner, and I also refuse to quit drinking coffee, even for short periods of time.

Quinn’s writing isn’t limited to her blog, however. Her book “Notes from the Underwire” has just been published, full of the same humor and self-deprecation as her blog. As part of her self-promotion, Quinn has offered to answer questions from whatever random bloggers send them her way. After deciding that she really didn’t mean to include little people like myself, I abruptly changed my mind one night at around 1am and decided I’d send something her way. Lo and behold, she really answered it!

Keeping it all in the spirit of Thatstom, I asked her a couple of quesstions about creativity…and toast. Click here to enjoy her answers. You might also want to pick up a copy of her excellent book.

Prepared for Party Conversation

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I’ve mentioned this in some previous posts, but it’s pretty important, and after several folks asked about it, I realized that finishing my novel deserves more than just a paragraph. I’m apt to minimize the importance of some of my accomplishments, and maybe this will help non-minimize the minimizing which has already started to appear.

Way back in October of 2008 I signed up for something called NaNoWriMo. Some of you are familiar with National Novel Writing Month, but for those not so, it is a challenge where participants attempt to write a novel of at least 50K words in length between the dates of 11/1 and 11/30. This is especially lovely for those of us in the U.S. who work this frenetic exercise through the Thanksgiving holiday.

I loved NaNo. I can’t say enough good things about it. I made some new friends, learned a ton about writing, and overall just had a reall kickass time with the whole thing. I also spent a lot of money on coffee, but that was just a bonus. Come the end of the month I had blown the 50K goal out of the water by writing seventy-six thousand words! One little problem. Novel still wasn’t finished.

That’s right, I’d gone from day one where I wondered how crazy I was to be even attempting to write a real honest-to-pete novel-length novel of not-so-lengthy longness (50K is about 200 or 250 pages, as I recall – about the length of “Fahrenheit 451,” for reference), to “Holy crap, how am I ever going to stop adding words! Won’t these people please resolve their conflicts?!”

My determination at the outset of the project was in keeping largely with NaNo’s idea that it’s just pretty awesome to set yourself a big goal and then allow yourself the time and energy that you need to make it a priority and complete it. Completing it was still my priority, and I was determined that this was not going to be another one of those things where, two years from now I’d run into a friend at a Christmas party or a gig, and they would say, “Hey, how did that book go that you were writing?” and I’d shuffle my feet and look away and go, “Oh, yeah…I, um, I got a lot done, but it sucked, so I didn’t finish it.” I’m so NOT about not finishing these days. It’s one of the hallmarks of my past that I want to change about myself. Even if the final product isn’t that great, or I don’t really do anything with it, I want to be a person who finishes things, because if I keep doing that, then sooner or later those finished thigns are going to improve in quality, and then, maybe, at some point in the future, I will start having finished stuff that I can look at and go, “Okay, not bad. Kind of cool.” and then I won’t hate myself for never doing anything. It just makes it easier to get out of bed in the morning, you know?

So, November ended and me and my NaNo buddies scattered to the winds for the holiday season, but we kept in touch and after things calmed down we were able to regroup and still get together on the odd weekend for a little informal meeting and catchup. I continued to write either at these meetings, before, after, or just whenever the heck I could get some time.

It dragged on…and on…and on. At one point I remember there was a two-week period where I only wrote 80 words or something like that. I just had other stuff to do, plus I was getting the beat-down from the novel itself. I was stuck. I’d never done something like this, and it just wasn’t moving. I dug in my heels and refused to quit. Weeks went by here and there where absolutely no words made it into the document, yet I still refused to say I had stopped. When this happened I’d try to find a couple of hours one week and pound out as many words as I could, sometimes getting a thousand down, maybe two thousand, before events conspired and I was kept away again.

By June things had evolved. I’d moved forward with the plot a good deal, even though I didn’t like where it was going or what was happening, or even how it was happening. It didn’t matter, I was going to keep going until it was finished! I looked at some saved documents and noted that it had been about a month since I’d even pecked out a single letter on the novel. It was grim, but it looked like I was in the home stretch, I just didn’t know quite how to end it.

Have you ever ended a novel? I hadn’t. How do you take all those thoughts and words and wrap them up? I mean, after they’ve done all this incredible stuff, how do you have them do something so mundane as to just…get on with their little imaginary lives? How do they say goodbye to each other? How do I let go of them myself?

On June 28, 2009 I was sitting in the cafe wondering about this. I knew I was at the end. It was a done deal, but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Two of my characters were down to saying goodbye to each other. They didn’t want to part, and I didn’t exactly want them to just stop living their little lives either, even if I knew their little lives needed a massive rewrite to become interesting little lives.

She has to leave, I thought, staring at the screen. It’s time for her to go. They both have stuff they have to get on with, and this part needs to come to an end. I don’t know what they’re going to do from here on out, but it’s time to say goodbye.

They said their goodbyes (for probably the third go-’round now), and she finally really made it to the door, opened it, walked out, and closed it behind her. He sat on his bed for a few moments, and then picked up what she had left for him.

I leaned back and looked at the screen. There wasn’t anything left to say. They were on their own now.

I clicked “Save,” and took a drink of my coffee as the word counter totaled it up. 92,165 words from hello to goodbye, from start to finish, from “How am I going to write a novel,” to, “Wow, somehow I managed to write a novel.”

It’s been quite a trip. It’s been fun, aggravating, exciting, annoying, interesting, hard, and overall just plain excellent. What I do with it from here on out, I have no clue, but I can at least say I’ve written a novel, which is a hell of a lot more than I could say about myself a year ago. Bring on the party conversation. Go ahead and ask me “How’s that book going?” I’m prepared now, fully prepared.

Sculpture? Yeah, finished that too!

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After many weeks of deliberation and second-guessing and fearing for the worst, Tuesday night I finally set about putting the finishing touches on the rolling ball sculpture for which my friend Tina made the base. Getting some help on a base was a new twist on my sculpture building, short though its history may be. By the time Tina was finished I was so pleased with the results I was just certain that I was going to do something to horribly wreck the end result.

I didn’t like the most obvious method to me, which was to tie it down with wire through holes drilled in the base. Tina, of course, was totally fine with that, but I wasn’t. Being a fix-it/mechanic/backyard engineer, I had half a dozen concepts in my head for better ways to do it, ways that seemed classier, ways that would look better, and ways that might function better. These ways, these many awesomely-conceived and clever ways, generally involved materials that weren’t readily available (tiny U-bolts anyone?), methods that were time-consuming (fashioning custom brass feet interlocking with routed cutouts and countersunk brass screws), or stupid expense (back to those custom tiny U-bolts again).

I decided once and for all to use the wire and just accept the fact that, at this point, it was my best option both in terms of ability and expediency (after I mulled it over and fretted about it for four or six weeks…or, um, eight weeks, of course).

Tuesday night I picked up the drill. It was scary. I was going to drill a hole in this carefully executed bit of wooden artwork that Tina had created for me. Visions of a slip of the hand and the drill bit skittering across its surface, gashing the tongue-oiled brilliance of the piece went through my head. Yeah, that was what was going to happen, I was sure of it. Definitely. No other possible way out of it. Oh, well, there was one other: I was going to drill crooked holes with terrible burrs at the edges and the result would be so distracting as to make the piece as a whole just look like a hack-job.

Okay, maybe there was one other possible outcome: it would be fine, but I wasn’t betting on that one, at least not the noisiest part of my brain.

However, I listen to that quiet part of my brain more these days, the part that says, “Yeah, you know, there IS a possibility that things could go wrong, but, dude, you’ve drilled HOW many holes in your life? I mean, really, give yourself a little credit. You’re going to make reference in the divots before you start, and you’re one of the most ridiculously careful people on earth. You’ve stacked the odds in your favor that you can succeed at this. Just take a deep breath, and do the work. The results will be what they’re supposed to be, and that’s okay.”

So, having made my reference marks and double-checked everything four times (that’s eight checks total, right?) I fired up the trusty Skil cordless and went to work. Once the holes were drilled I went to work underneath with my fabulous rotary tool and routed out room for the twists of wire that would hold everything down tight. I should have take a picture of this part, but I completely forgot about it for once. I guess that’s a sign of how driven I was to finish the thing.

I feel very fortunate in that there really were no major snags. The wire ended up being pretty decent as a fastening concept, and I only had to cut and redo one attempt. I soldered everything on the underside so that it will hopefully never come loose. Then I put on a sheet of adhesive cork that Tina provided so that the base won’t scratch anything.

Here it is, and it’s fantastic!

Overall shot.

Overall shot.

I don't have video, but here's a shot of it in action.

I don't have video, but here's a shot of it in action.

Detail shot of Tina's work and the mount for one of the feet.

Detail shot of Tina's work and the mount for one of the feet.

I’m glad to have finally completed this one, and I thank Tina for making it really stand out. The other day I saw a notice online for a local art show that is having an open call for art work, and I think I may send a photo in of this one and see what happens with that. It may be that I can use this as an opportunity to meet some other folks who enjoy this kind of art.

Man, I’ve now finished up two creative efforts within the space of a week. Last Sunday was the novel, and then Thursday night I finished up this sculpture. I sure am glad I took some time out for myself to work on my projects. I’m feeling a little better about things now.

On a related note, weeks ago I was talking with a friend of mine about my sculpture work, and she said, “You know, my ex-husband used to do work with metal stuff, and I have a whole roll of copper sheet sitting around that I was going to throw away. Do you want it?”

I had a bit of a coughing fit for a moment, and then I accepted. See, metals have shot up in price (along with all kinds of other stuff) in the past couple of years. I had just been thinking about buying some copper sheet and trying it out with my sculptures, but I was a little concerned about the expense.

For a few weeks there were a bunch of missed connections meeting up with my friend again, but on Saturday a group of us were out for lunch, and she said, “Hey, guess what? I made sure to put the copper in the right car today. I have it for you!”

She hadn’t told me much about it except that it was “a roll of copper sheet.” When we got it out of the trunk, this is what I found I’d been bequeathed:

rollingballsculpture004

You may notice that this copper looks rather yellow. I did too. I said, “It looks to me like this may be brass.” She said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that.” I happily told her it was no problem, that brass would solder up to copper just as easily as the identical metal, and, in fact, I’d already started doing as much with my spare harmonica reed plates. I was totally jazzed and thanked her.

Later that night I went to take it downstairs. It was heavy. I mean, she really had given me a bunch of material. I got curious and laid it on the bathroom scale. Twelve pounds! That’s a lot of brass! I don’t know how many feet there are of it, but let’s just say I’m not going to be running out of it any time soon. It’s heavy gauge stuff too, so I’ll be able to fashion plenty of supporting objects out of it. It’s really good stuff!

I used to think that things like this just happened to people who were “lucky,” but these days it seems to me that if I put out the message of what I’m interested in, what I enjoy, what I’m working on, then things like this happen in turn. I’ve been operating under that idea for a little while now, and it’s been interesting what sorts of things have shown up in my life because of it. I see no point in changing tactics. Now, I wonder what would happen if I went around saying, “I want to write for a living” to everyone I ran into? Hmmm…

Stay creative!

Day of the Auditioning Dead

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Ever wanted to be a zombie? Thought so. Me too, but until now, I never dared believe that such a dream could be mine. It’s not in the bag yet, though, so maybe I just better back up and explain what I know at this point.

A few weeks back I was goofing around on Facebook (yep, I do that, and I do it very well, thank you!) when I saw that one of my friends had added a group to her favorites. The group was called “8 Wheels of Death,” and it had this kicky little graphic with two skate wheels making up the number eight. Combining wheels with anything gets me interested, so I clicked on it. Lo and behold, what should I find but a group for “the upcoming top-secret Roller Derby Zombie short movie to be filmed during the summer of 2009” in my old college town. “What the heck,” says I, clicking on the “Join this Group” button. “I’ll keep tabs on it. Sounds like fun.”

A week later an announcement went up: “A round of auditions will be held Saturday, June 27, from 4-7pm in 9th St Park.” “Huh,” says I, “this might be interesting.” I didn’t take any action, though. I mean, me, get involved in a movie? They’d probalby need for me to be places and do things and – well, that could all get very busy and uncomfortable! I just noted it and went back to my usual Facebook sending of flair and putting up announcements of finishing writing my novel (BOOM! Didn’t see that coming, did you?!).

A couple of days after that a note goes out to everyone in the group: “We need a cool old car for a scene, so if you know of anyone who has one…” *Tom smiles wickedly and rubs his hands together over the keyboard, then begins pecking* “Dear Mr. Director, I may have something you’d be interested in…”

A day later the ’67 Chevelle has been conscripted as the “cool car” for a pivotal scene in the movie. “Hmm,” thinks myself, “maybe I should go ahead and goof off with this audition thing. I always wanted to be one of the living dead.”

I send the director an email: “Glad the car will fit your needs. I don’t think there’s any abuse it can’t take, and it’s kind of beat up anyway, which sounds like that’s what you want. I’ll be heading down for auditions this weekend, too. I’m not dying for a part or anything, but I just thought it would be a fun experience.” At this point it’s prudent to mention that I’ve never done any acting in my life, unless you count grade school spring pageants, and I don’t.

Days later I’m gassing up at a station as I’m about to head out of town for the audition. My brother calls from the drag strip to give me an update on the car’s performance, the same car that will be in the movie. All is good. In fact, he’s doing rather well with it. I congratulate him and say, “I gotta go. I have to gas up. I’m going down to Bloomington to audition for a zombie movie, and get this: they want the Chevelle to be in the movie!”
“Really?” says my brother. “That’s kickass!”
“I KNOW!” I say, grinning like an idiot. I’m getting more excited now that my brother is on board with the idea as well. I gas up and hit the road.

Ninety minutes later and I’m down at the park. I basically just wander over to the one shelter they have there where a few people seem to be headed. I guess that’s how these things come together.

I get up to the group, who are laying out papers and positioning something that looks exactly like a video camera. My powers of perception tell me that I have, in fact, picked the right group to wander toward (this assisted by the fact that there were no other groups in the area at the time).

I introduce myself, and everyone seems pretty happy to be there and happy that I’ve come out as well. They’re a little surprised that I drove 90 minutes for the audition, but I didn’t get the opportunity to tell them that there were no zombie movies auditioning in my town that weekend. (I let them think it’s because I love theatre so much.)

Since I am cool and think of you, my Awesome Readers so much, I had the foresight to bring my trusty Nikon. Behold the gallery o’ fun that makes up the first round of auditions for “8 Wheels of Death!”

I had a blast, and the Chris, the director, was very awesome in granting my request to read first, as I had to leave only about twenty minutes later so that I could drive back up north and play a gig. It was a full day, but one hell of a good time overall. Before I left, Chris told me that it looked like I would probably have a good chance of getting a speaking part in the movie. I read for the part of “Chester” the EMT, who’s pretty much a straight guy, but I also read for “Buck” who is a “smarmy redneck” who comes to a bad end. I’m a little hoping I get to be Buck, because he’s kind of a jackass, and I could SO have fun with that, because I’m so NOT that guy. (It would be the perfect excuse to wear a T-shirt that says “Chicks Dig Me” or “#1 Lover” or something equally tasteless.)

I will certainly keep you all updated on this one. Shooting takes place in July and August with plans to have it done and ready to show to the public by Halloween of this year, which is a pretty short turnaround on a movie, in my mind. It’s a zero-budget thing, and very campy, but I hope it comes out fun and wacky and entertaining all the same. From the folks I met it looks like it’s going to be a good time!

Oh, yeah, and that part about the novel? For those of you who have just tuned in, I started my first ever novel attempt on November 1, 2008 during the wonderful caffeine-infused frenzy that is NaNoWriMo. I got 76K words written within 30 days, which was more than enough to hit the challenge goal of 50K, but not enough to finish the story. My goal in entering NaNo was to completely write the rough draft of a novel, beginning to end. Since it wasn’t finished, I plodded along, and sometimes it seemed like I was never going to finish the damn thing, but the day finally arrived. The day after my zombie audition, June 28, I sat at a table in a funky little cafe near my home, typed the final sentence, sat back, took a sip of my latte, and clicked “Save” once and for all. 92,165 words, and they are all done and all mine.

Stay creative, kids.

Anti-Perfectionism with Photography

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From time to time I’ve tossed up pics on the ol’ blogwall here to see how they stick. Mainly they’ve been illustrative in nature, and I guess that’s probably due in large part to the fact that I got a degree in Journalism and spent a good deal of my time learning how to create pictures that tell a story.

Sometimes, however, you just want a picture that makes a statement all its own. I have no idea if I possess an ability in that regard, but I still take a stab at it, but I’ve not often posted those results up here on thatstom. I suppose largely that’s due to the fact that I’m a perfectionist, and usually look at them and go, “Uh…suck!” The enemy of the creative spirit is perfectionism, and I’m a victim of it as much as anyone else out there, and on occasion far more than is healthy. Perfectionism is responsible for that voice that says, “Nah, you suck. That sucks. You’re not good enough. You might be good, but other people are better. People will laugh at this stuff. Who are you to think that you might even possibly be capable of doing something decent. You’re wasting your time!”

Perfectionism, it’s one of the most powerful anti-creation forces in the universe. It’s what makes us not start projects, or start projects but never finish them. (Hey, if you never finish something, it’ll never be imperfect, right? What a great excuse not to do something!) I have often fallen victim to perfectionism, and for years I thought it was actually a good thing, that it helped me create stuff that was very exacting and of good quality. I didn’t realize how often, by comparison, it kept me from trying new things I really wanted to try, from experiencing the joy of a completed work, or of basking in some justly-deserved praise. Perfectionism kept me from creating, and, as such, kept me from the very healthy practice of being myself! This, in turn, creates all kinds of other unpleasant negative feelings. Overall the whole thing’s just a bad deal, and I’m pretty much done with living my life being governed by negative feelings such as those.

Taking action is an outstanding way of dealing a blow to the negativity of perfectionism. Me not sharing some of my photos? Not a good thing. A very simple way for me to take action is just to put a few of them up here without worrying if they’re perfect or not. I achieved a massive victory this evening of simply flipping through a few photos from the past couple of years and picking whatever ones caught my eye without obsessing (too much!) over how fantasti-wondeful they were. And now I’m putting them up here for all of you, my Awesome Readers/Viewers, to take a gander at.

The following are just a few random images that seemed to at least sort of show some promise. Critique, lambaste, judge, wrinkle your nose, smile, roll your eyes, whatever strikes your fancy. Hopefully there is a little enjoyment to be had from them. I don’t know where any of this work is headed, I just know that I’m supposed to be doing it. If I’m not sharing it, then it’s not doing me any good. I’m my own worst critic, and it’s a good idea to get some feedback on occasion, because sometimes I may be wrong about me. Now enjoy, and feed back!

Dream a Little (Necessary) Dream

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I had a dream last night. No, this isn’t one of those blogs where I tell you I had a dream, but but then I reveal later that it wasn’t a dream in the sleeping-dream sense, that it was more of an awakening of thought while I still had my eyes open. It’s also not the sort of dream like I had this wish for myself for the future, but now it has fallen by the wayside, hence the past-tenseness of it all. Lastly, is not that I’m just pretending it was a sleeping dream, because it was really a real thought I had, but kind of a weird one, and so I’m sort of embarrassed about it, and so I’m just saying that it was a dream. Got it?

If not, well, here’s the basics: I fell asleep, and all these images ran through my head and there was some dialogue and a bit of storyline. Basically I got a short movie that I produced by and for myself for the price of closing my eyes and apparently being a little stressed out.

Two things are immediately significant about this whole affair. One, I don’t usually remember even having dreams. Two, if I do remember them, they’re usually like a photographic flash-type of thing, like this one: I was being chased by zombies. That was one of my more recent dreams – almost the whole thing in its entirety as I can recall it. If you want me to get wordy and descriptive, here’s what I remember: me and some unidentifiable other person (maybe, possibly, some other person) kind of running, and something was coming after us, and I knew it was a zombie, or zombies, but we couldn’t really see them, and I wasn’t going to turn around and look, you know? The end.

So, anyway, that’s what usually happens if I remember a dream I had. Last night? Not like that at all. Oh, and I should also mention, that when I do have dreams, they usually don’t have much bearing on reality – although there was that one time when I dreamt that a woman at the office was coming after me to kill me, which really was kind of close to the mark during that time in my life. Fortunately, she was eventually fired for taking pictures of sensitive documentation at work – but I digress! My dreams are usually vauge and/or pointless, brief, and I almost never remember them. Noted.

Last night, however, as I tried my best to attain some sort of uninterrupted REM the type of which truly restful nights are made of, a vision was visited upon me, and it was…well, it was…oh, it went like this:

In this dream I was trying my damnedest to get a residency in some new artist lofts that had just opened up in town. I desperately wanted to be a part of this. It felt like an immense moment of opportunity had arrived for me. This was the chance I’d been waiting for, the break that would enable me to lose myself in my creative work and really, truly, honestly, seriously make some big things happen.

My chances of getting accepted, however, were not looking good. The people who decide such things (I don’t know who they were, didn’t get that dream-info) were off somewhere considering my current work to see if I were worthy of being placed. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have that much completed work available. I’d known this was coming for quite some time, and I had been trying and trying to get some pieces finished for months now. Events had seemed to conspire against me, however, and one thing or another had cropped up and always prevented me from getting any real work done. The day job, the band, and a million other little things both expected and unexpected had continually thwarted my efforts to accomplish much.

I was at the point in my dream where I was aware of all of this, and I was sitting on the floor in some sort of makeshift studio or workroom, and I was looking at the few meager works that I had managed to complete plus a few projects that I had started – ones that showed real promise and would have secured my acceptance had I only been able to complete them! I sat there in utter frustration, knowing that I was unable to do anything, much as I might want to, that the time had passed, and all I could do was wait and pray I would be accepted, but that it didn’t look very likely. And as I sat there, knowing all of this, looking at my incomplete intentions on benches and the floor, I suddenly completely broke down and started sobbing, exhausted from anger and grief and stress.

Have you ever have one of those times when you’re physically and mentally worn out, like you’ve been working too many 12-hour days in a row, and yet, when you finally have an opportunity to sleep, you can’t? You just lay there and lay there and you’re absolutely dying to fall asleep, but you’re so wound up that your mind keeps going and it won’t shut down and you know that in another hour it won’t be eight hours, but seven, and then after that if you can’t sleep it’ll be six, and if you even get to bed by then it won’t do near as much good and you feel the night slipping away and you just know, you KNOW that tomorrow you’re going to wake up and be just as exhausted as you have been for the past two weeks, but you can’t do anything about it? It was like that. I was spent. Done. I was completely powerless to do anything, and I was feeling the opportunity just slip away.

I remember in the dream that I just kept saying “please” over and over again, while I was sobbing there on the floor, and I was saying that, because I JUST. WANTED. TO. BE. ABLE. TO. MAKE. SOMETHING! Something that mattered, something that made me feel good about what I could do and who I was, and it felt like somebody, like this big Hand of Life Itself was holding me back and preventing me from doing it.

I woke up at about that point, and I had a distinct feeling of relief for just a moment, a “Man, I’m glad I got that out of my system finally” sort of feeling – and then I realized I was just lying there in bed. None of it had happened. I fell back asleep almost immediately, and I don’t remember dreaming anything after that, but it came back to me when I woke up.

I don’t think that this exists as only a small connection to a conversation I had with my brother the other day. We were at the drag strip, and somehow he ended up asking how much sculpture I had done. I said, “Well, I’ve finished two, and I’m working on at third one, but I’m stuck. It’s been sitting there forever, and…I’m just stuck. I haven’t had time for anything lately. Just – no time at all. I haven’t written much of anything, and I haven’t done any sculpture work at all. It’s been two months or something like that.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a dream that was more transparent in my life. I think it’s time to stop waiting for some free time to reveal itself to me and time for me to start making some free time for some important work of my own. This reminds me yet again of the Artist’s Way in which it says that essentially creative people become unhappy, grouchy, cranky, and a little insane when we don’t get to create. I hope you allow yourself time for those some pursuits. It’s what keeps the creative self happy and, as a result, the rest of the self is happy as well.

Stay creative. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have schedule I need to rearrange. There’s free time to be cultivated.