This is what I did last night. I spent, I don’t know, about an hour working on this stuff. It’s improving little by little. Last night was pretty good. I actually made a weld on the sculpture last night, which I only screwed up a little. Better than that, I understand how I screwed it up. This is progress from a week or two ago when I was A) screwing up, and B) not knowing how I was screwing up. Now if I can just get “A” taken care of, we’ll be rockin’ like Dokken.

I know this stuff, these endless pics of pieces of metal with blobby, rusty lines on them are repetitious and maybe boring or annoying, but it’s kind of what I’m dealing with right now. This process is really important, the progress, the improvement. It’s even more slow and tedious for me to do it than it is for you to look at one picture of it per day, but this is the part where I am right now. This is the part where, if my life were a movie, there’d be this montage of me just sitting down at the workbench. I’d put on the welding shield, and then you’d see some flashes of light from the arc, and there’d be lots of images of burnt pieces of metal being tossed on the floor. They’d use some sort of rockin’, yet inspirational background music, like Doyle Bramhall’s “Big” or something, and periodically you’d see me lift the shield and make a face as if to say, “Damn! Failed again!” and then I’d get another look that would be all determined, and I’d wipe some sweat off my brow and go back to work. Then there’d be more pictures of steel bits being thrown on the ground, but they’d start to look better, and then I’d not look so frustrated, just maybe kind of tired but pleased, and we’d be all, “Look! He’s improving! He’s toughing it out! Killer, dude!” and then there’d be some shots of me working on real pieces of sculpture, and then a date would flash at the bottom of the screen showing the passage of eleven months and sixteen days and nine hours and thirty-six minutes would pass in about 2.5 minutes, and then they’d show me standing before a finished and unbelievably awesome sculpture, wiping my brow and going, “Whew! Golly! THAT sure took a lot of work, but, boy, did my patience and persistence pay off!” and then I’d grin and give a thumbs up or something. (I’ve been looking at too many vintage ads online. My brain sounds like a 50s ad for Lucky Strikes or something – “It’s Toasted!”)

Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of a montage here, or at least not so much of one. I guess I haven’t shown you every piece of burnt metal that I really did throw on the floor, so you’ve been spared that, and there really are a ton of them on the floor. Some of them I’ve picked back up again and welded more crap onto to save money – like this piece here! It has a weld on the other side, and I just flipped it over and used it for this test.

Anyway, the first weld is sort of decent, and the second one isn’t too bad. After that they start to get kind of squashed-looking, and some holes show up and some rusty coloring. I guess it’s better than some of the stuff I was doing two weeks ago. I actually like the top weld, even though I’d get thrown out of welding class for it, but it’s good for me.

On a slightly different/sort of the same note, I am really, really, REALLY trying to make progress on this stuff, and it is damn near impossible some weeks. This past weekend I got in one hour of practice on Friday night, and that was it! One. Hour. Over the course of the entire week that adds up to one hour and ten minutes. In seven days I got to work on welding for one hour and seven minutes. It is really difficult not to obsess about how long it will take me to improve if I only get an hour and ten minutes each week. It’s hard, it’s frustrating, but what else can I do? It’s really difficult many nights to find free time for it, and that’s even while I’m currently ignoring most of the rest of the daily crap that normal people don’t ignore – stuff like folding my laundry or sorting my mail (my couch has become a mail repository for months worth of unattended mail – good thing the bills are all on auto-pay). Lots of nights I just microwave anything that’s frozen, because sometimes saving that extra twenty minutes of preparing food is the only way I can make time. (I have become a conniseur of the frozen burrito.)

I’ve employed every other time-saving method I can think of. The only thing left to do is to quit my job, and I’m not that crazy. Motivated, yes, but not crazy. I’m feeling boxed in. Stuck. This is all I want to do, and yet I have so little time to do it. There are times when I decline invitations with friends just so I can do this stuff, as it’s the only free time I have available.

The other night, Friday night, the night when I can clearly hear many people in my neighborhood partying, I was welding and looking up basic geometry on the web. Why? Because geometry is the basis for machine work, and I’m interested in doing machine work, having a mill and building nifty parts for my sculptures, fabulously ridiculously unnecessarily complicated parts for my sculptures. I had a night off from the band, and I was looking up geometry. Clearly I’m either really taken with this stuff, or I’ve sincerely lost my mind. Given that my friends and family have not started avoiding me or continually asking me if I’m sure I’m feeling well, I have to consider the sincere possibility that I have not lost my mind, but am just really enthusiastic about building metal kinetic sculpture.

Still, what’s the point? Why am I doing this? Why am I exchanging all this free time and money and energy on this stuff? Well, simply because I like it, because it’s cool, fun, nifty, awesome – all that good stuff!

And that – that feeling of “YES! AWESOME!” is scary. I mean, do you ever have a “yes” moment? One of those times where you discover something or get into something and the only word in your head is “yes?” Those yes moments, those are when you know you’re doing something that is *exactly* what you should be doing in your life. I had moments like that when I first started playing music. It was all “Yes, let’s do that! Yes, let’s find out more about this! Yes, let’s practice more! Yes, let’s buy some records, lots of records and tapes! Yes, let’s get in this band and see what happens! Yes, let’s play that basement party! Yes, let’s record with those guys! Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!”

Here I am again, and this feels like one big “yes” moment. Nothing in my brain is telling me that anything about this is wrong for me to be doing. Aside from letting my spending get out of control, there’s nothing I could do wrong with this. It feels like a very natural thing to do.

But what the hell do you do with it? I mean, what are the practical purposes? If I want to devote so much time to it, how, uh – am I supposed to think I’m going to make a living with this or something? Really???? Have I lost my mind? I’m not at the point where I’ve just decided to throw all caution to the wind, go in to work, announce I’m quitting immediately, and saying, “I’m going to make a living as an artist!!!” Not that crazy, because I like to eat and have a house and all that, but I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve set many other things aside in life in order to pursue this. I mean, who was here when I announced that I had decided to sell my extremely cool and vintage guitar amplifier just so I could buy the welder? We do remember that, don’t we? That amp, I held onto it for YEARS not using it, but not being willing to let go of it, and suddenly it wasn’t even an issue. It was like, “Oh, I need to buy this welder…NOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!!!!!! SELL THAT FRIGGIN’ AMP AND BUY IT YESYESYESYES!!!!!”

Like that.

I don’t know what you do with these things when they come up in life. Oh, scratch that – I know one thing to do. You follow them. They’re scary, but you follow them. If they’re positive and healthy and they make your life better, then following them is the thing to do. If they make you feel better about yourself and your life, you follow them. I kind of have to follow this. It just feels too good. Yet I don’t know where it’s going, and that’s a frightening thing.

I don’t know, kids. I just don’t know what’s going on here. I’d love to see into the future on this. Until I achieve that ability (and I’ll let you know if I do), I’m just going to keep welding. And probably being kind of scared as well.