Now:

A page that updates periodically about what I'm up to and into right now. One of many. You are viewing the version of this page from October 21, 2024. When it's gone, it's gone.

Making

My gig-work boom at the expense of a personal-work slump continues. I have some things in progress that I'm juggling emails about and think will be good when they're done. The main Big Contract Project is coming along at speed now that I've started spending some real time on it.

I will have an idea sometimes and write it down but the problem with your day job being "looking at Adobe Illustrator" and your preferred free-time activity also being "looking at Adobe Illustrator" is that by the end of the workday you just want to like, go outside or read a book or something.

Doing

We spent the weekend in Philly to see Ginger Root at the Transfer. Really, really good show, probably the second best I've been to all year.

Like the Porter show I left really impressed with the technical production—the whole thing was held together by a guy running around with a shoulder-rig camcorder plugged into stacks of CRTs on stage, they were doing live feedback and mixing, goofy interstitials between songs, just tons of fun stuff. And of course the live versions of everything slammed.

That was Friday, so we got Saturday to just walk around Philadelphia and hang out, which I always try to make work. Lauren's brother and his girlfriend live right by Temple so we went to Reading Terminal and I finally got the widely-hyped roast pork sandwich at DiNic's. It is good.

I like Philly. don't know if my bumpkin upbringing would allow me to survive in a real, big-and-tall-and-treeless city like that but I think I would enjoy living somewhere along the Amtrak line where I could hop into town occasionally to get a bagel or something. Some key part of me has a distrust and distaste for the A-list cities; New York is doable for 72 hours at a time, LA seems like it sucks. But a place like Pittsburgh or Chicago or Philly feels right to me, a city on the near side of unfathomably large.

Thinking

Lately I am thinking that I'm gonna be fine. Freelancing full-time has felt kind of like when your dad lets go of the bike in the driveway, but a few weeks in I am working hard enough lucky enough to have my expenses covered provided everybody pays me on time and I don't like break my leg or anything.

I do still need to find a full-time job somewhere, and the "Estimated Taxes" cell on my spreadsheet of invoices keeps growing, but I'm out of the valley of thinking "oh shit oh no I'm broke I'm broke" every single day.

Reading

The slump is over and reading books is back bigtime (I spent between four and five hours on a train this weekend). Two and a half books down since Thursday:

Blindsight by Peter Watts (which I learned after Googling it to link here is available for free under Creative Commons? Sick) was very good. Leaves out the quirks* with Watts' literary style that kind of burned me out on him after I finished Starfish. It does still embody and mostly revolve around his venomous loathing for humans as animals and the human brain as an instrument, especially in the final reveal of what the aliens' whole deal is, but succeeds as a story rather than a lecture, and the vampire stuff is fun without being too corny.

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle I would liken a lot to Alex Branson's Water, Wasted in that it's partly about some weird stuff happening to some small-town folk and mostly about the circumstances that produced and which sustain those people—a heartfelt and genuinely empathetic sketch of the rural experience. This book was pitched to me as a horror novel, which shaded my time with it a little, but if you don't spend the whole book anticipating the sudden horror turn that never really comes it's a compelling work that does some interesting stuff with ambiguity and the idea of a linear story.

Now I'm reading Asteroids by Martin Elvis for a break from fiction, which has been gathering cyber-dust on my Nook since like last December. It's pretty good! Sometimes spends a paragraph explaining something I already know about but it's honestly relaxing to get to shift into skim mode now and then.

Listening

It's been a "throw my likes on shuffle for want of some executive function" type of week, but as I write this up I am really enjoying Club Kuru Live at the Bungalow. Their last album was great and these versions are even more psychic and sweeping than the studio cuts; it feels like they're opening the door on these songs and letting them diffuse into a larger space, a slower and more atmospheric approach. This take on Gone Like a Flower is gorgeous.