Wire Nail

Originally uploaded by heavyprints

Learning how to crop my photos with the rule of thirds. Also testing out the Flickr to WordPress functionality.

“if you decide something is beautiful
then something else immediately becomes ugly
without you realizing it”
                                      – Lao-Tzu

I thought about these words for several hours the other night, and thought I’d share them with you. I think the most interesting part of the realization for me was that Newtons Law is an observation of Nature itself, not just physics. Everything we do, mentally or physically, has a consequence.

Let me know what you think about it.

I’m learning photography. I have had this thing for a long time where I can’t resist taking pictures of textures I find interesting. I used to run around my old jobsite snapping pictures with my cellphone constantly.

These are high resolution photographs of interesting textures I’ve found, most of them should be suitable for use in graphic design. They’ll be about 5MB each.  The entire zipped folder is about 140MB. Please download and enjoy, let me know what you think. What can I do better? What am I doing right? Diggit.

Download it here.

Here’s a few small samples of what’s in the folder. It’s mainly distressed wood textures:

Download it here.

I’m aiming to make this nook of the internet a place that you can come and get an accurate definition of who I am. A place that I can talk about what goes on in my head, and maybe you can find some interest in my humanity.

I have been thinking back to my youth lately. It’s scary how vividly you can remember the smells and the feelings, and the bitter knowledge of the brevity of your situation. The clumsiness of your first kiss and the relief of her being okay with it. Pride and embarrassment and feeling like you’re not alone for the first time, all wrapped up into one. Years later you remember the girls who you had, or didn’t have, or could have had. You remember the youth and the startling beauty in their face and it haunts your dreams. The sweetest reminder that you were once so wide eyed.

It’s a gift, and it’s so fleeting and beautiful, and then it’s gone. You’re left for a lifetime with the impression it left on you. You realize that when you are old and the beauty of youth has long left you, that these memories will burn in your imagination as vividly as yesterday. You have children of your own and it strikes you that they will have these experiences, in their own way. You are at once happy knowing that they will know the beauty of it, and sad that they will also find the shortness of it.

I think back to those years and realize how quickly the time since has left me. It’s jarring to see how fast life moves and is gone. It’s not a heartbeat in the pulse of eternity. Not an entire exhale. It’s so short and everything I do seems in vein in the face of it. I become instantly aware that I am scared of dying.

I hate the idea of simply not being. I find the idea of hell and eternal torture to be a kinder fate than to simply cease to exist. Certainly if one could retain themselves in the face of eternal torture, they’d still have their memory. I am haunted by wondering what will happen in the future after I die, and wondering what the faces of the beautiful girls in my memory are like now. I wonder if they would look on me differently after seeing what time has done to me. I think, sometimes, that life is a cruel joke and memory is the punchline. Remembering the smell of her and the taste, remembering her touch and every intimate detail. Knowing it’s gone forever. Knowing I will one day no longer be aware that it ever happened, or of anything.

I can understand why someone would give themselves to a religion, to the promise of eternity. I wish with all of myself that I could know the comfort of feeling like there was something after I die. I wish that the pain of knowing I am finite would be gone. I feel like I have a soul and I have a morality, and I feel like it is the result of my being a part of something larger than the confines of a lifespan. I want nothing more than to know that it’s the truth and that everything will be okay. I really do.

I can’t believe in the religions I have been presented with. I refuse to find console in the bosom of gods I find tyrannous and morally lacking. Gods that were okay with war and slavery and hating a man for his beliefs. Gods that say “do as I say, not as I do” and gods that promise vengeance upon a person who cannot believe what they have not shown themselves to be.

I am bitter in the face of the choices I have been given. I am bitter in the face of my own mortality. I feel small and weak and fleeting. I feel human in spite of my soul.

I have had lots of jobs in my short life. I have worked at fast food places and washed dishes at bars. I have worked construction jobs and I have sat behind the counter at gas stations. I spent 6 years of my life working in a machine shop for Emerson Climate Technologies, with millions of dollars of machines around me. Today I perch in front of my computer screens, drawing and coding, creating things and finding great pleasure in the detail and the soul of what I willed into existence.

In all of these experiences I have found that the common denominator is simple. Doing whatever you do to the best of your abilities is rewarding. A person who places value on the work that they produce is, or will eventually be, a crafstman. There is art in everything we do every day and the difference between elegant expression, or blandness, is attention to detail and forethought. These things define us to those who would take the time to study our work; we should do everything possible to bemuse their curiosity.

It is exceedingly difficult to feign love and attention to detail. It is a viewers great pleasure to unravel the mechanics of well laid plans; devouring the forethought and unraveling the complexity of your illusion within their own capacity. Sharing the decisions you made and wondering over those they’re not ready to understand making. There is a beauty and a wildness in flights of fancy, but there is such a personal connection in the understanding that comes with pouring over a work whose being is saturated with the labors of an artisan.

I’m not a teacher or a person of great wisdom, so I don’t propose to know what you should do with this information. It’s important to who I am, and I wanted to share it with you.