Get­ting ready– small, agile lap­top. Online back­ups we hope we can access. Installing server on lap­top to run dev sites. Drink­ing water.

So, after brew­ing up a mean cup of Vons© generic brand ‘euro­pean’ hot choco­late (which, embar­rass­ingly enough, is the best damn hot choco­late I have encoun­tered out­side of the gourmet Max Brenner’s stuff Katya bought me for my birth­day {but that is a milk/real-chocolate machine, whilst this is a water-based [and there­fore, slightly more effi­cient] mix}) I got right into try­ing to rework some pages in the new site/project I had out­sourced (to Moldova and Roma­nia) in an effort to get some seri­ous cod­ing. It’s in CodeIgniter, and it is my{our} first foray into frame­works, some­thing we {the dev team (see pic above of our work­place)} have eschewed up until now as a con­fus­ing overkill of code.

Any­way, this is me mak­ing a short story long. The res­o­lu­tion is, the trans­fer from the dev server to the live-mirror (penul­ti­mate home) server caused some wild train wreck with the rewrites. It took me about 4 hours to fig­ure it all out– that is, just to get it work­ing. I did not get a chance to actu­ally change the pages nec­es­sary for deliv­ery tomor­row. Now, I am rid­ing another wave of burn-out and have no desire to work, so it’s off to bed to face the reper­cus­sions in the morning.

Some­thing that I have — through expe­ri­ence — thought myself:

Mul­ti­task­ing is bad for you {from CNN, from Hivelogic}:

“Com­pared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time, heavy mul­ti­taskers had slower response times, most often because they were more eas­ily dis­tracted by irrel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, and because they retained that use­less infor­ma­tion in their short-term memory.“

I do think there are those who are quite adept, per­haps genet­i­cally wired for an adroit­ness, at this this mode of thought + action. I mean, we all can do it to greater and lesser degrees, and Katya’s gen­er­a­tion seems to be con­di­tioned to pre­fer it (though I am not con­vinced that this is *not* to their detri­ment(1)); I have known peo­ple who live in this post­mod­ern, frac­tured state of mind and make envi­able progress — reJon comes to mind. But I mostly think about Schopenhauer’s essay on noise — not due to the noise itself (for noise, I do love), but rather the ‘dia­mond’ mind, which when cut into bits by an inter­rup­tion loses its value.

This may come as a sur­prise to any­one who has cared enough to track my pro­gres­sion as an artist and musi­cian, and the things I have espoused pre­vi­ously. I have been influ­enced by Cage, by chance, by Rauschenberg’s being the writ­ing on the wall ethos. I have cre­ated free-for-all struc­tures for art, I have spo­ken of chaos as other peo­ple would of ‘free­dom’(2). These things have always held an amaz­ing intel­lec­tual appeal to me. How­ever– gem­ini that I am– I think my deep­est con­nec­tions are to the Beuy­ses of this world — those who are, to use a word I am not even sure is a word, the mythopo­etic ones.

Ah, too much there to get into now. But let’s bring this back to the beginning:

I have noticed, per­son­ally and with many oth­ers I have observed qui­etly or not so qui­etly, that our con­stant state of task-bombardment is like an itchy pox: irri­tat­ing, unful­fill­ing, unful­fil­l­able. It’s like being trapped in the shal­low end of life. Itchy :) I have read pre­vi­ous stud­ies that track the amount of time it takes for a per­son, once inter­rupted, to return to their pre­vi­ous task/thought– approx­i­mately 15 min., if mem­ory serves me. Given the schiz­o­phrenic nature of most of our day jobs, this adds up quickly.

I think about watch­ing my lovely daugh­ter, Gen Y through and through, sit­ting in front of the tele­vi­sion, chatting/listening/looking up tat­too designs, while tex­ting on her phone, and osten­si­bly keep­ing track of the con­vo­luted plot line of Lost(3).

I am not say­ing that this ruins us as human beings, not at all. We’ve proven our adapt­abil­ity and mirac­u­lous natures over and over again, and we still find ways of keep­ing all our shit together. But I won­der if we– all of us beneath the enfilade (self-imposed, or no)- might be more, with the ancient art of focus.

Lord, some­times I sound just like some­one I never thought I’d be, when I was younger.

So maybe this isn’t the best topic for this moment– re-inaugurating the ‘blog so to speak– but I had this dream the other night about which I keep think­ing: it’s sim­ple, and it’s also per­haps indica­tive of my computer-addled brain, but I dreamt I was using this computer-drawing pro­gram that was some weird intu­itive merger of Pho­to­shop and some 3-D thing like Maya. The idea was that I could draw any­thing, and when I held the ctrl but­ton (to be hon­est, I can’t remem­ber if it was a Mac or PC), it imme­di­ately ren­dered the draw­ing in a sim­ple 3-D. But the best part is, when­ever I did that, it would turn my pen tool into a knife tool so I could carve off bits, and they would fall off with vir­tual grav­ity. Per­fect for draw­ing a ruined cas­tle, which– you can prob­a­bly guess– was exactly what I was drawing.

As a side note, doesn’t Sigur Ros sound like some­thing like the slow, majes­tic, time-lapse march of gold– and emerald-colored lichens?

…bul­let stopped dead, I sup­pose. Was that really my last post? I will spare you the details of that flight, a sleep­less zombie-walk overnight in Bal­ti­more, lost bag­gage… I will spare you.

So, it’s been a while. I might not have even tried this (this=Blogger), but I am a lit­tle Microsoft-Accessed-OUT at the moment, and left my inher­ited lap­top machine scry­ing through its own innards, look­ing for viral infec­tions and the like– if I am going to try to exer­cise reg­u­larly, I see no rea­son my com­put­ers shouldn’t suf­fer the dis­ci­plines of health too– and I fired up the old Linux box (psy­cho­naut, I have told you all before) and *that* reminds me of post­ing. For some reason.

But I dis­sem­ble, as I dis­as­sem­ble… I have been itch­ing to con­vert said Access data­base to MySQL and pump it over to psy­cho­naut and then prac­tice admin­is­ter­ing via the web. And all that involves get­ting some of the Linux chops back up, so…

And the itch goes fur­ther, I sup­pose… I have been map­ping out writing-thoughts in my head, of late, and real­ize that writ­ing, like draw­ing, is a per­ish­able skill and must be main­tained through prac­tice. Of some sorts.

Which brings us to this, here, now: some sort of attempt at writ­ing. An update, if you will.

I was, just this morn­ing, writ­ing out a bunch of lists, and as I am still in the blush of such an orderly mind­set, I will give you, gen­tle reader, one of your very own:

1. Plane ride. But you’ve already heard.
2. Data­base for the par­ents. Which is inter­est­ing in a way, for it sug­gests some inter­est­ing work­ings of the mind. For exam­ple– and this has hap­pened sev­eral times now– I will be totally stumped by some aspect, give up on it, and find that later– days, a week– I will be build­ing some­thing more com­plex, based on that very knowl­edge I aban­doned which has sur­rep­ti­tiously become so clear to me as to be ren­dered transparent.
3. Con­tin­u­ing pre­vi­ous thought: catch­ing myself in thought recur­sion + ReJon’s ideas about pro­gram­ming accent­ing cer­tain of his human traits, con­trary to pop­u­lar misconception
4. Run­ning 4 miles, right past Randall’s house, but I don’t know which one. I think it was the grey-blue one that I heard some Radio­head out of the other day. I run once every 2–3 days. Run­ning sucks.
5. I made some pup­pet heads, shame­lessly lift­ing tech­niques from Chris Sick­els and Scott Radke. I am cur­rently sum­mon­ing up the time, energy, and mood to foam-out their bod­ies and put them in endear­ing or creepy poses.
6. bought the domain name psychicradio.org for a tighter cou­pling of site & comics.
7. con­tin­u­a­tion: I sliced up the pan­els of all the old and most the new comic pages and put a semi-random link­age walk-thru of them… go to psychicradio.org and see. Then tell me if it is inter­est­ing, groovy, frus­trat­ing, and/or incon­se­quen­tial (those are your only options, so keep to them).
8. Went to the Comic-Con with the beau­ti­ful Iryna (who doesn’t have a web page any­more but should) and we had an insane comic-frenzy and a t-shirt buy­ing com­pe­ti­tion and she bought us both H.P. Love­craft plush Cthulu dolls. Peo­ple of the world, please curb your envy.
9. From K.J. Hays: “the aver­age comic con attendee was between the ages of 30 & 40″
10. Launched into an insane work-week, get­ting so much done that I almost for­got that I am a lazy-ish per­son. I have even had mild fan­tasies of re-stocking my old plan­ner with new cal­en­der pages… not that I have any press­ing engage­ments at present, but it’s like the base­ball field… if I have the blank pages, the appoint­ments will come.
11. Went to the library today, here’s what I got:
    • The Green Arrow, writ­ten by Kevin Smith
    • Y The Last Man. heard alot about it at Comic-Con
    • The Books of Magic: Girl in the Box. Liked Neil Gaiman’s issue, thought I would see how John Ney Reiber would do.
    • The Chron­i­cles of Conan, Vol­ume 2. a classic.
    • Bone. Jeff Smith. got to check it out.
    • The Bat­man Archives. After some heated con­ver­sa­tions with comic-sage John Mark, I decided to get the full scoop, from the begin­ning. This has all the Bob Kane ones from Detec­tive Comics. And what I find most inter­est­ing is that in the begin­ning (issues 1–5) Bat­man kills about 1 per­son per episode. Threw a jewel theif off a build­ing. Kicked an Indian thug– who was unwise enough to stick his head out the win­dow– and broke his neck. Poison-gassed another Indian thug.

So, I am try­ing to decide some things. Mostly, I am dig­ging deep down inside myself to see if I have the patience and for­ti­tude to actu­ally draw some comics. My draw­ing is rusty, and though some­times its cranky and twisted lines please me, more often than not I can­not draw what I see in my head. Not like I used to, when I was an avid pen­ciller. As I said before: per­ish­able. Since I have decided, by and large, to con­cen­trate on the comic-images for artis­tic pur­poses, this seems a lia­bil­ity. So you see, some soul-searching is in order.

Alright, that’s about all I can muster for the day. I am going to try my hand at hand-coding some Queries, and as that is a bor­ing task, I will spare you the numb­ing journey.

Good week­ends to you all.