Astropus

For months I’ve been scribbling notes and ideas in my notebook, sketching page layouts and banner designs, and generally boring myself with the details for some new Big Idea. Some shiny new silver-bullet to answer all my questions.  Some outlet for all these fragments bouncing around in my head.  140 characters was novel for a while.  An interesting constraint to fuel artistic output; like Jack White and his Guitar-Drums-Vocals sound or Red-White-Black pallet, I took it as a challenge to craft effective bits of writing.  I liked to think of it as idea shrapnel.  But the ideas never stuck the way shrapnel is supposed to, and I’ve been pondering better ways to get the bigger thoughts out there.

I’ve resisted the idea of “blogging” again.  It just seemed too trite.  Too easy to start, then give up on.  Too played out in this 2nd decade of the new millennium.  But writers write, as they say, and I’ve been off the wagon for far too long.  I had acquiesced to the inertia of inaction and was happy to work my 9 to 5 and plink along on the guitar, and tell stories to friends that would listen. And I was even happy about it.  During my first vacation in five years, sitting on a beach and watching the sun languidly sink into the Pacific from the island paradise of Kauai, I thought that I had finally struck a balance of creating and doing and thinking and being. Then my world was obliterated by the sudden death of my mother in November 2010.

A story all its own, the weeks immediately following changed my perceptions of the world and myself.  My life suddenly lost the clarity that I’d attained and more resembled a stream swollen by sudden rains, waters moving fast and silt stirred from the bottom.  I spent a couple of months of fighting these new currents and struggling to keep my head above the water and then my Mother in Law, who was diagnosed with Liver Cancer just a month after the death of my Mother, was overcome by the disease and died.  Once again my reality was violently upset.  The waters swept me out to sea and left me with countless questions.

As I struggle to find perspective, and strength, and direction in these dark waters I feel the creative force within me build.  Energies that I experienced dwindle; from their roar in my adolescence and early adult hood to a faint buzz as I grew complacent on the still waters of my everyday.  I’m cannot wait for the prefect outlet, I need to harness this energy and apply it to whatever is in front of me.  My notes and journals can’t contain the pent-up energies any longer, and I have too many 1/2 formed ideas and too many ambitions to get hung up by the notions of what a “blog” could and should be.  Everything has changed now; the sandcastle I spent my adult life building was swept away.  But there is limitless smooth sand spread out from me now and Astropus.com is the first pail-full of the reconstruction.  This post the first spade of sand for the foundation.

I hope that you will join me as I experiment with this outlet.  As I try to strike a balance between grossly narcissistic and the culturally inane.  As I fight attention span to keep up with a post-count. As I expand, or contract, or diversify, or focus this site.  It is going to be a journey, and I don’t have any maps or even ideas when I’m headed.  But I’m compelled to take the first steps.  I look forward to hearing what you think.