preliminary sketches

what you have here is kind of my life in miniature: preliminary sketches for one of the paper discs i'm working on (which are supposedly a secret, but if you know where to look, you know where to look), but behind that is a sketch for a new song that popped halfway into my head this week, called "history of the world in brief", and beside that the notes for the hundred or so geocache logs i'm working on.

history of the world in brief:

i don't like you and you don't like me
content in our hostility
we'll act as if we're not insane
to wish to do the other pain

until we meet some other guys
that you and i can both despise
and we'll hold it like some precious gem
as we join our hands to
beat
on
them.

workmanlike approach

daniel pinkwater once told of a year in which he required himself to turn out one genuine piece of art each day before he turned in for the night.

he was not required according to his rules to do anything but make one good print, but this is a disciplined way to go about making art.

the thing about being an artist is that it's easy to sit around an wait until you have a golden inspiration, but quite another thing altogether to crank out work every day. if you go at it with the daily requirement, you don't always get a masterpiece, but you're exercising your craft, keeping your hand and eye in practice, keeping your work current.

so i'm working on a similar plan. i can't tell you what i'm up to because if you knew what i was working on i'd have to have you killed, but every day i turn out one new design.

some days, like today, i also make new music because i'm a composer and i'm working on my new album, songs nobody loves.

stay tuned.

pulling up stakes

last week i went out to catamount to do some trail work.

the trails are closed, but not if you're working.

pulling up stakes

they'd just hosted two cyclocross races and a collegiate mountain bike race, so there were a lot of trail markings that needed to be pulled in.

fall races are mostly on the hillside or in the meadow, so once they're mown they have to be taped off which means a bajiliion stakes get hammered into the ground and hung with flagging tape to mark the course.

in other places the course is marked by lots of those little flags you stick into the grass.

the thing is that when the races are over, someone has to go out and take down all the tape, pick up all the little flags, and pull up the stakes. the pack basket only hold so much tape no matter how hard you jam it in there, so it takes me seven trips back and forth to the barn, which isn't much of a bother since the weather is nice and i need the exercise anyway.

i gather the stakes in piles, leaving them on trails that are easy to get to by four-wheeler, and i mark each pile with one upright stake and a streamer of tape. little flags, if present, are put neatly under a few of the stakes, to keep them from blowing away in case there's a storm.

besides the happiness of getting exercise and being useful, i am also wildly attracted to the idea that if i finish all the prep work in time, i will get to drive the four-wheeler to haul in the stakes, which are heavy.

wooo-hee!