ThePeej™

Duality of the Singularity

2012-01-07T12:16:00.001-04:00

It's amazing to me that the one helping has TWO prosthetics...

Another inspiring Amy on TED

2011-11-29T09:35:00.001-04:00

Like Aimee Mullins, Amy Purdy turns her disability into her super ability!

Kids don't know they're supposed to be sad...

2011-11-29T08:21:00.007-04:00

Take a look at this photo:

It's a startling contrast eh? If you ever saw a photo of an adult who'd just had a quadruple amputation to save their life & were in a hospital bandaged & hooked up to machines, they're usually not this jovial. And that's understandable... This child is only a year & a half old. She has no experience to allow her mind to grasp the concept of the difficulties she'll need to face in order to overcome her disabilities. My realist Girlfriend scoffed a bit at my excitement when I showed her the photo, saying; "of COURSE she's happy. She doesn't know how hard her life is going to be." But does it HAVE to be? If the people around her treat her like there's nothing wrong with her, and only expect the best, won't she be more well equipped to rise to that occasion? Rather than being coddled and made to think she needs to feel sorry for herself? There's a certain zen perfection in her smile. A potential that most people rarely see in their own lives. If handled correctly... This girl's disabilities, could become her abilities!

Fast forward several years, and it looks like her family did right by her!

Check out the little Blade Runner!

Her name is Ellie Challis. She's a Scottish, soccer playing, running, laughing child. And she's also the youngest to ever have a pair of custom fitted Carbon Fibre Gazel Legs. She's also an ABOVE THE KNEE amputee, which makes her running achievements even more astounding.

Here she is with Oscar Pistorius. A bellow the knee amputee who's used these carbon super legs to qualify for the 2012 London Olympics... Not the special olympics... the ACTUAL olympics. (the jury is still out on weather he's legally allowed to compete!)

He and Ellie are part of a new breed of amputees who are finally reaching a point where the disability, is becoming a super ability!

Why am I talking about it? Well... for a very long time as some know already, I've had an obsession with the idea of prosthesis design. And lately the idea is becoming so loud in my mind that I can't ignore it. So I'm seeking out inspiration, and this little girl gave me a heaping helping of it today.

You can read more about her story here:

Brave girl plays football with no legs.

Five year old is youngest to ever have carbon flex foot legs.

And also the story of how South African blade runner Oscar Pistorious qualified for London 2012:

Oh Boy, it's been a while

2011-11-03T13:50:00.002-03:00

Hello there Blogger account.... it's been a while, hasn't it?

Wow. So much to rant about! Is this the right time to write? The write time?

A lot has happened... I won't get too much into it, other than to say, I'm inspired. An old dream that my inner critic tried to kill off a few years ago has resurfaced, and as I've learned: this means it's worth pursuing.

I will design prosthesis. More importantly, I will change the way people think about prosthesis.

As an analytical thinker, who's been through a lot of professional counseling in his life, I am capable of very detailed introspection. I'm able to retrace ideas and thoughts and obsessions back to their root cause. Though much of this introspection, I've come to realize lately, that a great ambition in my life has been fuelled by a pivotal scene in one of my favourite childhood movies: The Empire Strikes Back.

In this scene, the protagonist, Luke Skywalker looses his hand. This hand is later replaced with a prosthetic (robotic) hand. Having my hand replaced by a prosthesis has been a recurring theme in many of my dreams, for as long as I can remember, I used to fear it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but now conclude the much more innocent and banal reasoning of this movie scene having a powerful impact on my mind in it's formative infancy. (I was only 2 years old when my Father took me to see this movie in Theaters)

Whatever planted the seed: it's flourished in my fertile imagination.

I'm also blessed with a sufferably powerful sense of empathy, and a terrifying curiosity. One that would often see me spellbound by any sort of medical enhancement or prosthesis I would encounter in my life. I used to cringe at the fleshy plastic hearing aid a child would be forced to wear. Or the eerie "doesn't quite match" colour of an artificial hand or foot. Why do we give such consideration to the beauty and charm of an optional enhancement product like an iPod or cellphone, and offer none of these considerations to things seen as necessary artificial components?

Why can't that hearing aid be a gorgeous blue anodized aluminum? Why can't an artificial robot hand be the envy of a classroom full of children? Why doesn't a prosthetic arm have replaceable vanity faceplates?

I'm 30 now. Dreams like this aren't a matter of simple conversation starters. Or the subject of late-night ramblings with captive and willing audience members. This is my purpose. It's my higher calling. And I must pursue it. My life, happiness, future all depend on my heeding the call that my brain has been making in seeming vein to me all these years.

I'm not going to let the excitement of this post eat up too much more of this afternoon. I have things to do. Like calling the Sunnybrook hospital volunteer line again in the hopes of setting up a schedule!

http://sunnybrook.ca/research/content/?page=sri_groups_obl_home

Here's Aimee Mullins, leading the charge:

Vintage Skatboards!

2011-06-12T14:31:00.001-03:00

Today I Learned

2011-06-01T22:20:00.004-03:00

Today I learned the value of film photography... I don't know that I could ever get my Digicam to capture a photo of a nuclear explosion.

Today I learned that the first Nuclear Explosion looked like this:

And that the explosions that happened over Nagasaki and Hiroshima occurred mere WEEKS afterwards! (shocked by the naivety of the age)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)

Today I learned that the Atomic Age [Future]'s genesis was in fact, this explosion. What a poignant photo!

I was also tangentially informed of the existence of a machine called a Cyclotron!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron

And finally the fact that surprised me most is that Canada actually had a key role, (along with the U.K. and spearheaded by the U.S. Army) in advancing nuclear physics and the development of the bomb that produced this explosion!

History, and it's internet proliferation, is AWESOME.

Tutorial - Making Vector Video Game Sprites

2011-04-26T15:37:00.001-03:00

GrinSpiration

2010-07-13T03:29:00.003-03:00

Grandfather always singing songs.
He's crooner with a voice so strong.
From a world full of so much wrong.
Gives me strength to continue on.

His upbringing that was oh so hard.
Barely grown had a wife to start.
Kept working 'till they owned that yard.
Made life held it in their arms.

Grandmother had a tough life too.
She was the reason he could sing on through.
Keep pushin' 'cause the bills were due.
Stuck together but with love as the glue.

Made a family that was oh so big.
Acadian & Lebanese, you can dig.
Deep roots workin' on those rigs.
Aged sweet like a ficus to a fig.

Kept movin' and improvin' by bit.
Out screamin' comes the first Grand Kid.
Wantin' to sing like his Giddie did.
Cookie jar with the big heavy lid.

3 Aunties made his style so fresh.
Kept him up, hugs and kisses to death.
Always surrounded by the proudest and best.
Foundation that could stand the test.

The straight groovin' little boy so small.
Slick dancin' with the crews at the mall.
Best believe he appreciates it all.
'Cause of their love he will always stand tall.

Random Rhyme

2010-06-14T23:13:00.003-03:00

A random rhyme that popped into my head while I was listening to a Teddy Pendergrass Tribute mix.

I was gonna post this as my Facebook Status, but didn't want anyone inferring that it was them. It's really about no one.

♫
She knew how to work the web cam,
that's the best scam,
tattoo on her back with a rack & fake tan.
Got him on the long play payment plan,
can't explain it Man,
entertainment fan
♪

This computer was built the same year as I

2010-06-04T02:02:00.002-03:00

Our Future

2010-06-03T11:10:00.003-03:00

Uh Ohh!! I haven't even WATCHED this video yet and I know it's worth blogging.

THE FUTURE PEOPLE!

I almost feel like I was born a biiiit too early. Like I won't be around long enough to TRULY see my dreams of a cohesive, complete, and socially accepted Man-Machine link.

Then again, maybe I'm happy I can be here during it's infantile stages? Sign be up to be a testing platform. I'm really for my chip implants!

TURNING INTO GODS - 'Concept Teaser' from jason silva on Vimeo.

EDIT: I just finished watching it, and it seems like these cats have a DIFFERENT idea. They believe they can GENETICALLY code a human body to maintain itself in a healthy peak state indefinitely.

I say just build a better body and stick my brain in it!

:^D

Summertime Spittin'

2010-06-02T13:53:00.003-03:00

I've recently been energized by a song that DRAKE released. I know, I know, it's cheesy auto tuned POP, and he sounds just like Lil Wayne and bla bla bla.

Listen, I'm getting too old to pretend I don't like things just because they are popular. I REALLY LIKE THIS SONG:

I relate to what he's saying. He's admitting to his fragility and to having issues handling his meteoric rise. The song is about a small town (Canadian) kid being overwhelmed by the sudden love he's getting. Sometimes, the universe gives you EXACTLY what you've been asking for, and it's terrifying. You can turn and run from it, or take it by the horns. As I type this, Drake is taking his life into his own hands, and this song is giving me chills in the process.

I love it so much I downloaded an instrumental version and wrote a few verses to it:

Instrumental, with hook:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/733735440030617a/

I didn't really think this through much then, I had the first verse in my head suddenly and couldn't ignore it. I'm not rapper, I'm a singer... but I can rhyme in my head. And this was a LOT of fun to write:

My frame might be small, but my brain will tackle y’all.
I take it then I make it mine, hear them people call.
Be Bold, release hold, I gotta leap before the fall.
Stand tall, Do you really live without havin’ a ball?

It’s fun! Out in the sun, when your mind is on a run.
Got them haters leavin’ comments ’cause their egos is undone.
Turn ’round, see your reflection, like a raver who is spun.
We one, talkin’ gibberish together as we bun.

Haha, did you get it? When you read between the lines?
When the words are bouncin’ up and down, your body’s feelin’ vibes.
The bass to make de gyal dem wine, shorties lookin’ fine.
Thank you, to the Gods, for this smokin’ summer shine!

It’s blazin’, and amazing when the winter does subside.
Got the people acting crazy, playin’ tricks to get outside.
From patios to radios, we’re feelin’ so alive.
Mixin’ liquor with the laughter, make Sangria from the wine.

From Atlantic to Pacific, Summer records gettin’ struck.
But I heard it snowed in Edmonton last night! Well, Whut the fuck?
It’s Canada luck, I don’t mean that it sucks.
We just gotta live a lot of life before the season’s up!

:^D

Thanks for the inspiration Drake! I refuse to bow to Canadian conventions and hate you just because you made it big outside the context of your home. Keep doing you, and inspiring those of us who dream globally.

:^D

Asthetic Prosthetic

2010-05-11T16:30:00.002-03:00

I've been obsessed with prosthesis design for a very long time. Ever since grade school when kids were forced to wear ugly flesh coloured hearing aids...

Why can't that hearing aid look cool?! They NEED to be worn... why not make them look neat? Why not have it in Anodized iPod Blue? With interchangeable face plates?!

Anyway... One day, I WILL be a prosthesis designer.

This lady is reinforcing my existing beliefs in a powerful way.

:^)

Life Lessons from Lego

2010-04-14T13:17:00.005-03:00

There was a very brief time in my life where I rejected Lego. VERY brief. As a teenager it's normal for you to buck old habits in an effort to "find yourself". I gave up things I loved because they were "beneath" me. In some people, I've seen this last decades. Thankfully for me, it only lasted around a year, before I came back to my senses and realized that ignoring things I love will not make me more mature.

I fronted like I was too grownup to play Lego, or to climb trees, or to roll around in the grass.

I guess, like any other young man, I did it to try and appeal to "the ladies". Luckily, I quickly realized I don't want to be with anyone who doesn't love that I love Lego. I don't want to hold the hand of someone who will scoff at me for wanting to briefly let go of that hand to roll down a grassy hill until I'm dizzy. I don't want to commit to anyone who will tell me not to climb a tree.

So fast forward to my adulthood, and I've embraced Lego for the therapeutic vice that it has become.

I NEED it in my life. It saves me from myself all the time. It's a way for me to forget about the stress of being grown, and be creative for no reason other then it feels good.

I've learned many very valuable life lessons from Lego. Building with it last night reminded me of several of these, and I'd like to share them.

First Lesson Lego taught me: In order to create, one must first destroy.

This is a pretty big deal. And I was fortunate enough to learn it at a very young age. With all of my creative endeavors, I always feel like the things I create are gifts. Lego, drawing, writing, singing... none of it ever ceases to astound me. I'm THRILLED at the things that come out of my brain. Often times, I would build something that was SO GOOD, I couldn't fathom HOW I had come up with it. It still happens! Only now, I've simply come to terms with the fact that I am gifted. No no no. I don't mean it like that. Not in a swollen ego kind of "look at me, I'm so great" way. But in a "thank you so much to the universe for every single one of these gifts, and I pray I may never take them for granted! I am aware that my eyes and arms and even life could be taken from me tomorrow, so I will marvel and delight at the magic while I have it! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU FOR THESE GIFTS!" That kind of Gifted.

So, when I would build these things (usually Space Ships) I would stare at them in disbelief! Sometimes, they would be so good, that I'd put them on my shelf and display them for weeks, even MONTHS at a time. I was so floored that I was actually able to come up with these things out of my own head, that I would display them as a reminder that my life was worth so much more then the taunting teasing bullies on the playground would have me believe.

And it's not ALWAYS this magical. 3-4 out of 5 times that I actually sit down to build, nothing comes out. I spend a long time thinking and building and trying new things, and they often don't work out. I can spend 3 hours experimenting and end up with nothing. It's about 1/5th of the time that something CLICKS, and the universe GIFTS me these creations.

On a good day, I can build 3-4 amazing things that totally blow my mind, and blow the last ones I did out of the water!

So, that leads me to the lesson. Often times, by reveling in these past accomplishments for too long, I would stifle FUTURE potential. I would leave these works on my shelf and they would collect dust. (Lego attracts more dust then any other material in the world. SCIENCE FACT!) Most of the time some of my BEST pieces (elements, bricks, blocks, what have you) would get "tied up" in these beautiful master works. Well... it came to me one day in a flash. If I want to move forward unencumbered and free my mind and my resources up enough for the universe to give me my next gift... I need to completely release my attachment to the past accomplishment!

I LITERALLY needed to DESTROY my past peak, in order to even have a CHANCE at climbing towards the next highest one.

THAT'S HUGE!!!!

So I eventually trained myself OUT of being SAD when I broke my old creations, and started REVELING in it! I would smash huge spaceships into the mother pile with great dramatic effect! Often holding them up above my head in one last appreciation for their divinity, before violently throwing them at the floor, and releasing their potential back into the mother pile.

TERRIFIC!

And, like I said before, only 1 in 5 "build sessions" results in one of these master works! So the times I destroyed the old were almost NEVER the same times as I build the new.

But that was ok!

Which brings me to my next lesson:

Patience, and embracing of failures.

So what of these times when I sit and build and build and build and nothing comes of it? Are these wastes of time? Well, in a younger, more hyper-critical faze of my life I thought so. I used to get upset about it. But I'm realizing now that these "in between" times are JUST as important as the dramatic "Ah HA!!" times. My faith, and my willingness to sit through the days when I build and build and get no where, are the REASON I receive the gifts! If I didn't sit through all of these so called "failures" then my successful builds would NEVER happen. You MUST be willing to put enough FAIL times in to get to the WIN!

HUGE LESSON!

And I learned it from Lego?!

Lesson # 3: There's no light like Sunlight

Somewhere in my childhood, a friend and I were playing with my Lego, and Mom, like most well intending Mothers, told us we needed to go play outside...

WELL. This started a chain reaction that led to my worship of Sunlight. AND to the discovery of a dramatically efficient cleanup method. In a flash of brilliance, my friend and I decided we could just bring a sleeping bag outside, open it up, and pour the Lego out on to it.

WELL. Have you ever seen Lego in direct sunlight?! It's MARVELOUS! The colours, the shapes, the textures, all come to LIFE in the sun. The translucent elements are suddenly BRILLIANT, and every colour is richer. There's NOTHING like playing Lego outside. It's really one of the better ways to spend a sunny afternoon.

Now I hunt for sunlight in my daily life. I choose places to live that have South or West facing windows. I sit by windows at restaurants and cafe's. I chase the sunsets on my bike. Sunlight wins over ANY artificial light.

If it can make Lego look so good, it MUST be the best way to look at all life.

Lesson #4: Work Smart, Not Hard

So the Lego was now on a blanket outside, and when it's time to come in, we simply pick up the blanket, and pour the Lego back into the box! GENIUS! I now NEVER play with my Lego without putting it on a blanket. It's just the way to go.

And finally, the last lesson:

The Destination doesn't matter, it's the journey, and the company you keep that lasts.

My Aunt Lynda is my favorite Aunt. I don't mean that in a way that should be insulting to any other Aunts. She just put in more time, and was the closest to my Age.

One day, when I was very young, she was at our house for dinner. She was helping Mom and Dad with cleanup after eating, and I kept tugging at her pant leg and asking her to play Lego with me. My parents tried to save her by saying "Grown ups don't want to play Lego". The look on my face must have gotten to her because she immediately said "No! I'll play with you, right after I finish dishes".

I might have been 5 at the time. 6 tops. Well, she, a grown Woman, and my God Mother, came into my bedroom, and sat on my floor, and played Lego with me. She didn't build ANYTHING. I can remember her sticking one of my Mini-Figs (Official name for Lego Men) on a 6 x 4 black flat panel, and then sticking a couple lights on it. (how do I remember this?!)

Anyway... the point is, she built NOTHING. But she did it. And it meant and still means, the WORLD to me. This lesson was big too. It didn't fucking matter that she couldn't come up with a finished piece. Heck, I don't have the slightest clue what I built that time. Another Space Ship I suppose. But what lasted, was the fact that SHE PLAYED LEGO WITH ME. It wasn't the destination that had an effect on me. It was the journey. The time spent with this WONDERFUL adult. This person, who lowered herself to the level of a child for a half-hour, changed that child forever with her kindness and caring.

The fact that she built nothing in particular made the lesson ring even truer to me. She did it JUST to spend time with me, and to let me know that my aspirations and creativity had value BEYOND a simple childish pass time.

WONDERFUL!

All in all, Lego has been an inspiring tool that I've employed with great joy. I feel further blessed that I've been able to apply the lessons it has taught me in my real life. All of these principles of Lego philosophy can be applied to real world situations. Certainly not clinging to passed accomplishments with too much vigor, and forgiving myself for days I spend going through the motions of being creative, without much concrete results has made me much more forgiving of the sometimes painfully un-productive "process" of being a creative professional.

If you haven't played with your Lego in a while, I urge you to do so. But please, let go of the idea that you NEED to end up with something finished in the end. Allow yourself the freedom to construct whatever you wish, and don't worry about any judgments or standards of quality. Sure, building that amazing creation is pretty rewarding... but in the end, the time you spend chasing it is far more valuable then the artifact you may or may not create.

Happy Building!

This sums it up very nicely

2010-04-12T12:49:00.002-03:00

I love this!

2010-04-12T12:47:00.002-03:00

huh? What's happening here? (unfinished Christmas Post)

2010-01-13T00:44:00.000-04:00

Flying to Toronto on New Years Eve! Well actually, flying to Mississauga. Well, actually, flying to Montreal and THEN flying to Mississauga. An epic adventure on borrowed time. Gifted to me by the sweet twist of a fated winter storm.

To call these last three days serendipitous would in no way be an exaggeration. From the moment the first massive chunky snowflakes started to fall on Tuesday, I had a feeling inside that something was right. I woke up feeling wrong about leaving PEI that morning actually. Like I hadn’t experienced something yet. Like the much desired “switch” hadn’t been flipped, and my brain and spirit were still on Toronto time. I’d yet to truly let go and relax. I felt like I hadn’t hugged my mother enough. Like I hadn’t seen my nephew enough. Like Dad and I didn’t sit and hug on the couch long enough reminiscing about mine and his youth. And waxing poetic about our potential futures. I’d had a evening out with my boys the previous night that ran into the wee hours of the morning. I woke up later then I’d wanted, just in time to see my Mom leaving for work. I saw her pulling out of the driveway and was heartbroken. So when the announcement came over the loudspeaker at Charlottetown Airport later that afternoon to say the flight was canceled, I was elated. I felt a great release. Like a valve had been opened to vent the built up back pressure that had plagued me through the other 12 days of my Christmas trip. They made the announcement that I’d be stuck on the island for at least one more night, and I finally let go. Let go of the inner city pressure. Of the constant state of readiness the metropolis forces me to live in. I love that state. I thrive on it. But I desperately needed refute after being in it for a solid year. Everything in moderation.

What I needed, was to let go. To not worry. To relax. And in that moment on Tuesday, I did. I fell heavily into that airport waiting room chair and held my Mother’s hand. Sitting between her and my Father, in a state of mischievous satisfaction, I finally let go. Most people were frantically scrambling to figure out they’re alternative traveling plans, as my father suggested I do immediately... but I didn’t budge. I was so pleased. So happy. So relaxed. Not even worried about it!

Right now I’m on board a crotchety old Dash 8, in the most exciting seat! Window, right beside the big whirling loud 4 bladed turbo prop. We’re passing over some rural area of New Brunswick and the lights look fantastic! Like a webwork of orange pathways, all linked together and converging at concentrated pockets of sparkling brilliance. I’d reach down for my camera to try and capture this stunning view... but the old Rebel doesn’t excel in low light situations like this, and the quarters are so cramped that I don’t want to subject my seat mate to another awkward rifling through my over filled bag.

My flight path is a relatively long one. A direct flight from Charlottetown to Toronto on a decent sized aircraft takes less then two hours. Even 1.5 hours with a tail wind. This trip has me in the air for two hours aboard this archaic little turbo prop before landing in Montreal. When I get to La Belle Province I’ve got an hour to saunter through the airport to catch my connecting flight at my convenience. Again, I’m blessed with this healing alone time in transit. I love it. The Tuesday flight was going to see me stuck in the Halifax airport for several hours waiting for a connection. I’d rather spend the extra time in the air aboard this charming old people carrier anyway. And Montreal is a much better city to possibly get stuck in for New Years eve in my humble opinion.

So the switch got flipped on Tuesday when they announced the flight was canceled, and the magic had only begun then! As soon as I’d heard the flight was canceled I told Facebook. Facebook then told my friends, who all proceeded to txt me to tell me I had to come out that night! I casually mentioned to my rentals that I was already getting the call out, and Mom responded with “Well you’d better go out tonight and have some fun! No more complaining about how you didn’t get to go out!”

Little did I know what an epic, and soul healing night was waiting for me out in the little city with the big soul.

The previous week I’d been out to Babas with awesome results. Also a Tuesday, the bar was unusually jam packed with people. Many of whom were just back for Christmas break like me! The energy was frenetic and palpably intensified from what a normal Tuesday night at Babas is like. Babas is always a feel good spot, but it’s not always a high energy place. The fervor comes in waves and nodes. The swells were big on the previous Tuesday, but they crested and broke in unison this week!

Last week, I’d seen the chalk board marquee on the back covered smoking patio and saw John Connolly was scheduled to play on the 29th. The very day I was supposed to leave. John Connolly is a great artist, great friend, and hands down my most satisfying design client. The quality and length of the bro grab I get for him on the oft chances we see one another says it all. They’re always awkwardly long, but never awkward. Our friendship transcends many of the normal constraints we as a society place on such unions. I don’t have to call him often, or see him, or even speak to him via any of the currently popular social mediums. But when we connect, it’s electric!

So I start getting the txt message call-outs before I even get an opportunity to recall that he’s playing that night. I agree to come out strictly based on the desires of my island friends. Babas it is!

...

I was unable to finish this above entry on that flight. The snacks came, and away went my laptop. So now, I’m re-reading it, on another Tuesday night. This time I’m not in Charlottetown. I’m on a GO bus from Square One to Union Station. The scenic route back from Mississauga. I just drove Ivan’s Mazda 3 out to him after a nearly missed orthodontist appointment had it stranded downtown. I should probably be working now... I’ve been getting a surprisingly satisfying amount of freelance copy writing work lately! So I’m still spending a lot of time writing... but none on my blog... I just went to visit it before cracking open the work documents.... It’s in a horrible state! It’s got a very unwelcoming post as it’s main one now for two whole months! (Eeeew, stagnant self expression!) :^P I needed to post something on there! I was so distraught with how it looked, that I stripped all the theme colours off and hastily replaced the header with a logo I use for my print design invoices... :^P

My iTunes shuffle actually played the downtempo version of “Inner City Pressure” while I was reading the line about inner city pressure I had written on the flight home. That’s how I knew I had to just friggin’ post the unfinished entry. hehe

And this horribly unformatted and rushed adendu....

.....

Addendum I was trying to type! But then I got distracted by the Tower. THEY TURNED IT INTO A FRIGGIN’ 1500 FOOT TALL LED TV for frig sakes!! The damned thing looks INCREDIBLE!

I know I have a sweet view of it from my place, and believe me, I take advantage of that! But seeing it from the outer arteries as you’re driving into the city is AWESOME!

Toronto looks MUCH different then it did when I left in 2004! The CN Tower isn’t the only structure to have been highlighted with some kind of LED array. Tons of the new condo towers have blades of colour. But most of them stick to a single colour, and a static panel of it. Not like the dynamic lighting they added to Toronto’s giant phallus. Hahaha

Love this city.

I can also see the Peakcock building (U of T brutalist library. Massive concrete slabs at jagged angled laid out in the shape of a cubist peacock. Must been seen to be beheld.)

Ok. Home now. Sleep time. Better blog soon.

Page 3. An unbridled reflective rant!

2009-11-06T12:42:00.002-04:00

<<<< This entry was written three days ago in some word processing software that has a page counter. It's "3 pages" long. I only got the guts to post it this morning >>>>>

I’ve got a freelance writing project that I could be working on during this train ride, but alas, I’ve left the creative brief at home. So instead, we’re gonna have a little freestyle session. Now THIS I haven’t done in a while. I read part of the book “The Artists Way” and used to do the “morning pages” exercises. Basically, you force yourself to write three full pages of free associative rambles. There’s no intended structure, no goal, no subject. You just WRITE. Needless to say it’s very therapeutic. There’s some magic that happens when you write without subject or goals. Where the objective is quantity, and not quality, or communicative. I always learned something amazing about myself in the final moments of the third page. No matter how banal or uninspired the opening was, the simple act of forcing myself to produce, always yielded a result. The book says: You worry about the quantity, fate will look after the quality”. And it’s true! I might write more if I didn’t have such high expectations of what my writing is or needs to accomplish. So here, out of habit now, I’ve found a nice corner seat on the train car, stuck my longboard up against the wall, and begun typing. I have to say, it’s already terribly liberating. I just noticed that I haven’t done any of my regular “return key pacing” tricks. That bad habit I have of spacing my phrases like I want them to be read. I usually plot out my sentences in a way that I hope, forces the reader to read with the same cadence that I’m thinking in. I control the rhythm and timing by designing my paragraphs. Like those poems we read in school that were shaped like their subjects. This is fine for my blogging, but I find myself studying a lot more high school english class theory on proper paragraph structure now that I’m picking up more corporate copy writing work. Bad habits. Good habits. I used to think ALL habits were bad habits. I hated the expected. Loathed the laziness and predictability of a comfortable routine. Thrived on facing the unknown with gusto. But my priorities are changing as I climb towards 30. I almost typed “as I speed down the tracks of the roller coaster of life, approaching 30.” but I think that kind of speaking/thinking is very dangerous. People ask me how I maintain such a positive outlook on life. Well, it’s all about building good habits. One good habit I’m building, is that I only project what I desire, instead of what I fear. I WANT to be climbing towards 30. I FEAR that I’m falling towards it. So in that moment, I’m faced with a decision. Do I want to propagate my fear? or my desire? So here, as I climb towards 30, I’m discovering the value of a properly planned and executed habitual behavior. There’s a REASON the world operates on a regular, repeated schedule. Granted, I think we’d be better off on a 28 day, 13 months calender, that would better match our own natural rhythms. But I’m finding a way to make the 12 month calendar, 7 day week, work a bit harder for me. And that’s really part of the magic. Build your habits with intent. Plot every move. Oh sure, I’m a “go with the flow” kind of guy. I roll with the punches, and make the best of what life gives me. That’s how I make it appear at least. The truth is, that I make conscious decisions to take control of EVERYthing that happens to me. By choosing how I react to a situation, and by controlling what parts of my life I project outward unto others. It ALL matters. The way you do one thing, is the way you do everything. So, even seemingly small events always present you with this decision. The decision can always be broken into this “Desire or Fear” yin and a yang. I also believe there is only one right answer for YOU to these questions. My fear might be your desire, and vice versa. There’s no right answer, only the one that’s right for you! The problems arise when you ad another human being to the mix. Someone else’s feelings/fears/desires is almost always the source of any pain and frustration I ever feel in my day to day life. I always KNOW what the right path in the fork is for me. My current challenge in life, is to stop taking the path that I feel is right for OTHER people. So as I climb towards 30, I’m making a conscious effort to pick the path that I KNOW is right for ME. And not worrying so much about what I expect that others need or want from me. It’s been really hard to do. I’ve always been terribly obsessed with, and connected to, the feelings of others. I say all the time that my heightened sense of empathy is my power and my crux. My blessing and my curse. But I’m getting better at it. Getting better at hearing my first instincts when they present themselves, and not burying them under a pile of “what if”s and “what does she think”s. I’m getting really particular in my old age. The next person who breaks through my shell and really gets my heart is gonna have to be one fucking strong woman I can tell that much. I’m just not going to be satisfied with settling for anything less then what I believe and know in my heart that I want. So what is the secret to my seemingly amazing outlook on life? To my boundless energy and constant smile? Well, it’s two things. FIRST, you make one, big, declarative decision. “I AM GOING TO BE HAPPY”. Sounds irritatingly simple. I know. But here’s where it gets complicated and difficult. In order for this one decision to stick, you then have to back it up, with COUNTLESS other decisions. Everything that EVER happens to you has the potential to be a brick on the house of your dreams, or a brick on the prison cell of your fears. You have to recognize that EVERYTHING is connected. And EVERYTHING matters. Everything you do. Every reaction you have to anything that happens to you throughout your day, shapes either, your dreams, or your fears. The powerful thing, is that NO one, can control WHERE you put your brick. NO ONE. YOU are the one in control of WHERE you place these experiences. And so, when you see me on Facebook, or on Twitter, or on my blog, and I’m going off projecting all of this positivity, know that JUST as much BULLSHIT is happening to me in my life every day as it is to you. But, when I GET that load of shit thrown in my face, I scrape it off to reveal my smile has not weakened. Then, using the straw of my experiences, I turn the shit into a brick, and knowingly, carefully, intentionally, place it on the house of my dreams. IT WORKS. I used to be suicidally depressed at one point in my life. From the age of I would say 9, until about 14, I was in a steep decline that culminated in my having serious suicidal thoughts and intentions. Lucky for me, my father was there to pull me out of the hole with some real straight talk. He laid out all the disgusting realities of what suicide really was, and what it would do to him and my family to have to clean up after my selfish act. It was a real turning point. Later in that week, I reconnected with my creative side. My gift of drawing. Which, in many ways, is just an extension of my love for my Father. He gave me the gift of visual arts. My Grandfather gave me my voice. So, without going into too much detail about the circumstances, I recall the DAY I made the decision to be a happy person. THE DAY. I remember sitting on that bed, in that room, and watching that show on that TV about comic artists. I picked up my pencil and paper, and drew myself out of the grave I’d spent 5-6 years digging. Depression is a terrible self centered sickness. Everything was about me. Why did we move from New Brunswick to PEI? Why did I leave my friends behind? Why did the kids at this new school tease me so much? Only when I threatened the ultimate selfish act, and my father told me about how my bowels would release when I died and he’d be stuck cleaning shit off the dead body of his only son, did I see my great gaff. Now, 15 years later, the pendulum has swung a bit too far, and I’m realizing I need to back up a bit and be a bit more of that selfish, and sometimes sad kid. I need to allow myself a little bit more down days then I do. To embrace the bad moods and anger I sometimes feel. Still creating those bricks out of the experiences and using them to build my dreams. But realizing you get a sturdier brick out of a bigger hunk of shit! So I made the decision that day to be a happy person. To be thankful that I’m alive. That I have both legs. Both eyes. Both nuts. That I can speak properly. (thanks speech therapist in grade 5 who helped me loose my lisp!) That I can DRAW ANYTHING I can imagine. That I can SING. That I can write. That I’m blessed every single morning that I wake up. And that with this blessing, and these powers, and these gifts, come a great responsibility. I have a responsibility to myself to make me, the best me I can be. To fight every single damned fucking day to move closer to achieving my potential. Truth is, I’ll never be satisfied with where I’m at. I’ll always want more. But that’s great! That’s why we die. To push us forward in a battle to be the best us we can be in the short time we have. So I made that decision that faithful day, and now I make dozens, or hundreds of subsequent decisions every moment of every day to back the first one up. Hahahaha. Well looky here. I’m halfway through the third page and about to reach some truth. Hahaha. How do I know the truth is coming? Well, I just had a passing thought as to weather or not I’m going to post this. My FIRST instinct told me this HAD to be posted on my blog. I HAVE to commit this thought. But it’s so crass? And declarative. And bold, and combative, and not properly structured and ... and ... and ... The list of excuses could be long enough to fill the rest of the third page. But, I’m not going to allow that. I see my demon now sitting right in front of me. He IS me. He’s telling me that, because I’m worried about what other people think of me, I shouldn’t post this. Well, Mr. inner Demon, explain to me, WHY, I felt compelled to omit my regular spacing habit on this entry? Hmmm? And why is it then, that the person I’m going to be writing for tonight when I get home and start my corporate copy writing, mentioned the Artist Way book and the morning pages to me when I met with him for the first time at the coffee shop? See, that’s the problem Demon. You’re transparent. I know you too well. You can’t pull the wool over these eyes. Especially not my third eye. That one is tuned to perfection. And I use it to peer right through you into the truth. No, I was compelled NOT to space this entry, because I was meant to come to this conclusion by SEEING the end of the third page approaching. This lesson was a visual one. BOLD, and in my face! Real tangible evidence that I’m on the right path. That my current battle is the right one. That the lesson I’m learning this year, about not worrying as much about how others perceive me, or how my actions affect their feelings, is of utmost importance! So I’ll trod on, un-daunted, and push myself passed what I know it a great obstacle that stands in the way of me reaching the next level of my potential. I will post this on my blog and I will not care that it may be ill received. I heard a quote once from John Lennon that I found really compelling. He was asked by a 16 year old Toronto boy about “messages” in his music. His answer to the kid, was that the messages were all there, in the music, but that they weren’t planned. He revealed that he sometimes writes, records, and then listens to his own song, sometimes hundreds of times before ever hearing the message. But that it’s there, and it sometimes reveals itself magically to him. I feel this way about my art. People used to ask me “how did you draw that” and I would say “it was already there. Already in the paper, in the pencil. I just spent enough time on it that it came out!”. I hesitate to say things like that because people might think I’m crazy. But it’s the truth. So I just write. And the message takes care of itself!

Bronchial Melancholia

2009-10-30T00:02:00.012-03:00

So my cold is in it's final stages. The final irritating faze where you feel fine at idle, but loose energy quickly when trying to build up speed. I feel healthy for lengthy moments, only to get dizzy when I stand up, or winded when I move around.

But I'm going to work tomorrow. Working from home today was hellish. No longer do I have a nice niche carved out in my own corner of the apartment. The kitchen renovations have tapped all of our previously spacious common areas. Leaving me to attempt design work from the couch today. Nothing doing! Cords strewn about. Hard drives overheating on micro fiber upholstery. Basically, I spent 6 hours feeling massively blocked and got a whole lot of nothing done. So a little bit of the sniffles and a nagging lingering throat tickle aren't going to keep me from going downtown tomorrow and killing it!

I couldn't help but be bitten by melancholy today. I've just started to feel like true productivity is within my grasp working from the studio downtown. But then to have a minor cold banish me back to my domicile in the middle of crunch time was less then ideal.

In my unusually banal state I started to get nostalgic, as I often do in the rare moments when apathy overcomes my usual enthusiasm. Something came over me around dusk and I was inexplicably compelled to go check on my Vanagon. A Gorgeous Dark Chocolate and Platinum coloured, 1984 VW Vanagon that's been sitting dormant in the parking garage since over two months ago when I last drove it and the clutch failed on me. A harrowing trip back the 6 blocks to home with no clutch was something else!

So that had scared me out of driving her obviously. It's not Charlottetown. I can't just rip around Mississauga willy nilly and clutchless, turning off the engine at each light like I did back in PEI when the clutch failed the first time. And I haven't had the steady income I've needed to be able to justify taking her in for expensive repairs.

But today, I just couldn't help myself.

I'd had this itch of an idea in my mind for a while, that, somehow, with the extra clutch fluid I'd poured into the reservoir two months ago, that some settling would have occurred, and what had simply been a nasty air bubble in the hydraulic lines would have rectified itself... Like... I've somehow KNOWN for a couple weeks that the Vanagon would run if I went and tried to drive it. A strange compulsion that became too strong to ignore today in my less then enthusiastic state.

I had sent my roommate a txt msg asking him what we should do for dinner tonight. We're both pretty considerate Dudes, and tend to make sure the other person is looked after for mealtime. Nothing crazy... but if I'm gonna go grab food, I make sure he's not about to land home hungry 20 minutes later...

So not having heard back from him, I couldn't wait without eating any longer. Instead of grabbing my longboard, or bicycle, as has been my habit of late, I grabbed my keys.

Down the hallway to the elevator, with an odd certainty. I pressed the P1 button to take me to the parking garage.

As a side note, a very thuggish, and "angry all the time" looking fellow got on to the elevator at another floor. He smelled TERRIFIC, which I found quite funny. Here this man went through so much effort to maintain his hardened demeanor, then he bathes in floral musk. Hilarious!

I got down to the garage level, and proudly walked to the other, farther doors that lead to the Vanagon. Unlike the closer door I've been taking lately to get to Ivan's parking spot and the Mazda 3.

The parking garage was relatively vacant. Most people probably don't finish fighting their way back through gridlock until after dark this time of year.

So the Vanagon was sitting there in all her regal glory with nary another vehicle in sight to ruin my view. I walked triumphantly to her, and with slight trepidation, stuck the key in the lock. A waft of hippy stink, gasoline, oil, and a broken lemon zest glade scented oil refill smacked me in the face. My cold must be all but gone if I can smell all of these things so clearly!

I lifted myself up into the cab and was overcome with a bevy of strong feelings. (I hate that word; bevy. *shudder*)

The drive up here from PEI was such a fucking epic adventure, that I can't help but be overwhelmed by the memory of it now as I'm sitting up on my perch as captain of this great vessel.

The Vanagon is in a sad state right now. The inside of the cab is a mess of fast food napkins, bits of wire from a partially completed stereo install, and a host of other non-necessities I've lazily left floating around in her.

I'm ashamed that she's reverted into such a state of chaos. And yet, oddly proud to be reconnected to my humble origins. Such a stark contrast between the earthy vintage mess of my ride... and the pristine urban shine of Mississauga City Centre.

So I'm sitting in the 4 Ton behemoth that, to my knowledge, does not have a working clutch. Again, this odd 6th sense tells me that I'm not just going to sit in it. I FEEL that it's going to run. I pump the clutch a couple times, trying to recall how much resistance it had when it was repaired back at Dave's service centre in Charlottetown. I could feel that it wasn't at 100%. But there was enough resistance for me to keep moving forward with whatever it was I was attempting.

I put the shifter through it's motions....

It didn't feel good. Not smooth at all. Thank god I'm alone. Nothing like being alone to make me brave. I tend to second guess myself the second another human being is in my space. But the lot was empty. Just me, and my ride.

So I muddle with the shifter a few times while pumping the clutch sporadically until I finally get it to run from first to fourth gear smoothly. Well... that shouldn't be possible. The clutch is supposed to be dead. It was fully fucking dead the last time I drove this thing. That's for sure.

Again, despite my frontal lobe telling me that this was a logical improbability, I continued my pre-flight tests.

I pushed firmly down on the big ball that's perched on the tip top of the extra long, big rig style shifter, and jammed her into reverse. (reverse on a VW is like that; Push down, and then left and up, passed first gear. It's complicated, but safe. And oddly, smugly satisfying. Different for the sake of different.) I stuck it in reverse because I park the damned thing right up against a wall. The Vanagon has a frighteningly blunt front end. It almost feels as through your toes stick out passed the bumper sometimes when your sitting in it. That's why I love it so much, and what makes it so fun to drive. But I'm no slouch in the logic department, so I figure, if I'm gonna turn the engine over on this beast, and the clutch is, or is not going to work, I want the old girl to lurch AWAY from the concrete wall, rather then smack into it.

So I get it into reverse, and, against all logic, confidently turn the key for just a second.

KACHUNK!

She lurches backwards about a foot. As to be expected for a vehicle who's clutch does not function.

But some dumb unseen motivator is telling me to push on. To keep going.

I plunge the clutch down all the way and let it spring back up two or three more times, and try again.

KACHUNK!

The engine turns over once and the van heaves itself backwards another foot.

Crap.

By this time, my heart is beating out of my chest. That frontal lobe I'd previously mentioned, screaming in agony as it's logic circuits continue to be scrambled by my blind determination.

I try and pull it into neutral. Usually it's quite easy for me to slip it back out of the push in, up left, reverse position. But now it's not co-operating. The Van is now two feet too far back, and jutting out of my paid parking allotment. At very least, I need to get this poor beast back into neutral, and push it back into place.

Maybe it's not too late for me to walk away from this whole thing, and go back up and take my skateboard instead.

But wouldn't you know it. My stubborn inner miscreant wasn't going to let the responsible side of me walk. Nope. I'd been compelled to come down here for weeks now, and the logic circuits couldn't hold the curious instinctive side back any longer.

I got it out of gear! Dammit. In neutral the sheer weight of the bugger becomes instantly evident. Suddenly, the barely noticeable 5% grade I'm parked on becomes a terrifying hill. Without a gear to hold it, the Van wants to roll back. I jam in the break, pump the clutch again, and jam it back into first gear. EFF WORD.

Now what do I do?

It's 3 feet too far back out of it's spot, and on a hill!

I step out of the cab and begin the effort of trying to push this whale farther up the concrete beach! This involved me planting my feet on the floor, heart racing, and then reaching over the drivers seat to pull the shifter down into neutral. The door is open, and I'm pushing the frame and the drivers seat with all of my (sick therefore reduced) strength! I get a rocking motion going and realize I AM strong enough to move her. (Frig, being a grownup is cool!) But I need to really use all of my strength. Everything I can muster. If I relax for even one second, and this thing goes rolling backwards, I could get uncomfortably jammed between the front open door, and the giant cement column that it will smash into in a matter of feet.

For some reason, and again, this goes back to me being alone, I was never really mad at myself for trying this. I was nervous for the Van, but didn't have the usual "worried about being in trouble" feeling that I get when I'm concerned for others feelings.

I knew that I was only doing myself over if this didn't work... and for some nonsensical reason, still believed it would.

So... I get her pushed back forward, and leap up into the cab, jamming my foot onto the break.

Now. Common flipping sense would dictate that I call it quits at this point, and count my blessings. Walk away unscathed, knowing I almost went too far.

But no one is around.

I own the Van. It's paid for. It's mine. I'm alone. And I have this burning feeling that I need to keep going!

A couple more clutch pumps. Jam it into reverse again. Turn over the key....

No lurch!

I turned the engine over, and it didn't move! The clutch is engaged! The fucking clutch is engaged!

THE CLUTCH IS WORKING!

Turn the key again.

vrrrRRRROOOOOOMMMMMMMM

Putter putter putter putter....

It's ALIIIIIIVE!!!

Hahahahahaha

By this point, I hear another car has triggered the electric door into the garage. I'm no longer surrounded by the safety of loneliness.

A sudden urgent need to escape the underground in my newly revived beast overwhelms me. I let the clutch out gently, and the Vanagon gracefully backs up, like it did so many other times for the first few months I was here and driving it!

VRRRRROOOOOOM VRRRRROOOOOOOMMMMM VRROOOOOOOM!!!

I confidently rev the engine while I pull the shifter out of reverse and into neutral.

*Pow, Kapow pow pow*

The engine backfires as it had been for months before I parked it. (Another issue the Van Doctor is confident he can fix for me)

I slip the shifter into first with frantic satisfaction. The other car that had just entered the garages headlights can be seen illuminating the path in front of me. I ease the Van forward cautiously and come to the corner where I see the other car to my left.

My goodness lady. Get on your own god damned side of the parking garage!!! Common courtesy! STAY ON THE RIGHT SIDE! DON'T YOU KNOW?! THIS THING COULD GO OFF AT ANY SECOND!! GET THE EFF OUT OF THE WAY!!

The sub compact car complies with my searing stare and shuttles its way to the correct side just in time for me to grease by, engine puttering and stuttering to ever more vibrant life.

for a 1.9 litre flat four cylinder (translation: tiny) engine, this bad boy makes a LOT of noise. Especially in an underground parking garage.

I drive with my hand hovering over the ignition. If I feel even the SLIGHTEST feedback on these pedals that tells me this clutch isn't properly engaged, I cut the engine and hit the break, and no one gets hurt.

We lumber triumphantly around another corner, and the automatic garage door springs to life!

VRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!!

The blasting echo of indoor, becomes the sweet softness of outside as the Vanagon proudly marches up the steep incline out of the underground. The wooden barricade at the top mocks me as I approach. It doesn't have any sensitivity to my newly miraculously engaged clutch. It requires me to bring the massive beast to a full stop on a 30 degree incline and hold it there for the longest 3 seconds of my life.

THE CLUTCH HOLDS!

I spring through the barricade as it lifts itself up and out of my way cordially.

MY GOODNESS!

My heart pounds even harder at the sudden feeling of freedom, control, and independence that has all at once been restored by this singular miraculous event!

I cruise down Confederation Street triumphant! First gear... VROOOM... Second gear... VROOOOOM... third gear.. VROOOOOOOOOMMMM POW pop pikaw plop pop bang....

I drove that damned thing around the block 2-3 times in disbelief. The clutch held by gosh, it held. I could feel that it was still not right mind you. I was definitely leaving more then 10 car lengths between myself and anyone else for the first couple blocks until I was REALLY confident it was going to be ok. Even then, as I approached lights in first gear, I had my hand on that key, ready to cut the power if I felt the clutch disengage.

I did feel it slip a couple times. It's definitely broken. 3 times as I came to a stop I felt the van shudder a bit from the clutch wanting to let go. But something didn't let it. Something. Some unseen, inexplicable force... being it divine intervention, or blind, dumb ambition and unwavering faith, made sure that that clutch held on just long enough for my little joyride.

I was even able to take her through the drive thru at A&W for a teen burger and an old fashioned root beer!

I don't have any clue what compelled me to try this RIDICULOUSLY STUPID thing tonight. But as you can tell, it got me jazzed up and energized to say the least.

I'm moving to Toronto December first, for better or worse.

But in that 15 minute joyride, I knew that my destiny is still on the open road. I'm still going to take this beautiful Van of mine across this gorgeous country of ours and make a photo book. I'm gonna take it to the Van doctor as soon as tomorrow (now that I have a more reliable source of income!) and many more times between now and next summer.

If Toronto is as lucrative as it has the potential to be for me, then a Subaru Engine conversion will not be out of the question!

Imagine, Vanagon... you and me, and a brand new Subaru four cylinder!

POWER! RELIABILITY! QUIET! And best of all, no leaky gasoline smell to give me and my passengers a headache as I drive!

You know. I don't know why I went down there and had that moment of absolutely reckless bravery... but boy am I happy I did it.

I brought the Vanagon back to it's parking space safely... grabbed my food, and gave it a kiss.

I used to kiss the Van every time I drove it. But it has been so long since it ran well, that I'd forgotten to show it love lately.

I planted a nice firm one on her before coming back upstairs triumphant.

Whatever force guided me to take that risk, is the same one that made me get back up out of bed to write this entry.

And I gotta tell ya, I feel a whole lot better now as I finish this, then I did when I started writing it. And even better still then I did before I snapped into auto pilot and went walking towards the elevator.

Thanks instincts. And thanks to myself for following them.

My roommate just sent me a text to say he's on his way home with McDonald's.

:^)

Amazing what a little blog rant and a bit of bravery can do for a man's spirits!

GOOD NIGHT!

Hungry Man

2009-10-22T21:33:00.002-03:00

Just sitting on the Subway and feel compelled to blog. It's a real blessing that I can't connect to the internet on here. It's so easy for us to self medicate with short bursts of satisfaction and instant gratification. It's no wonder I have a hard time working when I'm "online". Too easy to sustain short pops of fulfillment then to work towards real accomplishments and deserved satisfaction.

Fulfillment. That brings me closer to the topic that prompted this entry. It's pretty late right now; 7:52 pm. I had lunch at Rich Tree with my buddy Phil and his wife at noon, and hadn't eaten since then. So I was HUNGRY. Really hungry. The kind of hungry that negates taste, and requires immediate rapid sustenance. I had a Koubi sandwich. But not a Lebanese Koubi. A Persian version, that, while it was good, did not ignite any hint of nostalgia for my Father's or Grandmother's Lebanese Koubi.

Something else lit the nostalgic feeling.

I really miss my Father right now. Not in the normal way where you think of some specific activity you miss. But the carnal spiritual way. The kind where, for brief moments, I'm 4 years old again and in his arms. Lying on his massive chest, listening to the air fill his impossibly large lungs, and trying my best to time my breathing with his.

My father is a good looking man. A lot of lady friends I know always make really awkward comments/compliments where they tell me that I have a hot future ahead of me because they think my Dad is a hot old guy. But even good looking people have ugly moments. My Dad turns into an animal when he eats. It's always fascinated me. I used to pride myself on gorging on large plates of food, and packing them away very quickly, because I wanted to be just like Dad. Later in life it became a sore spot for my sister. A point of embarrassment. But I always found it very endearing. After all, Dad was God for me growing up. Everything he did was perfect. And I wanted to be just like him. So seeing him when he was eating, was a rare glimpse into the humanity behind the God.

In my later teens and early 20's I became a bit enthralled with this concept. What happens to people when they get really hungry. How much of their survival instincts kick in and overpowers their trained social skills. I just broke one of my own cardinal rules. I ate some stank ass food on a crowded train in front of people. And I didn't pay a lot of attention to how nice I looked while I was doing it.

Hunger broke down my social armor, and turned me back into the animal my species once was. And in many ways underneath all the fluff still is!

I've been passively planning a photo series for years now. I want to do side by sides of people. One classic "head shot" portrait, where I use all of my skills to make the person look their very best. And then, beside that, a photo of them stuffing their face! I think there's a great truth in the face of a person who is truly hungry, and eating just to live. Not a fancy sit down meal, but a real, "I need to get all of whatever this is down my neck ASAP" experience.

If hunger can break the perfection of my father into a dribbling sloppy savage, then it must do the same for everyone.

So in this moment of sustenance, when I was breaking my own social rules, and forcibly feeding myself in a frantic bid for survival, I felt myself reconnecting with my Father. Very vivid and carnal connection. Like, I could FEEL him with me. The way you can feel a parent or teacher when they are leaning over your shoulder. You don't see or touch them, but it's very apparent they are there, in your space. I felt him with me while I was eating on the train.

I see his humanity reflected as my own. His vulnerability is mine. His love and care for his family, and his desire to feed us properly (Dad did all the cooking in the house) resonates with great truth. I feel a humility and am humbled by the great sacrifices he made in order to give me the life I am so blessed to live.

So on this train ride, as I finish feeding myself, and look up to realize I'm on a train packed full of people, I had to get this out of my system.

It's now 8:23... I'm on the bus. The internet is connected, tweetie is open and telling me there is new content to read with it's little blue light. Instant gratification awaits, and the food has finished delivering it's energy to me. I no longer feel the weakness. My shield is back up.

But I'm glad I took time while the window of weakness and humanity were open, to express the vulnerable animal I have inside.

And to thank my Father.

Love you Dad.

The Journey - In Transit

2009-10-12T13:22:00.009-03:00

Well...

It's been a while since I've waxed in self analytic reflection on here. Partly out of disgust with how long it's been since I've had a visual refresh of this forum... and partly waiting to have subjects worthy of discourse... I came to a realization today. An epiphany who's truth resonates ever stronger as I type these very words. Let me get the quote out of the way before the momentum of rant takes this paragraph too far off the beaten subject:

I really enjoy life in transit.

That's it at it's simplest.

Now lets elaborate...shall we?

:^D

Oh man... I've got a huge smile on right now. Sitting at an outdoor bus terminal in Mississauga... Square One to be exact:

View Larger Map

I've got my Macbook Pro tethered to my iPhone, borrowing it's healthy, and surprisingly viable 3G connection. I've got a Venti Carmel Machiato to keep my fingers warm when the wind picks up. And I've got the itch to write! No, not the itch... the hunger! The desperation inside that says: get all of these words out, or risk loosing sanity!

I've just missed another bus. That's ok! I'm going in to work on a holiday Monday. Thanksgiving actually. I shouldn't say going into work. I'm going into the office. But to do freelance work. It's pretty awesome having an office to go to. It's certainly unlocked a freedom I've been craving for some time now. Being that I'm someone who always tries to propagate the positives, I haven't been blogging lately. Too much financial worry getting in the way of unabashed enthusiasm. :^)

But now, I have an office to go to. Some pay to depend on. A light at the end of my broke-ass artist tunnel!

And so, I'm happily going in on my day off, to put in some time that will move me forward. Allow me to break free of the financial pressure of freelance. Or more so the TIME pressure of freelance. Of the inability to separate work life from home life. Up time from down time.

I'm spending one more supposed weekend day as a freelancer... so that I can take back my weekends, moving forward! No more will people own me during the times I select as my rest and refute from work. Business calls will be screened during hours of supreme lethargy. And leisure will be penciled into the schedule as a top priority at least one day out of the week!

Oh, here's a bus that will get me to the Subway. The # 20... I think it's a slightly longer trip to Islington station then the # 3. Perfect!

So I'm on the bus now... a bit sad to leave my sweet outdoor seat at the terminal. But my 3G connection comes with me! And I prefer a life in transit anyway. :^)

Back to that!

When I was 9 and 3/4 years old I flew on an airliner alone for the first time. Charlottetown to Moncton. It was a remarkably liberating experience. I was a regular kid rounding out his single digits and headed into doubles, and as such, had a healthy anti-parental disposition. My Father, and the woman I proudly and lovingly call Mom were the establishment, and my not too often seen Bio-Mom was the blurry figurehead and instrument of escapism. I'd see her once every few years, as fate (or behind the scenes adult tomfoolery) dictated possible. Never often enough to form any sort of reality or rules based interaction. She was an escape. Someone, who, though sporadically and briefly, appeared to love and lavish me dearly. Without risk of much reactionary behavioral correction. And I was flying, alone, to see her.

So imagine the pure freedom I felt.

Back in the 90's... a kid flying alone was a super star. Ridiculously lovely looking, sounding, smelling, acting, uniformed women chauffeured me from one check point to another. Passing me between themselves while outwardly reminding one another, and myself, of my importance, independence, and bravery. I was their most precious cargo. The chosen child, unique and revered. They gave me a special person kit; including a colouring and activity book, crayons, and my very own lapel "wings". They even invited me up to see the cockpit!

This was the pinnacle of achievement for a 9 and 3/4 year old boy. The cockpit of an airliner. Of a giant miraculous flying machine. One single instrument on this dashboard would have kept my curiosity satisfied for hours. The hundreds of them in concert together was overwhelming. The only comparable experience would have perhaps been driving an Excavator. But since that didn't end up happening until adulthood, seeing the cockpit of an airliner was IT!

Needless to say, without going into homoerotic detail about the perceived virility of the Pilot and Co-Pilot... I was having the time of my life, and felt like THE MAN.

Escaping.
Flying.
V.I.Peej treatment.
Absolute Freedom.

In this moment... in this process... in this transit, I was totally free. Reflecting on it now, and comparing it in context to the feelings I've had today which have sparked this entry, I've realized something.

The destination was almost never as pleasing as the journey. And I like to go it alone!

Sure, I imagined this person I was going to visit to be the bearer of the freedom flag. But in reality, the visits were never free. So much emotion, contradiction, confusion, and overcompensation took an emotional toll. Anytime you put people in a scheduled "vacation" setting it's tiring. A drain. No, the journey itself was the true bliss.

The true release happened "in Transit".

And this feeling is something I've kept with me all my life and on well into adulthood. I LOVE BEING IN TRANSIT ALONE.

Anyone who has been dipping a toe into the psychological cesspool that is my blog, may already know I get really comfortable in airports alone. This feeling transcends to all places designed for personal transport. The airport is still the favorite. But the feelings can be tapped at a bus stop, in a subway station. Any place where loads of people rush around frantically, and where I can melt into a puddle of cool calm reflection and independence.

Today I have that comfortable feeling. The liberation. I've discarded all responsibilities to any other person, at least for the time I will spend in transit. Once I get to the office, I will again be at the mercy of the clients. But here, now, it's just me. Me and the physical instruments of my freedom. (laptop, cameras, skateboard). No parents, no teachers, no boss. No guidance, no suggestions, no other people's needs imposed.

Ivan and his girl left the condo today around the same time as I did. They were heading to Panera for some baked goods, and asked me if I needed a ride to the terminal. No thanks, I said without really thinking about it. Not that I don't love the two of them. They are great. But I'd rather skate the 0.7 km to the terminal myself. :^)

I lazily meandered to Starbucks before hitting the terminal, and didn't sweat it when I had to go back to make change and missed a couple buses.

I'm comfortable in transit.

Now, there are some stipulations that regulate the free feeling.

It's hard to capture the feeling with another person. I can think of less then a handful of souls who could join me in the flighty feeling and not impede the perceived release of responsibility.

"But airports are places full of responsibility and structure and control"

If you think that, then your not one of those people in my handful. Sorry. But your interpretation of the airports stifling control is just that, an interpretation. For me, it's bliss. I strive to turn those tooth pulling banal interactions into beautiful brightening displays of humility and reality. I pride myself on pulling these strangers OUT of their contrived and scripted routines and lighting them up with some unexpectedly bright and flowing interaction. If you're someone who stresses out, and then takes that stress out on the staff, then we wouldn't work together in my dream land. I make damned sure that I'm the sweetest most personable mother fucker any of them have spoken to all week. A little humility and humanity go a long way in these places. These people aren't pleased about having to ask you to take your shoes off either. And having the freedom to be as polite, or as revoltingly pleasant as I want, is something I usually only get to do on my own. Without someone else who's needs and discomfort supersede my flighty ambitions.

But, the one BIG stipulation, is that it doesn't work when I'm late. Lateness can take ALL of the joy and freedom out of the experience. It ruins the stress free relaxation and turns it on it's head. Late usually means, someone else waiting on another end, depending on me to be on time. If I'm flying somewhere for myself, no problem. I can even miss a flight and not worry one bit. (talked my way into having flights changed free of charge before after missing them.)

Partly why I felt the freedom so strongly this morning. I don't really NEED to be ANYwhere today. It's Thanksgiving.

There was an eerie sense of calm and solitude at the terminal today. The buses were sparsely populated at best. The sprawling mall parking lots, completely vacant. Everyone is at home. But not me. I'm in transit. Glorious transit.

The journey has changed gears again. I just looked up from my seat to see the subway train is at Old Mill Station. We cross a bridge over a river near, you guess it, an Old Mill, and for a brief moment, natural light fills the train car prompting me to look up. A track that was once underground, plunges outward over a brightly lit abyss. This is also a short window back into Cyberspace. The iPhone grabs just enough of a connection for a Tweet or status update between stations.

But I pay little attention to that fact, as I'm busy trying to allow my fingers to dance out these words as quickly as I think them. It's hard for someone born just on the technological cusp. And who didn't adopt and accept typing as early as some of his contemporaries. I don't type with two fingers... but I'm no stenographer either.

:^P

So the transit period has ended. I've arrived at my destination, for now. Here I will sit, and bang out design work corrections. Cross t's, dot i's, until I can take no more of the stagnant geo-location and have to resume the transit.

I don't know where I'm going tonight. I've left my options open. I'd like to go exploring somewhere. I brought my cameras and laptop... surely something will be created. :^D

I'm going to allow myself to be satisfied with this entry at it's present length. No need to try saving the world. It's a first step back into the swing of Blogging. I should really cherish these next few weeks of working downtown, while still living in Mississauga. After all, I will soon live downtown, and not have a need to spend 1.5 hrs moving from one place to another by myself. I'm about to buckle down for a long season work and discovery. So that I might be able to financially build myself back into position to resume transit once again. I've got bills to pay, and a Vanagon to repair and rebuild. For now, I'm blessed with a great deal of bus and train riding in the weeks ahead.

:^)

Excelsior!

Enjoy the Ride!

Using Mac OS X to "meassure" things on the web!

2009-10-05T14:32:00.005-03:00

I'm setting up some embedded YouTube content for a client. Trying to figure out if the dimensions on the embed dialogue on the YouTube site are total player dimensions... or just video content dimensions with the actually player controls outside those dimensions.

I'm going to embed a 480 x 295 example of video here... then use Mac OS X built in screen grabber tool to measure the box.

Command > Shift > 4 to do a custom screen grab of just one section. Note the metrics displayed beside the cross hairs as you click and drag out a selection of your screen to be captured! Measure without even taking the screen cap by clicking and dragging around your selection, then hitting the "escape" key before letting go of your mouse button. This way, you can keep pressing Command > Shift > 4 to initialize the screen grabber, and yet only save the ones you need.

I use this native Mac OS X functionality to measure things on the web all the time!

:^)

I <3 my Mac!

Edit: Well, that's strange... it's showing 412 x 295 ... How Random!

Edit Again: Not so random after all. My super powered Brainz have deduced that my Blogger Template scripting is superseding the YouTube Embed Code... iiiinteresting.

2009-10-02T19:06:00.001-03:00

No need for me to remember the order of the wiring... Just upload to the hive mind and let it remember!

2009-10-02T19:01:00.001-03:00

You can still see some smoke from the ceramic tiles and stucko we dumped into the bin

Lots of stories in these textures. The sweeping tool marks, the embossed tile branding, my footprints in the moon dust...

Burning Man Mississauga

2009-10-02T18:32:00.001-03:00

Good thing Ivan and I watch a lot of Restaurant Makeover :^)

She faught the good fight, but I'm stubborn, and own tools. There goes the kitchen sink!

Someone dropped a stinkah in the lift. Neither of us.

2009-10-02T18:19:00.001-03:00

Good thing Ivan and I watch a lot of Restaurant Makeover :^)

She faught the good fight, but I'm stubborn, and own tools. There goes the kitchen sink!

Someone dropped a stinkah in the lift. Neither of us.

I love my Nephew (Skype Laughs)

2009-09-21T22:01:00.003-03:00

I've said it once, and I'll continue saying it. We live in the Future!

Never would it have been possible for me to maintain a relationship or bond with my Nephew after having moved so far away. He was less then a year old when I left... and making him laugh was one of the great joys in my life.

For a while after I left I couldn't get as much of it out of him. But now, through Skype, I can crack him right up just like I used to in person! Knowing that he will still recognize me when I come home for Christmas is AMAZING!

I had to share my joy with a screen capture of his awesomeness.

I recorded in a hurry, and stupidly didn't think to make it full screen. So you get a shot of my lightning desktop background image as well as my awesome Nephew. :^P

What dreams of Men

2009-09-17T16:37:00.001-03:00

These structures are the result of someone having a dream, and then taking a step everyday towards that dream. If a man can create this monument to his dreams, what monument will you create of yours?

L is for Love Charlie

2009-08-24T19:02:00.002-03:00

L is for Love Charlie

The whole time in drawing these super thin lines I can here my buddy and drawing mentor Troy saying "just be more confident when you lay down those lines. Commit!"

Digital Archiology? Future Prediction!

2009-08-16T12:38:00.028-03:00

So I've had this idea for a while now. It's something I came up with back when I was in grade school, that has since seen a resurgence in my day dreamings. A philosophical idea about the importance of everything we're creating as a species during this very exciting time. A theory I have on how the content we're feeding the internet during these first exciting moments of it's inception is going to be of great cultural importance to future generations of our species.

First a little background material to give you an idea of what birthed this hypothesis, and what has brought it to the forefront of my thoughts lately.

When I was young I watched a lot of Nature or Science programs with my Dad. We both have an especially fond appreciation for anything to do with Space, Flying, Human-Machine interface, and technology.

Nova, The Nature Of Things, anything with Carl Sagan or Steven Hawking.

We watched them all! And I was really into this stuff from a VERY young age.

I think I can remember one we watched in school too. In science class with a substitute or something. We watched the "Powers of Ten" video. Everyone was mostly happy to have a movie day and to not have to pay attention. I was sitting up front and center enthralled, and not even blinking! SO into this stuff.

I kept obsessing over how our atomic structure so closely mirrored the universes astronomic structure. (proton Sun, Electron and Neutron planets and moons) This led me to believe that we could be living on the fingernail of another sentient living being, and that a single small decision in his or her universe (clipping fingernails for example) would have extreme ramifications on our own existence. It was somewhere around this time that I began to feel that EVERYTHING I did was important, no matter how seemingly insignificant it seemed to me at the time. I'm talking elementary school here.

I was a deep thinking 10 year old.

One video, which I have not been able to specifically find, but that struck a solid chord with me, was the one about how Man's earliest TV and Radio broadcast signals have traveled so far away from earth. And that, presumably, the right culture, with the correct equipment, could collect and decode these signals, and enjoy this Man Made content.

I was also especially moved by videos that chronicled the journey of the Voyager Probes that were sent out in the 70's. Voyager 1 with it's gold foiled record chock full of greetings and information about the human species and our home in the universe. We, as a species, WANT to connect with other people from another time and place.

Voyager 1 is the most traveled Man made object. It's WAY the fuck out there. But it's hardly even began moving on a cosmic scale. It's just leaving out solar system! The only things we've made that have traveled farther, would be our SIGNALS. Digital, radio, television. All of these signals, some of them traveling outward at the speed of light have been flying away from our planet since the very first radio broadcasts at the turn of the 20th century. So quite literally, the voices of millions of us have been blasted out into space. So much of our culture has been broadcast into space, that the Earth could disappear tomorrow; Huge impact with a meteor destroys the whole planet. There would still be a VERY complete picture of our species out there for other explorers to find! We've left our mark, regardless of our physical presence!

We've also started listening to what's out there. The last 40 years we've been actively pointing our ears outward to hope to hear someone else. An important fact that my hypothesis is dependent on. One that re-enforces Man's desire for connection, and exploration. SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is a testament to our innate desire to connect with anyone who is outside of our regular space and time. We seek these connections very actively, all the time!

There's not just a technical or scientific side to this as you can already start to see from these ramblings. But also a philosophical one.

Imagine for a moment, that Leonardo Da Vinci were somehow brought back to life. Throw out science and fact and think of this philosophically. Hypothetically Leonardo Da Vinci is brought back to life in Modern times. What would he see?

Lets take ONE of this master works for the sake of this argument; the Mona Lisa. How many times would he be exposed to the image he created. How many mediums has it been reproduced in? How broad is the reach of his work 4 centuries after his death. Give him newspaper, the internet, television, radio. How overwhelming would it be for him?
So there's no WAY he would EVER be able to comprehend the sheer number of times his piece has been re-created. The vast propagation and worship of a single example of his painted work. This is a single act, out of his life's work as a creative person. To him, this particular painting might not have been that big of a deal. Just another gig. Another paid job he had to do in order to survive. He was only a man. Only a painter. How could he possibly ever have known his work would have such cultural significance, across such an immense global population?

The point is, he couldn't. And neither can we. We can not begin to imagine what our world will be like in 400 years. Let alone in another 2000. What kinds of reach will works of the great masters have then?

It is said that one week's worth of the New York Times news paper contains more information that a person living in the 18th century would have ever come across in their entire lifetime.

And how much smaller was the population of the earth then? Or in the 16th century when Leonardo was around!

My point?

My point is that there is no WAY that we could POSSIBLY be expected to fathom how important what we create today, will become to someone in many tomorrows.

Imagine. A future where Man (or whatever Man-Nanobot hybrid Borg-like creature we have evolved into in 1000's of years) has left Earth and populated a number of other worlds. Technology has improved and changed our lives in ways we could never imagine today, and inter stellar space travel is common place. People live to be 200 years old regularly, and with technology saving many of us from manual labor, most people will be quite free to follow more intellectual pursuits. Heck, even my own life is much more relaxed and effortless then that of my grandfather. He had to work 10 times as hard, and had a micro-fraction of the comforts and luxuries I have in my life! So increase that again 10 fold. Give people 200 years to develop extremely picky tastes and behavioral patterns, and then stick 500 billion of us out there.

Now think about how obsessed our culture is with history. No I'm not talking about formal history like you learn in school... but CULTURAL history. How many pairs of sneakers do you own that are "Throw backs"? An old design that's been resuscitated and re packaged. How many posters in your College apartment were recreations of Alphonse Mucha paintings? Or Andy Warhol's work? I guarantee the person who created the packaging for Zig Zag cigarette rolling papers could have NEVER imagined his work would be printed at 3 x 4 feet on glossy paper and hung in thousands of college bedrooms across the world. How many of your favorite songs are re-imagined versions of an older piece? Sampling, remixing, covers. We're obsessed with the past! We covet it. We live it. We love it! An appreciation and idolization and emulation of those who came before us, is so ingrained in our culture, that most of us don't even consider ourselves to be historians. It's just so natural for us to surround ourselves with this historic culture, that many of us actually believe we are being innovative! Kids who don't pay attention in history class, are wearing throw back Nike Air Force Ones, an 80's style knees ripped pair of jeans, and faux Ray Ban sun glasses! We LOVE history. We are culturally, and naturally, historians.

So imagine a future where technology allows people to "harvest" old digital and analog signals. Not just a couple weak old radio broadcast... but literally every single byte of information we've sent out, is then meticulously brought back in and cataloged. Imagine a future where there are 500 billion Humans alive across multiple planets and space stations. And somewhere among those humans, are the Digital Archeologists. People who spend their lives, harvesting, chronicling and cataloging ancient signals. To a population of 500 billion, 6 billion people's lives would be EASY to remember in great detail. The numbers reveal the inevitable truth!

So I submit this:

Everything we're doing. All of these Facebook and Twitter accounts. These status updates, these events and wall posts and thoughts and feelings. Make ups, break ups, weddings, child births will all one day, become a part of popular culture. We're broadcasting and archiving it all! All of it will one day become a part of a vast network of SEARCHABLE, LIVEABLE, and coveted, shared experiences! We're lucky to have been here during the birth of the information age. This truly is a glorious time to be alive, and one that I believe will be celebrated as a grand milestone in the history of our species. How many of us keep a blog actively right now? Seems like a HUGE number compared to 10 years ago. But how about compared to 30 years from now? I can't imagine how high the number will be then. So really, there's a relatively SMALL number of us on board here during the first few laps around the Internet race track!

It's all very fresh and new. Which I think will have a lot of appeal to a person living in the future where this kind of connectivity is common place. My 1 year old Nephew talks to me on Skype. Video phone. There's no novelty in video phone for a 1 year old! It's just normal. So the fact that the internet is NOVEL to us, and NEW, peppers our use of it with a culturally significant sense of wonder. A sense of wonder that may not been seen again for a while. Not until the next major Paradigm shift.

Tell someone who's graduating from High School in 1979 that in 2009 every piece of information they ever learned in their entire 12 years as a student, was now indexed and available instantaneously on a TV screen that you touch, that fits in your pocket. Go ahead! Travel back to 1979 and tell them that. Tell them the encyclopedia is useless and that all of that information can be found much quicker on your telephone. They would think you are crazy! That would just be unimaginable! Unfathomable! Impossible!!

I strongly believe our descendants will be able to look back on a snapshot of our entire culture if they choose. Or, they will be able to look at just one of us at a time. Their choice. They will be able to see how we lived. What we ate. Who we loved. Where we went. Everything. We're filling up the catalog and beaming it out into space! I submit to you, that there will be SO MANY of us (human beings) in the future, that each of us who is alive now; every blogger, every Facebook or MySpace user, every bedroom musician or garage band, will, in the future, be mega famous by today's standard's! Enough people will be alive then, that a today sized portion of "fans" will use the recounts of our lives to further their own growth and understanding of themselves on a daily basis.

1979 guy wouldn't believe in the iPhone. Right? The entire world available instantly on a screen that fits in your pocket! Unbelievable right? And that's only 20 years of progression! So I submit that at some point in the future, the "Google" of tomorrow, will be so powerful, that Future PJ will be able to instantly download my entire LIFE into his brain. He will be able to search and find every single piece of digital content I have ever created. Photos (over 1000 of them, of me, TAGGED AND IDENTIFIED ON FACEBOOK AND OTHER WEBSITES ALREADY! Ready to be searched through and recalled for anyone, anytime!)

Future PJ's advanced brain, coupled with the advanced machines he is using to enhance it, will be able to absorb and build on, everything I have every thought, created, attempted, perfected or produced! All in an instant! Not only will he as a single user be able to plug into us that directly and instantly, but he will be able to SHARE this experience with a group of his like minded peers. Entire sub cultures of future Hipsters, will obsess over re-living the lives of us... the information age pioneers!

This is why it's such an exciting time to be alive. We're witnessing the birth of a new paradigm of what a Human Being is.

Take this speech from 2005 about the future of humans. Here we have mathematical predictions of when humans will begin to have micro-scopic robots implanted in us to enhance our physical bodies and push them beyond their bio-logical evolution.

It's not the connection with the machines that will make us stronger as a species. Sure nano-bots can make one person physically stronger. But how these machines will connect us to one another is what will revolutionize us as a species. Across VAST distances we can now connect. We've seen the paradigm shift in our lifetime! The guy who graduated in 1979 could not have imagined the how the internet would transform how we interact with one another, but if he's still alive, it's a part of his every day reality now!

The World of Warcraft (an online game where players assume a fictional fantasy reality and interact with other human controlled avatars) has reached a population of nearly 10 million people! 10 million people living a second life in Cyber-Space in real time!! TODAY!

The internet has bridged the "space" gap. Geo location is becoming irrelevant. You can speak to any person anywhere, anytime, as long as there's a connection. Soon the connection itself will be everywhere. It will all be wireless, and it will be ubiquitous. Our thoughts, emotions, feelings, they're moving towards a kind of disjointed unity where we share what we want, when we want, and with who we want, with a startling amount of minutiae and detail! Soon EVERYTHING will connect to the internet. Some people's watches already do. You can connect to your cable box on your phone and tell it to record a show while your at work. You can tell your fridge to automatically order more milk from the internet grocery store. How about your babies toys, or your keys to your car. If they were connected you could use GPS to find them anywhere anytime! It's coming!

So I can't help but feel that the "Signal harvesting" tools that make my imagined future possible can't be that improbable!

So why make this post?

Well. I personally feel a great relief when I ponder the future in this way. My theory gives me peace. It makes me happy. I like thinking that in the future, someone will know me after my physical body has long passed. That my digital self, is already destined to live eternally. Even in the event of a global catastrophic disaster in which everything is lost, the SIGNALS have already been sent out. The information, will in fact, live forever!

Think of it when you make a cell phone call.

Think of it when you post a photo online.

Think of it when you agree to attend an event on facebook.

Think of it when you change your relationship status.

Think of it when your friends post comments on your new baby pictures.

Think of it when you send a drunken txt message on the weekend.

Think of it when you enter your pin number into an ATM.

Think of it when you use your coded magnetic sensor to enter your secure condo building.

Think of it when you use your GPS on your cellphone to find your friends downtown.

Think of it when you post a photo of your grilled cheese sandwich on Twitter.

Think of it when you tag your friends in photos.

Think of it when you search for something in Google. (google is watching what you search by the way. It also reads your e-mails so it knows what crap to try and sell you.)

Think of it any time you do anything that involves communicating to someone, or something, that requires you to interface with a machine.

Every single time you use these tools to make these connections, you are feeding the machine! By feeding the machine (the internet) your creating a digital artifact of that moment which you have just lived. Your writing history. I... right now... with this one inch thick super computer (which will be obsolete next year), this simple "blogger" account, am writing history. This is forever.

I don't even have to hit "post" for this to become a part of that digital archive! The blogger account (google again) has already "auto saved" this entry! Even if I choose not to share it with all of you now, all of the willing and conscious participants of my thoughts, it's STILL being written to the underlying base code of our culture. It IS history, weather I choose to share it now, or the machines share it later, I've already created the snapshot! These words will live forever! This is that artifact!

I for one do not feel like being a passive participant in this new paradigm. No. I want to aggressively contribute! I want to grab the machine by the horns and point it towards the future that I'm choosing for myself. I'm doing everything I can to teach the machine! And to leave a legacy of artifacts I can be proud of! I post tutorials and tips online on Twitter every day! Every single time I learn something knew in design or videography or audio production, I share it online! I'm sharing it with the knowledge that it will be used by my current peers, AND by an unseen and incomprehensible amount of Future Human Beings!

So far only my peers and contemporaries are choosing to be a participant in my artifacts through their chosen mediums. Your reading this because you want to. [and because your crazy. Who reads all of this stuff? ;^) PJ rants and rants for a long time!]

In the future, participation in us and in one another, may be much more passive. How actively and consciously will my descendants absorb me? Will they study the artifacts I leave behind of their own free will? I'd love to imagine a future wherein they use us as their entertainment. Or they use the data in a classroom setting for social studies. Where it's fun and leisure activity to search the past and re-live it.

But unfortunately, the way the current future is playing out, I feel that it will be a bit less pure then that. We almost always forget that there is still money to be made in the future. That there will be pop up ads. And infomercials. And digital CGi recreations of us all, selling our great great grandchildren crap that they don't need!

Look at JFK appearing in Forest Gump. Or a Digitally re-created AhNold being in the latest installment of the Terminator franchise.

Yes, along with my happy and lofty vision of the future, is the sad realization that it will be a lot cheaper then I dream it to be. That's one thing my Grade 7 science book story on "the world of tomorrow" didn't predict about the future. That it would be so disposable. That there would be so much focus on cheap, quick, easy, and not on quality. That the past could be recycled so many times that it would be cheapened beyond it's original glory.

Would Leonardo be pleased with how his image and legend had grown in the future? Maybe. Or maybe he'd be revolted by how played out the Mona Lisa had become. Maybe small plastic keychains with "Pop Art" versions of his master work would make him wretch in horror!

I'll bet it was an emotional and moving experience for people to view his paintings when they were created. They were the pinnacle of artistic expression. To view the Mona Lisa in the decade after it's creation would have been an emotional and visceral experience! Now, we hardly bat an eye or give it more then a seconds recognition before moving on to the next image.

So in the future, this miracle of "signal harvesting" and "Digital Archeology" will be blazé and common place for most. Re-living an entire summer that your great great great great grandfather spent traveling through Europe will just be something you do while you're bored and waiting for the bus to come. Or for the next shuttle to the moon to arrive. (Fucking moon shuttle, never on time. Bullshit!)

So go forth Web Minions. Post your posts. Meet your friends. Drink your shots, and snap your photos. Keep on creating artifacts with the knowledge that your painting the most vivid and complete picture of a human life that's ever been possible in the history of our species. Never before has it been feasible for such detailed accounts of single lives to be kept. And that one day, all of this information will be cataloged, search-able, contextually organized, and free to be absorbed in ways we can not yet imagine. And that everything you do, no matter how minute and insignificant, may one day have a tremendous impact on the lives of future Men and Women.

That's it! That's my big idea for today. It's the artifact I'm choosing to create in celebration of this moment of my life. A life I am blessed and privileged to be living, and am pleased to be recording and sharing.

If you are living in the future that I speak of, and reading this in retrospect... well... how exciting for you! A thrilling moment of synchronous connectivity between my time and yours! I feel it too. ;^) I hope that somehow the hyper links to the other reference video content I've posted here are still live. If they aren't, tell your service provider that's bullshit, and demand they upgrade your search engine! After all, I am nothing without the shoulders of the greats who have come before me to stand on. Here I use Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, and a few other great thinkers to boost my own words. It would be a shame if you were to read this without their work as reference. And just so you know, in your present time, as in mine, the artifacts we choose to create will live on. And what a glorious reality it is that we're are in a position of control over these artifacts. The people you worship and revere were just that, people. And they had all of the faults and imperfections of any other human.

The difference between a life celebrated and a life forgotten is ultimately up to those of you who come after me. But I find great solace in the fact that I can actively choose which artifacts I am leaving behind me. Choose your future, as it will some day be history. Do everything you do with intent, and purpose. You never know who might come poking around the great archives to see what kind of person their great great grandfather was. The future of the family tree is going to be a much richer multi-media experience that reaches far beyond a simple list of names printed on paper.

Post with purpose! May your lives and love all be remembered!

Excelsior!

2009-08-07T02:17:00.001-03:00

2009-07-29T01:16:00.001-03:00

2009-07-26T18:02:00.001-03:00

Writing a Resume can be Terrifying!

2009-07-26T15:37:00.007-03:00

I find any forced introspective or self analytical writing work to be excruciating. In a professional setting that is. I can rant and rave all day about myself on this blog. But this is my own. People read it (or parts of it) of their own will and at their own discretion. If I take a concept or idea too far down the rabbit hole and they don't feel comfortable reading, then they stop! This is for my own therapy. There's a liberation and freedom that comes from that type of writing that I really enjoy. But A resume, or cover letter however... is a different thing. THAT is something where I'm putting myself out to someone who's FORCED to read what I'm saying... and MUST pass a final judgment of my character and qualifications based on how I choose to present myself.

I fight my emotional side in order to allow my rational side to shine in these circumstances. This is very difficult. In my blog, rationality is usually found buried deep beneath a thick topcoat of analogical, abstractly painted simile and metaphor. I like to take the long scenic rout to logic. I share how an experience made me feel in a roundabout way of painting a vivid picture of how an experience actually happened. Full bore emoting however, comes across as very awkward and "try hard" in a resume setting. It doesn't fit that medium. The medium then dictates the message as Marshall McLuhan taught us. The message of a resume is "I am worth paying to do the job your company needs me to do."

I got so PUMPED UP writing my resume a couple weeks ago. So emotionally involved was I in my own tale of exaggerated glory that I wrote it with the same thick full colour glossy stock I bang these ramblings out with. When I finished it, I knew I was too excited about it for it to ring with the professionalism and stability it needed to.

I had to put it away, and let the dust settle after having written it. Go out in the real world, and put myself through the ringer a couple of times, and then try to look at it again with fresh objectivity.

I'm now embarrassed to be reading it back to myself. It's TOO emotional. There's hardly a scad of professionalism to be found! Just over the top, melodrama, peppered with 'office speak' jargon. I stopped short of using "pro active" or "lateral thinker"... but got pretty close a couple times!

Sure, maybe now I'm exaggerating again as I describe how bad it is. But that's the message of this medium! (the blog) This is where I vent my excess hot air so that my steam powered persona doesn't blow up in people's faces! This is where I come to work things out and refine the passion to find the order beneath. Where I bring the light airy balsa building blocks of my ideas to carve them into finished pieces of sculpted and varnished sensibility.

So now's the big challenge. The next step. I got into myself long enough to write the resume out. Now to hang up the ego, and brace myself for the one two punch of reality this thing needs in order to become effectively professional. I'm going to need to bruise if I'm going to grow stronger.

I'll hand this thing over to someone I know has much more experience in a professionally creative environment and tell him not to hold back. Give me REAL feedback about why this resume doesn't work. I KNOW it doesn't work, or I would have sent it out already and we'd be talking about interviews I was worried about going to by now. But instead I put it away, hoping that a later more seasoned version of myself would be able to sort it out on his own.

But I'm in over my head.

I need someone else who's in the position I want to be in, to help show me how to get there!

The hard part is that I'm so hypersensitive to criticism. Especially when I concur with the critique. That's when it's the most intense. If someone points out something I've done wrong, I usually immediately agree with them. Even if I'm actually right! So when I KNOW they are right... the feeling is even stronger. Red face, heart racing, shakes.

I'm getting it now just typing about it. The dreaded Anxiety!

But these instinctual, reactionary feelings are just that. These are leftover remnants of the days when my soft weak fleshy frame would have needed to move quickly to escape the danger of Saber Toothed tigers. Chemical drugs fed to my body by my brain in a reaction to what it sees as life threatening dangers. But this danger isn't a tiger, and I won't be immediately killed. My rational thinking brain knows this and can choose to over-ride the instinct. By recognizing my fight or flight instinct's outdated and oversensitive algorithms, I can actually manipulate them to my advantage by triggering them earlier! I can intentionally place myself in specific situational harm, in order to grow the tools needed to overcome and defeat that harm sooner!

BOOYA!

So... YES' it's going to feel awkward and embarrassing to have to hear all the things that are wrong about my resume. But it's going to be WORTH getting the embarrassment over with and out of the way. So that a new, empowered, knowledgeable me will have already grown passed that embarrassment and recovered the confidence I'll need to take the job I deserve!

Now if the vessel of that gut wrenching, growth inspiring, brutally honest feedback would just get his ass home from work with that Jerk Chicken, we could get on with playing video games for the rest of the Sunday evening! Who goes into the office for three hours on a Sunday afternoon anyway? Oh yeah, people who are successfully employed in the creative field and making a comfortable living, that's who!

It should only take him about 10 minutes to go over the resume and tell me how to fix it. Get me ready to pound the pavement on Monday and look for my REAL job!

I'm glad I'm getting over myself long enough to use the resources I've got right in front of me!

2009-07-25T22:25:00.001-03:00

Picnic in Highpark!

2009-07-25T22:15:00.002-03:00

Some pictures from a drive through Highpark at sunset! The sunbeams were out of control! Thankfully I had the iPhone!

Me, simply stated, in a roundabout way - TED . com video

2009-07-24T16:10:00.002-03:00

2009-07-23T14:45:00.001-03:00

Pride 2009 - Dirty Disco on the South Stage

2009-06-29T18:48:00.016-03:00

Where do I even begin to put my Pride performance experience into words?

I don't really feel like writing about it to be honest. I'm too busy enjoying the high, even days later, to feel like recalling and recording it all. But it was such a groundbreaking and incredibly fulfilling experience, that I feel I owe it to my future self to document these feelings while they are still fresh.

Everyone who is close to me knows I find great joy in connecting little seemingly insignificant occurrences into a woven fabric of wonder and delight. That is to say, I find meaning in banality of daily events, by straining to connect them together in interesting ways. I look at life through a pair of those polarized "star burst" glasses so that every guiding light, no matter how dim, appears to have brilliant sheen! I love to recognize patterns and use them to organize, direct, reassure and propel myself through the Earth's dizzying rotations. I see "the signs" because I actively look for them. It's a kind of selective perception that helps me filter out the negative, and focus on the positive. Manipulating which signs I see, and thus, which paths feel as though they are divine, and chosen.

So if I am someone who can find divine connectivity and unity in all of my daily doldrums, then what of a day that's anything but dull? What if I can live through something that breaks from routine and allows me a fresh new set of circumstances to connect? A situation like this is usually ripe for cultivating meaning and inspiration! What if you then make this experience something I've dreamed of doing for as long as I can remember? Something I've spent my youth practicing alone in the safety of my bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms, car rides, or un-ending shifts stuck in mindless jobs.

This moment, this day, this 'performance', was the the genesis of this practice of pattern recognition and manipulation! It was the culmination of billions of synapses fired toward the completion of one expressive moment. It was a moment that was soaked in these connected and significant experiences. So submerged in significance was this performance, that my brain, somehow in a desperate attempt to save itself from drowning, took dynamic control of space-time! At moments completely freezing it in order to finish processing the sheer vastness of information it was being fed. Floodgates of excitement, passion, love, fear, and absolute acceptance and calm, rushed by at alarming speeds. While moments of purity and joy sat as glowing stationary orbs, filling my vision with blinding happiness that will forever be galvanized in my memory. Parts of my mind that I'd never used, were openly, willingly, and joyfully squealing in perfect harmony with parts of it I hadn't used since I was a child! New memories exploded with electromagnetic energy, stirring the old connections into a newborn fervor! Never has so much of my mind, heart, and spirit been energized in unison.

In this state, on this day, every passing SECOND rang out with truth and grandiose significance. Every smile felt like it was my 1 year old nephew smiling at me. Every mention of my name sounded though it was spoken in the familiar comforting baritone of my grandfathers voice. And I heard it with auditory nerves who's functional lifespan within my ear had long passed! Old dreams re-born in the ashes of the flame that engulfed my inner critic!

I will give ONE concrete example of the kind of synchronicity this day was coated in. When I took the stage with Robb G... it was cloudy. The ground was wet, and people were dying for some Vitamin D. About 3 songs into Robbs set I got the nod indicating that the track in current rotation was an instrumental, and that I was free to improvise over it. I stepped forward on the stage with trepidation, and as though out of my body watching from above, I heard and felt my voice come out through the speakers. I don't remember my exact words... but a friendly (and gorgeous!) girl in the crowd later reminded me that I said something along the lines of "lets dance the sun out from behind the clouds". Then I sang a couple lines from "The Sun is Shining" by Bob Marley.

"Sun is Shining, weather is sweet yeah. Make you wanna move, your dancin' feet."

Wouldn't you know it? The Sun did NOT hesitate! It's light broke through those clouds and surrounded us all in warmth and brilliance! The crowd reacted to the feeling of it's heat on their skin with a kind of gasping coo. And THIS was just the BEGINNING of the set. The rest of the day went JUST like this. Everything just HAPPENED. Robb G's daughter getting up on stage with her little Pride Socks was intense! And so was getting up on stage at the end for my initiation as one of "the new guys" on South Stage. I was so fucking proud to be there. There is no other place in the WORLD that I know of where you can feel as open, as free, and as comfortable as Toronto Pride. EVERYONE smiles, hugs, laughs, loves, and dances their freaking ASSES off. There's no other feeling that matches the purity and freedom of expression that singing and dancing on the South Stage at Toronto Pride gave me.

The whole day felt like it was playing out in some cheesy teen angst movie. I was the nerdy underdog, finally getting his chance to shine! The crowd was the buxom curvaceous sweet spirited shorty who'd just broken up with her jerk face Quarterback boyfriend and was finally seeing me for the sweet slice of destiny I was!

From the moment that sun came out, until the moment the rain poured once again, everything was perfection. Oh and that rain! That rain was as life saving as the sun had been hours before! Truly a divine day that I am blessed to have lived!

This is my 5th time sitting down to pen this entry. I keep starting to type specifics about the event, and then getting hung up on them. I've started to type out whole paragraphs of names to drop, and of individual occurrences to record. But clearly... this isn't the type of blog entry I'm meant to write! Simply touching on the details, while elaborating about the feelings is going much smoother. And that's just fine! No one wants to read 10 paragraphs of name drops and event specific braggings. I'm not writing this to brag. I'm writing it to say thank you! Thank you to the divine spirit (God, Jesus, Ala, Earth Mother... whatever name you use) for blessing me with the strength, and the friends I needed to make this dream a reality. And to say thank you for everyone who's awesome energy helped propel my soul to new heights. All the drugs in the world can't match the high that the South Stage crowd gave me that night!

I love everyone who was there. And I thank them all for their wonderful energy and support. I was SO surprised by the directness of the love I got after I came down off the stage. People were bravely walking right up to me (a perfect stranger) and hugging and congratulating me. This is something I never predicted or expected. And something I never thought would continue on as long as it has! I'm still getting e-mails, PMs, IMs, and the like telling me how good I did, or how moved someone was.

Thanks once again to everyone who's smiles, screams, dances, and hugs gave me the best high of my life! Thank you to everyone who took the time to come up and approach me and share with me how my performance made them feel! This was the best gift of all!

(One person said I inspired them to be brave, and to be true to themselves. This compliment had a profound effect on my life and will never be forgotten!)

I've come out of the other side of this experience with a massive boost of confidence, and am humbled by the support and encouragement from everyone.

I could really go on and on and on about how good I feel after having been a part of Dirty Disco on the South Stage at Toronto Pride 2009. But I feel like I've been spinning my wheels and gushing in this little composition window for too many days already. Time to just wrap it up and post the damn thing!

Besides, the next gig is already happening! Tomorrow night at Tota Lounge!

Thunder graciously invited me and Donnie (Red Lion) to MC for him as he throws down some U.K. Garage (two step for those in the U.K.)! Another long lost dream that has come back to me in a hurry! (Craig David got his start as a UKG MC with the Artful Dodger!)

If you ever get a chance to see me sing, or dance, please do me a favor, and let go of all of your inhibitions. Turn off the outside world, and join me in the liberation of your spirit! Drop your hang-ups, and your insecurities, and DANCE dammit! DANCE!

We are lucky to be alive, and we don't have a lot of time to make our mark. I'm on a mission to make as many people as I can dance and smile and dance and smile and dance and smile! I thank God for Robb G and his amazing energy. He's jump started me back on a path that I'd wandered away from far too long ago!

I can't wait for the next time I can hold a mic in my hand, and feel my voice amplified through the speakers!

Tomorrow at Tota, and again on August 14th with Robb G for the ShuffleBanger CD release party at Footwork!

What a rush!

I'm the luckiest kid on the block!

Power Ballad Anyone? Dirty Diana - Michael Jackson

2009-06-25T22:14:00.000-03:00

R.I.P. Michael

2009-06-25T20:07:00.000-03:00

Great in 2008 (what am I waiting for?)

2009-06-16T16:10:00.001-03:00

What I did great. from blackduke on Vimeo.

Breathless in Time-Lapse

2009-05-24T14:20:00.005-03:00

This video just left me completely breathless, and I didn't even get half-way through it:

CANARIAS TIMELAPSE from luis garcia de armas on Vimeo.

The shot of the clouds scraping the tops of the mountains at the 50 second mark put me over the edge and into chills and gasps.

I HAVE TO SEE THE ROCKIES!

Edit: After posting the above, I finished watching the video. And not only was I breathless, but I was COVERED in pins and needles. Not the slow kind that creep up on you, but the super high frequency buzzing kind that travel in waves over my whole body.

I know it's good chills when it's not just limited to the back of my neck or my arms. But ALL OVER MY BODY!

Astounding.

No Frills Sunday Morning

2009-05-24T13:08:00.002-03:00

I just took the Vanagon to the local No Frills grocery store. I used to love their bargain basement prices. But they're lack of selection and terrible produce gave me stink face this morning. :P

Back to Loblaws next time. I'll overpay to be able to browse the Lego section of the grocery store. :^P

So last night was the BIGGEST breaks party EVER since I've moved back. And I spent the night unshaven and stinky on the couch playing Xbox 360. Yelling at young children on Halo and telling them not to use so many cuss words because they're shrill screams were distracting my old brain and making it impossible for me to concentrate on the game. LOL

Maaan I'm old.

I passed up a chance to dance to funky break beats to stay at home?

There was even an envelope of CASH waiting for me at the venue if I had just GOT there.

Long story short, my Van is un-drivable right now. And my two possible rides downtown never came through, so I used it as my excuse to be lazy and stay home. I think that speaks volumes about my desire to stay here. I think it's pretty safe to say that I'm "over it".

As much as I LOVE to dance, and I mean, LOVE to dance to breaks. I just couldn't handle the idea of writing off an entire weekend for it.

It's so FAR to get downtown from here, that if I go down on a Saturday night and have a drink, then I don't make it back until late the next day. (Once I'm downtown, there are obligatory "next day" hangouts and lunches and bla bla bla. The weekend is a write off.)

So I stayed home, like a bitter old fart. But now I'm up and at them and ready to do some work! I went out this morning and got groceries and breakfast and coffee, and now I'm here and not hungover!

I am quite concerned about the Vanagon though. I got another parking ticket to top it all off too.

The engine is very loose. Rattling against the frame, badly. The poor thing is backfiring and quitting like mad. It's loosing power at speeds, (the engine just suddenly and randomly stops responding to pedal inputs for a few seconds at a time).

I've found a local (like 5 minute drive away!) guy who supposedly does great work and knows these things well. I'm gonna call him tomorrow and take it in for an assessment. As much as I like to think I'd do the work on it myself, it clearly has not happened yet. It would be different in Stratford sitting in my Dad's drive way. We could jack it up and crawl underneath it and tinker away. But I live on a busy street in the Saug, and I've already been told I can't work on it in the underground because of the oil leak. So I'll take it to the professionals and ask them to make me a list of things I should do to it, so that I can start a bit more of a clear plan as far as the finances go.

I've never been one to save money. Rather, I figure out how much I'm going to need for a given event, and then chase it. Not knowing how much the Van repairs are going to cost, means I haven't set aside anything for it. I think if I can take it to these guys tomorrow, and chuck them 87$ bucks for an hours worth of peeking around, then hopefully they can give me a list, with priorities, and dollar figures. Then I can start to take some real steps towards making this great beautiful beast of mine road worthy.

My buddy Rob had some grand ideas for what we could do to it in the interior, to make it pimp. But I want her guts to be working correctly first. Then we'll worry about making it flashy and funky.

Speaking of which, I owe Rob a vector file of the skunkworks logo. I'm gonna get on that now!

I've gotta get back into the mindset of planning for this trip. I need to be making at least one step towards my goal every single day. It doesn't have to all happen at once, but one thing, each day, and I'll make it!

Today's steps:

Research the repair centre. Check
Create vector for Rob. going to check now!

The Pendulum Swings

2009-05-21T22:23:00.002-03:00

And of course, and I knew it would, the pendulum continued to swing. And I hit a breathless high today after my stagnant low last night. Today I had unparalleled clarity and focus. I busted my ass and got a TON done. Despite 5 hours of sleep!

So is my pendulum building speed? Or will it slow down now after this little episode?

I have a feeling it's NOT going to calm down. Things are going to get crazier over the next two months. Did today really happen? Did all of those opportunities REALLY present themselves with such synchronous serendipity?

Ugh.

Alright, that's enough!

So You Think You Can Dance is on. And I got wordy enough last night. Or rather, early this morning.

Oh lord, the first same sex Latin ballroom couple is auditioning! They fell. Ugh! The poor Dears.

The message behind the Insomnia?

2009-05-21T03:10:00.003-03:00

I've been making a conscious effort lately to ask for less. Less help, less handouts, less time... but mostly, less advice.

I don't know where I read it. Maybe I thought it myself! But not likely. No I think someone told me something along the lines of... NO WAIT! I remember! I remember where I heard it. It was in a "self help quotes" book on the table in a waiting room. It said "Beware those who ask for guidance". It was a business book. One of these "read all of these leader quotes and POOF, your a leader" ones. But this particular quote, struck me. I became immediately embarrassed by it when I read it. I was that guy. The guy who would slack off all morning, then go up to the boss after lunch with a bunch of questions that made it seem like I'd been real busy. I always knew the answers to these questions. Asking was nothing short of wheel spinning futility. Beware those who ask for guidance. What an odd thing to put in a leadership book. But man, did it strike THE chord for me.

So I started to make a conscious effort not to ask for so much advice and help. I can't ignore the procrastinator or the slacker in me anymore. It used to be I could just walk to the desk and ask the question, and that would make me feel better. Like I'd made some steps towards actual productivity and it was ok for me to go back to the desk and watch some more YouTube clips...

But that slacker is starting to piss of my dreamer. He's getting in the way, big time. And I'm not really able to float along quite as carefree as before.

Which brings me here. 2:18am. My fourth day of lying in bed more then 2 hours (three tonight so far) and just staring eyes open, wide awake. My mind racing a mile a minute.

The Dreamer is getting angry again.

Sure, I'm doing some cool things. Some photos. Some videos. Even a song. But I still can't help but feel like I'm slacking off. Not quite working hard enough. Still spending too much time on things that don't move me forward.

See, I don't even need my Dad around 24-7. I can bring my guilt level to a boil all on my own!

Yeah so anyway. Enough tired self loathing. Back to the "I'm trying to ask for less advice" thing.

See, there was a real paradigm shift that day in that waiting room. "Beware those who ask for advice"...

I used to ask for a LOT of advice.

I'd ask the same question to 5 people trying to make a decision.

What I've realized, is that I almost NEVER REALLY want any advice. I just want my already formed opinion to be confirmed and validated.

Why?

Why do I have such a need for external validation?

So I'm realizing more and more, that I've had all of the answers all along. Lately, when something has been on my mind, and I've gotten back into the pattern of presenting myself with two or more options. Despite knowing which option is best nearly right away, I entertain the others for much too long. Humming and hawing, and never really committing until the very last second! Like, last minute panic is the only thing that washes away the guilt I inherently end up feeling for choosing something just because I want it!

I'm a very empathetic person, and almost always see both sides of an issue. I frequently pick the road that will make other people happier then the one that will make me happiest. If I made two Sandwiches, I have to give the other person the better one. I've always been this way. If I take the good sandwich, the guilt tears me up inside and I can't enjoy it.

Anyway. I'm a people pleaser I suppose. Always want to make sure the people around me are happy. No, that's slightly dishonest. Always want to make sure the people around me are happy WITH ME.

Boy, we're getting somewhere tonight aren't we? Look at all of the worms they fit into that seemingly tiny can! Amazing!

I knew I wasn't going to be able to comfort myself with a few lines of dribble thumb tapped out on an iPod tonight. I disconnected the computer from the hive (external monitors, power cords, external hard drives, tablet, printer, etc etc) and brought it to bed with me. I actually watched a bunch of YouTube hoping it would put me to sleep, with no success.

There's far too much on my mind.

I hardly use this thing as a "laptop" lately. It's easier to leave it all plugged in to the collective. Funny how when you have a Terabyte of Data on an external drive, how meek and meager a 232gig drive seems when it's laptop only.

I'm digressing slightly.

The point is, that I'm not writing this to ask for advice. I hope, through this conscious effort I'm making NOT to ask for advice, then I'll be able to work out the true answer on my own. Instead of asking people's 'opinions' in a controlling and suggestive way that coaxes them into feeding me the answer I want. The one I've already subconsciously chosen.

I suppose I'm being a bit hard on myself. We all yearn for the approval of our peers. But I just think that since I was made aware of this fault, by that random waiting room quote, that I would be dumb to ignore it. It's a sign, and an opportunity to grow passed an obvious short coming. As well as a chance to empower myself to be more in control of my own fate and progression.

You know. Maybe that quote wasn't "Beware those who seek guidance". I think now that I reflect a bit more, that it was "Beware those who seek approval!". Yeah. That was it! Approval was the key word.

I read this as I was waiting to see a counselor about a relationship that I already knew was over. But I selfishly wanted to pay a professional to tell me I was right one more time. So there I'm sitting in this waiting room, on this self serving mission to receive approval for a feeling I had in my heart, and a book slaps me in the face with a palpable reality check.

BEWARE THOSE WHO SEEK APPROVAL.

It's kindof a catch 22. Real rock and a hard place. Because on the one hand I have all these aspirations of being this successful person. And I'll need to get plenty of approval from people if I'm going to make lots of moneys doing the things I'm passionate about.

But I think that's a different kind of approval. A kind I won't have to go FISHING for so directly. I shouldn't have to fish at all. It should just come flying at me because I worked really hard and made something amazing. Not because I slacked off 70% of the time and pulled a magic rabbit out of my ass at the last second, and then presented the rabbit like I'd busted my ass over it and it deserves 100% approval and praise.

I'm getting better. I'm putting more heart into things earlier. Not waiting for "last minute panic" to be my only source of work-horse motivation. Finishing things on time, or early, and then rewarding myself.

But I'm still looking around for answers when I have them already in my hand. Still choosing to wage the debate in lieu of taking the action that only I can see is clearly necessary. Climbing up ladders to see over hedges when I'm already in the right courtyard.

So I've been back and forth, nay MANIC, over the last few days. Really struggling with WTF I'm going to DO with myself in the next month. My time in "paradise" is almost over. Ivan has taught me a lot, and we've shared many laughs and smiles. But I'm way too comfortable here. There's no fighting to survive. Life is EASY. Too easy. Cushy, and comfortable, and EASY!

I hate it.

I'm miserable.

This condo is so fucking nice, and has every imaginable amenity any person could ever ask for. And it's driving me nuts, because none of it is mine.

I want mine.

I want to own a Condo, or a house, or a NICE vehicle. No offense Vanagon. You've got mad style, but underneath it all your an unreliable piece of shit! Wow. I can't help but point that sentence back at myself.

So I think this is me making a decision here. Trusting my instincts. And NOT seeking advice or approval. Like I said I've been back and forth like CRAZY. One minute, I'm staying and moving to downtown Toronto and getting a job with a design studio. The next minute, I'm still leaving to go to BC. I guess I've been more on the side of "still going to BC" for most of the time. But the last three weeks, since I visited Orillia, I had a perceived change of heart. A friend wanted to get an apartment downtown, and keep his house in Barrie. Leaving me with a downtown apartment I could afford, but had to myself on weekends. I was pumped! I didn't have to leave! Another year in slackers paradise! But no, I wouldn't be slack, I would have a full time job! Great, so waste someone else's time for 8 hours a day and then come home and smoke until I didn't care anymore.

*sigh*

That's just not going to cut it for me. I clearly need to leave. I've fallen into a rut of comfort and routine. I need a challenge. I need a mountain. A race. A space flight. A path to follow. Even if (especially if!) it's a path to the unknown and undecided!

Nigel said I should stay in Toronto and reap the rewards of my education...

His opinion, and approval, weighed heavily in my recent battle to talk myself into sticking around.

It's hard to think of Nigel being wrong about anything. But Nigel doesn't know Toronto and Me. About the old bad habits. And stagnant social circles. About how EASY it is for me to live here, because I've fought for the approval of so many people, and have it sitting here waiting to save me from ever having to challenge myself.

So as quickly as the option to get the apartment downtown with my boy materialized three weeks ago, it disappeared today. And with it, my "easy out".

Ivan is a great friend. And a very smart one. He agreed to let me come stay with him, but only temporarily. He's given me everything I could possibly ever need to be fully comfortable here, and once I've had a 6 month taste of the life of luxury, organization, property ownership, style and success, he's gonna pull the magic carpet right out from under me! God bless his brilliant mind, and quiet anti-confrontational, brilliantly subtle and effective guidance.

I flipped the script today and decided with near certainty that the show must go on. I have to keep moving. I have to see the country. I have to make my photo book. And dammit, I have to make my web series of regularly uploaded videos so that people can follow my misadventures.

It's like, the question of how I'm going to connect to the internet while I'm on the road, iPhone, Blackberry, or Rogers stick. The moment I THOUGHT of the question, the TRUE answer presented itself to me in CLEAR AND PLAIN ENGLISH!

DO NOT GET A ROCKET STICK, BECAUSE IF YOU HAVE INTERNET 24-7, THEN YOU'LL NEVER ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING! YOU'LL PARK THE VAN ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND CHAT WITH PEOPLE ONLINE ALL NIGHT!

Sure, I'll upload lots of pics (to Facebook, even though they look ugly, that's where I get my most character validating feedback) but I'll never get around to editing any of the videos! On the OTHER hand, if I don't HAVE internet access 24-7, then I immediately open up a new element to my adventure! WiFi hunting! I can picture days at a time where I'll have limited to no access to the internet! PERFECT time to work on video editing! NO DISTRACTIONS!

So I had that answer the MOMENT I thought of the question. Yet, over the last four months, I've wasted COUNTLESS people's time. Asking them their advice on what my best option was for internet coverage on my journey.

PFffft.

wtf!?

So. How can I turn this blog entry into something productive now. Instead of just a sleepless, self deprecating rant of vague intent?

Maybe I don't have to. Maybe this "blog" thing will serve me much better 10 years in the future, when I come to another fork in my road, if it's not filled with fluffy crowd pleasing filler. If it's just raw, un-edited verbosity. A truthful historic recount of that sleepless week I had on the brink of insanity in Mississauga in 2009.

I must say; spewing truth untapped from the bowels of your psyche is a terrifying, and liberating ordeal. I highly recommend it!

I also highly recommend thinking twice the next time your going to ask for advice! Oh dammit, here comes the "G.I.Joe, knowing is half the battle" moment I was just specifically trying to avoid.

*sigh*

I'm such a cheese ball. Way too many television shows have shaped my vernacular into a formulaic and contrived dribble. I always feel the need to "wrap up" my posts with a Cosby show moment. Breaking everything down into one clear cut, endearing lesson...

Ivan agreed when I told him in the car on the way to the Ultimate game, that there's probably something out on the road that's still waiting for me to learn. It's becoming pretty clear now, after four nights of laying awake and alert, thinking it all over in my head.

The fact that my boy can't take the apartment with me was just the sign I needed help me listen to myself. I can see now that I've been SCREAMING the truth at myself from beneath a layer of thick, flashy, bright, shiny, big city bullshit. I want to maximize these next two months. Make as much noise, and do as many new things as I possibly can. Hopefully make a couple thousand dollars more then I'm currently pulling in, and sink it into the Van. Give the beast a fighting chance to get us to the west coast.

She'd sell in a SECOND if I got her to Cali. And for twice what I paid!

I wonder if you can enter America with "selling my Van" as your purpose for visiting.

Anyway. Think twice before asking for advice. You may already know EXACTLY what you want, you just have to turn off your internal critique, and silence the popular vote filter. "DO YOU" as a wise man once told me. I wish I remembered his name. Chris I think? DO YOU he said. That was the name of his production company, and also a brilliantly simple piece of advice. Cool black guy I worked with in a Radio Shack like 7 years ago. He made movies. I helped him once by drawing him some stills from one of his shots. Sort of a reverse engineered story board. I think he needed a board for funding, and had shot the footage without one. So we paused his film a few times and I banged out some story boards. Story board artist! Now THERE is a fucking job I could sink my teeth into! A job where I can draw all day, and never finish a single drawing!!

*swoon*

IDEAL!

:^D

The west coast makes movies.

I'm gonna go make some movies. And draw some story boards. Fuck graphic design. I really hate designing for print. It's a pain in the ass. Maybe if I'd taken Sandy and Nigel's advice and gotten into die cuts, and cool substrates, then I'd get a little more excited about it. But clients can never afford foil stamps. Or embossing. Or interesting cuts. So I'll chase this web design thing, and this movie making thing, until it gets me in the door with some story board people. And some interactive new media types.

I wonder if I'll make babies with someone before I get a chance to go back to school for industrial design. Maybe I'll hate industrial design like I hate print design. If I get frustrated by 2D pre-press, imagine 3D factory stuff. LOL

Another bridge for another time.

it's 3:13 am now. I'm gonna shut this sob story up before it consumes all of my sleepable hours. Maybe now that I spewed all of this out into cyberspace I won't have such a busy mind when I go to try and close my eyes again.

Man. What a burden, to realize I'm in complete control of everything, and have all the answers myself. Ignorance is bliss... and I aint ignant!

Oh sweet. I just noticed the list of keyboard shortcuts under the post box. I can hit Control - P and this will publish!

BAM!

Come on now! A blog post from an iPod?

2009-05-20T01:30:00.004-03:00

Ok, so it's night two of lying in bed awake long after TV had me out for the count on the couch! There are obviously more things on my mine then just getting my taxes done. On weather I typing on an iPhone is really the dealbreaker I think it is. I was so certain I wanted a blackberry... Like I was certain that I wouldn't be staying in Toronto longer then a few months... Oooh jeze, yeah, typing on this damned this gets laggy and annoying... And when the auto speller thingy does it's corrections he results can be hilarious! For example, I typed Ooooh in the last phrase and it substituted Pooh no word of a lie... Maybe the next time I can't sleep and insist on blogging from my iPod I'll allow all of the auto spell discrepancies to go uncorrected :^) aaaAah very clever Apple, auto capitolizing the 'P' in iPod for me as I type... But yes... There is clearly much more on my mind... All of the projects due, and the lack of return I'm getting on most of them. My taxes. My sisters business proposal thinger. My busted up Vanagon. I want to spend sooooooo much money on that thing. I had to type this entry just so I would stop reading articles about people putting bigger engines in them. Spending 15,000$ on one of these fuckers just to have a stylish AND reliable ride!? I could sell tje Van and buy a 10 year old Golf and a Mac Pro with that coin! Ooooh man that magnifying glass ainmation this damned thing uses to show me where I'm moving my cursor to is so damned gorgeous! Darnit! Why do I have to be such a sucker for style! I know his is a terrible typing experience on a puff upped and bloated laggy interface! But here I am! tapping away on it like it's my job!

Well, this entry didn't quite have my usual zest for storytelling and linguistic nuance. LOL

But it felt good. In a controled chaotic nothing for nothing sake kind of way.

:^)

And as I did on Twitted last night, I do on here tonight; come ooooon Sandman!

co

2009-05-20T01:30:00.001-03:00

My Blog is Jealous of Twitter!

2009-05-18T16:16:00.001-03:00

I mean, no offense blog! It's just that micro-blogging is sooo damned immediate and gratifying! And convenient!

But alas, some things need more then 140 Characters. (so I split those entries into two tweets! *snicker*)

I want to do some icons. Like, re-design ALL the icons I use on my Mac and replace them. Something unique, like maybe hand drawn cartoonish icons?

Yyyyeeah!

That's what I'm gonna do! As soon as I take these other 7 things off my list!

:^)

Backdoor to Clubland

2009-05-06T10:39:00.003-03:00

My journey into Clubland Toronto was unique to say the least. I would say I came into it backwards compared to most people. My trip down nightlife lane differed in that I became a club promoter, before I was ever a club goer!

It all began a decade ago, in late 1999 early 2000. The last millennium. Unbeknownst to me, Raves were just beginning their downward free fall after a rocket like Apogee. (I've heard tales of the famed Freakin' 99 that brought umpteen thousand people to the Dock's. The party that was touted as both the peak of Rave in Toronto, and as the final poke that burst the bubble before the whole thing deflated.)

I was "fresh off the plane" from Prince Edward Island and had Just turned 19 years old. As far as I knew, Friday Nights at the Joker, were the pinnacle of nighttime entertainment.

I was next to straight edge, and barely 10 cents passed a virgin in every sense of the word. When on one fateful day, I was fired from my day job hocking faux designer gear at Chateau Works on Queen St West. Citing low sales numbers as their reason (a valid one. I can't sell Junior Girl 'diva in training' clothes to 9 year old's and their misguided mothers.) I was sent on my merry way. This would start a chain reaction of good fortunes that would profoundly change my life for the better.

In Prince Edwards Island in the 90's, the closest thing to a Rave I'd experienced, was a 50 person party in the UPEI "Barn". I use quotation marks because The Barn was both, it's name, and a true description of the structure! The local disc jockey (my friend Brett Doyle, aka DJ Flycore) played what I later learned was a mixture of trance and progressive house, that we ignorantly and blissfully lumped together into the blanket term "techno". There were pacifiers, glow sticks, phat pants, and even a guy from Detroit who showed me how to "Candy Stomp"! But that was all I'd ever known of Rave up to this point. Just enough to know I loved it and wanted more.

The only other place to hear "techno" in Charlottetown, was on Much Music every Friday night. And I was glued to the TV every week! I had literally moved to Toronto from Charlottetown with the singular focus of becoming an Electric Circus dancer. This had proved far easier then expected, and I enjoyed a long run as a regular on that show in the first year I was here. So Le Chateau had been the perfect place to work as their 50% employee discount helped me furnish my cable TV dance show outfit needs on a weekly basis. When they let me go, I immediately walked across Queen West to a little spot I knew called K.M.R. Mode. K.M.R. was owned by two Iranian brothers. Kevan as I remember was the designer, and his brother ran the books and did the hiring. They sold an eclectic mixture of high fashion dresses and skirts and tops, and low brown rave centric fun fur phat pants and shiny pvc gear for men. They knew my face because they supplied the host of E.C. with her outfits for the show, so I'd haunted their store as an extension of my Much Music experience.

Now anyone who's ever walked down Queen West at the turn of the last decade remembers this place. You may not remember the actual store. But you remember that in front of a doorway, sandwiched between Guess and Steve's music, stood a meek looking fellow in shiny gold pants, a mesh tank top, and some kind of fake sheep skin leopard print jacket. Doing whatever, behind the back, and under the leg, tricks he could to convince you to take his Flyer. Neon paper photocopied flyers touting 50% discount for a seemingly un-ending "store closing blow-out sale". For a short time in one summer, that fellow was me.

So I got fired from Chateau Works, and walked across the street the next day and started handing out flyers for 7 bucks an hour. 7 measly dollars an hour, 8 hours a day. Standing out on that busy hip trendy funky street, handing the same damned flyer, to the same Queen West regulars, 5 days a week!

Until, another eventful afternoon came along. A busy, bright, and sunny Friday I remember. I was approached by an over the top friendly, loose jawed character, who, for the sake of discretion, we will call, Ricky. Ricky may have come across as quite the snake oil salesmen, were it not for his friendly girlfriend, whom I'll call, Helen. Helen played straight to what I would later come to know as Ricky's magic pill induced wacky. The man, jolly and inebriated at 3pm on a Friday afternoon, saw fit to offer me a job handing out flyers for him at a downtown nightclub, that very same night. He liked me, for some strange reason. :^P

"Wadya makin' here, Dude?"

7 bucks an hour!

"I'll give ya 8 if you come do the same thing for me tonight!"

What a guy, that Ricky. Skimming that extra 2 dollars an hour from the 10 dollar per hour budget off the top of my pay! Yet still managing to make me feel good about the 1 dollar per hour raise I was about to receive. I didn't know the standard going rate for club promoter was 10 bucks an hour!

He described the location of this nightclub he wanted me to go to, and assured me that a box of flyers would be waiting at the door with my name on it, and I just had to show up at midnight, and ask the bouncers.

The club was a place I'd never heard of before called "Industry". It was quite far from the regular downtown "club district". But actually very convenient for me since I lived on Beaconsfield Street, just east of Dufferin on Queen West. Beside what was then, The (sketchy) Stardust, and is now The (hip trendy) Drake Hotel.

So, terrified and nervous, but mostly excited and curious, I made my way to 901 King Street West to present myself as "PJ who's here to hand out flyers for Ricky". The bouncer, one of the larger and more intimidating of his kind that I'd ever seen, was friendly enough to set me up with my box of flyers. I was the first promoter there that night. Or at least, the first one to set up and start working. The rest of them were inside, where they should have been! Rubbing shoulders and a getting to know the happy party people, before admitting to themselves, defeated, that the party had started to clear out, and it was time to go out and become a part of the flyer gauntlet.

I'm floored at just how young and innocent I was that first night there. Terrified and lost and up way past my bedtime, I didn't even ask to go inside! I just stood there, and waited for people to come out, and did as I was supposed to. Behind the back, under the leg, spin around with a big smile on my face. Whatever it took to get them to take the flyers!

Some of the thoughts that went through my curious and ill informed mind that first night:

Man, some of these people are really drunk! Maybe they're on dope or something? Some of them seem really fucked up! Whoa, they just pulled that guy out and dropped him on the ground! He hit his head! Is he ok? Is anyone going to help him? Man, that techno sounds awesome! I wonder what it looks like in there!? This is a strange building for a club to be in. It looks like a regular office building! And it's in the middle of nowhere! Holy crap, was that a man? That was a very pretty man! I wonder who all these people are on this flyer I'm handing out? There's a lot of names on here. I've never heard of any of them! Maybe I can quit working for K.M.R. now, since I make more money doing this anyway? And it's closer to home! I don't need to be awake during the day. That's boring. Oh, the guy they pulled out woke up, he's gonna try and get back in. Oh man, I hope they don't hurt him again. Come on guy, just leave. They aren't going to let you back in. He's not wearing a shirt. Someone should at least get him a shirt. Though he's showing no signs of being cold. This place is fucking crazy! What am I doing here? Holy frig, this song sounds awesome!"

*dance dance dance*

Again, I was fresh from the East Coast, and the pinnacle of innocence! And I saw some serious shit go down that night. People of every single race, creed, colour, shape, and size. And in every state of mind expansion imaginable. People who didn't look like the type I'd ever peg to be out at such a scary place at this strange hour. Folks who looked like they held down real money making jobs during the day. And others who looked like they'd sleep in the club on top of some speakers if they could. I saw some things that by all rights should have sent me home packing, never to hand out flyers at night again! But that's not how it went. Some sense or curiosity, or love for the throbbing baselines I could hear coming from inside this place made me crave more. Something made me come back the next week, and the weeks after that. Until eventually I was showing up early for all of my shifts, and dancing my ass off inside where I belonged!

Ricky proved to be a very good first boss despite short changing me and keeping the difference for himself. (he didn't last much longer as the go between for his boss and the street team). He and Helen took me out and showed me a lot of what the REAL scene had to offer. And I started to get less and less interested in making it to Electric Circus on Friday nights.

First I got to go see Sasha and Digweed at Meow on the Lakeshore. That place had a Disco ball so big it didn't fit in one room! They had to cut a hole in the wall for it! Not to mention all the fake boobs and the big muscle men! We didn't have fake boobs in PEI! Glamorous and fancy and really cool. Not particularly my kind of people, or my kind of music. But awe inspiring for a kid so green around the gills! They took me to the parties at Industry, where I got my first taste of V.I.Peej line bypass, no cover charge treatment! And most importantly, they took me to a Breaksfest at the Elmocombo!

Whaaaat is THIS place? And why have I never been HERE before!? These people all dance like ME! They put their elbows up, and kick their feet around! They play with their hats and collars and move their heads around on rubber necks! They're all dressed so FUNKY! Not like the fake boobs and collared shirts of Meow and The Guvernment and The Joker. Everyone in here has crispy fat sneakers on! A club where I'm allowed to wear running shoes? I'm HOME! I'm with my people! B-boys and Girls smiled, and all were happy and approachable! When I danced at people, they danced back, and said hello! This was it for me. I knew the moment I walked in and saw the crowd that I was going to be into Breaks. And that I would chase the breaks around to every opportunity I had to hear them!

I bought my first "tape" that night at Breaksfest. It was a mix by the Electrician. I played that tape until it wouldn't play anymore! It was my favorite tape until I got a copy of Funky Skinny Whiteboy by Robb G. That's another story for another time. (meeting Robb G on the rooftop at Lime Light on a Wednesday, about a year later, and loosing my shit on $2.50 drinks and star struck idiocy. LOL)

I'd finally found my way, and knew where I wanted to be. I'd been brought into the scene almost by happenstance, and from the wrong direction, but I was pumped to be there. That was the very tip of the mountain of what would be a whirlwind three year epic journey! The scene swallowed me up and spun me around, and I wouldn't come flying back out the other end for a while. That first night at Industry was historic, and I'll never forget it. But it was really only the tip of the ice-berg. The characters I'd later meet, and the friends I'd make, could fill countless other posts.

Yesterday I took a drive down King West to # 901. I can't help but chuckle at the irony of Industry; arguably Toronto's most notorious and hottest underground nightclub, turning into a Shoppers Drug Mart. You just can't write stuff like that! Who would have ever thought?!

Seeing Industry turned into a shoppers, and seeing how much Toronto's Queen West and the surrounding club district have been gentrified in the decade since my journey began, really made me feel sentimental and nostalgic.

I took my camera through "The Club District" to see if it really did still warrant to be referred to as such. The photos I got are sure to stir up some memories for lots of people. I'll edit them and drop them in another post next week. Some places I found still intact, save for the name on the front. Others are boarded up and vacant. Other still are just a memory where high priced, high rise condominiums
now stand.

Is 10 years really long enough for me to be writing such retrospectives? I think so. Time passed a lot differently for me in clubland then it does in the real world. A decade is a lifetime! And what I experienced and learned in that first summer as a flyer monkey will be with me forever! I'm a better person for having dove headfirst into that pool. And I'm better for having climbed back out and dried off before I got pruney too.

Ok, enough analogies. Time to start working on these photos!

J-Quality in the mix. New YouTube video!

2009-05-01T16:46:00.000-03:00

Break The Walls Down. Web Design outside the box

2009-04-27T20:13:00.003-03:00

There's a reason a lot of websites are built on grids. It makes sense to contain everything in a predictable and consistent system. This predictability and structure make it simpler for the end user to navigate with ease and familiarity. But every once in a while, when the malaise of repetition and conformity have taken their toll, we yearn for inspiration. For someone to DARE to think outside the box.

Well here a two blindingly breathtaking examples of that clichéd euphemism!

Prepare to be dazzled!

Honda Insight Ad on Vimeo

Wario for Wii Ad on YouTube

I urge you to really play around with the second one. It's not a spellbindingly beautiful as the Insight ad... but it's FUNctionality is off the charts!

Gawd DAMN this is a hot Advert! Adidas 60 years!

2009-04-25T00:54:00.006-03:00

Beggin'!! Put Your Lovin' Hands Out Baby!

Soooooo good!

I usually don't fall for the whole, Celebrities and beautiful people partying thing. But the combination of the old's cool looking film style, the slow motion, the phat Adidas, and the AMAZING TRACK make this one a winner!

And holy shit, Katy Perry must be pinching herself right now! Thinking "I'm not reeeeaaally in the same league as the rest of these people yet!"

Sick commercial.

Making me re-consider K-Swiss as my favorite brand for crispy white kicks!

P.S. I just bought the track on iTunes! It's called "Beggin' (Pilooski Re-Edit) and is like 5 and a half delicious minutes long! Also, the original vocal was by the Four Season's.

:^D

Halfway through the Honeymoon?

2009-04-24T22:36:00.004-03:00

I had to put the track "Belfast" by Orbital on. I'm in THAT kind of mood. :^P

Whenever I get sick for more then a couple days I always have these reminiscent, child-like feelings. The weakness of being beaten by a little invisible bug. Brings me right back to being a kid. I used to have these really bizarre Auditory and Visual Hallucinations when I got sick. I can vividly remember, waking from some mid-day half sleep. In my basement bedroom at my parents house in PEI. Under my Superman comforter, on my captains bed. I slowly drifted awake and could hear my mother talking. But it sounded different. Something was wrong. She was talking calmly and normally, about nothing, but it sounded to me like someone screaming. That is to say, my conscious mind knew she wasn't yelling, but the sound carried the intensity of a yell. Well, not just any yell. But my FATHERS yell. I don't know that I've ever described this to anyone before. I'm having trouble articulating it. But basically, when I get sick, I have these mini "trips" where every sound, sounds like my father yelling at me. Again, I don't feel like that's a proper description... I know the sounds aren't screams, and my ears don't FEEL them any louder, but my brain processes them as though they are screams. Does this make sense?

Also, the visual portion of the hallucinations. That's much easier to explain. Everything looks much much farther away then it really is. Objects appear very very small. Again, my conscious mind KNOWS that my bedroom window, with the aged off white venetian blinds and the sheer white curtains isn't that far away, or what small. But maaaan, it looks like it's a mile away! Weird!

OH GOD. The Benny Hill Theme just came on after Orbital. Hahahahaha

SHUFFLE FAIL!

:^P

Ok, back to Belfast. Better keep it on repeat. I'll get through this quicker. :^P

So anyway, I remember consciousness materializing and my window looking very very far away and small, and all sounds piercing like the angriest yell. Of course I was terrified the first time it happened! But then, another cold came, and it happened again! This time I was pumped! And it got to the point where I'd look forward to being in this altered mind state! I can remember it happening one time, and getting out of bed to walk upstairs and talk to Mom just so that I could experience the distorted sound! haha

It doesn't happen as often anymore. But in my adult life I've been able to bring it on without even being sick! It hasn't happened in a while though. And it's never quite been as powerful as it was those first couple times. I've been sick now for almost two weeks. (I think I have some kind of lung butter producing infection. My cough has been consistently gag inducing for several days. Only today does it show signs of relenting. But anyway, no groovy auditory and visual hallucinations this time. But certainly some nostalgic feelings. :^)

I don't know if it's spring, or if it's riding my bike around like an idiot for three hours when I most likely have a lung infection of some kind? But it SMELLS different today. Life smells different. I stood out on the balcony this evening after the bikeride, and the smell charged me right up! Be it the changing season, or the neighbors experimenting with new cooking/air freshener. But the air smelled both excitingly NEW, and comfortingly Familiar when I took a deep breath and looked around Mississauga City Centre.

I've been feeling a LOT of pressure lately. Mostly because I'm broke. Things are happening for me here. Lots of exciting things! But none of them very lucrative as of yet. So I've been beyond pressured and stressed. I've had a couple minor meltdowns. Nothing out of hand. But a couple confrontational and declarative boundary setting moments that's for sure.

DAMMIT!

BENNY HILL AGAIN!

LOL

*gets up and walks over to iPod touch plugged into mixer*

Ok. Orbital, once more. LOL Three times is enough self centered blog writing time. Then back to work.

I can't believe how much fucking AMAZING video I've banked since I've gotten here. And I've done next to nothing with it! If I knew Final Cut as well as I know Photoshop then I'd be YouTube famous! And telling all of my Subscribers to come see me at Vimeo, because YouTube jumped the shark. LOL

I just realized something really amazing.

This blog post is all OVER the fucking place. But, I think that's ok now.

I got a job writing "proper" blog posts for another website! So this place can be where I rant, and ramble, without sense or sensibility. That's a comforting thought. It's nice to let my guard down.

I need to let my guard down more.

I can't believe I let those hateful comments people left on that SXE Phil response video keep me from uploading to YouTube for so long!

There's a LOT of stuff I don't share, here and on YouTube, or Facebook, because I'm afraid of judgment. The crazy thing is, it's not the opinion of the strangers I'm worried about. It's my family. My family is so important to me. And I love them all so much. I hate to think for a second I might be doing something they don't approve of.

I'm 28.

Time to get over it and be myself!

SRSLY!

:^P

Ok. Back to work.

OH YEAH. Shit. The sortof "point" of the entry....

I'm about halfway through my time here! And then I'm off to see the rest of this country! I'm amazed at how many well wishing friends and family members have tried to suggest other "more sensible" things I could be doing instead of driving my crazy Mystery Machine across the prairies... chasing the mountains like an idiot.

But fuck man. I owe it to myself. I said I was going to do it! I want to do it! So I'm gonna fuckin' do it! That's it! I mean, if I can't be reliable and accountable to myself, then how will I have a chance to be that for my future partner? Or my future family?

Being back here, among the "glamor" and all the big city action, has actually made me more reserved and narrow minded in some ways then the last 5 years on PEI did! When I moved back to PEI from Toronto, it was like, I had this big thing to prove to everyone. That I was so big city. And now, moving back here, the whole script has been flipped right back around! And I'm realizing a lot of the values I had when I was 18 and first moved here, where the right ones all along!

I'm a one woman man (just haven't found THE woman yet) who doesn't really drink or do drugs, and who wants to be a father more then anything else in the world!

Secondly, I want to support my family off of the things I'm move passionate about. My art.

I'm getting there.

I'm learning I need to grow a spine and a sack and start demanding what I'm worth (monetarily), and not letting people take advantage of my excitement and my passion.

I'm not quite there yet. But I'm very pleased to say I'm still growing! Actually, I hope I never "get there". I hope I always keep evolving, learning, growing.

I'm obviously still typing because I've trained myself to write in a certain way. I always have these melodramatic endings to my posts. LOL Too much TV watching.

This one isn't going to wrap up with a bow. It's just going to end. And that's ok! I got some stuff off my chest, and now I'm gonna go back to editing photos, or videos, or making web banners, or club flyers, or bicycle jersey designs, or twitter backgrounds, or websites, or any of the other 482 000 things I've agreed to do for people. And want to do for myself!

LOL

/end rant

P.S. I HATE that the white stroke around my wordmark at the top of this page has ROUNDED corners.

Photoshop, you SUCK at Stroking...

That's what she said?

But I'm planning to go Wordpress soon. So fuck it!

:^)

And to all the family reading, I apologize for the vulgarity in this post, but come on, I'm almost 30. I can use teh swearz now? Right?

*looks for approval*

;^D

Springtime Splatter Sessions

2009-04-23T12:17:00.002-03:00

Myself and my roommate hanging out being creative. He with his new sketchbook, me with my Gouache and a penchant for Photoshop splatter brushes and some Gouache.

I shot this on my Canon SD790 on Macro mode.

BlendFu Splatter Sessions from PJ Stephen on Vimeo.

BlendFu is my new favorite PS Brush source!

2009-04-23T09:39:00.002-03:00

My Brushes got found on Twitter by a brush distribution website!

HOLY FUCK THE INTERNET IS AWESOME!!! :^D

Here's the official link to my first official design resource release!

I'm floored by how powerful a networking tool Twitter is. I just can't say enough good things about it! And also, this new brush site BlendFu is killer! They even let you test the brushes on the site!! How is this even possible?! We live in the future! So cool!

AMAZING!!!!

I'm beaming with pride right now! I barely remember that just two hours ago I was sweating and throwing up in the bathroom. Hahahaha

WHOOO!!!!

OK. That's enough exclamation marks. Time to get some work done. :^)

Danny McAskill - Urban Cycling Madness

2009-04-21T11:26:00.003-03:00

High Rez Splatter Brushes by Peejworks

2009-04-15T13:35:00.004-03:00

Here's a link to download my second ever (and first proper) batch of photoshop brushes. These are some splatters I made with watered down Gouache on plain paper. There are two of each brush, one with just the paint, and the other with the paint and the paper texture left in for extra depth.

Be warned, the file is huge (70mb) and the brushes may not work with anything but CS4. I made each brush as large as possible (around 2500 pixels!) so there's lots to play with if you can sort it out!

Also, I played a lot with the levels until I was happy with them, but the brushes still appear very faint on a transparent background. A simple fix is to make your background white which seems to really "light up" the brushes. You can also double up layers and then merge them to thicken them up and make them more opaque.

Edit: I took some advice from Kelley Toombs and cut out some of the brushes that were just superfluous. So here's a much smaller pack that only has the splatters in it. None of the paper textured ones that are in the full pack.

Here's the new Download Link!

This file is only about 17mb. Much smaller! But still lots of full resolution paint splattery goodness!

Enjoy! And please, if you use them, send me a link to whatever you made! :^D

Shufflebanger Two, the next day!

2009-04-15T12:56:00.002-03:00

Still riding very high from my awesome experience yesterday recording a track with Robb G.

The process was amazing. I'm so glad I held out years ago when I had producers trying to cut a cheesy pop album with me. I was so hungry back then that I almost compromised a few times.

I just think I have a lot of things to get off my chest lyrically, and the other dudes didn't understand this. They used words like "simplify" and "not so personal" to try and get me to dumb myself down to fit the "claps" beats they were churning out.

But lastnight was the polar opposite of that experience.

Robb and his sound engineer friend Andre were SUPER positive and supportive of my insane methodology. I get so jacked from singing and writing that I literally shake and sweat. It can throw some people off because I probably look miserable when it's happening. But the truth is I'm as high and happy as I can get!

The microphone is SO powerful. And being able to hear the playback on the headphones live is a trip. Not to mention just being in a proper looking studio with sound proofing and all the right equipment. I was certainly a bit intimidated at first. But the boys were super encouraging and told me I sounded great, even when my nerves were throwing my pitch off and adding vibrato where none should have been.

:^D

I really don't want to reveal too much more of the experience just yet because the track itself is still very up in the air. I wrote a real song, with real words, and a real start and finish. But I did it with the understanding that I was only giving fodder to someone else so they could create with it.

Robb had a drum loop, and a bit of a baseline, but nothing melodic really. As it turns out, the drum was one stripped out of another track ANYway. So what I rhymed and wrote and sang over isn't even the final track! Which is AWESOME!

I also gave him about an hour of me just talking pure shit into the mic. We turned the mic on when I arrived, and didn't turn it off for nearly 3 hours! So I have no sweet clue what 3 minutes will end up being used out of the whole3 hour session.

That should explain my hesitance to pour my heart out over how stoked I am about what I wrote. Fact of the matter is, my lyrical story may never get featured on this track.

I'll be perfectly satisfied if all he uses is a couple "Yo yo, yes yes, Robb G in the mix" samples and breaks and cuts me up beyond recognition.

The important thing is, Robb G is dropping an album this summer, and there's going to be one track that says "Featuring The Peej" on it!

YEAH!

YEEEEEAAAAAAH!!!!

Fuckin' eh!

I'm shaking again just thinking about it.

WHEW!!!

ShuffleBanger

2009-04-14T12:24:00.002-03:00

Big Tings happening this evening. I can't talk about it. I'm too excited.

I'm not even paying close attention to the Price is Right today. I have no emotional attachment to today's contestants. I'm too excited.

I need to build web banners for a client. But I can't pick a typeface.

I'm too excited.

Holy Fuck.

My Nu Haircut

2009-04-11T16:25:00.002-03:00

Yep. I'm that broke. I cut my own hair.

Not too shabby I think!

:^D

I mean, it's patchy as hell. But wadyagonnado?

This is Well Good! Donk Donk Donk

2009-03-25T21:08:00.000-03:00

Living the Dream! (Time Lapse and Tilt Shift Vid)

2009-03-18T11:28:00.000-03:00

Eclectic 3.0: The Roads Less Traveled from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

My friend Kristin posted a photo

2009-03-18T09:52:00.000-03:00

And I was inspired the moment I saw it. So I created this:

Motion Graphics

2009-03-12T19:43:00.002-03:00

Ok, so I've known this for a while. But since moving back to the city my desire and decision have been galvanized.

I want more school.

When I was in Graphic Design I was sure my next step was Industrial Design. But lately my itch has changed. I don't find myself designing toasters and salad spoons in my spare time as much anymore. I don't dream up ideas for a better toothbrush, or flashlight as much anymore.

No, lately, it's Motion Graphics and Interactive Multimedia that's tickling my fancy!

Ever since Nigel showed us that video that someone had made, where the type moves around to express a quote from Pulp Fiction. Lemme see if I can find it.

That video snapped something inside me when I first saw it.
It's brilliant!

I'm also loving the new Reese peanut butter cups commercial that's on right now that uses the same effect. It's gorgeous!

I can't believe I found that on YouTube! We live in the future!

Anyway, this stuff is amazing, and I really love it. So I keep thinking about it all the time. Even when I'm doing static designs I'm THINKING of them in dynamic terms.

But I don't think the solution to sate my hunger lies in just making dynamic type videos. I think it needs to evolved a step further. I think it needs to be interactive stuff.

I'm obsessed with how man interfaces with his machines in ever increasingly intimate and intuitive ways.

I REALLY want to design machine/human interfaces.

That's what I want to do to school for.

A story (with video) about the Tweetup!

2009-03-10T12:02:00.000-03:00

Click here!

Coffee Cup Preachers?

2009-03-04T11:52:00.003-04:00

So Ivan (my roommate) works for a big shot marketing company. Today he had a scheduling conflict that resulted in him not getting some StarFucks coffees delivered to a client that he was going to meet with. Long story short, roommie to the rescue and I made the delivery. I got a free Venti Double Shot Soy Carmel Maciato out of the deal, so it was well worth it.

Well, I have to admit, that I really enjoy Starbucks. I know I know. It's the devil. But dammit, it's pretty! Their design department churns out nothing but WIN all day long. I could just go sit in a Starbucks for hours soaking in all the gorgeous warm muted colours, and interesting contemporary applications of typography. For someone who hasn't been surrounded by it's all encompassing homogeneous douche-baggery his whole life, it's still very fresh and new.

So anyway. There are these silly preachy quotes on the sides of the coffee cups right now, and the one I got eerily echos the sentiments that came frothing and whipping out of me yesterday.

"The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating - in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life" - Anne Morriss, Starbucks Customer

Now how do you like that for synchronicity?!

I must admit that Anne has a much better grasp of brevity then I. And no, I did not embellish. That is the actual quote on the cup (inner critic? She read my post!) and her name is actually Anne with an 'e'!

! SYNCHRONICITY !

He makes me look white, I know.

2009-03-03T11:39:00.013-04:00

In PEI I always felt a little bit darker skinned then I really am. My Grandfather once said to me "Don't worry Boy, the Lebanese blood cells have killed off all those French ones!" and I believed him at my young age. I was always Lebanese. Truth be told, there's probably more French in me then anything. Along with a slew of other races. (Anglo, Germanian, Abodiginy, Francais, Acadian, Irelandish, Skirt-Wearing Tough Guys [Scottsman] etc etc etc.)

But mostly I'm white.

I now have a photo, that without question, finally puts to rest any ideas I had of myself being anything but white:

But enough long winded jokes about my lack of visibly identifiable race. And more about why I'm fortunate enough to have the spectacular photo above.

Anyone who's been reading my Blog on the regular (both of you!) know that I've been following LeVar Burton's meteoric rise to Internet notoriety for some weeks now. And a couple days ago, I may have even had contact with him online. After this brief contact I'd then written a spastic blog entry about how cool it would be to one day meet him.

Then, like the spiral of cream in the all revealing cup of coffee, things came full circle. Seemingly at random, LB announced he was arriving in Toronto within' a couple hours, and asked what would be a good bar to hold a Tweetup at.

Well, I pride myself in being very conscious of synchronicity. I take hunches that I have very seriously, and I listen to my instincts and piece together seemingly unrelated life events in an effort to un-scramble the deeper code I believe is embedded in everyday life. There are no coincidences. Only signals, signs, and markers. Instructions or suggestions on when and where to act can be found in everyday mundane occurrences. Like street signs and maps, but for Life. I've recently purchased one of those dash mounted GPS units that actually speaks instructions to you! (metaphorically speaking) That's how clear and loud my inner voice is getting as I age.

So I took this as a very serious sign from the Universe (LeVar coming to Toronto). I was being told that I was moving in the right direction, and needed to keep doing what I was doing.

See, for LeVar, yesterdays Tweetup was just a little simple experiment that someone who's also new to this wonderful world of instant communication decided to carry out. He was in Toronto filming an episode of "The Hour" with Strombo, and decided to take an hour out of his day to try something fresh!

So at around 4:45 he announced, on Twitter, that he would be at Hemmingways (the famous Australian pub where Russel Crowe beat on someone) in Yorkville. Yorkville is the trendy expensive place where Celebs hang out. It USED to be the artsy hippie spot where Joni Mitchell and the like would hang-10 back in the day. Before money got a hold of it. Now it's a celeb hot spot.

But I digress.

4:45 we get the call out. And he says the "Tweetup" is to happen at 5:15!

So I live in Mississauga. It's taken me more then two hours to get downtown all three times I've attempted to go in the month I've been back here. So I panicked. I called my boy Robb (Astroboy) and asked him his opinion. He's a Twitter Guru so I trusted him to know the rules of engagement a bit more then me. He encouraged me to Carpe Diem, and go!

This is where life's lesson was being broadcast at full volume.

TAKE EVERY OPPORTUNITY YOUR GIVEN, AND RUN WITH IT!

(Side Note: The Price is Right just came on. This is going to make this entry hard to write! LOL)

Ok, she didn't win the car. And it's a commercial, I can keep writing. I'm not interested in getting a free diabeetus tester anyway.

OK, so where was I.

Yes! I was out in Mississauga. Impossibly far away from downtown!

But I wasn't about to let that defeat me. I mean, I had JUST posted about how cool it would be to meet the Reading Rainbow guy days before, and here was an open invitation to go have a beer with him! THIS IS THE KINDS OF OPPORTUNITY ONE CAN NOT IGNORE.

So I quickly pulled myself together (read: put on pants) and started to think of how I could make this happen. I called around to a couple more people trying to see if anyone had any good ideas about how I could get downtown.

Suddenly, all of the fear and apprehension I had about my Van melted away. I hadn't driven it since going to Alcina street downtown, and getting the hundred dollar ticket. (and also getting spotted by the paparazzo! Amy B. whutup!) I'd had a shitty experience getting the Van out of downtown that day. It wouldn't start, and once I got it going, I had problems with the gas pedal and almost got it stuck on some streetcar tracks on St Clair street. Enough drama that I was scared into leaving it parked downstairs in the underground lot for the last 3 weeks or so. I was waiting until I had money to put into fixing her before driving her again.

But suddenly, with time a factor, and a once in a lifetime opportunity available, my apprehension melted away and revealed a nice looking chunk of bravery.

When I walked into the underground and saw the Van, I felt a pride I hadn't felt since I had first started driving it in PEI. My vehicle and I have a very deep connection, in that I think of it as much more then transportation. It's an extension of my character. And will only become more of one as my trip progresses. It seemed that the adventure of getting downtown to Toronto to meet LeVar Burton, was going to have positive ramifications that evolved far beyond the simple experience that meeting him actually was.

I consider myself blessed to be able to find these lessons hidden beneath the mundane and routine. So I find LOTS of them in situations as unique as this one was yesterday.

So I climb into the Van, and am immediately taken back to the 5 days I spent in it getting myself here. And it felt good. I MacGuyvered the pedal back together (wads of paper towel stuffed under the carpet to hold it in place) and fired her up! She started without much of a fuss, and I was off!

So, here I was, following some insane whim, dropping what I was doing at no notice, and tearing around in my VW Van. It felt really good. And it served as a very tangible and graphic reminder of why I was even here in the first place! I'm here building up my portfolio and skillset, so that I can continue on my journey across the country once the weather gets nicer. I had almost forgotten that! Almost. :^)

So I was on the horn with friends, Robb, and Rob, and Ivan, trying to find out where I should be driving, and what the fastest way downtown was! At this point it was only about 5pm. Shit happened fast! You can't seize the day in slow motion! So we figured out that driving to the end of the subway line in Toronto, parking, and taking the train in was the absolute fastest way to get me to Hemmingways. I was happy with that. Enough of a drive to make sure the battery was recharged after starting her, but not too far that I'm going to be risking getting into too much trouble. (no trying to find parking downtown was the biggest sales point on this plan!)

Now this is where things start to get frighteningly synchronous. It just so happens that when I called Ivan, I was on a street that would take me nearly directly to the station! Burnhamthorpe meets up with Kipling, and Kipling is where the station is! One turn only! So solid! (Peej, your on the right street, just take that straight to Kipling!) So this street Burnhamthorpe was familiar for some reason, and it wasn't long before I figured it out. Within minutes I saw a sign saying "Welcome to Toronto" and the neighborhood looked oddly familiar. I came up over a hill and saw the Canada Bread Building. Also known as the Lavalife building!

So the route, unplanned as it was, just so happened to turn into the EXACT ROUTE I TOOK TO AND FROM WORK FOR TWO YEARS WHEN I WORKED AT LAVALIFE!

So on my way to discover and experience something completely out of the ordinary and new, life decided to remind me of exactly how far I've come! I passed it all. The building I worked in. The bus stop I used to wait at after work. The station I used to ride to. The Loblaws I used to have to RUN to get to in order to buy some lunch in my inhumane 1/2 hour lunchbreak. It was insane! I barely had time to take it all in as I rushed to get to the Subway.

But the lesson was not lost on me.

Look how far you've come? More then 6 years! You went from Working at a club in Toronto in 2001, to working at a Subway as a sandwich artist in Stratford PEI. Then back here to work in a shitty call center for two years in 2002, only to leave that shiteous job in lieu of going back to PEI for school! 4 years in PEI, and here I am, DRIVING the route I used to Bus, in MY VERY OWN bus! With my camera, and my education behind me. The world at my fingertips!

It was a fucking deep head trip for sure. I soaked it in and let it pour over the firey heat of my excitement. It balanced me out and a calm washed over me as I navigated the busy city streets on my way to the Subway station.

This was about a lot more then getting downtown to meet some celebrity that I'd adored since childhood. (Reading Rainbow was fucking BOMB people. You all know it!)

This was about me trusting that no matter how silly they may seem when I look at them under the auspices of the judgment of others, my instincts are generally fucking BANG ON. And that no matter how insane or innate my whims may seem on the outset, they are all gifts from the divine that I must take with a thankful and humble appreciation. I can't ignore any of my feelings, no matter how silly or nonsensical they first seem.

I wrote that entry last week KNOWING there was more to it then even I could forsee. It's just that at the time these things happen, they seem silly. I was ranting and raving like a lunatic about LeVar fucking Burton. LeVar Burton? How random? What possible chance could I have foreseen last week when I had imagined meeting him? How the fuck could I have known, that by imagining sitting and having a beer with this person, and then committing the idea to words, that I was actually manifesting it as my destiny?

I won't apologize for this belief anymore. I've been around the sun 28 times now, and I'm starting to be able to see the patterns as, and even sometimes before, they happen.

Fate? No, not really. I don't think it's fate in the sense that most people think of the word. Fate seems like a cop out to me. Things don't just HAPPEN to me. I MAKE things happen to me. Every decision matters. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Anything you can imagine, you can create. And your life is a mass product of the sum of each of your daily decisions. Nothing more, nothing less.

So I make it to Kipling station by about 5:25, and hop on the train. The train ride lasts forever, but I had some good music.

I come out of the Subway with the worlds biggest goofiest smile on, and walked proudly through Yorkville. I didn't know where Hemmingways was along the 2-3 streets that make up the Yorkville area, but I just walked. I trusted my instincts, and voila, there it was at the end of the street I picked!

In I walked, and the place was dead. About 15 people scattered around the various booths, and a lonely two at each end of the bar.

Seeing my puzzled and slightly panicked look, and my camera bag, the hot blond server said "Looking for someone?"

Yes I am!

"They're just upstairs"

There's an upstairs! Great! I'm not too late then!

I got to the staircase and looked up and immediately knew I'd made it. A swarm of nerds surrounded what I knew must have been him, despite not being able to see him through the crowd yet. I got to the top of the stairs, and what I had envisioned the week before, was now galvanized into tangible palpable reality.

I SAW IT HAPPEN IN MY MIND LAST WEEK. AND THERE I WAS, LIVING THE ACTUAL SCENE I'D IMAGINED! FROM DREAM TO REALITY! JUST LIKE THAT!

I could never have KNOWN when I wrote that last week that it would really happen. But it FELT right when I wrote it. Does that make sense? Last week it was just a hunch. A feeling. A tingle in the back of my mind that I couldn't ignore. Again, you fly around the sun enough times, and you start to be able to see the patterns. And sometimes, you can even foresee some things before they hit.

I believe I foresaw this.

So I calmly, and with big smiles, pulled my Canon out of my bag, and snapped a couple candid shots of LeVar interacting with the other Tweeters.

This is where another big lesson was learned.

LeVar had originally informed us he would be in Toronto yesterday morning. His first post mentioning a possible Tweetup had been at 10am. I had PLENTY of notice to get ready. But the fear, kept me from admitting to myself that this was real. That what I had imagined could really come to fruition so quickly. We're trained to think this stuff can't really happen this easily. That the world goes by with or without our input, and that we're just passengers on spaceship earth, barely in control of our own pre-determined destinies. This is bullshit. But it's the status quo, and the generally accepted reality. So even for me, sometimes the obvious signals get ignored. Because it's a scary concept, to be in complete control of your destiny. It's so much easier to take a back seat, and leave all responsibility up to "fate" or "luck".

I think that's a cop out. Luck. Pffft.

So anyway, I ignored my instinct, out of fear and disbelief, and made up an excuse why I shouldn't get myself ready and get myself downtown camera in hand. I told myself "I don't have an iPhone or a Blackberry, so if I get downtown, I won't be able to check my Twitter, and won't be able to find out exactly when and where he will be!"

IDIOT! He said Yorkville, it's not that fucking big! Bring your laptop and steal some fucking WiFi! Don't have an iPhone? What a terrible excuse not to seize an opportunity!

Anyway, so I spent the whole day doubting that this was real, and didn't get ready.

Lesson being this: I snapped a couple candid portraits, only to realize, that I had no memory card in my SLR.

Yeah.

Foreal.

He told us he was coming in the morning, and instead of getting my camera charged, loaded, and ready to work hard, I left it up to chance, and waited for LeVar to give out the REAL order to come meet up. PFFT! I sat around at home all day, working on design stuff, and waiting to see if he was really going to be downtown, or if I was really meant to meet him. A temporary lapse in confidence, and a moment of self conscious doubt, and as a result, I'm not able to maximize the potential of this event!

Instead of TRUSTING that my instinct had been correct the first time, and properly preparing for what had been generously laid out before me, I doubted the reality, and doubted my control over my reality. And I think I even expected him to extend a personal invitation for me to come take his picture or something. Like I didn't deserve to control the situation myself and just GO TAKE THE DAMN PICTURE! GO! BE THERE WAITING IN YORKVILLE! BE THE FIRST ONE TO MEET HIM! DO IT!

But no, I sat around and waited to make sure it was really going to happen.

This little bit of self doubt, resulted in me having to rush out of the apartment in a furry of insanity, and not realizing my memory cards were both out of my bag, and sitting on my desk next to my computer. Thus, not getting any REAL photos of this event.

It could have been more then it was! And I will take this as an invaluable lesson. I will let it eat away at me until I'm so bothered by this mistake, that I don't make it ever again!

So there I sat, with my useless camera in hand, and a dumb, slightly defeated smile on my face. I wasn't angry, or upset, because I knew this was part of the plan and that a bigger lesson was being taught to me here. I had to learn this ugly lesson the hard way.

"The next time life presents you with a blindingly wonderful opportunity, don't spend 4 hours questioning it's reality, waiting for a further sign. Take the FIRST sign, and run with it! Believe in yourself, and in your power to manifest your dreams, no matter how "silly" they may seem on the cosmic scale."

So I didn't let it bother me for too long. I knew I didn't have my memory card, and that I wasn't going to get the pic. A nice looking girl who was also crammed into the doorway at the top of the stairs says to me "Oh, are you a professional photographer?" in a delicious twist of irony. The Universe has an AWESOME dry sense of humor. LOL

I said "Not very professional today! I left my memory cards at home!"

The crowd parted and I didn't have time to properly put away my camera, so I stood there with it in my hand, as I was suddenly face to face with LB. He extended his hand, and a piercing stare, and we introduced ourselves.

I think handshakes are VERY important. If done correctly, they can totally make or break up the effectiveness of a meeting. The handshake and introduction for me, are paramount to success. If a person masters a proper handshake and introduction, then they can do anything or get anywhere in this life.

LeVar Burton's handshake game is top notch.

He's rolling up there with the best of the best as far as I'm concerned.

The shake was firm, but never hurt my hand. (I was wearing my fancy pinky ring that my sister gave me. The one with the the piece obsidian and the awesome swirly bits on it. I usually hurt my finger a LOT when I shake peoples hands while wearing this one. So it's miraculous that he didn't kill my finger!) He locked in SOLID eye contact and didn't break it until I'd said my full intro. Then, and this floored me, he held the handshake for the entire denouement after the initial intro. It wasn't awkward, or weird at all. It was a right fucking proper handshake. I mean, here's this famous actor, who has every reason to act like a superior douche by all societies pre-determined standards, and yet, he's so good with people, that he's making me believe that I'm just as important as he is! He's paying me the same respect and attention that he would want anyone to pay him at this very moment. I was elated.

I'm VERY proud of how I handled it from this point.

I didn't mention Star Trek. (despite having seen EVER episode and being a huge fan)
I didn't tell him I loved Reading Rainbow. (despite the fact that I REALLY did)
I didn't tell him he was my favorite anything, or the best something something ever.

I just thanked him for inviting us, and told him that he was the reason I had a twitter account.

I had no intentions of telling him ANYTHING other then hello, and thank you. But the man was genuinely (or at least professionally good at making me feel that he was) interested in who I was and what had brought me out to see him.

"LeVar it's great to meet you, Sir, I'm PJ".

There's something magical about when two people both know the value of a good handshake. It's the same feeling as when two people who work in a call center talk business to each other on the phone. A kind of perfect flow and mutual understanding and respect. Or when someone who works as a server, or bartender, goes out and gets served by someone else. It's this understanding and a respect for the other person that enhances the interaction, and gives it a very satisfying smoothness.

Shaking hands with LeVar Burton felt just like this.

So he got much more of my story out of me then I ever expected he be interested in.

Still holding on to my hand, and again, not in an awkward way whatsoever, he repeated my name to me.

"PJ"

ThePeej I said.

"ThePeej" he said slowly, while searching his mind for the thing that would make him remember who I was. This was the first time his eyes strayed away from mine, as he riffled through his brain looking for the connection. I knew he didn't know who I was yet, and didn't expect him too, but this was part of my presentation...

I'm the guy who told you about someone wearing a Reading Rainbow teeshirt on the Price is Right.

His eyes LIT UP!

"OOOOOOoooooh!! YES! PJ!!!! WOW!"

He squeezed my hand a little bit harder before letting go so that he could move around and become more physically animated over having made a tangible connection to who I was.

"PJ, that was such an amazing moment! You were the FIRST PERSON to tell me about that! The first one! That was so incredible!"

He said it with the same passion for discovery that used to enthrall me on Reading Rainbow. How he'd really connect with the person he was talking to or intervieing. And seemed genuinly excited about what they had to show him.

At THIS point I had to step back and just smile. In a way I felt like I had to get the fuck out of there because it was going TOO well.

We were surrounded by about 30 Twitter nerds, all going apeshit on their iPhones, snapping pics and updating their Twitter feeds.

I was torn, because he was holding a beer, and I wasn't, yet I had his undivided attention. My vision was of me having a beer WITH him. Also, fearing I might start to ramble a bit, I told him I was going to grab a beer, so we could have a cheers and another chat to which he smiled and agreed. I moved to the bar, leaving him free to touch more people with his kindness and enlightening approachability.

I went up to the bartender (another smokin' hot blond of course) and told her I'd like to have a pint of whatever beer LeVar is drinking.

"Who's LeVar?"

My inner Nerd died for a second, and I realized how really OLD and NERDY I am. What was she, 21, 22 tops? Despite my nice clothes, trendy haircut, and well kempt facial hair, I was really just another GEEK freaking out over the sight of a famous person. LOL

I told her never mind, and ordered an Amsterdam Blond.

MMmmmm.
Amsterdam Blond! Funny, I like blond beer, and brunette girls.

Anyway...

Fighting my way back over to LeVar was tough. I took my time. I wanted to make sure I was engaging and personable, but without fawning and geeking, and being obtrusive and rehearsed.

So I saddled back up near him after he'd had his picture taken with a few more people. There was a TV camera, and a seemingly never ending slew of Tweeters coming up the stairs to introduce themselves.

One was even heard to say "You were my favorite visually impaired character on Star Trek!"

No, you did not just say that to LeVar Burton. Oh my god. Brilliant. LOL

At this point I was standing right behind him, and he was energizing the crowd. He dropped a couple "Make sure to tip the bartender" followed by cheers from the Massive. It was awesome. I was loving it. And he was clearly enjoying himself too, which was great. Everyone was smiling so much and really enjoying the spontaneity and seemingly random surrealism of the moment.

My inner douche saw an opportunity during the conversation and I ran with it! Someone made the snafu of asking him where he was staying. To which he smoothly replied "that I'm not telling you" which was then met by nervous awkward laughs. Someone else asked how long he was in town, and he said only until tomorrow.

Again, the inner douche saw an opening, and had to take it.

"What, you don't want to stick around for this gorgeous weather were having? It's just getting nice out!"

The lowest of the low. Weather jokes.

Oh god.

IT WORKED! The crowd all guffawed, and he turned around! HAHA!!

"No no, I think I'm ok going back to the Sun in L.A.!"

Beer in hand, and triumphant, I struck up another convo:

"So I have to ask, the deal you inked to distribute more Reading Rainbow shirts, was that something you had rolling before the episode of Price aired?"

"Yeah yeah! I've been working on that for a while. So it was totally crazy and synchronous that you mentioned that to me on that day. I had literally just finished inking the distribution deal. So what's your thing? Your a photographer?"

Yes well...

And I explained as briefly as possible that I'm on a photographic journey across the country. And that I had planned for some time to make Twitter a big part of the promotion of my trip. I told him that seeing him command the crowd at the Diggnation party was what prompted me to finally set up my account so I could follow him. But that it had evolved into what it was in just the right timing and setting. I thanked him for being so tangible, and for inspiring such amazing things as this Tweetup. He seemed genuinely as excited about the possibilities as I was. Someone else who I believe was with him, agent or something, offered to take my picture with him. I told them I'd forgotten my memory card in my haste to get downtown on time, but that I had my backup camera with me. I handed the guy my little point and shoot, and LB eagerly put his arm around me and smiled in anticipation of the flash.

Again, this is something I found really moving. This famous person, who has every right to be stand-off-ish, was making himself completely and 100% available and transparent. He was a real person. An honest to god, reach out and touch him, man. Not some silly quasi-royal figurehead that held himself up above the people.

Now I know he's not Britney Spears, or any of those MEGA stars. But he's still a star. And he's made a conscious decision to remain grounded in reality. He's on the cusp where he could, if he decided, be a famous asshole. But he, in full control of his fate, has DECIDED to be tangible and real.

I was moved by this, and let him know.

The crowd moved around some more, and I backed off to give a chance for other people to talk to and meet him. I sensed the beer he was holding would be his last, as he'd already been there entertaining the masses for over an hour.

As he was starting to wind things down, and get ready to leave I handed him a couple of my cards, and thanked him for his time again. "Thank you. And know that your seemingly small action has inspired some great movement! here, this is my card, it might give you a chance to remember me"

He looked at the card, and repeated my name several times. Pointed to the card and said "PJ, photographer, crossing the country, taking pictures. Driving across country and taking pictures. Thanks for coming, PJ, great to meet you!"

I pulled my Houdini act and slipped away unnoticed. I bounced down the street and back to the subway on cloud 9. The whole thing had taken less then 15 minutes from the time I walked in to Hemmingways, and to the time I was out and walking back to the Subway to go home. I had arrive JUST in time. Perfect.

How could I have ever known that something like this would happen? I couldn't have. But I believe in it as a possibility. I think that was the big difference, and the big lesson I took away from this experience. ANYTHING is possible, if you believe it.

I was rewarded in spades for my blind belief through how awesome and invigorating the actual meeting was. And also punished for my moments of self doubt. If I'd just believed in myself 100% then I'd have a roll of AMAZING and candid professional photos of this historic and epic event to show for it. But instead, I spent the day noooot quite believing that it was going to actually happen for me, and as a result, wasn't properly prepared for what life had to offer.

So lesson learned, be ready for ANYTHING. Because ANYTHING TRULY IS POSSIBLE.

Even as I write this, my inner doubt is pointing and laughing at me.

"how could anyone be so ridiculous as to pull such deep meaning and inspiration out of something so silly and geeky? Erase this stupid rant and do something more productive and realistic with your time. Stop being such a flighty looser"

That's what the inner critic says.

Fuck the critic.

My inner Dreamer sings a sweeter song, speaks in rhyme form, and is a hellova lot funner at parties! So Go Fuck Yourself inner Critic! You're the reason I don't have a roll of awesome candid shots of the LeVar Burton Toronto Tweetup!

See if I listen to your stupid doubtful ass again!

No, I'm posting this entry. And I'm making no apologies for it!

I'm a long winded, flighty, unrealistic dreamer, with a penchant for epic blog entries. And there's no amount of self doubt that's gonna rid me of that anytime soon!

Meeting LeVar Burton was an awesome, heartwarming, and inspiring blip, along the great journey I've been fortunate enough to hurl myself into.

It reminded me that everything is possible, and that dreams, no matter how seemingly silly, are all valid, and all tangible!

But you don't have to take my word for it!

:^)

Big Office Moves - The Sauga-sauga Continues!

2009-02-27T15:11:00.004-04:00

So I moved in. And I unpacked, kindof. I brought 80% of the things in from my Van, but not before running out of space! Right now I'm sitting in a tiny little white fold out tubeframe and plastic chair, and the chair is being swallowed by an encroaching pile of "stuff". I'm being forced closer to the desk and my mobility is slowly being limited by the oozing of this seemingly living mass of crap I deemed vital to my survival when deciding what I needed to cram it into the back of my poor Van. The chair is too low for the desk and I hurt. The desk is SWEET. Bright red glass top, and big. Solid, and capable of supporting my 2 external monitors, my laptop (that's been moon-lighting as a desktop since I moved) my two hard drives, my cups of pens, pencils, tacks, Buddha figurines, kerosene lantern ignitors, silver, keys, watches, empty oatmeal bowls and coffee mugs, photo frame with picture of my Mom and Dad posing with Spongebob Squarepants while at Universal Studios on Vacation.

etc etc etc

My stuff. It's big enough for most of my STUFF.

But it's too big for the room. My damned queen sized bed takes up the entirety of the rest of the room! I've got a printer scanner copier on my dresser, and a big stupid locker crammed between the bed and the door. The door to the room doesn't shut unless you pull back the hoodies that hang from the locker, and it covers the lightswitch. There is literally a single line of floor from the door to my chair, with the option of falling sideways onto the bed, as you step over more homogeneous piles of my crap that fill said sparse floor! Actually, as a measurement, the landing strip, (or lets call it the runway, in keeping with the aeronautical theme, but with a glamorous double entendre) is four strips of press-board interlocking hardwood pieces wide! No Fat people in my room! I don't discriminate, it's just an unfortunate physical reality! They wouldn't fit!

So I don't know how to explain it, other then he sensed it, but Ivan somehow knew I was having a claustrophobic experience in my new office.

I never complained. I mean, my back aches, (Naomi gave me an hour long "adjustment" and told me my back was fucked, and it was from the office set up) but I was still so fucking pumped to be here that I couldn't think to complain about it.

Ivan started to make little suggestions randomly one day, about how we could improve our enhance the media sharing experience. By this point, whenever I wanted to use my Mactop in the livingroom, I'd unplug my external monitor, and switch the cord over to one that was strung from the livingroom, and into the bedroom (formerly Ivan's office) through a discreet hole in the base of the wall behind the couch. It was easy! There was a cord for the audio too, already set up in here!

(Oh God, "John Connolly - For Old Times Sake" just came on my iTunes. FUCK I love this song)

So I would just take my bluetooth wireless apple mighty mouse, and my bluetooth wireless aluminum apple keyboard into the livingroom with me and compute through the wall! (The keyboard and mouse both purchased second hand. Actually, the mouse was broken, and I got it for free and fixed it!)

So that was pretty cool! Great for sharing YouTube, and other videos on my computer, as well as iTunes and such. The iTunes visualizers look AMAZING floating in front of the cool Victorian inspired wall-paper on the big screen!

But I couldn't actually COMPUTE, this way. It was all fluff, no action. The keyboard cuts out every few minutes then reconnects. The mouse works shady at best. (If you want it to be smooth you can contort your arm oddly and awkwardly back into the couch. Or just use it on the coffee table sloooooowllllyyyy)

So it was amazing, and I was super happy about it. But it wasn't all it COULD be. Also, the picture was stretched on it that way too.

So I wanted to bring my computer out into the livingroom. Ivan often works on the couch on his lappy while some mindless Television or music is on in the background. And I draw or fix things or whatever. But I could never WORK on my computer in the livingroom.

My laptop looks like a Japanese Anime drawing of a robot girl. You know the one where the girl looks like a real girl in the face, but then her body panels are all opened up and there are a million umbilical chords sticking out of her back and arms and legs and shit? It's like that. I have two monitors plugged in.

"But PJ, Macbook pros only have one display output? You can't span a Mac Laptop across more then two screens (the laptop, and one external) and what would be the point of mirroring three displays?"

I know I know, random, long-winded, and thoroughly descriptive voice in my blog! I only have one monitor hooked up to display! Ivan's twenty something inch Sony monitor has spanned open my workspace significantly. While the other one (my 17inch Dell flat panel) is acting as a USB hub so that I can keep my two external hard drives (one Terabyte for general storage, and my 500 Gig set up to do Time Machine backups every hour) and my printer, and my Bamboo tablet, hooked up to my laptop at ALL TIMES!

So you see, my setup is PRIME right now. I HAVE EVERYTHING I always need EVER constantly plugged in. ALL of my images. ALL of my videos. ALL of my projects and client files and past work. It's all here, and connected. So I never wanted to just, pull off my laptop and take it into the livingroom with me. That would mean relinquishing the connectivity I've become so accustomed to in the first month here.

But Ivan had ideas, and didn't give up. We figured out that between the two of us, we might have enough USB extenders to string an umbilical through the wall in the other direction! Thus allowing me to connect to everything, but from the livingroom!

Ooooh and this worked gloooriously for the first day. I was pleased as peach. Sitting out there, on the corner of the big comfy couch, watching Price and sipping coffee while I worked away. Tablet connected, music playing through big 500 watt surround sound speakers! All wonderful. But then a new kind of back and shoulder pain. The "stuck in one position and on one side of the couch plugged into a USB umbilical" kind of pain. OUCH!

Ivan came home to me at this, the couches "sweet spot" three days in a row.

I couldn't give up the comfort of the livingroom, to go back into the crammed and cramped bedroom scene. Something had to change!

And I didn't even ask for it!

Ivan, again, kindly suggests; "What if we move the dining room out into the area off the kitchen by the big windows, where the shelf with all the plants is now, and then make a combo office out here where the dining room is now, behind the short side of the sectional couch"

BRILLIANT!!

So that was two days ago, and since then I've been cramped back up in the "Office Bedroom" scene. It hurts, but it's productive! Everything is here!

Soon, everything will be out there!!!

We're doing the "big cleanup and re-org" tomorrow. First thing in the AM were gonna get up, heat up a pot of coffee, make some breaky, and turn on some kickin' tunes and get to it! Clean sweep, top to bottom, then moving all the offices out of the bedrooms and into the common area!

SO GOOD!

Last night, right before sleeping, my body had a sudden urge to sit up and move. (there's a balcony door overlooking a mega-city that's one wall in my room. The room never gets dark.) I sat sideways across the foot of my bed, and suddenly knew this is where my head needed to be in this room.

When I'd moved in, necessity and time constraint, and fatigue, dictated the setup of my room. And it never felt right...

Ivan, being the keenly conscientious Roomie he is, sensed this, and offered a dandy solution! I'm so pumped to see it to fruition tomorrow!

Now I must get back to designing for moneys. My iTunes stopped playing because it got to the end of my search or some thing. I need to snap out of the blog bubble, post without proof-reading, and come back to this again another time.

My back hurts, I need to reboot my computer since I installed some scanner drivers anyway. So time to get up and have a walk around to stretch out.

:^)

The ears of a teenager!

2009-02-26T00:58:00.001-04:00

Created by Train Horns

This sound is AWFUL and would keep me out of the mall for sure!

The Interweb Wins at Life!

2009-02-24T18:45:00.002-04:00

As if the story couldn't get any better. I approached a fellow YouTuber who had a few double showcase winner vids up, and asked him if he happened to catch todays Double Win.

I think THIS EXPERIENCE has been my proverbial Double Showcase win!

Hahahaha

WIN!

EVERYBODY WINS!

STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES!!!!

2009-02-24T14:47:00.003-04:00

DUDE~

HE DID MENTION ME ON HIS PUBLIC PROFILE!!!

MY FOLLOWER COUNT IS RISING AS I TYPE!!

YYYYEEEEAAAAH!

%$^&$%^&#$^@&@$%^!!!!

HAHAHAHAHA!!!

What a wonderful day! It's so nice out, I want to go ride my bike around singing and whistling like an idiot!

BUTTERFLY IN THE SKYYYYYY, I CAN GO TWICE AS HIIIIIIGH!!!

The Levar Burton Bromance continues

2009-02-24T13:29:00.003-04:00

If my time as a dancer on the once hit Canadian cable television show, Electric Circus, taught me anything, ( other then how to look good in pleather and sequins ) it's that celebrities are generally turned off by gushing fans. They are real people, just like you and me, and if you run up to them, salivating, and chomping at the bit to vomit your verbal excrement of loving language all over them, they will be put off. How would you react if some stranger ran up to you and started telling you they loved you, and your such an amazing person, and bla bla bla. I would be put off personally, and wouldn't rush to make this strange excitable creature a regular fixture in my life.

Often times when Much would hold Intimate and Interactive events, or MMVA's or other "close and personal" live events, us veteran EC dancers were often hand picked to act as "filler" in these events. For the simple fact, that we understood that there was a show to put on, and no where in this show did anybody want hair clippings being stolen from the heads of the talent. They didn't want people sitting within' 2 feet of a famous person, if there was a potential for those people to go "Beatles fan" in the middle of the program, and start flipping out screaming. They knew we could keep our cool around even the most famous of famous stars, and we would smile politely, laugh wholeheartedly, clap gently, and dance perfectly (not too hard, not too bored), at the appropriate moments, with little guidance needed.

Stand there, smile, clap, and for fuck sakes, don't talk to the talent. They don't want to hear about how you have ALL of their albums and totally changed your haircut to be more like them!

They trained us. They taught us not to act a fucking fool around famous people. How did they train us? If you kept your shit together, you got more TV time. If you acted like an idiot, then you were quietly sent to the back of the crowd where, not only do you not get to sit 3 feet away from Gwen Stefani (ZOMG she's like, so tiny in person!) but your grinning mug doesn't get shown smiling and clapping politely on TV. (Hi Mom!)

So you'd think that now, 10 years later, I'd have a bit cooler of a head when it came to dealing with famous people who's work over the years I've enjoyed.

But no, here I am, fighting with all of my worldly might, not to stand on top of my proverbial soap-box and proclaim my adoration for one Mr. Levar Burton.

It all started back when I made that post about him being at the Digg party. I, along with the crowd at the party, was electrified by Levars sudden tangibility. I mean, here he was, the Reading Rainbow guy, and lets not forget Geordie Laforge either, offering us a glimpse into his life through Twitter.

Tiny, 140 character snipits. Mere tidbits. But still, he's there. Tangible, available, REAL!

It's terribly exciting to me. So much so that I've dove headfirst into the Twitter lifestyle, and can't get enough. I'm connecting with friends, and expressing and recording my life in an increasingly short and fickle manner. But it's great! All these tweets are going to be a riot to read in 10 years! I know because I've got 10 year old online journals and reading the old entries is HILARIOUSly revealing, and very very therapeutic. It's nice to look at where you've been, when you need help plotting where you want to go.

So back to me acting a fool in front of some famous person.
Try as I might, I just couldn't resist the temptation to reach out to Levar again today. I mean, the dude has 33 173 followers! (Who, 3 threes and a 17, TRIPPY!) and has 333 updates! (whoa! Again!) So a random person like myself can HARDLY expect that he would respond to them. He must get HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of tweets directed at him on the daily!

But today, someone won BOTH showcases on the Price is Right, while wearing a Reading Rainbow Tee-Shirt. It was too much. I couldn't resist!

Well,

About 20 minutes after I @ commented him, I got a direct message! But you don't have to take my word for it! Here's a screen cap:

HORRRAAAAH!!!!!!

HE ACTUALLY WROTE TO ME?!

WTF?!!!!

I mean, in an ideal dream world, he would have shot me an @ reply, but then he would have thrown my Twitter account open to all 33 173 people that read HIS feed. And that would have been irresponsible on his part. For the sake of my security and protection, I'm sure he was just being extra cautious and considerate. What a thoughtful guy, not wanting to subject me to all that extra attention. ;^) :^P

I find his response incredible encouraging. After sXe Phil whiffed me and didn't become my BFF, I was kindof disillusioned about this whole "normies and fame-ys" getting to talk to one another thing. But my faith was restored today.

And Levar, if you ever happen to for some ungodly cosmic reason read this Blog entry, know that when we meet in person I will be totally Kosher and not weird at all, and that I just had to write this entry to get the giggles out, so I could go back to twitter and be cool. I'm not gonna cause a big scene or anything. I'm just super pumped that your a real person, and that when I become famous, I don't have to loose touch with reality, and with real people.

Thanks for taking 3 seconds out of your life, to give me an awesome smiley boost in mine.

:^)

Big Brother? Is that you?

2009-02-24T02:13:00.004-04:00

Whoa. I love The Google Bot. The Google Bot is my friend.

Obey the Google Bot!

I mean, at least, I think it's the Google at work here.

That post I made about the Art Race TV show? Someone left me a comment saying "glad you enjoy our programming" with a link to the networks website!

They are Toronto based! Another station to pitch my insane "Guy takes and prints photos out of the back of a VW Van on a whirlwind trip across Canada" idea to!

I don't think anyone actually READS my blog. So it must be the Google bot scanning for mentions of the station in blog entries. Which I'm completely fine with. I mean, weather a it was someone I know who works for the station lurking lurking my blog but prefers to remain anonymous, or weather the Google knows everything and watches my every keystroke, and then tells another robot that gave it some money when people are talking about it, I'm tickled pink! I find BOTH of those possible solutions absolutely fascinating and would consider them both sufficient calls to action!

And since these people may be a future sponsor or promotional partner of mine, I might as well keep buttering things up by further plugging their exciting and compelling line of programming!

haha

Here's the site for Art Race

Fish Fish Fish Fish Fish

2009-02-23T20:12:00.000-04:00

Fish - Mr. Scruff

My Inner Designer's Inner Child...

2009-02-23T18:21:00.003-04:00

Secretly, somewhere deep inside, buried under two years of intensive training and education, there's bad graphic designer. A kid living life in the late 90's, raving and electric circus-ing his ass off, and LOVING the future-tech Rave culture derived design movement happening in certain sub cultures around the world. Cut angles, robotic and technical themes, horizontals and verticals, dancing between machined perfect diagonals. Circuits. Lots of circuit board inspired lines.

Anyway, stern talkings and nonchalant yet earth shattering ambivalence towards my early school work from Profs has all but killed that side of me, and for the better! For how could my own design style be permitted to evolve if I'd maintained an unhealthy obsession with the work of some of my predecessors?

Anyway, it's still hidden down there. Beneath the layers of sensibility and freshness, is a pleasantly crusty, stale, and very comfortably "worked in" appreciation for this style of design. The whole "lets called it 2001 because it's the year 1999 and we're obsessed with the future" thing just jazzes me. I actually love Futurism no matter what era it's in. The Habitat in Montreal, The Confederation Centre in Charlottetown. I love seeing what people think the future will look like.

Aaaaaaanyway. That was my third anyway. The Anyway's are the part of my brain that knows I should be working on something more productive then this blog non-sense, and wants me to wrap this rant!

I stumbled upon Infinite Designs while searching for some photychop inspiration, and I LOVE it. I KNOW it looks dated. It's trying too hard to be web 2.0 and ends up looking Just Pre Web 2.0. BUT I LOVE IT! The diagonals. The colours. The rounded corners. The reflection in the title! It's all there!

ESPECIALLY love the "break" in the middle bar with the chopped techy sections, and the drop shadow to push it farther back. So dericious!!

Heck even the name of the website as it appears in my Firefox tab is

.:Infinite Design:.

Hahaha. I LOVE ::Punctuation Decoration::

~punctuation~decoration~ is SO teH nU !nt3rWeb keWL!

Collector Showdown: Lego edition!

2009-02-23T14:03:00.004-04:00

Oh Em Gee!

The episode of Collectors Showdown today has two Lego Nerds facing off against one another in a Lego Collection showboat match!

A girl, (who organizes ALL of her kits by colour, and shape) and a guy who LOVES Star Wars lego and freestyles a lot of working models (he's more like me).

I'm no where NEAR as serious as these two geeks! hahaha

This is AWESOME!

Edit: I would have beaten BOTH of them in the question round. The "skill testing" build round is next! From the "coming after the break" preview, I would have beaten both of them in the build-off as well!

Art Race, on Treasure HD

2009-02-23T11:12:00.004-04:00

So, television is much better here then back in PEI. We have these high definition channels, four in particular, that offer compelling, original, and varied TV all day long! I'm watching Treasure HD now, which is part of a suite of four complimenting channels that one company puts out. Treasure is like The Antiques Roadshow on awesome, and not just for antiques. They have shows about baseball card collectors, and photographers. Super candid and personal stuff, lots of Canadian made TV. (I watch Aperture all the time. It's an amazing show where the host (a different B list Celeb hosts each episode) sits around drinking with the photographer until they reveal super personal details about their methods and journey. Anyway, right now I have it on in the background while I work, (laying out endless battery package shapes in illustrator copying and pasting from a spreadsheet, mindless stuff) and they are showing a program on gourmet pizza techniques. Different pizza experts talking about why their pie will win the championship this year, peppered with amazing high definition shots of deliciousness. They also just showed an ad for another show, called Amazing Cakes. They really are amazing! Anyway, the thing that sparked this entry was an ad for an upcoming series that is going to premier soon. It's called Art Race, and it's about two goofy looking young 30's art dudes, traveling across Canada in a race to see who can move on their art and personality across the country fastest. They start with a single dollar, and go on their way!

Edit: I just did some research, and while the ad said "Canadian Premiere" it was actually filmed in the US! So a Canadian one has not been done yet!

http://lastheplace.com/2008/03/23/art-race-seeking-artistsart-racers-for-show-to-win-20000/ for the show that I found.

Anyway,

They travel across the country coast to coast trading their art for money, travel, and experiences.

Sounds amazing'! Who wants to sponsor a Canadian version?

:^P

Copyright, again. Facebook found me!

2009-02-21T20:26:00.003-04:00

Ok, so, I'm not allowed using the song "Highway Star" by Deep Purple.

Maybe the next step is to e-mail the company in charge of their copyright? The record company? And ask permission to use it in my little interweb video?

The Lovely Miss B.Traits

2009-02-19T12:06:00.005-04:00

I had the joy of building some posters for a show DJ B.Traits is playing in B.C.

Nice that I'm getting work from the west coast months before I even land there! :^D

I uploaded it to Flickr, and they have an HTML embed code... lets see if it works in my Blog.

Fi de rudegyal pon MySpace

First Time Contributor?

2009-02-12T14:48:00.002-04:00

.
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.
.
.
.
.
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First_Brush_Pack_ThePeej.abr

And thus, upon dipping my brushes into the bucket, I, for the first time, leave more in it then there was before I dipped!

Who is this guy? He's Hilarious!

2009-02-12T13:14:00.000-04:00

http://barefootmeg.multiply.com/video/item/56/Louis_CK_Everythings_amazing_nobodys_happy%3ELouis%20CK%20%20%22Everything%27s%20amazing,%20nobody%27s%20happy%22%3C/a%3E

Digital Copyright Management

2009-02-10T12:21:00.003-04:00

You know, I'm trying. I'm trying really hard. It's been a long time since I haven't bought a CD. I've spent the better part of a decade consuming music for free. I mean, I pay for concerts and live events, but generally, am given music by friends, or download the music illegally.

Last year I took the leap and bought 10 dollars worth of iTunes credit. Well, I was given 10 dollars of iTunes credit as a gift. I enjoyed the ease of use and reliability and sound quality iTunes downloads gave me. Super easy to find a song, super easy to preview it instantly to know if it's the right mix, and then super fast to download and the quality is guaranteed. Unlike P2P sharing communities which are so overloaded with shitty, patchy quality, misnamed files, that finding one song is nightmarish.

So I'd almost considered myself converted back into legal music consumption.

That is, until I started to try and use the music as I've become accustomed to being able to use music.

Tried sending music in an e-mail. Nope, digital rights management says you can only play this song on YOUR computer and YOUR iPod.

Huh?

Tried embedding music into videos. "Sorry, the song you've used is copyright protected, and won't play on anyone else's computer but yours.

The first time this happened was when I made the Christmas pictures slide show with the Diana Krall version of Chestnuts Roasting. The video played fine on my Mac, but had no audio when I uploaded it to Facebag. What?!

So I had to download a second copy of the song, illegally.

PFFT!

So just last month I heard this rumor on the internets that said that iTunes was converting to DRM FREE music! You pay a little bit more (1.30 instead of 99 cents?) and your able to actually USE the song you pay for!

HURRAH!

So I jump on, eager to spend the credit I have in my account. (I kept buying songs from them, just didn't try using them in videos or other projects) So I jump on and buy "Highway Star" by Deep Purple. A fairly obscure title, not easily found through illegal means without downloading entire albums. I don't WANT to steal THAT much music in order to use one half of one song in a video. So I log on and pay the bucks (funny, no buck thirty option seems selectable) and go about making my video. The video plays, with no warnings about it's audio copyright on my Mac, so I go ahead and upload it.

Eiiiiign! <----(FAIL buzzer noise from the Price is Right)

YouTube gives me a message about copyright, and asks me if I'd like to substitute my perfectly selected music, for some LAME copyright free tune they have in their databanks. There's even an automatic audio swap dialogue and a list of tracks! Kudos to them for trying to make it easy to work around, but FUCK!?

What motivation is there for anyone to legally procure songs?! I don't get a nice printed vinyl album cover to look through while I sit in my beanbag chair with my giant old offwhite headphones on. Nor do I get to use the music anywhere but within the bubble of my digital home.

Buying music online is great for a lot of reasons, and I'll continue to do so when I need a song quick and don't have the time to find it through other channels. But when I have the time to do it right, I'm going to have to continue to be a pirate. It's simply a better experience all around.

Sort it out Big Brother!

We're not going to play your game unless you make it fun and easy!

I'm uploading the revised, and now illegal, copy of my video to my YouTube channel now.

Check it out!

www.youtube.com/thepeej

MY FIRST HOME PRINT!

2009-02-08T12:43:00.002-04:00

I had the USB cabled plugged into the Ethernet port in the back of my printer.

*IDIOT*

Thus not allowing me to connect until just now, when a website message board post suggested that I "make sure the usb cable is connected". I thought Pffft, of COURSE I have it connected... Wait, it's a bit loose, lemme take a look and... OOOooooh IDIOT!!!

So I plug it in correctly and then of course, just like the pretentious commercial says, the Mac and the Canon already know one another by name. And when I add it as my default printer, Mac says "you already have something in queue to be printed by this new guy over here, should I warm him up for you?" And I'm like, HELL YEAH!

AND LOOK!!!!

IT'S FRIGGIN RIDICU#$T#$^#&^%@$%T#$%T@Y^!!!

AWESOMESAUCE!

No athletic wear or running shoes?

2009-02-06T15:24:00.002-04:00

It's been SO LONG since I've been to a place that had a proper, and enforced dresscode!

I'm going here tonight:

http://www.maro.ca/venue/

I'm going to see Dimitri from Paris.

http://www.myspace.com/djdimitrifromparis

Essentially House musics answer to 1960's lounge. But you can dance to it. His newer stuff is very electro, which should help my Techno-Mullet. LOL

I might have to wear my pointy shiny douche shoes. But hopefully the value village vintage brown leather shoes instead. They're broken in and comfortable at least.

FRESH FRESH FRESH

2009-02-05T21:55:00.002-04:00

I just got the FRESHEST HAIRCUT!

No disrespect to my Charlottetown stylist. He always cut my hair to perfection, and cut outside the box by Charlottetown standards. And we had an awesome rapport and the conversations always flowed.

But I just stepped my hair game up 10 notches!

JUST HAD THE SUPERSTAR TREATMENT! Came out lookin', smellin', and feelin' oh so good!

So my PEI haircut was like, 28 and change, plus tip was like 34-35 bucks all said and done. And again, it was a haircut I was always pleased with.

But THIS place.

I got the inside scoop on this guy Loucas who was good. I called the spot in the mall that I can see from my desk right now as I type. They had ONE appointment available for the next three days and it was RIGHT NOW!

So I threw on some B.O.dorant and took off out the door and down the elevator. Ran in the freezing cold, and had to call the place again when I got in the mall because it's so freaking huge.

I walk in and was IMMEDIATELY intimidated. The spot was HUGE. There must have been 30 or more BEAUTIFUL and smartly dressed people there. And in I walk with my dirty ass old skate shoes, and my parted on the side hair, and my not-cleanshaven mess of a face.

The guy looked like Adam Lavigne from Maroon 5, if you were watching him on a widescreen TV that had only regular screen signal coming in. A bit rounder in the face, but otherwise, Maroon 5 guy. He was straight, which was nice, because I was able to talk to him about how intimidatingly gorgeous the reception girl who took my coat was. "Yeah bro, she's smokin' hot! I used to date that one over there, check it out"

haha

Lots of appropriate man talk.

Anyway, I gave him carte blanche and said go to town! Your an artist, and my disgusting mop is your canvas! And it went to down. It's hard to describe. I'd call it a heavily textured, asymmetrical faux hawk variant. The part is on the opposite side of my natural one and it's really fun. Lots of feathers in the back center going off to one side. And a curvy winding line at its edge. There's not a single hard edge on the cut. It's all curves around the back of my neck and ears. Very fresh!

So not only did I get a SICK haircut and some awesome man-banter. But then a smokin' statuesque blond takes me in the back for something called a "hot towel"!

It's even better then it sounds!

So they wash your hair like, 3 times, and during each washing there's a piping hot towel on your face! Then she pulls out this awesome soapy smelling stuff and washes your whole face! Then, without rinsing the stuff off, another hot towel. This one sits on your face steaming the pores open. At this point they could very well have left me under this towel with soap all over my face, and I would have been delighted to take a nap! It was damned comfortable! (the chair was like a lazyboy, it reclined and had a flip out foot rest) But instead of just leaving me there, she massages my head and neck! No word of a lie, an actual foreal and superbly executed head massage! I felt like a Hundredaire, or even Thousandaire! She takes of the towel slowly and gently, while using it to clean the soap off my face. Then she says "close your eyes and mouth for the toner" and a fine mist of some other nice smelling product goes on, followed by another towel. This towel sits for a few minutes of peaceful head massaging bliss, then another hair wash. Then the last towel comes off, and she massages some OTHER product into my face.

My face has never had three products lovingly applied to it in a row.

Back to Adam Lavi...er... I mean, Loucas' work-station, for a final chat and a style. He fixes my hair up proper, and does a bad ass rendition of the "here's the back of your head with another mirror" routine. In this version he gave ME the little mirror, and turned the chair around so I could see the hair in the BIG mirror.

Genius!

So I walk to the front to pay and the lady (this one still a different shade of delicious skin colour then the other three delightfully varied shades who assisted me in my hair freshening adventure) says to me "that'll be 31.50$. THAT'S IT?!

After the whole micro spa relaxation treatment I was expecting 40 bucks, MINIMUM! But it was 31.50!?

And she didn't ring in, or prompt me to ad ANY TIP! I of course made her put my card through again so I could leave them a proper tip. They made me put the fiver in a small envelope with Loucas' name to be written on it, and drop it into a weird over the top posh silver container that they for some reason stick all the tips in.

I strutted out of that fucking place like my shit smelled of bakery fresh cinnamon rolls and ran home to skype my Momma!

:^D

She was the first girl I showed my swank new Haircut too. Then I showed Kelley. I asked several other people if they wanted to see it, but none acted as excited as my Mom did. LOL

So I had to write this entry about it to get my fresh haircut excitement out of my system. Hahahaha

Shit. Now it's late and I'm very hungry. Off to the kitchen to cook some nitty grits!

I'll post some pics of my amazing hair cut from the future when I get some taken. Too hungry and excited to bother now.

Re-Connected!

2009-02-02T10:43:00.003-04:00

WELL. Where the FUCK do I begin?!

It's been 10 years since I first moved to Toronto. Galvanizing the incredibility of this reality is a lovely collection of thought to be forgotten pics from my Electric Circus days currently making their rounds on the Facebooks.

Thanks Candace!!! :^D

The timing of the posting of those pics is a bit of the divinity for certain. It's intense.

I got lost "downtown" yesterday. The city chewed me up and spit me out.

I'm so happy to have been gone for 4 years. The absence, and the addition of a camera, have given me back my sense of wonder and bewilderment. I'm looking UP again! Head forever tilted back! I was constantly looking up when I first got here. The buildings astounded me. Monuments to man's insatiable need for "progress"! I live in one now. 21st floor! (20 stories high. No 13th floor) I've got a KILLER view of Toronto from a safe hour away. But I ventured downtown to see John Connolly play an AMAZING show at the Cameron House on Queen West on Saturday night. It's was a fucking mission and a half! But well worth it. John played one of the more inspiring and intimate sets I've seen out of any musician. The venue and crowd were perfect, and unlike anything I'd ever seen here or in Charlottetown. The Cameron house was a trip in itself. A venue of extreme historical significance that I had previously never been in. I got there just in time to see him play too. Literally just enough time to order a pint and sit down before his first song! The Venue was a classic old bar. You could sense the years of joy and escapism that had been experienced within it's walls. Décore that was so long pasé that it made its way back to chic by default. The front room was nearly empty when I walked in. And other rooms were not evident. So I was worried. Strung out from 6 hours of driving, 5 of which had happened earlier that day, and having just payed the better part of a 50 dollar cab ride downtown from the Saug, I was more then a little bit drained by the time I hit the venue. When I walked in to a room with no more then 10 people in it, and some loungy breakbeats playing from some unseen location, I didn't have high hopes that I'd made it to the correct venue. But I asked the bartender and she told me that the band was playing "in the back".

Perfect!

I stumbled back in my tired stupor and was met by a ragged old curtain, which led down a hodgepoge hallway to another tattered and torn red velvet curtain. The second curtain parted to reveal a WONDERFUL scene. A TINY venue, but in stadium setup. The back room of the Cameron House is about the size of Baba's in PEI. But picture it on a slope with tables. So the back of the room is about 6-7 large long stretched out stairs higher then the stage.

I sat down up front after a now, at this point expected, solid hug from John. Asked him if I had enough time to slip back out front to grab a brew and his said of course!

Came back in and sat down to photograph one of the most intimate and deeply connected sets I've ever had the joy of seeing an artist perform.

By John's third song an owner of the venue was heard to tell the ridiculously cute girl working the cash that the venue was about 5 people over it's 75 person capacity already, and not to let anyone else in. :^)

John killed it. The crowd was pleasantly and surprisingly responsive, and I was moved by the passion and connection. He took the crowd on a maritime journey, and they followed with enthusiasm. Each song more warmly received then the previous. He explained the story behind each song, and the small crowed cooed and cawed in appreciation with each descriptive verse and powerful guitar solo.

The band sat down after the set and John played his encores alone.

He played his last song sitting down, unplugged at the front of the stage. The crowd aghast with anticipation as he rounded the first chorus, and all of us joining in glorious harmony as he sang it for the third time. It was like Sesame Street, he said "everyone sing along" and magically by the second time the chorus came around everyone knew it and sang along! I belted it out with unbridled enthusiasm.

Needless to say, in my tired state, my second beer set me over the top and I was hammered. I stuck around to soak up the shmoozing and smiling after the show, ran out of business cards, hugged John again, and stumbled out into the dark and cold airy noise of the early morning club district.

It was far too late for me to take transit back to Mississauga.

I felt a bit helpless and trapped for a few seconds. So used to the freedom of my Van, or the closeness of everything on PEI. (where a 12 dollar cab ride is considered extreme. And her I am 50 dollars [by cab] from home!)

So I stumbled for only a brief moment, before remembering I used to own this area of the city, and should still have a phone number or two I can call for a favor.

30 seconds later I was hell toe expressing it to Casa De Vibe (Jesse Brown's spectacular downtown bachelor pad in the sky) and he had the Pizza Pizza with strip bacon ordered and on it's way!

:^D

So nice to know I'm still well taken care of in this city!

So I crashed at his place in the spare bedroom and woke up the next day downtown. Very comfortable indeed, but with a burning sense of urgency pulling be back to the Sauga. My Van was still not unpacked from the epic journey and I felt all but relaxed in Jesse's place.

I set off to try and figure the transit system out again. 4 years is a long fucking time to be away from this place. I feel overwhelmed by it again. I don't have a magic "get anywhere" card in my wallet (TTC Metropass). Nor do I have my routes memorized and able to be accomplished on autopilot. So I leave Jesse's with the goal of getting a coffee, and making it to the 1:20pm bus back to Mississauga.

Well, I got the coffee around 1:30, but didn't make the bus clearly. An hour walking around shooting photos slack jawed with my head cocked back, put me at the Go station at 2:22. Missed the second bus by 2 minutes. LOL Another 200 photos later and I made it for the 3:20 bus.

Got home around 4:20 and Ivan and I ordered some dinner. Thai food. Good thai food!

We finally unloaded the major items out of the back of my Van and things started to feel like home!

Then the most awesomesauce technological synergy happened. I've got my lappy set up in my bedroom/office. It's got my two monitors, my two hard drives, my tablet, and my bluetooth keyboard and mouse all set up.

I asked Ivan if there was a way I could bring my laptop into the livingroom and connect it to the 500 watt sound system when I wanted to play music in the main area. And he says, no need to bring it into the livingroom.

Seconds later, using existing plugs, (my room used to be his office) and cords already strung through a whole in the wall, I had my laptop connected, not only to the big stereo tuner, but also the big screen LCD!!!

THAT'S RIGHT!

So, without moving my computer out of my room, I'm able to take my bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse into the livinroom, and use my Mac on the 42 inch LCD TV, with the 500 Watt sound system, IN THE LIVINGROOM! There's an input channel on the TV and sound system for Ivan's PC in his room, and for my Mac in my room. You just press a button on the remote and both of us have our entire digital libraries accessible through the TV!

WOW!!!!!!

INSANITY!!!!!!

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE!!!!!

I think I need to go make another single serving coffee in the futuristic wasteful over the top one shot disposable built in filter pack Jetson's coffee machine so I can build up the steam needed to finish this entry!

LOL

I need to tell more about the insane drive up to this place, and how the gas pedal of the Vanagon broke off on the highway when I was doing 120 behind two semi trucks with near 100% whiteout conditions.

I handled that one with gumption and gusto. But to say I still remained my annoyingly happy and calm self during that debacle would be a lie.

:^D

But I survived!! And made it!!!

I've got some pictures to upload. (138 gigs our of 460 done transferring from my old hard drive to my new one. I'll have room to upload them soon!)

Back to unpacking!

Van Post Numero Deux!

2009-01-28T15:30:00.002-04:00

Ok, so the second milestone came sooner then anticipated! Big fun pretty snow storm has hit MTL and the Van is struggling to get excited about it. What it doesn't know yet, is how much awesome Tokyo Drifting fun we're going to have once she decides to start!

Don't remember midnight parking lot madness do ya Dear?

That's ok. We'll jog your memory in a little bit.

First I need to spend the time to write this entry to give you a moment to get ready.

So I come out of Akiva and Shira's place in the lovely Jewish neighborhood that they live in. Walk down the snow covered lane of town houses to see a cute stalky old man struggling to shovel his driveway free of snow. In doing so, he's burring the back end of my Van, covering the exhaust.

I smile to him, and say "Anglais ou Francais" to which he replies "English" in a soft and spry voice.

I ask him if he'd like some help shoveling. He looks at me puzzled for a brief second before jumping at the chance for me to end his misery. I tell him I'll just start the Van and let it warm up first. Then come help. I clear enough snow away from the tail pipe and go try to turn her over.

*click*

The solenoid on the starter does it's "I'm too cold" routine and she doesn't even turn over.

Undaunted, I step outside, and put on my gloves, and walk around to the back of the Van where Mr. Octogenarian is having his way with a tiny spittle of snow. He says to me in the voice of someone who quit smoking 20 years ago, after having smoked for 40, "I only have one shovel".

No problem! I'm young, I can do it much quicker!

"I'm 82" is his reply. So quiet that I think he said 83

83 wow!

"No, 82!" a bit louder, but still mouse-y.

Oh, ok! Well I'm 28! We're opposites!

I take the shovel and we exchange a smile.

The snow is SUPER light and fluffy and I finish his piddly little "urban driveway" in a fraction of the time it takes me to clear my Fathers Suburban sprawling concrete automobilian mecha.

He gives me a very satisfied look when I inquire about the edge of his drive where it meets the neighbors. Motioning with his cream leather gloved hand he says "Straight line, make it a straight line".

Ah yes, make sure you don't shovel any of that good for nothin' neighbors drive!

;^)

So I finish, and our conversation turns to the Van.

"It won't start?"

Won't even turn over, I say. Needs some heat put on the starter.

In my delirium brought on by the sudden physicality of speed shoveling a driveway, I believe myself to be of Herculean strength. I ask him for his shovel, and clean a path for my Van to roll forward. We're on a "hill" that has no more then a 2 degree grade. Barely a hill. But I'm convinced a rolling start is my solution. I clear snow out from around the tires in a fury, and start trying to rock the van back and forth. I'm convinced that each time I push and pull it back and forth (from the open drivers door, one hand on the frame, one on the wheel) that I'm moving it more and more, and that soon, it will take off down the "hill" and I'll roll the engine to life!

The 82 year old new friend who had admired me moments before, now gave me a judgmentally puzzled stare.

"Why are you moving it back and forth?"

I'M GOING TO PUSH IT DOWN THE HILL TO START IT

I yell, as though he's hard of hearing.

"What hill?"

...

...

Slightly embarrassed, if not defeated, I stagger back into the Van. And sit down.

Out of sheer desperation I try the key again.

*click*

nothing

*click*
*click*
*click*

VEERRRRRRUUUUHHH Vruh Vruh Vruh

IT TURNS OVER!!!!

HUZZAH!!!

I hold the key in and pound the pedal to the floor!!!

...

...

Nothing.

Not a fart.

And that brings me to here. The Van will turn over, but won't fire.

In the past, leaving it sit for 30 minutes seemed to solve this problem.

Well, it's sat, and now I'm running out of Blog entry to write. So I'll post this, close my computer, and hope for the best!

If it doesn't start, I'll be calling Emma to cancel lunch, and spell checking this blog entry while I'll I sit and wait some more.

:^D

ADVENTURE!!!!!!!!!!

Wrote this while stuck at a Gas Station in Quebec...

2009-01-28T10:44:00.005-04:00

Wow, my first "In Van" blog entry!

Well, I'm writing this in the Van. But with no WiFi it will have to wait until later to be posted. So there's another milestone to pass another time; POSTING from the Van. ;^)

But for now, I'll settle for penning the entry in Van.

This entry is born out of necessity. Like most worthy creations. You see, my lack of patience makes it nearly impossible for me to wait without doing SOMETHING. I hate waiting. Can't stand to wait. The first of many life lessons this Van is determined to teach me. Patience. Or is it good time management? The Van is currently stuck, unable to fire up, in the parking lot of a random gas station off the highway in the middle of nowhere-ville Quebec. And the more often I try and turn this key, the worse it is for my poor starter and battery, and the longer I'll be stuck here. The only solution for this problem is to wait a full uninterrupted 20 minutes, and then turn the key with the gas pedal to the floor.

I just finished a hearty dinner, consisting of a fresh apple, some peach yogurt (my fave!) and a freshly made chunky peanut butter sandwich! All courtesy of my Sittie! (lebanese for Grandmother.) No, Sittie didn't MAKE a peanut butter sandwich for her 28 year old Grandson's roadtrip. But she packed me a jar of PB, (empowering me to make my own sandwich!) a loaf of bread, some real butter in a tupperware dish (frozen solid, unable to spread at this juncture) along with all the other fixins a boy like me could EVER ask for. (I didn't ask for any of it. Which makes her gift all the more generous.) Old people are very organized. She and my Giddie have had 55 years of married life to hone, practice, and perfect their daily routines. And they managed to cope with me disrupting that routine for two days VERY swimmingly.

I'm not about to start rhyming off the entire list of things they gave me, as bragging is in bad taste, but lets just say I'm well taken care of.

So back what brings me to a point where I'm writing an blog entry:

The Van.

This Van is doing a VERY wonderful job of getting me through this trip so far. This would be it's third time deciding not to start. Lets rephrase that. This is the third time that my lack of proper maintenance and care has forced the Van to not start. It's not her fault. I'm the one with the flighty and ill prepared ambitions.

Chasing the Sunset.

Or am I running away from having to see the same old Sunrise?

I don't think so.

the PEI sunrises NEVER made me feel BAD. But these last two "on the road" sunsets have invigorated and stimulated parts of my imagination long left dormant!

The Van has been chugging along GREAT! Far exceeding it's pre-concieved speed limitations and keeping me as warm as I could ask for considering I hadn't taken the time to fix the front fan, and have the rear fan all but blocked with my 'things' all jammed up in her hind quarters.

She's drinking her fuel as slowly and as carefully as a girl her age could. Again considering the extra weight I've forced upon her cavernous interior. She's Keeping me right on budget for the trip so far. About the same cost as a plane ticket, but with all of my "things" and a killer view!

But there have been these three times that she's not been able to fire up.

This being the third of those times. And the second one to happen at a remote Gas station. At least the last time the sun was still up. I've pushed the Van into a dark corner of the Gas Station parking lot so it would be out of the way while it rests.

An eerie calm overcomes me now.

The first time it wouldn't start stressed me out. Because it happened at my Grandparents house. It stressed me out for the same reason that my initial departure from PEI stressed me out:

Other people's feelings.

See, this self centric journey of discovery I'm on is at a stage where it's still really affecting the people around me emotionally. People don't want me to leave. They worry. And this in turn worries me.

But here, now, in the middle of nowhere in the Belle Province of Quebec, I sit shivering in my overloaded old pile of steel and bolts, and I smile. Smile as the fog of my breath temporarily obscures my view of my monitor. Smile as my heels freeze in my big winter boots. Smile as I rub my hands together between sentences. Smile as I look at the clock and realize the right amount of time has passed for me to be able to justify sticking the key back in the ignition and trying to start this machine up again.

I smile because it's me. All of it. It's exactly what I envisioned. My imagination willed this into being. And if I can dream up and create this unlikely scenario, then many more of the things I've pictured myself doing will also become a reality.

Scoff at the idiocy of my bliss if you'd like. But it's mine. And soon, when those I love, and that love me, learn to count on themselves to provide the happy release of their own dream fulfillment, and I have only myself to impress and sate, it will be ALL MINE!

The next four months are going to be exciting. They are going to be fun. They are going to be a lot of hard work. But deep down, I know already that I've done the right thing. This Van is going to start when I finish typing this, and it's going to make it to Montreal, then to Ottawa, and finally to Toronto.

Dreams will come true, and new ones will be made. And the ball will only grow bigger and stronger as it rolls forward!

In the word of Stan Lee:
Excelsior!

In Too Deep?

2009-01-18T09:57:00.003-04:00

I've ventured too far into the realm of possibilities for this Blogger account. Between Kelley's ever evolving layouts, and frustrations mounting from not being able to code my own web design work, I've figured out that the possibilities for this blogger stuff are, for all intensive purposes, nearly limitless.

So instead of just picking out some nice colours, and pasting a custom header on my current template, I'm now obsessively researching and trying to teach myself HTML!

GAAAH!!!

On the plus side, I created a Twitter account to satiate my need for constant stalker-level self promotion.

Levar Burton, and Brett Spinner (Geordie and Date from STTNG) are also Twitterers! Haha

Whooo hooo!!!

Click this link and watch the video for big smiles!

http://revision3.com/blog/2009/01/16/levar-burton-jimmy-fallon-and-diggnation/

So Many Things I Want To Do

2009-01-08T14:38:00.002-04:00

I want to make a video. (have scads of footage, but no time to edit it)
I want to pen a long blog entry. (lots of stories, but too busy getting ready for the big story)
I want to go hang out with my friends. (Tri-fecta of birthdays, People going home after being here for Xmas break, etc)
I want to design a new desktop background for myself. (the current one is played out)
I want to work out. (my fitness trainer sister created a routine for me)
I want to edit and post photos on Facebook. (character validating instant gratification feedback)
I want to create my SmugMug account and do a backup of all my photos. (you can also order prints off SmugMug)
I want to do a Photo Show at Ampersand. (this was supposed to happen over Christmas)

But instead, I'm sorting through old drawers of SHIT I've been carrying around with me for 10 years. Trying to let go of it all and throw it out. (This camera is gone! Do I still need the dock and all the cables to connect it? It might come in handy someday. Can't throw it out!)

And I need to do some major work on John Connolly's webpage too.

Ok. Enough procrastinating. Out to the Van I go to sort through more (hopefully) garbage.

I need 5000 dollars

2009-01-05T19:35:00.001-04:00

2009-01-04T12:15:00.002-04:00

Holy Crap. Talk about the calm before the storm...

"Peej, where's the Blog action, huh?"

Coming!

But this isn't it yet. This is just a quick entry I need to make to document and timestamp an idea I have that I've over zealously and prematurely unleashed upon the collective unconscious. So I need to pen this entry to secure the idea as having been mine before others capitalize on it.

Ok, so I have an idea for an application. But since I can't build applications, I've reached out for help building it.

The person I reached to said "my idea now!". So I'm beating them to the punch by spilling the idea here.

My Dream Application will be called "Beautiflow". A combination of Beauty, or Beautify, and Flow.

OK, so what the fuck is it already?

It's a custom iTunes album art generator!

That's right.

Import photos, or any other custom created JPEG, and the application allows you to position and scale the image, just like an iPhone wallpaper. Then you enter in your custom text, choose a typeface and formatting options for the text, then you export the file to the appropriate MP3 file. The application then attaches the image to your MP3 and voila. Suddenly your iTunes and iPod Cover Flow is a useful and beautiful tool. Not just some abstract "oh, that would be nice" idea. But a real, useful, visual way to scroll through and browse your music.

I have WAY too many MP3's that aren't even FROM any album. So simply going to Amazon.com and downloading the actual album art, then importing it to iTunes isn't a viable solution for me. Many of the custom DJ sets and mash-ups my friends have sent me don't really HAVE any album art. So wouldn't it be sweet to be able to use ANY photo or any of a collection of stock abstract images, with custom text laid over top of them?

Great idea, I know.

I only wish I could build it myself!

Photychop Addict

2008-12-12T20:00:00.005-04:00

I'm addicted to Photoshop. It's all I can think about during my idle time. In fact, I have no idle time to speak of. I refer to photoshop time as work, yet I do this work in my idle time.

Hmm

When I'm doing the dishes, Thinking about photoshop. When I'm taking pictures, thinking about photoshop. When I'm cleaning my room, thinking about photoshop. When I'm driving... thinking about the Van actually. That may be the only non-photoshop time. Though it's not always non-photoshop. Sometimes I think about photoshoping things on my van. Like so:

I have so many ideas, that I'll never be able to do them all. So prioritizing is so difficult! It ends up that I mostly do the ones that are for other people. Clients, family, friends. But once in a while, when I get to complete a long fiddle with idea, the satisfaction is worth all of the fleeting moments of daydream and distraction.

All of the A.D.H.D. finally comes to an explosive and frantic apogee as the months, or days, or sometimes as little as minutes of brainstorming peak and fall into synchronous order. Chaos becomes control, and imagination and inspiration breeds creation!

I can't get enough of the feeling of satisfaction of creating something in Photoshop, or Illustrator for that matter. InDesign, or Final Cut. Flash.

I just wish they all had the same keyboard shortcuts!

:^p

Afgananda

2008-12-08T11:46:00.002-04:00

This morning on CBC Radio there was a feature on Afghanistan and the landmark 100th Canadian Soldier killed in action there.

I've felt emotion when listening to this before, but not like this morning. Remembrance day they had something similar where they named off the names of all those killed. This time I woke up to a story of a father speaking of his son who was killed in 2006. Paul was his son's name. He spoke of how his Son came from a broken family, but had found a woman who came from a stable family and how proud he was of the father and husband his son had become. He spoke of the last moment they looked at one another. Their last eye contact as Paul was about to board the airplane to Afghanistan. He read the final e-mail that Paul sent to his wife and daughter the morning of the day he was killed. And finally he read a letter that he wrote to his son this year, two years after his death.

The letter broke me. I cried. I sobbed as I stood in the shower. I thought of my Van, and my Computer, and my Camera, and all of the so called "problems" I had in my life and how lucky I really have it. And I cried. I bawled like a little girl who didn't get her pony for her birthday. I couldn't believe that tears actually flowed. I'm not a crier. I just don't cry. I've cried maybe a fist full of times in the last few years. But as the reality of this "war" hit me like a ton of bricks this morning. Here I am, free to come and go as I please in this wonderful country, and there are brethren of mine DYING out in the dessert RIGHT NOW. While I was snapping photos of a band and a bunch of models this weekend, 3 men were being killed in service to this country in the middle east. Three men, all younger then me. Dead.

After Paul's father read the letter he'd written to his dead son, CBC ran off the second half of the 100 names of those killed. I couldn't control the tears as the names were all read off. Even with the splash of the hot water from the shower, I was able to feel and taste the reality of my tears. The poured out like a faucet. I listened intently as each soldiers title, rank, name, and most jarring of all; age, were read aloud slowly. Half of these guys were younger then me. They had the same dreams, same freedoms, and same opportunities as I have, and chose to give their lives so that I could maintain that freedom.

I'm thankful for the sacrifice they've made. And happier then every to be alive.

I'm proud of them, and of all the others who are over there, fighting in the dessert.

It's even more evident that I MUST take this trip across our country. The more each day goes by, the more certain I am that it's what I really want to do.

I'm so lucky to be in this position. I'd be a fool not to take advantage of the freedom I have.

Back at School

2008-12-04T11:26:00.001-04:00

I Love This Little Guy!

2008-12-03T10:10:00.002-04:00

The Future is Now

2008-11-15T17:20:00.001-04:00

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Slides right in like a College Frat Boy at a Keg Party!

2008-11-14T18:04:00.004-04:00

Horror. Shock. Embarrassment. Panic. Distress.

These are all words I'd use to describe how I felt yesterday when the Vanagon's shifter started to act up.

The Vanagon has a bus like shifter. The thing is huge. Long. Unruly. To say it takes finesse to drive and shift this beast would be a kind understatement. She's a brute!

So a couple times I've gotten myself into a panic at a set of lights because the shifter has a tough time finding first gear. The "sweet spot" isn't as clear as on a newer vehicle. And the shifter always worked like the linkages were moving through a pile of sand. But this was part of my vehicles unique charm, I told myself. Being one of only a handful of people in the world who can actually drive it makes me feel special!

But a couple times, charm and character have been overshadowed by disaster.

Let me take you back a couple weeks. A week before I made my last Van related post I had taken my boys Adam and Scott out for a Bikeride. the Van's first real trip! Three bikes in the back, (the very back, behind the 3rd row seating! There's LOTS of room!) and three grown men in the front.

So being that I had other rowdy boys in the Van I was pretty excitable. I was shifting with relative reckless abandon! (you never quite act with any kind of abandon in this thing at low speeds. Shifting is stressful.) So we come to a set of lights in Cornwall PEI. A suburb of sorts. A mini town outside of town. And I come to what is the last set of lights before the main artery turns into highway. So I'm excited to get this beast and her precious cargo up to cruising speed! (about 90 for the Vanagon) ;^)

I fumbled, as usual, with the long clunky shifter and tried to get it into first. But this time something felt wrong. It wasn't the usual rough pile of sand I was used to pushing through. This was more like the stick was in a pile of gravel. REALLY rough. The shifter finally chunked into first with a muffled thud. Off the Van groaned. First gear is super short so I quickly jammed it back into second. But then the most horrible of horrible. When I plunged in the clutch and tried to lift the shifter up and over into 3rd, it dislodged from it's normal pivot point and became as limp as a first time porn star with stage fright! UH OH! Light green, traffic behind me, screaming laughing passengers, and no shifter. NO SHIFTER!!!

An untapped slew of expletives gushed from my mouth like raw oil. Filthy and expensive! Many eff words. "I'VE GOT NO FUCKING SHIFTER!!"

THANKFULLY I was able to maintain some semblance of sanity and control. My RoboCop electronic targeting systems saw a gap in the oncoming traffic, while my neural net processors read the tactile feedback coming through my feet on the pedals and told me I still had contact on second gear.

VVRRRRRROOOOAAARRRRRRM!!!

I Gave'R and cut across the road, coasting comfortably into the parking lot of the Pizza Delight.

By this point I felt a powerfully contrasting mix of emotion. I was relieved that I'd gotten my passengers, cargo, and their faithful vessel off the highway without impeding other traffic, and without killing or damaging anyone or anything. But I was horrifically heartbroken that my Van, and all of the plans and dreams I've bound so tightly to it, were by all rights, finished! In the mili-seconds it took for me to react to the questions of my passengers, 10 thousand scenarios went through my mind. Was my transmission sitting on the road 30 feet behind me?

You readers know very well that's not the case. But at the time my faithful friends, your dear narrator, did not.

I could smell the end. And it stank.

Within' a couple seconds my fear, turned to anger, and then to determined inquisition. I purposefully lifted the brown rubber accordion that covers the working bits of the shifter and helps it blend gracefully, and I will argue, stylishly with the cream coloured carpets, and slid it up the spacious span of the shifter shaft.

The simple (by today's standards) construction of this area of the Van revealed itself to me in an immediately soothing glory! A metal plate, two screws, and two wonderfully free wayward nuts!

HUZZAH!

Most people would not be happy to find dislodged hardware in their vehicles business end. But I was just so damned happy that there was a possibility of me fixing this problem and carrying on with the bike trip that I didn't bother being angry! Here now, a situation that had been not 3 seconds ago dire and insurmountable, was suddenly manageable, and hilarious!

I breathed an immense sigh of relief as I screwed the nuts back on. Thank god I'd put my tool kit in the Van instead of leaving it home. My heart was beating so fast, that I used the first passably suitable tool my frantic fingers had gripped. A crescent wrench was certainly not the right tool for this job. But it was doing just fine under the pressure!

I could feel the tension as my Van mates breathed silently. Once the bolts tightened, and the bottom plate was fastened back to the chassis, the shifter sat back up. Proud in it's own imperfect and well used way.

While the Van was still off, I pushed in the clutch and tried to find first.

*CLUNK*

THERE IT IS!!

With glee, I quickly cycled through the other four gears. WHOOO HOOOO!!!!

Cheers erupted from all corners of the Vanagons cavernous interior.

I turned the key and she started back up with a purr, and rumble, and several clunks and dings that have since been remedied. :^)

Off we went.

Since that day, every second day or so, I would reach under the rubber skirt and fiddle with the bolts. They continued to come loose, and I continued to tighten them by hand. Certainly not a fix by any stretch of the imagination. But there was a certain satisfaction I felt just having something to tinker with. The plan was to eventually put some thread locking compound on the nuts and fasten them permanently with the proper tool. But every time I tried something just got in the way and I never got around to it.

Fast forward now to yesterday, and the Horror Show.

I've been doing some graphic design and web design work for my Father's Hobby Shop. It's a small company, with a tight nit crew. Birthdays are always celebrated with cake in the board room. Mom (who also works there) sent me up to the Sobeys to pick up a couple cakes since two peoples birthdays happened upon the same day.

I gleefully jumped at the chance to take my Van for a ride ANYwhere.

This time though, I noticed something wrong RIGHT away.

The clutch. The clutch was engaging much earlier then usual. My underpowered, overly heavy brute of a van, hopped forward in first gear, without my even pressing the pedal. Interesting. Not terribly upsetting, but interesting. I drove cautiously to the grocery store. Even with symptoms of something wrong, I still had nothing but love for the Van. So proud was I sitting up high in it's cab. Even prouder as I walked across the parking lot towards it. It stands up above and out like a thumb in a parking lot.

I walked back to it, sat down, started her up, and lurched forward. Same hyper-responsive clutch. Now I was starting to worry. I pulled it out of the parking lot in second, and up to the lights. This time, it was a left turn to get onto the short strip of highway back to the store with my delicious frosted bounty sitting shotgun.

At the red light is where the horror took place.

I can't find first.

Don't panic. Stay calm. Be gentle. Just like Peter said, finesse, don't force.

Halfway through the light's cycle and still no first. Panic sets in. I scramble to find second. Nothing. DAMMIT.

The light turns green, and I flip the archaic four way switch.

Defeated, I watched as the drivers of the cars behind me sat, awkwardly. Thankfully, this is PEI; not one person honked!

The green light sat mockingly in front of me. Out of desperation I tried to push the shifter down, and left, for reverse. First gear presents itself like a woman on her wedding night after I've been in reverse. It couldn't be any easier to get into as it is right after I come out of reverse. There's a "back end" joke in there, but I think I've already gone too far with title of this entry.

So I push down, and left, then up for reverse.

GGGGGGGGRRE!$@#R!$#R!#@%$#%!RRRGGG

Awful sound. Horrible horrible grinding gears sound.

By now my face is flush from the blood that boils beneath the skin of my cheeks. This isn't anger, it's fear and embarrassment. I snap the key back and kill the engine, and jerk the parking break upward quickly. (if I don't pull hard on the parking break, it doesn't grab. And I don't want to bump the car that's been so patiently waiting behind me for this green light.) I pump the clutch several times, and manage to force it into reverse while it's stationary. The light turns yellow, then red. Relief. For now. While the Van is still off, I fumble out of reverse and wiggle the shifter around some more. Still no first. I rip up the rubber skirt and shift the plate around, trying to slip into the right point of actuation. Back into reverse, back out. Still no first. The light turns green once again, and this time, the cars all go around me.

FINALLY, out of reverse for the second time, the shifter catches first!

HUZZAH!

I waste no time getting the engine started and getting the van moving! Over-revving slightly to get it through the intersection and onto the highway. With some momentum behind me, and a lot of nervous energy in my hand, I attempt to shift into second.

Nothing.

I pull over and jam the 4 ways back on. A police cruiser parked across the highway facing me ads to my stress. Back down to the plate the shifter sits on. More adjustments, and more 'engine off' shifting practice.

FINALLY, I get it to go through first, second, third, and fourth.

A minuscule amount of relief cools my cheeks and I start the Van again. (Vanagon?)

When I pull back into the parking lot at work, a crucial part of my regular parking routine changes. I don't proudly pull in making a large circle, and then backing into the space. I simply pull in forwards. The Van's new, tail out stance, reflects the defeat I feel on the inside. Instead of it's gorgeous face pointing out and towards the office window, it sits pointed in, like a truant student made to sit and face the corner of the room in shame.

I brought the birthday cake in and set it on the boardroom table, and without missing a step, continued on through the offices and into the work shop. I grabbed the socket set, and the thread locking compound, and went out to "fix" the problematic shifter plate.

I did my long overdue work with an unfinished feeling of futility. After all, deep inside I knew from the way the clutch felt, that this problem was deeper then a simple metal plate that held my shifter in place.

No, my Van was sick, and it needed immediately medical attention.

As I walked back into the building my Dad's sullen smile greeted me as I came back in. He said nothing as he saw me carrying the socket set back in. I forced a smile and came in for some cake. The layers of whipped chocolate and caramel helped me distance myself from the vehicular stress for a few moments. My Dad's silent recognition of my stress also really helped. He very well could have given me all sorts of "I told you so" speeches about making smart purchases. And the benefits of a vehicle who's lack of character was outshone by it's steadfast reliability. But he said nothing. And I took his silence as the respectful gift that it was!

After cake, I went back to work, knowing in the back of my head that I had a real problem to deal with.

Leaving at the end of the day was an ordeal. I some how wished that my newly lock tight reinforced shifter plate would solve the problem. Though I knew it wouldn't. In my haste, I hadn't even picked a "sweet spot" to secured the plate at! (the bolt holds are oblong, allowing for some play back and forth) I was so frustrated, that I vindictively bolted it down where it sat without rhyme or valid reasoning.

I sinking sickness filled my belly when starting the Van that evening. The sun had set, and the parking lot near emptied. I sat in the Van and knew that the backing up I had avoided earlier that afternoon, now had to be faced, head on. I started the Van. Sat for a moment. Wiggled the shifter, and pushed down. I slowly pulled it left and pushed it up.

GRRRRR#!@%$@$%#YQ#$R!#$R#RRRR

DAMMIT. The grinding sound.

Snapped back the key and killed the engine.

I put it in reverse while it was off, and with a great amount of fear and hesitation, turned the key. It started, and thankfully with the clutch all the way down, made no terrible grinding sounds. I let the clutch up, and like before, it engaged too early. The van lurched backwards too quickly. I pushed the clutch back in and it slowed down, then stopped. I tried to pop it out of reverse and back into first.

GGUUHGTH$%@%#^YWY%$^#^#$%

GRINDING!

DAMMIT!

Cut the Engine.

This time, the Van was sitting beside the boss' office window. And my Father and his two partners we're sitting with a perfect view of me and my woes. Without looking up I moved the shifter into first gear, and started the van back up. I lifted my left foot slowly and let the over eager clutch engage the engine. The Van eked forward and I pulled out of the parking lot, defeated.

I drove it home with the same sad feeling that I used to get when the roof leaked. I was still happy that I owned it. Sill proud to be driving it. But I knew work needed to be done.

I did something that is out of my realm of appropriate. I called Dave's cellphone to ask him about work, when I knew he wasn't working. This is a no no for me under normal circumstances. But I only had one thing on my mind, and that was fixing the Vanagon.

Dave, as usual, was super awesome about it.

"If you call the shop, you won't get an appointment, I'm all booked up this week. But tomorrow is Friday, bring it in around 3:15 and we'll sneak a look at it. It's probably your clutch if it's not the shifter. We'll take a look".

I woke up this morning and took my sweet time getting ready. I was a half hour late for work because I didn't want to face driving my Van in that state. Sure enough though, things went off without a hitch this morning. The shifter was back to it's 'pile of sand' state of nominal operation. Again with a mixed reaction, I felt relieved and further perturbed all at once.

Throughout the day I found out that no one had heard me grind the gears. But Dad confided that he knew something was wrong when I had to stop and start the engine several times. Once again, in a surprisingly respectful move, he simply asked me what time Dave was planning to have a look at it. With a myriad of possible lecture subjects, he decided for some reason at that moment, to treat me as someone in control of his own life, and asked me how I was dealing, instead of telling me how he would. This melted a lot of my stress away immediately. And Dave hadn't even looked at it yet!

So on we go to what is now approaching 4 hours ago (Jeeze! This entry is taking me like 2 hours to type! No wonder I don't do it every day!) and I bring the Van in for Dave. He's busy bolting a plow mounting bracket on the frame of a massive Ford F-250. Being that he's clearly busy, I park the Van and go in to ask him if I can offer a hand.

He tells me to pull the Van into the other available spot in the bay.

"Really?"

"Yeah, pull it in".

Still surprised that he's asking me to bring it in while he's so busy, I run out to the Van, with a little bit more bounce in my step.

I pulled the Van in, and once again, get to see it hoisted up on the lift.

This time I REALLY get my face in underneath it with him. He's walking around under it, in front, and behind. Looking for the Clutch Fluid reservoir, he says. "I have a hydraulic clutch?" Yup! And fuel injection too! (I thought it had a carburetor! It's fuel infected Dad!)

Now this is when something REALLY out of the ordinary happens.

Dave has his head up underneath the Van, poking around, jamming his free hand in and out of various crevices, while holding a long stick style LED work lamp with the other hand. He reaches in, and without missing a breath of batting an eye says: "Half a coconut".

WHAT?!!

I look at he's holding half a coconut.

HALF OF A FRIGGING COCONUT! HE PULLED THE TOP HALF OF A FREAKING COCONUT SHELL OUT OF THE BOTTOM OF MY VAN!

From this point on my stress was gone. I laughed my ass off as my mind wandered to possible ways that in 24 years, this Van had been in a situation where it was possible for a half of a coconut to get lodged into it's underside!

This was a Van who could tell many many stories. And when I'm done with it, it will tell many many more!

So Dave doesn't find anything underneath, other then half a coconut, and brings the Van back down. This time he pulls apart the inside again. He finds the reservoir for the Brake and Clutch fluids behind the dashboard, of all places! There's still plenty of fluid. No leak.

So back under he needs to go.

He tells me to hop back up into the cab, and hoists me up high once again. Just like last time, only in the other available bay of the garage. A new view from the other side! He gets me to press and release the clutch a half dozen times. We yell back and forth to one another as I press and release my clutch. He tells me only to move it through it's 'free play' which is the range of motion before it engages. It's an awful lot of room to move. About half of it's travel was "free play".

He tells me to release, then in a minute, says to press again. This time it's all free. There's no liquid resistance on the clutch this time. Only the relatively weak return spring. It remains like this for 5-6 press and releases.

Then on around the 14th magical pedal press, EUREKA! The clutch now has 1/5th range "free play" and the rest of the travel is AAAAAALLL BUSINESS!!!

LIKE AN OLD USED FIXED ONE!!! (Like brand new!!)

Then he tells me to put the clutch in, and shift into first. It moves through the proverbial sand, and I find first as easily as I ever have been. Then I can hear a spraying noise. "Move it through all the gears one by one over and over" he says. "Yeah, that's it, keep moving".

Suddenly, what had previously moved like a stick in the sand, was suddenly moving like, well, like a well lubricated shaft in a perfectly fitted hole! As hard as I tried I couldn't help but make all sorts of awful yelping noises! "Keep shifting it!"

I shifted that thing like a spoiled rotten brat kid bangs his action figures together! Pure fucking bliss is what it was!

"Start her up!"

"Really? Start it? While I'm up here?"

"Yup, we gotta see if it works right? Put it in reverse and let in engage".

I started it up. The familiar put put put rumble filled the garage. I pushed down, and left. The shifter knob slid into reverse like that was it's job! I let off the clutch and saw the back wheel spin up in the rear view mirror.

YYYEAAAH!!!!

"Ok, now try first"

Clutch in, shifter down, over to the right, and up.

PERFECTION!

THIS is what the shifter is supposed to work like!!!! LIKE A HOT KNIFE IN BUTTER!!! That thing was shifting like I never imagined it ever could! And it took not one new part. Not one replacement ordered off the internet. Not one scratch built, this should get you buy for now, band-aide solution. No no. My man Dave, in 15 minutes, brought my Van, and my ego, and my aspirations of cross country travel, back from the dead! And all it took was a bleed of the hydraulic clutch fluid, and an adjustment to a plunger in a cylinder that controlled the engagement point of the clutch itself. Along with some lubricant for the overly long shifter shaft that extends from the shift knob in the front cab, aaaaaall the way back to the transmission in the rear of the underside of the vehicle!

Overjoyed, I turned the ignition back off and yelled down to Dave what he already obviously knew. "DUDE! Your a genius!"

So once again, I gave what is now becoming a routine battle cry of satisfaction when pulling my "just like an old used fixed one (new)" Vanagon out of a parking lot and on my way home.

I never imagined the shifting could be so smooth, and he fixed both the shifter, AND the clutch.

All of these miraculous, and timely repairs are making me very worried about something. What the fuck am I gonna do without Dave?

Dad says "your screwed without him that's what!"

And he's right.

A mechanic in Ontario or Quebec is gonna see me coming and have dollar signs in their eyes. They're gonna take these 15 minute, 3 dollar repairs jobs and turn them into 4 day, 500 dollar nightmares.

But I'm not worried about that.

Why worry about a hypothetical future, when you could be busy being very very pleased with an actual present.

I'm enjoying the work I'm doing for my Dad's store.
I'm enjoying the time I'm spending with my family there.
I'm enjoying the excitement that's building for the big trip that lies ahead and the fun I'm having with my new ride and the new freedom it gives me.
And I'm enjoying pouring my heart out into my now "classic" Macbook Pro through this blog!

*deep breath*

Aaaaah.

Writing is really nice.

Now I have to go return all those phone calls I ignored over the last two hours while I typed! This writing thing is really engrossing. When I get into it, there's not stopping me until it's done! And this entry, is DONE!

:^)

Thanks again Dave!

My liccle Nephew, be rockin' Evisu!

2008-11-09T15:05:00.003-04:00

ThePeej™

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Vintage Skatboards!

Today I Learned

Tutorial - Making Vector Video Game Sprites

GrinSpiration

Random Rhyme

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Our Future

Summertime Spittin'

Asthetic Prosthetic

Life Lessons from Lego

This sums it up very nicely

I love this!

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Page 3. An unbridled reflective rant!

Bronchial Melancholia

Hungry Man

The Journey - In Transit

Using Mac OS X to "meassure" things on the web!

I love my Nephew (Skype Laughs)

What dreams of Men

L is for Love Charlie

L is for Love Charlie

Digital Archiology? Future Prediction!

Writing a Resume can be Terrifying!

Picnic in Highpark!

Me, simply stated, in a roundabout way - TED . com video

Pride 2009 - Dirty Disco on the South Stage

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Breathless in Time-Lapse

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The Pendulum Swings

The message behind the Insomnia?

Come on now! A blog post from an iPod?

co

My Blog is Jealous of Twitter!

Backdoor to Clubland

J-Quality in the mix. New YouTube video!

Break The Walls Down. Web Design outside the box

Gawd DAMN this is a hot Advert! Adidas 60 years!

Halfway through the Honeymoon?

Springtime Splatter Sessions

BlendFu is my new favorite PS Brush source!

Danny McAskill - Urban Cycling Madness

High Rez Splatter Brushes by Peejworks

Shufflebanger Two, the next day!

ShuffleBanger

My Nu Haircut

This is Well Good! *Donk Donk Donk*

Living the Dream! (Time Lapse and Tilt Shift Vid)

My friend Kristin posted a photo

Motion Graphics

A story (with video) about the Tweetup!

Coffee Cup Preachers?

He makes me look white, I know.

Big Office Moves - The Sauga-sauga Continues!

The ears of a teenager!

The Interweb Wins at Life!

STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES!!!!

The Levar Burton Bromance continues

Big Brother? Is that you?

Fish Fish Fish Fish Fish

My Inner Designer's Inner Child...

Collector Showdown: Lego edition!

Art Race, on Treasure HD

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Digital Copyright Management

MY FIRST HOME PRINT!

No athletic wear or running shoes?

FRESH FRESH FRESH

Re-Connected!

This is Well Good! Donk Donk Donk