020090210 23:24 • 
The rain comes down, deep sheets of water transforming earth and air into a world I can swim through: streets running rivers of life, winds rippling with ionic charge. The heavens and oceans are one out there.
From this perch in the upper studio, I can see far beyond the window panes, across the darkness of the San Francisco Bay to the liquid wavering of civilization’s pinpoints in the east. It all just keeps standing in the endless falls of transfiguring, cleansing washes of sky. Everything continues on as the cycle returns again and again.
Layered on it all is my reflection in the glass. Glowing LEDs, black and white keys, luminous LCDs, grids of buttons and lights, green and amber mixed with the scent of teak and joyous data throughput. Machines singing to each other and singing with me. Snapping fingers, vibrating air, inner ear conduction.
Sonic worlds in motion.
I have missed this so much.
A spare six weeks into the collective year and I’ve found my current. As an individual who has joined the collective, the time between the communal annum roll and my own solar rotation of 365.25 days is always one of looking, listening, gathering, re-experiencing, deciding.
In 18 days I will complete this passage around our star.
In 18 days I will continue in downpour, in rain, as the cycle returns again.
020080229 21:00 •
The darkness surrounding tonight’s stars holds a deep blue tint. Looking across the Bay I detect a faint glow rolling the world’s ragged curve, amber flashes breaking in the soft luminance. These are the lights of guidance towers far in the distance. They’re beautiful.
Tonight is the flash-point of a brave new year, a personal mark on the track… an old finishing, a new starting, a now holding everything between this and the next February end. I’ve said it many ways since 020080101… but tonight, for me, the work does truly commence. It’s going to be a hell of year. I know this because I won’t rest until it is.
Over the last few twelvemonths, I’ve mapped deep structural elements within, examined tightly wound zones I knew only by the barbed wire and lightning launchers ringing their barriers. I knew them, circled their cloaked existence, but didn’t understand enough of what they contained to name them. If you can name, you can own… and re-make.
I cannot take all credit for my transfiguration. Often I was simply in the right frame of mind at the right time, aware enough to notice a silver key or magickal wrecking ball dangled in front of me by a friendly universe. One by one I have turned the rusted tumblers of entrances to long-sealed emotional crypts, felled the bulwarks of boneyard fortresses, opened trapped realms in my heart to exploration and merciful release. It hasn’t always been pretty.
This image is of NASA’s Skylab circling our home planet, 019740208. It’s a vision I hold in my mind. I use it to remind myself of this world’s true nature when I need perspective, of the true nature of humanity and its relation to the spinning blue, of my true nature as an avatar of our shared existence.
By default, I’ve travelled the underworld all the short years of my life. I was born there, but it’s no longer my most useful metaphor for psychological motivation. Like Buckminster Fuller’s dismissal of the classic nomenclature up and down, I’m now leaving under and above to dust-laden superstition. They’re useful for fairy tales, but I need an accurate descriptor: a name to own and re-make.
As with the sky, I’ve become aware the true directions of self are in and out.
Out is where I’m headed.
020060228 22:26 •
Ania birthday-gifted me with two wonderful stacks of tree and ink today: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and an excellent Taschen book on Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is a massive set of three hardback tomes, a beautiful 1440 pages collecting every strip Bill Watterson ever released for circulation. Simply flipping through, I’m struck with wonder at every smile, every arc of tiger through air, every well-wrought flip of social commentary disguised as the shenanigans of a six year old: all simple pen strokes placed deliberately by the artist’s hand.
The book on Wright is filled with gorgeous photos of his architecture and blueprints. I can never get enough of Wright’s work: sweeping lines, complex geometries made deceptively simple, an interdependence with setting to the extent setting becomes a part of the creation. Wright created dwellings the way Watterson imbued his characters with life: every beam, every angle, every space an expression of its creator’s pulse.
These works of art, these breathing embodiments of aspects of their artists, live equally in our minds as in the physical world. That’s where the creation began: in an artist’s mind. Through artistic expansion and expression, their creations as avatar allow simultaneous appearance throughout the world and throughout time. Watterson walks our minds still in the eternal pair of boy and tiger, and Wright is very much alive as modernity and progress itself.
I like New Year’s Day for the mass cleansing and renewal our society longs for and attempts, but my true, personal measurement of year to year is from birthday to birthday. My life as lived, like those of all artists, all human beings, is an aspect of my mind, which popped from void into this improbable place on this day. What I see is what I create, what I do is what I will, what I am is what I believe.
A new rotation, a new creation… architecture, sketches, tigers and fallingwater…. I wonder what I’ll build in this brand new year?
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