JOURNAL: Thanks For Reading And Why

+ Thank you for reading and looking at pictures.  Last month was the most viewed ever.  Blogs weren't around long before they became synonymous with failed artists and writers hoping to pump their inconsequential, amateur, and aborted works onto an unsuspecting and uninterested world of internet surfers.  There's good reason they are typecast this way.  But I found myself fascinated with them, and not so much for what purpose the bloggers themselves had for their posting, but for the workbooks grown gnarly over months and months, posts and posts.  It is one thing to take five years of work as an artist and organize it online, but quite another to have such a portfolio built organically day by day, trees before the forest.  And I felt like I wanted to do this; my thinking was that a few years of progressed work to parse through on this blog would be more enjoyable for me to work over than a stack of papers hidden in storage.  Had no one read it, I could still organize a magic shelf, particularly while on the road, with each idea, each location, time-stamped - each draft time-stamped.

+ I was at art school once.  And without irony I can say I was the worst photographer there.  Intimidated.  Insecure about the crappy camera I could afford to bring with me.  It is funny now, (and sad), that I can't, (now or then), walk twenty feet without being enamored of some image I could make out of angling power lines just so over a dilapidated building on the side of some country road, but when I look at the imagery on this blog, I know the reason for my progress is the desire to provide dynamic content for the book this blog is.  It's a fever to need to create, and the thing where this blog allowed me to resume some of that business, and to feel satisfaction, isn't in the images, or the stories, the scripts -- but the progress.  This is my workbook.  Imagining you reading it, whether you judge it good or bad, is fuel to me.  When a post goes up and dies there with little traffic coming in, like a roman consul I thumbs it down because of the crowd reaction.  But sometimes, months later, when without explanation that same post all of a sudden catches on, I'm re-fired.  Yeah!  I thought there was something there.

With readers, I can see my own mistakes, my shortcomings, in a way one can't see when one's burgeoning ideas are safely fortified by stacking up on a private hard drive.

So thank you.