BEFORE
Thoughts unreel, leading nowhere in particular: parrots leading monkey-brain. So many sketches started—more than one hundred drafts in the ‘pending’ zone—while lacking the embodied discipline and focus to finish any. Blah, blah, blah.
My situation is moving rapidly towards a major change, assuming I can manage, and that is the main focus of a very blurry existence. Blurred by fractured attention, internal and external stressors: societal instability, monetary insecurity, psycho-spiritual transience, mortality, inexorable cosmological flow, etc.
Reflecting on the four-year tenure here in rural western Colorado, the “Western Slope” as it is called, being on the west side of the main range of the Rocky Mountains. It’s been a mixed experience. Initiated in the depths of a bad cancer prognosis, it had a harsh essence from the beginning. Three of the past four years was spent, primarily, working full-time/remote for the CGS. Two of those years were with the most miserable excuse of a boss, the former State Geologist. With new management, the final 16 months were far better, but the profusion of way too many responsibilities simply burned me out. After a disturbing interaction with one of my colleagues—one whose work was an essential support element to mine—who had confided to me that he wasn’t going to do anything at work unless forced to, I decided to pull the plug with just three weeks notice. Precipitous, yes, but somehow necessary, given how life-time was/is slipping away at a rate that continues to disturb tranquil thought every day. It was a bit surprising how easy it was to ‘retire,’ and how quickly the job vanished in the rear-view mirror. How all that time spent since 2016 evaporated almost without a trace. I did leave the highly organized legacy in the form of their information/dataspace, built with my life-energy. That along with putting in place workflows that guaranteed—to the degree possible at my level of responsibility—the highest quality of their public-facing information.
“So what?” Richard Pryor asks.
The other focus of attention was to the house and the 13.5 acre property, the land. Once I left the job, the countdown started on the retreat from this place, first back to Arizona, and thence back to Iceland/Europe. All along, since I bought the property here, I’d spend hours each week day, many more on weekends, working on clearing up something or other. Cutting and collecting dead wood, pruning trees, moving rocks, weed-whacking, clearing defunct fencing, encouraging re-wilding, selectively reinforcing aging out-buildings and root cellar, removing vast amounts of detritus from same, improving the water drainage situation, setting up a large composting system, and re-doing the house interior and exterior to some degree (roofing, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom especially). I have made a couple thousand images from the property, but rarely explicit before-and-after images, there is some evidence of the improvements. The main goal was to stabilize the physical infrastructures and fix things that bothered me or obstructed optimal enjoyment and operation of the facilities. This became, cumulatively, the dominant creative act. In retrospect, I could have done more careful documentation and explication here on the blog, following my efforts, but there wasn’t the will. If nothing else, the move from Golden saved me from paying $50K in rent over the years. I do have a potential buyer.
I do watch the sky here. With a 360-degree panorama (the property has few trees) and a view up to a hundred miles (the San Juan Mountains to the south, the Uncompaghre Uplift to the southwest, Hells Kitchen directly west, and Grand Mesa to the north), there is always much to contemplate in the sky. And aside from a paranoid neighbor from Southern California who recently installed a ridiculously bright night light on his garage, the area is known for its dark skies. This will be the greatest adjustment, as my place in Arizona is deep in the ponderosas. I’ll have to wait for Iceland to ponder and enjoy big skies again.
The economic demands of this particular period of existence, from 2016 until now, have impacted life in ways that confirmed my long-standing perspective on the pursuit of money—as Blake expressed in Laocoön—“Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only.” Formal creative pursuits were sporadic, and amounted to little more than recording fragments of life along the way, this blog being the only public venue aside from aporee::maps and participation in a few international streaming projects.
Contemplating my next situation includes mulling the question of how the physical dislocation and change will go down. The next temporary physical landing place is known, but far away, and the inertia of being here is now exceedingly large as precipitated by time and age. That and TOO MUCH STUFF. The Archive weighs heavily on mind, and, once moving, on body. In a cosmos that is transitory at all scales, the attempt to stop entropic decay is almost completely pointless. And through aging, The Archive becomes something of a retroactive creative crutch where delving into it is a poor substitute for actively creating *now*. At the same time it presses down heavily with the message that there is enough stuff in the world: no need or reason to make more. Best to simply live and spend time with Others instead.
Stay tuned. Oh, but wait, there will be stiff competition for eyeballs here, what with the ongoing socio-political conflagration about to receive another corpulent splash of gasoline… Sigh. I’d advise dropping social media.
AFTER
