Chattels, Personal Change, and Chugging Along

I have not been blogging, and so I bought myself a "Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 4TB Quad Interface Dual-drive Storage System with RAID".

That's not a non-sequitur. And nor is any of this.

My roommate who longed eschewed social media has taken up blogging with a vengeance in aid of his great hobby, fine cocktails. As I write this first blog that I have attempted since March, he is busily photographing tonight's offering, the Singapore Sling. His still life photography is very fine indeed, as I think anyone perusing his blog will agree. But tonight's photograph presented a problem. He uses objects from around this madhouse of my numerous collections and accretions for his still lifes. He asked me if I had an idea for objects that might evoke Singapore. Well, alas, Singapore's national identity is pretty much wrapped up with squelching anything with character or difference in favor of a landscape of towering apartment blocks unhindered by vegetation or affectation. He settled on some fresh bamboo from the garden.

Photography is at the root of my own blogging behavior, and a few months back I made an error in regard to its electronic piece. I switched from iPhoto to Aperture without spending the time to master Aperture, and meanwhile my storage capacity slowly got close to maxing out. That's where the RAID drive comes in. If I stretch my space, maybe I can settle back into it.

I did a similar thing with a 60-gallon tank in the living room. I've always had water problems in that tank, so I moved the last of the fish into a 40-gallon tank that had some space due to the final demise of an ancient Rottkeil. This opened up a vast surface that permits me to play and move stuff around and create a new installation. I bumped into some wayangs today ... shadow puppets from Java for those not as anchored in the Indonesian reality as I am. I figure I will make some bases and stand up a bunch of my wayangs on that surface, and then for good measure make add back in a 10-gallon tank with some plants and fancy goldfish.

You see, I have always used chattels to burst through personal blocks.

I am a thing person. I like things. And things are attracted to me. Things seek me out magnetically and stick to me. Eventually things and I make a deal: I give them a little spot and they stay there, nice and pert. I dust them off twice annually ... for the Christmas Party and the July first or fourth party, depending on the year. And once in a while I move them around. I like to fondle things and, to be frank, I talk to them as if they live.

So it is not such a stretch to use these bloody things to burst through my personal blocks.

Of course my inability to re-seize my photography life from the not-so-difficult embrace of Aperture is really an excuse. Here's another excuse. Twitter has seized control of me. I'll write a post about its sublime joys in due course, but suffice to say that I spend the time I used to spend blogging composing 140 character koans. And it provides the same little blast of 'lectric sociality. I like to say ... If Facebook is the broad Mississippi, then Twitter is a fast-rushing mountain stream. In that paradigm, blogging is the open ocean. In another vein, if Facebook is marijuana, Twitter is crack, and blogging is old-fashioned alcoholism.

So, I'm evidently not a crack addict and pointedly not a stoner, as if there is anything pointed about pot. But I like my booze, and I like blogging.

So I bought a RAID drive, I emptied my 60-gallon tank, and I sat down and wrote this post. There.


Photos by Arod from my trip to Toronto, my old hometown, in April. First time I have looked at them. Feeling ok.