Sea Change

Hey people. I spent the weekend working on Tina, with a little break Sat morning helping out at the trail that is to be her home. This weekend it was all about the butt people-- Tina's butt, anyway.

I spent Sat afternoon working on her right thigh and working my way around to her backside. It's challenging because I have to keep shifting my thinking from 2D to 3D. In the frame-out process it's pretty easy. I kind of see whatever it is in 3D before I even start, so it's just a matter of caging that image.

But with this new method of covering the entire frame with steel, it's a bit of a trick figuring out how to take the flat pieces of steel and mold them to the shape. They aren't elastic, can't stretch. They generally only want to curve one direction, so if you think of someone's leg, which is roughly cylindrical, and how it attaches to their body at the butt-- that curve, you begin to see that people curve all kinds of ways.

To avoid a stove-pipey, robot appearance you have to cut all kinds of triangles and odd shapes you can work multi-directional curves and slight twists into. Since I'm doing all the bending by hand, usually just using a couple pairs of pliers and sometimes my trusty blue hammer, it's tricky-- and slow.

When I looked at her at the end of the day Sat it was a big disappointment because her butt was a little draggy. She had a little too much junk back there and I knew Sun the first part of the day would be spent cutting apart all the work I'd so meticulously done the day before.

It was worth it though. My working mantra is "I'm not going to all this trouble to have it turn out 'okay,'" -- or some version of-- if you're going to put in any effort, you're already buying in, so why not go for it? You might as well give it your all. That way, you have a shot at creating something really awesome-- special.

I'm going through another phase where my base metals are reconfiguring somehow. Every once in a while I have a major shift. I used to fight it, but now think it's just part of my journey and roll with it, as much as I can, and trust it'll lead me where ever I need to go.

The last time it happened was a couple years ago. I felt like a capped fire hydrant all the time. I needed to listen to music constantly. My earphones were like an umbilical cord, filling my ears with raw, heavy rock that felt like it was helping me vent off some of the steam.

I wrote constantly, and the theater in my brain ran movies every waking moment. It was so overpowering it sometimes made it hard to hang out with actual humans because I'd be distracted by the fictional characters in my head. I felt like my life would be totally pointless if I never got published.

Now something's changing again. I seem to have figured out how to manage the energy surges, which are less intense. Mountain biking, even just thinking about it or watching it, seems to have replaced the need for non-stop rock and that wild, hyper feeling (most of the time), and the writing? It's different.

I've detached from it, and that feels scary because I worry about not being able to "get back" to wonderland, but also important, like I can get perspective. I've written enough and read enough over the last couple of years to realize good writers are sort of a dime a dozen. The real trick is finding a story that holds up structurally-- and is different enough from everything else out there to feel fresh, and so needs to be told it's clawing its way out of you-- unstoppable.

Right now I have no such story, so am concentrating on my visual art, both technically and energetically, and letting things ferment, and reading as much as I can. I'm going to start listening to books on tape again too, after almost two years of taking a break from that and just jamming-out while I weld.

I'm monitoring my always fluctuating energy, and waiting to see what will happen next.

Life is pretty amazing isn't it?