I often wonder what people’s concept of me is… on the basis of what I post online. I have different mediums, different oulets for different things. It isn’t usually that I’m making deliberate decisions about showing some things and not showing others (except where it seems to make sense thematically, combining all the YouTube related stuff, for example).

This is really quite a long winded way of telling you (the readers of this particular blog) that it has been too long between posts. And I want to go into some detail as to why… Two things have preoccupied my time lately.

Firstly, I’ve been depressed. Much more depressed than I have been in a very long time. It feels like I try to play every game that life throws at me and there’s no hope in hell of winning at any of them. (They are clearly rigged!) My existential angst found a concrete place to land within my psyche. I actually don’t want to write about that much. I want to talk about that, and hopefully an opportunity will present itself sooner or later.

But then there’s been the other woman. I call this activity that because I’ve been kind of secretive about it and well she’s been taking up all my time lately. I decided I wanted to explore the visual arts. Infact I decided this many years ago but stalled. And then last year I said I wanted to paint… but I never did. I bought some sketching pencils, and then some watercolour pencils and some paintbrushes. Eventually I bought some acrylic paints and canvases and accessories. But then I had to work up the nerve to cover those canvases with paint. It was kind of intimidating, and I’m still fumbling my way around with it. I get frustrated at times that I can’t represent on the canvas what I want to represent. And it’s a whole other discipline, even compared to drawing. But I’ve really been enjoying the ride. I’ve been pouring over art books from the library, and watching all these tutorial videos on YouTube and elsewhere. It’s been exciting in a way that creating hasn’t been for me in such a long while. I think in some ways there’s a freedom that comes with dabbling in something you have no experience with. You can’t compare and contrast with other efforts, because there aren’t any! You can’t berate yourself and say, “Gah, you wrote something more convincing than that in the 7th grade!”

There is a certain physicality in the act of painting, something that I don’t find in writing. And I don’t feel like I’m restricted by conventions … because I don’t really know what they are and even if I did I don’t really have the technical capacity to follow them that closely anyway.

Anyway that’s all I have to say right now… Just wanted to say ‘hi.’ What have you been up to?