The Grumbling of Mondays

 

So, it's another Monday morning, 5:30 by the clock, but I've been up for a couple of hours. This seems to be the new sleep pattern: down around nine, up around three. Despite the warm nights, both cats have taken to sleeping on the bed, and I don't mind.

It has been a week of hard work on both the stone, and the Lost Canyon project. I'll be doing a presentation/performance of the Lost Era slideshow at the closing reception for The Hills Are Alive show at the Whittier Museum on August 5th. I finished re-formatting all the pics for the Arkhaven uploads. I'll be composing the text and image panels this week. I hope to have it all in the cue in the next week or so.

 

I always manage to work myself into a tight cramped space in the stone sculpture, some spot that needs to shaped just so, and almost nowhere to fit the tool into that space to shape it.

 

  And I need to do  something more with the back face of this thing, and I still haven't figured out quite what that something is. This is fun, right?

 

 The morning tour through the bookmarks is depressing as always. I won't even bother with news and current events. 

Thought Experiment:

Imagine a restaurant serving computer generated 3D printed non-nutritional synthetic food simulations.

 Just like real food only without calories or nutritional value!

 People could eat there, have three meals a day, and  stay full and satisfied while slowly starving to death. In this age, and time there would be suckers lined up around the block waiting to get in.

So it is with our newest techno-fetish, AI.

GAB is infested with AI "art" these days. Every horny ass fanboy, and his uncle is "composing" images of anime fetish girl pin-ups in sexy costumes. Fantasy scenes like the covers of cheesy sword and sorcery knock offs are popular as well. Other are making digital abstracts. 

Elsewhere, every wannabe writer is employing the chatbots to compose essays and articles.

It's all shit, and it's creepy as hell. Not one of these clowns could pick up a pencil and draw a cat, or write a paragraph.

Writing is hard work. Art takes a burdensome investment of effort. Both are fraught with failure, and frustration. Pardon the melodramatic metaphor here, but a writer, or an artist picks up a sword, and does battle in the war for Goodness Truth and Beauty. The real guys work very hard to produce food for the soul and spirit. AI clowns are wanabe cooks in the no-food restaurant. They're pretend warriors with imaginary swords.

So that's it for me being all creative, n' stuff. Breakfast is ready and I have things to do.

Thanks for stopping by.

 

Progress and Changes

Here's where the smallstone project stands at the moment.

Later on this morning I'll get back to it.

I'm pleased with where it's going, but improvising doesn't mean working with no plan. It means that the planning and carving play hopscotch. Plan a little, carve a little, plan a little, carve a little . (Music Man, anyone?)

 

It has been a while. The last three weeks have been tough. Too, I've found myself posting notes on Pbird's blog, and over at Founding Questions, rather than writing stuff here on my own small platform. The reason for that is pretty simple: Both sites have interesting content and an active, thoughtful, and intelligent group of participants. I don't have either.

I'm not doing an 'oh poor me' here, and I don't mean that as a dig on the few folks who stop by.

I have no desire to run a hundred comments a day blog. There is a shit ton of great sites out there for discussion of items of interest, news, and current events. All I want to do here is chronicle my progress on the stone carving projects, and right now there hasn't been much progress on the stone work. What little energy I have is being taken up with The Lost Canyon stuff.

 

And I have felt like total shit for the last three weeks.

This is entirely my own fault. Three years ago it was time for me to take a break from smokin' dope. I love my weed, and it has been a sort of ally for me in a lot of ways. All my artwork , and I mean ALL of it was done with a buzz. Even so, I would periodically take a long break from smoking to clear out my head. I was way overdue for that break when our evil overlords, and their rotten Chinese cohorts dropped the covid bomb on us. 

I had worked myself into exhaustion on the Lost Era Transcripts. I had begun a break in the weed routine, which set me up for a long brutal bout of insomnia. A disastrous encounter with ambien threw me into a terrifying psychotic break, and I behaved in a way that shames me to this day.

 

I had to say, "Fuck this, I'm getting my ass good and stoned, or I'll go off the deep end for reals."  And, indeed, the bud kept me from going off the deep end. The psychic overload got so heavy that it re-awakened the artistic fire in me, and I put steel to stone for the first time in nearly twenty years. And I made some damn cool shit, too. 

 

But I've been three years overdue for that break from smoking, and I've been hittin' it hard. Three weeks ago I had some scary breathing issues. There was no debate or equivocation about whether it was time to stop or not. Cannabis leaches out of the system slowly. The good side to that, is that there are no withdrawal symptoms, or craving like with nicotine, alcohol, opiates, or pharmaceuticals. But you get used to falling asleep with a buzz, and you don't dream when you do. The insomnia sets in after about the third or fourth night, and it takes a while to reset the sleeping pattern. 

I'm sleeping again, the head is clearing out, and the breathing problems have mostly disappeared. But the time for taking breaks is over. I'm seventy goddamn years old, and I'm feeling every one of those seventy years. Time let it go for good. Mostly I don't do  what I call, "finger-in-the-air" declarations. They're almost always a source of embarrassment when you don't live up to them. But I gotta' make one now, and stick to it. So it goes. 

My good friend Penny came by yesterday, and picked up the three plants I was growing. I gave her all my old-school pipe fittings, and a billet aluminum grinder. Some time in the future I may nibble a shroom here or there, but for now it's coffee in the morning, and that's about it. Maybe next post I'll have some stuff about the art show, and progress on the whole Lost Canyon effort. There is good stuff in the wind, and a new act waiting in the wings. Thanks for stopping by.