More Laddering

It turns out that when you plunk down the money for a 40-foot ladder, there are a lot of other folks in your neighborhood who need one. That’s typical for specialized equipment: people forgo using it because they don’t want to go to the trouble to obtain it, but … borrow it? Sure.

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A Break For Something Good In The World

My projects, I realized, define my life and separate me from reality. When I am working on something, I am totally focused and nothing else matters, so all the evil of the world temporarily fades from my mind. Although, that’s not entirely true. When I am thinking about an article, I often read and re-read sources, and I sometimes mutter under my breath as my subconscious formulates my viewpoint. I am careful not to have one of my creative avenues bleed over into the other and destroy it – imagine if I started trying to make art that represented how I feel about the Palestine situation; it would not be pretty. I want to make elegant-ish cooking knives, not killing tools.

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Keeping My Head Above Water, Modern Times Edition

Often, my gutter-crawling through politics and the history of revolutions, government, racism, and nastiness, leave me so sad and angry that I don’t know what to do. Add on top of it my leg hurting and the clot-buster drugs, which seem to be making me a bit stupid and low-energy, and I’ve got a real motivational crisis. Oh, yeah, and looming over it all is my certainty that species extinction and the collapse of civilization is hurtling toward us at an accelerating rate. “Why bother?” doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable question; trying anything at all seems to be an act of denial.

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