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by doug | December 17th, 2011 @ 8:31 pm
 So of course it would take the inevitable (but still jarring) winking out of one of our brightest lights and most gifted authors, Christopher Hitchens, to shame me into posting something in this long-forsaken space. As someone who, at the very least, holds reason and good writing as being of the greatest value (if hardly standing accused of being a very reasonable person or erudite blogger myself), it is unforgivable for me to leave this oft-cultivated/infrequently-updated slice of internet – dedicated, as it is or was, at least, intended, to being a diary of the creative mind – remain unattended for so long. Steps have been taken to rectify that atrocity. Before jumping in to my pornocopia* of self-aggrandizement, however, please consider bookmarking and reading some of Hitchens’ essays and fond retrospectives at your leisure. Not a word you read – whether you agree or disagree with the points being made – will leave you anything but richer for having read them. RIP, Hitch.
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A brief rumination on what has transpired since last I blogged:
In short: commitments and stress have eaten away at all my spare time and all my vision. Visitors looking in on the state of grammaticaster.com from time to time will no doubt have noticed the sharp drop in activity after mid-year 2011. Aside from blogging – photography and leisurely pursuits such as running and reading have diminished as well. The end-of-year book list? Isn’t going to happen – largely because the size of the total population is too depressing and I doubt I’d be able to conjure up any semblance of a top five or ten. The half-marathon I was going to run? Didn’t happen. (This was partly due to not being able to perform even mild street-jogging for a week after one session – that is how long it takes my stupid knees to recuperate. But time was an issue as well.) The portfolio – poised for grander things in 2011 – has grown even staler than this blog. The only activity I was able to adhere to was the daily snapshot project, which still exists on its modest little tumblr site and is ported to twitter, facebook, and the grammaticaster sidebar (see left) for the internet audience to enjoy.
What good is living in a creative mecca without the time or energy to dedicate to creativity? What good are pages and pages of good ideas, and stacks of unread books, when I get home too late and too exhausted to do anything but vegetate and eventually pass out in front of the television? The refrain which grew ever louder from July to, say, November was "life is too short." And it is.
Life is too short, for example, to waste on people who add no value to it. That may seem harsh. But I have always been an advocate of keeping the peace and being the bigger person in the midst of personality clashes and petty squabbles. I am not going to worry myself with that anymore. Chameleons can vary their colors to fit their surroundings, but in the end they are always going to be filthy, cold-blooded reptiles. People who have no respect for me or the people I love should no longer expect to receive any respect – even a paper-thin disguise of forced respect – from me.
Life is too short, for example, to devote to an occupation that leaves no time for the enjoyment of anything else. I am very good at my chosen profession – both the technical day-to-day aspects inherent in the spreadsheet- and calculation-heavy, standards-dependent accounting world and at managing and communicating with clients who may not always have the knowledge or the time and patience to deal with what we auditors are asking of them. I cultivated that side of my personality very well and am proud of the levels of precision and tact I have been able to attain. But it takes a special kind of person to take on 60-70 hour weeks of public accounting work. It takes someone with the drive to make partner in a big accounting firm and someone with the fortitude to ride out the constant waves of corporate consolidation and market changes inherent in the business world. I do not, nor do I want, to possess those traits. Auditing is my profession, not my life. As October rolled on, I often confided to my wife that my stress did not arise from the difficulty of the tasks I was given or even the number of jobs I was being asked to juggle at one time… the stress came from the inescapability of the job itself. There was never a time away from work, even when I was supposed to be enjoying a holiday with my family or a weekend with my wife and dogs (or even a single romantic evening, for that matter) that I wasn’t consumed with the notion that no matter what I was doing, I should be working. At the end, work was always present. At my desk, in the field, in the car, in the shower, in my bed in the morning, on the couch with spouse and pets at night, on quiet walks, on sightseeing trips, on vacations home… work was always looming and the tasks were never done. And as friends were canned or left for more stable or less demanding positions, and as the question of who exactly I was serving, and what the priority was supposed to be – the public or the client’s interests or the firm’s bottom line – and even as my responsibility and reputation with my superiors supposedly grew, the lifestyle slowly but steadily fell out of favor with me.
As an aside, there was one fantastic respite from the accounting doldrums: the annual International Balloon Fiesta. My father drove across the country to share the experience with my wife and I, and I was able to get some spectacular photographs of the event. You will see the results eventually, but at the moment my desktop – where my photo-editing equipment resides – has stopped powering on. I have exhausted all the moron-tests (is it plugged in, is the surge protector on, etc.) so now I’m afraid I’ll need to take it to a computer doctor. Once I have power and access to my software and photo libraries again, I will post wonderful balloon pictures here.
In addition to my work-stress, my wife had recently been expressing some nagging bouts of homesickness – especially in the wake of our week-long June vacation that took us back to Alabama and the company of our old friends for a short while. She hadn’t been as successful making new friends and acquaintances as I had been (which is way out of the ordinary, let me tell you), and seeing our lonely, empty little house that we couldn’t sell made her wistful for the old days. While I wasn’t exactly longing for home, I did regret that we often took our friends for granted and more often than was necessary opted to spend time to ourselves rather than with people we enjoyed. And I have fond memories of that old house too, of course, having talked her into buying the damn thing to begin with and spent nights with paintbrushes, toolboxes and drills making it our own.
So it was in mid-October my wife sent me a LinkedIn post from the fellow who recruited me straight out of college years ago. My old company in Birmingham was in the market for a senior internal auditor, and she thought I might like to explore that possibility. It may have been that I was in the middle of a particularly painful assignment in Santa Fe, or it may have been the accumulation of all these factors listed above. But whatever the instigator was, I was inclined to shoot a short, informal email via my phone to my old recruiter inquiring about the position. That act set a series of what now seems like lightning-quick events into motion, culminating in a series of long-distance interviews and an extremely impromptu flight to meet the internal audit department in person… and on that same trip, a respectable offer of employment. I accepted it that very night, and turned in my letter of resignation the following week. The allure of being able to throw my knowledge, expertise and passion into a position serving a single client with clear objectives, broadening my experience and at evening’s and week’s end, being able to leave that work at the office and throw my passion into my other passions again, and the allure of being able to do all this on a larger salary while paying for one living space instead of two – the incentives were too strong to ignore. And as a colleague (who, as fate would have it, was also making a career change at the same time) told me: happy wife = happy life.
It also occurs to me that an entire football season has passed without me writing a single word about it. The end result is that my beloved Tide are going to the national championship game in New Orleans to face LSU – a rematch of a game I suffered through in person earlier this season. It is icing on the cake, people. Blah blah Trent didn’t win the Heisman trophy. Blah blah BCS bias, computer rankings, etcetera. This is the cherry on the sundae. Our season was made with 42-14. Everything else is gravy. I intend to enjoy it (from the first row of the Superdome… look for me on TV January 9th).
What now? We are one month in to our new life in our old home. The boxes are semi-unpacked. The pets are semi-chilled-out. There are kinks in the system – my wife’s car has catastrophically died, we aren’t receiving mail, the water department thinks we used 89,000 gallons in August. But there are also glimmers of the life to come: I enjoyed the Iron Bowl with the very closest of my friends at Lake Martin, my wife and I participated in a progressive dinner with some very fun neighbors and hopefully made some new and lasting friendships, I bought a new car. During the day I am enjoying adjusting to my new position surrounded by friendly, cheerful and helpful coworkers, and at night I have time to breathe and think (and unpack… but that will give way to other pursuits in time). I will be migrating my photography portfolio to a new site in the coming weeks, and will be actively planning new photography and writing projects – if nothing else than to simply produce some sort of creative output again. The schnappschusse! project marches on. And I will read many many more books in 2012. Progress on these and other life pursuits will be chronicled here at this blog. Friends: expect to get more invitations to gather and enjoy Leslie and my company.
Here’s to the turning of the new leaves. Here’s to the rekindling of the old fires. Here’s to old friendships, old haunts, new pathways, new passions. Here’s to Christopher Hitchens. Here’s to poetry, photography, the processes and the products. Here’s to Birmingham and Albuquerque. Here’s to Crestwood North, our quirky little neighborhood where our key fits perfectly in the lock. Here’s to the Alabama Crimson Tide – back in the Crescent City for redemption and revenge and that pretty crystal football. Here’s to family. Here’s to art. Here’s to figuring it all out, one step at a time, never getting there but always getting closer, which is all that matters.
Goodnight friends. And roll tide.
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* Not a word, but dammit it just fits.
by doug | February 21st, 2010 @ 7:43 pm
 In today’s installment, I am going to jump on the ‘share the Roger Ebert Esquire story with the world’ bandwagon. I know I am at least a couple of days late, if not more. Ah well. I will start out by saying that I do not read Roger Ebert. I do not really watch movies that often anymore, and so I care even less about one particular man’s opinion of them. I never watched his television shows with Gene Siskel or Richard Roeper. I have, however and oddly enough, linked to Ebert’s material on two previous occasions: his deeply personal write-up (and what I called at the time, on twitter or something, probably his most important review) of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my favorite film critique of all time, his evisceration of the movie North. So I suppose I hold some affection for the man, or at least his writing, even though I can hardly claim to keep up with him (I did not, for example, have any idea of how sick he had been until I read the Esquire piece).
Anyhow… yes, Chris Jones’s article is touching. It is sad in places – in the places where such stories are supposed to be sad. And it is inspirational in its description of Roger’s perseverance and courage and prolificacy in the wake of his life’s recent misfortunes. But the feeling I came away with was an overwhelming sense of shame.
Here is where I am posting the link to the Esquire article. Click it. Read it.
How dare I complain about a lack of inspiration? How dare I wax quasi-poetical on the modern rat-race world’s intrusion on my personal creativity? How dare I make excuses for why I do not write?
Here is a man for whom writing is all that is left. He cannot speak, eat or drink. He is disfigured (though not horribly, I must point out… I enjoyed Jones’s observation and description of Roger’s permanent smile). He struggles to walk. He has endured numerous surgeries – mostly, it seems, failed attempts to restore some of the more basic faculties that we, the unafflicted, take for granted. He must write to communicate with his family, his friends, and the world. For him, every word counts. Each is important. To write is to live.
That is an oversimplification, of course. By all accounts I’m sure he still enjoys movies. He enjoys the companionship of his wife. So on. Etcetera. Still, even though he has always been a writer, now he writes not simply by choice, but out of necessity. Meanwhile I am content on most nights to procrastinate – to put off writing until tomorrow. Until there is time. Until it is convenient. Until my muse inspires me once more. What a crock.
I understand why so many people feel moved by the story. It is uplifting and inspirational and absolutely should be read by everyone. Take those words as ones with real gravity – as they come from someone who carries a hearty disdain for celebrity profiles and pop culture pieces.
by doug | February 4th, 2010 @ 11:31 pm
 It is incredibly frustrating to find myself here: struggling to force myself to do what I once did because I could not NOT do it. Create. Even this blog is a struggle. I am consumed with organizing and compartmentalizing thoughts, techniques, ideas, facets of my life. I spend most of my idle waking moments in an endless state of gathering… while edging no closer to the starting line. (If I could only pare down my rss subscriptions or find the right tool to export my blog posts to twitter, then I could finally focus on writing or photo-editing… oh, and after I find some new lightroom presets and textures and read a couple of photoshop tutorials and find some interesting books or magazines to read, then… oh, and…) Instead of feeling inspired, I feel increasingly oppressed by my own immobility. I even try to come up with, in the absence of being compelled to capture and sketch life in words or pictures, a creativity-themed topic for this website. And I keep returning to the subject of creative block. What are the obstacles? Identify. List. Name. What I really need is to have a writing space. How to write in the midst of external stress. How to find the extraordinary in a mundane, day-to-day existence. It is a circular path. I have stood in this place before. Standing for years.
In the cabinets under the bookshelves among the untrashable clutter of the home office, my stacks of black notebooks silently age – curling and yellowing their pages imperceptibly but as surely as time clicks on and on, all the while growing no taller. Stunted. It is not for lack of time. Even now, during my busiest quarter, there are plenty of hours in the day. That is no excuse. And I know I could, if I wanted to, blame it on a profession where creativity has no value. But that is unfair and untrue. My career allows me to keep my personal expressive endeavors entirely separate from my livelihood. My burnout has no effect on my earnings or my job performance. See: compartmentalizing even now. How many posts have I devoted to categorizing my life? Even if there is truth to it, or even if there is some merit in examining one’s existence and ensuring order and meaning in its routines and processes, you still must at some time reach the point of diminishing returns. I am stuck in a muddy pit and, instead of grabbing a rope, have been content to sit and describe the mud. While I starve, the rope dangles right there above my head, well within reach.
There must be a way to jumpstart the growth again. And I am fairly certain the answer is something along the lines of giving up trying to find the right tools, the right mindset or the right voice. Giving up and just jumping in and doing what you have always done… what you used to do without hesitation and without restraint. Giving up and giving in and allowing yourself to be reckless and raw and unedited and piss-poor. Starting. Starting now. Begin.
by doug | January 23rd, 2010 @ 12:12 am
Today I came to the realization, some time between 2:30 pm and 5:45 pm, that one of the major problems that needs to be addressed re: my literary and pictorial creations is that neither my writing nor my photography resemble the literature or the photographs I admire. Not even remotely.
 I blame DeviantART (to which I have recently retreated after a Flickr flirtation that went nowhere, and where I am currently having to re-migrate my older photos so as to have some recent-ish work to show to the critical masses – that I find more photography that I admire on DA may be more a result of site-navigation preference on my part than a failing of what I am sure is a hefty and vibrant Flickr artist community… nevertheless…) for the epiphany’s onset. Upon browsing, my eye and attention is continually drawn to photographs that depict washed out, dreary, hazily-haloed landscapes and unnaturally faded/flawed portraits seemingly beautiful merely by accident but surely concocted purposefully and, well, artfully. Meanwhile, where I can look back at the photos in my online portfolio – a year or so of work, thereabouts – and enjoy them for what they are, they really do not represent what I would ultimately envision my art to be. My photographs remain the experiments of a novice still figuring out what all the pretty buttons on the camera are for. And I am ready for that phase to be over.
Whether that metamorphosis should take the form of learning new, more advanced digital manipulation techniques or of devolving and experimenting with film and development, I really cannot say. One way or another, though, I think we are just about done with the era of the Technicolor flower close-ups.
The same holds for my writing – not that I have been doing a heck of a lot of that lately (intentions, intentions, intentions, etc.). Surveying the past, say, five years of scribbled nonsense, however, what I perceive most clearly is not only a lack of focus and a lack of consistency (both prevalent flaws, mind you), but also an unforgivable lack of growth. Again, my writings do not come close to reflecting what I find most admirable and exciting in the world of literature.
My favorite writers are those who are either masters and lovers of language – Nabokov, Eliot, and more recently for me, DFW – or soul-crushingly sharp observers of humanity – Pessoa, Dostoyevsky and so forth. The point is: I cherish inventiveness, insight and intricate detail. Where is that in my writing? Hell, I signed up for a contest whose very premise was speed over substance. How does that further the skills I care most about?
So, while I must stick to my original goal – to produce and to keep the creative wheels oiled and spinning – I must also remain mindful of whether or not I am making any progress. Whether I am growing artistically. Not that I imagine I could ever construct a poem or a story or compose a photograph that would scrape the ground that those great artists stand on (I do not even really need to publish or sell any of my work… that is the least of my intentions), but I hope that I might be able to look back on these things and see that I worked on moving toward a higher ideal.
Meanwhile, it is tax season.
by doug | December 30th, 2009 @ 6:46 pm
So… I have been at this weblog thing for over a year now, and I am still struggling with getting-started issues. This site has never, ever been fully fleshed out. Here on the longest ‘step 1′ ever, I can only claim to have figured out what this blog is not. For example, this blog is not:
- a political blog. Sad to say. I started this thing as the ’07 presidential primaries were heating up, and I do have strong feelings in regards to social and political and even theological issues. However, a) there are more informed and committed professionals already airing opinions on all topics political. My screeds have never added anything new to the discussion, and b) now I am finding myself disillusioned with the whole affair. Money, and the power it generates, has corrupted everything. No one is immune. The political discussion in the U.S. is dumbed-down and exhausting. Basically, I’m leaving the battle against that to others.
- a health/fitness log. I do need some method of holding myself accountable for maintaining a healthy lifestyle, but this is not the place. Perhaps my wife’s new Wii Fit will serve that purpose. But sharing my weight and exercise habits (or lack thereof) with the rest of the known universe isn’t so much motivating as it is really, really depressing.
- a productivity blog. There are several outstanding bloggers that do this very well. They inspire me to adopt their practices as my own. If something comes along that I find especially useful, I will certainly share it… but I will largely leave it to the innovators and be content to watch from the electronic sidelines.
- a ‘thought dump.’ Let me say: I really love facebook. It is perfect for posting silly rants, overly strong opinions and other miscellany. I like sharing those odd pieces of myself with my 300+ internet "friends." It is a marvel. So I will let facebook be facebook. Everything in its place. The overarching theme that is emerging is: not here.
My website needs to be, and will be, a place for me to express myself creatively. 
My blog is a journal of personal creativity. Where fitness, politics, religion, family life, GTD mentality and internet functions intersect with that creativity, they will occasionally show up here. But, largely, this blog will return to its original purpose at its inception: to chronicle what Barton Fink called "the life of a mind." My ideas regarding what direction my writing or photography will take, or decisions to dabble in other creative pursuits (God help me if I decide to try to paint something again), will be fleshed out here in hopes of highlighting my personal creative processes. Whether that will be useful to anyone is beside the point. Making my blog about something is the main objective here.
My daily snapshots will remain in some form or fashion. The act of cataloging each day that passes has truly served to make me more mindful and reverent of the passage of time. Where keeping a diary or attempting to write one blog post per day might often be overwhelming and sometimes (during tax season, perhaps) impossible, snapping a picture with my mobile phone and taking half a minute to post it on the internet serves just as well as a method of rendering each day unique.
My photography will continue to be featured here. Hopefully I will begin to work with specific projects in mind rather than just taking and posting unrelated pictures at random. The key seems to be finding the right mixture of constraint and freedom.
Additionally, it is my intention to devote much more screen time to my writing – both in poetry and prose. Look. This will not always be good, but I intend to try and craft my words and publish only those works that are complete and deemed ‘worthy’ (by me). There will be branches leaping off of my home page that will link to each of these projects.
So: the blog and the mobile snapshots will represent the process, while the photographs and writings will represent the product. Process and product. Anything that lies outside of those categories is as of this moment disallowed.
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Meanwhile, I am giving myself until the 12:01 AM on January 1, 2010 to get this website and all its pieces in the form it will be in for the remainder of the year. I cannot tell you how many times I have sat down with the intent of writing something and ended up just tinkering with the right way to feed my blog posts to twitter or display a specific font in my page menu. I am not a web designer, nor do I want to be. So, if you log on New Year’s Day, you will see this site in its official 2010 layout. Any further changes will be miniscule or will be placed on the back burner until 2011. 2010 is about creating art, not about creating a web space to display that art.
Now if you will excuse me, I have approximately a day and a half to whip grammaticaster.com into shape. Adieu!
by doug | December 13th, 2009 @ 10:17 pm
weight: 138.4
exercise: 0
blogs written: 0
photographs edited & posted: 0
books read: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (witty, graceful, sad… plot wasn’t what I expected)
my dad: awesome
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The NaNoWriMo’s effect on my creativity was completely opposite from what I had envisioned. It sucked me dry (not in that good way). It is as if I got so bored with writing during the month of November that now I am finding it difficult to jump start that creative engine again. I am currently engaged in an extended, yet mild, brainstorming session to try to make these activities fun or exciting or fulfilling. Otherwise, what is the point? I think I need some additional constraints: a project or series of projects that would incorporate or at least intentionally stimulate both the literary and visual aspects of my artistic self. I’ll keep you posted on what I come up with.
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