Archive

2012

July

• 20 Some of My Best Friends Are Horses
  • One of my favorite posts. All the illustrations were done at the time of writing. This is the future. Another record breaker. At this time, the site gets yet another re-design. The work of that keeps me from posting for a while. I also pick up some free lance web design work.
• 14 Chains of Darkness: The Human Condition
  • I conceive of mixing major posts with minor posts, like this one, short, pungent, and illustrated with one good picture. This one is a hit on StumbleUpon and Facebook. My longer, more wordy posts hit a different segment.
• 10 How to Be an Artist
  • I decide that my posts will be illustrated with original artwork. The result breaks all previous hit records. I have found my voice, and I have found my audience. Guess what? It ain't other bloggers—it's the whole world. I have broken out of the box.
• 04 Blogging About Blogging
  • A deceptive title. I am quite tongue in cheek. This is a deeply philosophic post in an innocuous package. Ricky has learned to wrap his bitter pills in sugar. Lots of page hits, but except for one courageous girl, stunned silence. For the first time, I consider shutting off comments entirely.
• 03 What It's All About
  • I finally say what I'm doing on this blog. It is about what I am doing and thinking. Simple. But there are things I do not say. And I do not talk about everything. I left that part out. Here, too, is a nice picture of one of my bird carvings.

June

• 30 An Image Gallery
  • The image gallery is done. I am populating it with pictures of my work. Inspired by the simplicity of the look of the gallery, I begin to revise the look of this site toward an ever more minimal theme.
• 28 Oak Flamingo
  • This flamingo is a commission for a friend. At this time, I'm working on both my carving and the image gallery for my portfolio. I have a lot of creative energy.
• 27 Carving Away the Days
  • For the first time, I talk about my woodcarving on the blog. I have been carving like mad. It is summer time; school's out. I have time.
• 15 Jane Jacobs
  • I observe a peculiar phenomena. Page hits are up; comments are down. But the comments are happening. They are happening in emails, text messages, Facebook, and Twitter, not on the blog, and it is not just me. The blogging scene has changed. Interesting.
• 12 The Sea Ranch
  • I'm back! Six months later, I see a new light. I am told I need to get my carvings on the web. It's my portfolio. This is what motivates me to blog again. With "The Sea Ranch" came a sea change. I have gone pro.

January

• 01 Forgotten But Not Gone
  • I confess my flakiness. After not posting in over six months, I finally say something. At that time, I am sure I had lost what credibility I had earned.

2011

June

• 24 My Girl, aka "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"
  • Here, even more than a month had gone by. In the mean time, I had been recording a lot of music, but I had not been blogging. Finally, I broke radio silence. This is a pretty cool rendition of a popular folk song with a little bit of back story on the folk tradition behind it. I was not to post again until 2012!

April

• 08 Checking In
  • Bang. Just as quickly as I had become a successful blogger, I was done. My very popularity had left me feeling harried and harassed. So I just stopped posting for a month. This was a typical response to success.

March

• 05 The Show Must Go On, And On, And…
  • I was starting to become quite the popular poet. The podcasting pushed it way up as well. This poem bleeds.

February

• 26 Simple Tools
  • This poem was another hit that I also liked. I introduced my first podcast too! That was fun.
• 22 Some Tanka
  • The form is correct, but I rejected the spirit of Tanka. I still do. I like poems that bleed.
• 19 Darth Vadar Plays a Black Violin
  • Another great title. This is one of my all time favorites. I was figuring out how to have my say and be popular too. It was possible, I saw. This poem still gets lots of hits.
• 18 A Non Poem
  • After my previous post was about as popular as a turd on the dinner table, I took the cue and vented raw emotion. It worked.
• 14 Valentine's Day: A Little About Cupid
  • As expected, the more scholarly, the less popular. Then too, my notion of Romantics as deluded fools never goes over well. :)
• 12 Sunday Photo Challenge
  • At this time, I had completely lost my way. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was cranking out poetry, and I was getting lots of comments. Soothed by the popularity, I kept it up.
• 12 How to Survive as an Artist
  • Part of my frustration with blogging was that my honest work seemed like wasted effort, while my frivolous work is well received. Looking back, I see why I was getting so tired all the time. One might also note that I buried this major post with a poem that same day.
• 07 Breaking the Rules
  • This marks the beginning of a poetry period. My short attention span at that time lent itself to quickly dashed off, entirely non-deliberate poetry.
• 05 Thinking Aloud: A Short, Scary Post
  • If you have read my abstracts below, you will know that I was wrestling with my reasons for blogging, and I was not finding the time it took to do it well. Here, too, express my anti-commercial bias. I question life itself. Interestingly enough, this weird little post holds the record for the most cumulative page views.

January

• 31 Pictures of Pictures
  • Flaky or not, I managed to come up with this story. Probably one of my better posts.
• 30 To Follow or Not to Follow
  • At this time, I had discovered Twitter. The intensity of school was making my attention span short. I was enjoying the short bursts I got on Twitter and dreading the hard work of writing well on a blog. As I said, I was already starting to flake.
• 21 Which Would You Rather Read?
  • This post, I think, marks the time I started to question whether I wanted to blog or not. As I said, writing those reviews left me drained. School was kicking in with considerable force as well. I tried to play this off as others preferring to read something else by introducing the idea of writing a serial novel as something superior, but really, I had lost my way. Nevertheless, there WAS the seed of a good idea here. Should I do an online serial novel? I still ponder that.
• 19 Just Another Day in Paradise
  • My second review. This one went better than the first, but the effort left me exhausted. It was to be my last review, even though I had gotten several other blog authors to agree to be interviewed.
• 18 Yandie, Goddess of pickles
  • My first review. It did not go very well. I think she is still mad at me.
• 17 It's Not About Me: Part II
  • The beginning of an entirely new direction. I decided to do some reviews of blogs I had discovered. In this long post, I compare the seeking of followers to the motivations of church leaders with their congregations. That was clever of me, huh? (I got the idea from the historian Edward Gibbon.)
• 14 It's Not About Me: Part I
  • At this time, I had started to get a lot of comments, and I had started making the rounds to other people's blogs. I was finding their work more interesting than my own, and I thought that was the most honest thing to write about.
• 11 Confessions of an Ex poser
  • A pretty incoherent ramble is how this post looks to me now. Ostensibly, I was talking about Lev Grossman's article on Mark Zuckerberg in Time Magazine, but I managed weave in ideas about private vs. public personas. I was only pretending to be self-critical. Really, I was critiquing others, using Facebook as a template. I would never write a post like this today.
• 10 Why Does This Post Suck?
  • Great title. Sucky post. A common thread to my writing was, "What the hell am I doing?" I was still examining Alan Moore and his work, however, but I wrapped that up in wondering what made a post a bad post according to common rationale.
• 09 Thematic Break
  • A throwaway post that got a lot of attention because of one strategically placed comment on a popular blog.
• 08 Cameras on Every Corner
  • Here, I argue that a loss of privacy is not a terrible concern. It's the waste of money on all that spy equipment and monitoring personnel that bothers me.
• 07 Purity
  • Some thoughts on The Mindscape of Alan Moore. I am in love with his statement, "…in order to be able to make it you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding."
• 06 Shouting Down a Well
  • My first post. Its tone is sad. I wonder about putting anything on the internet at all.