Ten Years Old

My youngest has passed a milestone: ten years old. It makes me feel old but also very thankful for what I have. It was a day spent on the beach at Lincoln Park in West Seattle, with a small, eclectic group of boys, with Tom as the very rare center of attention. He had fun. It was one of those moments that you realize that the big pay off to life is happening right in front of you. For all the logistical planning that life consists of (or avoidance of planning in my case) it is really all camouflage to the real beauty and and joy that is happening all around.

I can't help remembering that ten is the age I was when my dad died, and how that shaped most of my view on everything, and how really little you still are when you are ten. Naturally my superstitious side sees portentous omens in seeing my young son at ten and me at 52, seeing parallels and ghosts in the shadows. Generally I think such thoughts are complete crap, but there is a willful desire to connect the dots into recognizable patterns. I firmly resolve to break that pattern and live to be old enough to be a total burden to my kids.

Sending the first born to the middle kingdom.

Ned goes to China for two weeks.

Update: He had a good time. He is a man of few words.

More Graffiti War Update

It's been a while. This now confounds the skate park pot smokers. What it lacks in execution it makes up for in vague and joyless messaging.

My sixteen year old son came with me on this adventure.  Is it sad or encouraging that he is willing to engage in semi-illegal shenanigans with his 52 year old dad?

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/06/graffiti-war.html

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/10/graffiti-war-update.html

http://evaporationofjim.blogspot.com/2012/10/graffiti-war-3.html

Sleepwalking through my middle age.

Months go by. A week seems like  an hour. I am generally rudderless and without any plan for my life. While many people might find that refreshing, I have become most dissatisfied.  I can not find the fucking bootstraps upon which I should be pulling myself up by. It has become increasingly difficult to accomplish anything more than looking out the window. These being my prime earning years that would seem to be a poor choice. Business has been slow, but occasionally interesting. Sports figures and people of merit, recorded by the Gates Foundation (Kofi Annan, and others). But the money has slowed to a trickle. Normally I would welcome such a dry spell because I could paint, but that has of course seemed like too much of a commitment. I could also spend time with the kids, but they seem less interested in actually doing anything than in their electronic heroin screens. I have painted. More strange science fiction covers, and a painting I have been working on for a couple of years of a particularly bad dream I once had.  I have also been working on a novel called "Chronic Yard Sale", and have egoistically started on a cover painting for that. So that is the last several months in a nutshell. Yea me.

Trembling before the plow.

"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." 

Non-triumphant return from non-conquest of Guatemala

I spent a week in Guatemala.  As a first worlder, secure in my knowledge that my needs are many and my appetite vast, I witnessed, however briefly, just how the other nine tenths of the planet lives and was momentarily knocked off balance. Being an audio guy means I do not speak, lest I ruin a take or change the outcome of how a scene takes shape. Unfortunately that becomes how I also view the world; as a detached observer, somewhat less passionately than those in participation. It was hard not to see what was going on and want to help. We were shooting a team from Providence hospitals putting in cook stoves in the homes of indigenous Mayan people of central Guatemala because their traditional fire benches cause respiratory infection in their children.  The houses are small- some as small as 10' x 14'- and house sometimes three generations on dirt floors, with no water or electricity (though many do have some electricity) In a way the mission is a fake: the villagers do not need North Americans to put in their stoves- they are intelligent and capable people and could easily do it them selves- the crew from Seattle found that out quickly. The reason they need North Americans there is to experience the poverty and inequity first hand and then go home and try and do something about it. I very much want my kids to do this and see that the world is not just about adequate wi-fi connection. Guatemala is the destination of numerous charitable missions from the developed world and it needs them desperately. It is however becoming increasingly dependent on them. The clinic we shot, who bring teams of surgeons down from the states to do marathon surgery in their two affiliated hospitals, has almost inadvertently become the 3rd largest healthcare provider in Guatemala, a country of 14 million people.  There are many, many problems crime there: drug and gun running, disease, corruption and most visible, it is a police state  with every corner patrolled by either a army unit of 19 year olds with AK 47s or  rent-a-security patrolman with a ubiquitous silver, pistol gripped shotgun at every bank, pharmacy or fast food restaurant. There are also many American missionary Guatemala junkies who are like a woman who marries a man and wants to change him in order to "fix" him, but is always disappointed that he never changes, but keeps trying because, he would be so perfect if it worked.

A hundred inconsequential adventures.

Many things. All of them uninteresting in the aggregate. Shoots and work and discussions and an unending stream of first world problems all of which add up to the fact I have been busy and mildly disturbed by 21st century life. I am going to Guatemala for a week at the end of February.