January 2013

2012: The year in review, in photos

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know the drill, 6 years ago I did a post looking back over my previous year by looking through the photos I took and posted online. My thought being, if I’d posted it online it was important enough to remember – so I restricted it to that as opposed to crawling through personal libraries as well. It was cathartic to say the least, so I’ve done it every year since then. (Feel free to take a stroll through my visual time machine… 2007 & 2008 & 2009 & 2010 & 2011). I find it to be kind of wild looking back at a full year in one shot like this, so here we go for 2012….

The first thing I noticed as I began this is that I posted considerably fewer photos to flickr at the beginning of the year than I had previously. I think I was going through some question about the future of the service – I’ve been a long time user but Yahoo! had all but abandoned it and over the years my friends had slowly dropped off as well. That changed by the end of the year with returned enthusiasm from both my friends and Yahoo! but for a good chunk of 2012 I was trying out lots of other photo sharing / storage options and trying to find something that fit. Disappointingly, I don’t even remember everything I tried and thus whatever I might have posted has drifted away to forgotten land. Which is a bummer, and makes me again realize how important flickr has been for me and why I keep using it.

At the same time, I started shooting a lot of photos on film rather than digital, which when you add in developing and scanning times and my own habits of waiting until I had 10 or so rolls to make a trip the lab, means something that happened in January might not have been documented online with my photos until April. It seems like even some digital stuff I shot didn’t end up on line until months later for some reason. Every year that I’ve done this I’ve searched through my archive using the “posted on” date, but this year “taken on” became much more important. But even that is confusing.

Read More

Connections

Sometime in summer, 1991 I guess? I was hanging out at Rob Sexton’s house in Tampa. He’d offered to teach me how to silk screen t-shirts and we’d ended up talking about records. He pulled out a box of I don’t even know what anymore, a stack of 7″s he’d traded for an equal stack of the recently released Slap Of Reality 7″. This was how you sold records then, you’d press 300 and then trade 10-15 at a time to other people for records they released and soon you’d have a mini record store, a distro that you could take around and see off one by one. The records weren’t important, the story was. Rob told me how pissed he was at the guy who sent him the records because he’d shipped the records in a box but hadn’t included any kind of note. In punk rock / hardcore at the time, this was an unparalleled dick move. Who sends an order and doesn’t include a note? That wasn’t punk at all.

It’s funny what sticks with you, but Rob’s reaction that day definitely did and a few years later when I started my own label (Toybox Records, which I shut down around ’97 I think? ’98 maybe.) I took that to heart and went out of my way to include a note, no matter how short – just something personal, in every order I shipped out. It was important. This personal connection we all had with everyone else in the scene, even people we’d never met. There was this thing that tied us all together and we knew it, and a little note in an order, a “thanks, hope you like it” or whatever made all the difference in the world.

This was a long time ago. I communicated with people online via BBS’s and #irc and wouldn’t have my first email address for another 2 or 3 years when I moved to Gainesville and took over my roommate Anatol’s email account because he couldn’t imagine ever having a need for it himself. Anyway, point is back then we wrote real letters to people and when you ordered something getting a note in the package said “you aren’t just a customer, this isn’t just business” and we all knew it.

Read More

Beards

photo

Fucking beards.

I hate that I even have to think about this shit. When I shave I look like I’m 12 and when I don’t shave I look like a submission to homeless or hipster. Googling to try to find out how how I might trim it to give a different result is like a choose your own adventure story in reverse – no matter what question you start with and no matter what links you follow you eventually end up on beards.org which I’m convinced is just a front, a work safe thumbnail porn wankfest for bears. So there’s that. Which isn’t exactly helpful.

And the beard police are so agressive about keeping their numbers up – unless you have a beard and you’ve mentioned considering not having a beard in front of a certain type of bearded dude you can’t imagine the hate glares you get. Like you are letting everyone else down, or breaking your membership vows.

Look, I’ve got nothing against people with beards. I’ve just never been confortable with mine, yet have had one the vast majority of my adult life thanks to being too busy lazy to shave.

On top of that it’s another decision that I have to make but really don’t care about. I hate making decisions where I don’t care about the outcome at all. Can’t I just close my eyes and throw a dart? If only it was that easy.

And no matter what I do, inevitably I’ll run into someone who I haven’t seen in a little while who will start off the conversation with a comment about my face. Yeah, that’s not awkward or anything. Thanks for ensuring crippling self consciousness for the rest of our little chat.

To make this even more fun, thanks to the stupid TSA thinking anyone with a boarding pass is a terrorist I can’t travel with a razor or scissors or anything so I have to build in assumptions of weeks on end with no modifications at all. Totally sucks.

Answers

As far back as I can remember I always felt like everyone around me had it all figured out. I have vivid memories of sitting in class in 4th and 5th grade looking up and down the rows of my classmates, just staring in awe of them all. They knew something I didn’t. Not that I’d missed out on something, I don’t ever recall these feelings being that I was somehow lesser, rather that everyone else was just somehow exceptional. They’d cracked the code somehow – maybe someone slipped them the cheat book – I dunno, but they all knew what was up. I remember feeling pretty lucky to be surrounded by such enlightened people and hoping that some of it would rub off on me. I was generally a quiet kid for most of these years because I spent so much time just watching everyone.

I think I probably felt that I’d also somehow slipped through, because certainly if everyone knew that I didn’t have all the answers as well I wouldn’t be allowed to hang out so naturally I spent a lot of time fearing that my secret would get out. So everyday was kind of a race, could I pick up enough from everyone, fast enough, to keep them all thinking I was their equal?

This hasn’t really changed since then. If we’re friends today know this – I’m positive you have all the life answers figured out and there’s nothing you can say to me that will change my mind.

And I say that fully knowing that none of us have any of this shit figured out.

I know that we’re all making every bit of this up as we go.

I know that, and yet I refuse to accept it. Because I’m constantly impressed and blown away by people around me. I can’t believe the things they pull off. I’m awestruck at their will and determination. I’m beside myself at their gumption – that could only come from being somehow tipped off. They must have a pro account or something.

I’m not saying this to make anyone uncomfortable. We’ll all just keep on going under this same charade, after all it’s worked well for us all this time. I’m just saying it because I’ve been on a plane all day and bounced through too many timezones and am on too much sinus medication so I’m letting my guard down a little. But I’m onto you. All of you.

I always have been.

Anti-Analytics

I turned off all forms of analytics on my blog a long time ago. While knowing the traffic was interesting, it was too easy to dig in and start assessing things. Why is this post getting so much attention, why hasn’t anyone linked to that post. Every time I mention X I get linked from Y. Etc, and then suddenly it’s a game rather than a place I can just spill my thoughts. I always thought of a blog as a place where I can write what I want, how I want, on my own terms. Once I start thinking about what topics “my audience” wants me to write about then I’m no longer calling the shots, I’m catering to someone else. And worse, to someone else I don’t even know.

As my blog isn’t ad driven, I’m not really worried about traffic at all. If I talk about things that are interesting to other people then great, if I don’t then no worries. The point is I have a place to talk about things I want to talk about. Because ideally, if you are reading my blog it’s because you are interested in some of the same topics I am, or at least interested in what I’m interested in. If you are out searching for specific topics only, there are plenty of not-my-blog sources for you to indulge in.

I’ve always liked this about blogs. That by reading someone’s blog you could get to know them to some extent, know a bit about what interests them and what makes them tick. I don’t think you get this with twitter, facebook, instagram or anything like that as those are geared from the beginning to be about publishing to an audience. People frequently share tips about what and how to approach them to gain followers. They aren’t as personal. A blog, a web log if you will, seems to be to be a little more of a direct link to the authors head. That’s what’s always appealed to me about them anyway.

So while I’m back here kicking the dust off things and trying to find my voice again, I’m happy to see folks already responding (both here and elsewhere) but the promise I want to make to everyone is that I’m not going to be strategic in what I write about here. I never have been and I won’t start now. This will be an ongoing glimpse at what is on my head at the time. Different topics will bounce around, sometimes posts will be longer, as with a couple of topics I’m already working on – sometimes shorter, like on days when I’m traveling or offline most of the day. Though I will make the effort to put up something new every day, if I’m going to do this right I think that’s important.

Attachment

My friend Michael wrote a blog post (As an aside, I’m so excited to be writing blog posts linking to friends blog posts again) listing a few specific things you can do to improve your life. It’s a list worth reading just to consider even if you don’t put every suggestion into play. The first one is the thing that really jumped out at me.

Don’t sleep in the same room as your phone.

The oft controversial Tim Ferris suggests something similar in his 4-Hour Workweek, recommending to avoid checking email in the mornings and evenings.

While different specifics, the goal here is the same. Spend the last part of the day and the beginning of the next with the people and environment you’ve chosen to surround yourself with, rather than on the whim of whatever is happening in the rest of the world. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never laid awake at night caught in the refresh loop on my iphone checking email, twitter, tumblr, a few news sites, email, twitter.. etc. Or that I’ve never woken up in the morning and grabbed by phone to see what time it is, and upon leaning it’s 3 hours earlier that I needed to wake up notices I had some new email and some new replies on twitter and then spent the next hour awake in bed on my phone. In fact, I do that several times a week.

Now seems like as good a time as any to give this a shot.