framing a thought

Strangely enough, framing has me feeling less like writing than planting ever did. I mean, tree planting wore me down so much that although I had lots of time to think random bits of material out of the, um, woodwork, I nevertheless just couldn't do it.

Framing for babylon, however, seems to batter my soul into a niggling little speck of darkness. Fortunately for barkingreed, my wrist seems to be protesting violently, so I'll have to find other work - work which could possibly rejuvenate my literary self. I will now commence with the holding of my breath.

la prueba

So this here is my latest painting. It's a test. The question is, when you first saw it, did you think: "Hey, what a huge egg!", or "Hey, what a tiny elephant?" or "Wow, that egg sure is up close." The answer to that question will basically tell you everything you need to know about your personality.

unpopular

You are reading the words of a man whose had a very important part of himself crushed. No, no, no... not my fingers (although, as a new carpenter "building suburbs for Babylon" I have smashed my share of fingers) no, what I am talking about here is my ego.

A while back, this website went kerflooie for around two months. When it was eventually resurrected, the counter dealio that was on there had stopped working. It's been a good while now, so four days ago I went ahead and tacked on google analytics so I could get a feel for what kind of traffic I was looking at, were I to go ahead with my plan of using barkingreed as my primary tool for making a buck or two from my art.

This is the part where my ego got stepped on by a pair of elephant boots. As in, boots that were being worn by an elephant. With a maha-raja on it's back. A fat maha-raja, with three hefty concubines as companions. Basically, before the website tanked for a long time, I was getting anywhere from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand hits a month. Now I'm sitting at a whopping ten to twenty visitors a day.

Is this embarrassing? Should I be telling you this? I feel almost as foolish as I did the first time, when I put the first counter on and realized barkingreed was getting a lot more traffic than I had imagined. It was crippling for my writing, at first. I mean, mom probably made for about half of it, but how was I to account for the rest... total strangers, possibly!?! I'm not good with total strangers. I get nervous, say dumb stuff, dump fruit juice all over the fronts of their blouses and then make it worse by dabbing at the spills with my snotty kerchief. This was not good - not at all.

Nonetheless, I managed. I wrote about what it felt like to suddenly realize that I was the sole editor, author, and artist of a small journal with a respectable readership. It made me a bit more consistent with my writing. It kept me editing and improving. And later, when I found out that those counters are wildly inaccurate, and probably didn't mean that much, I was already in a sort of groove.

Now I'm here on the flip side, feeling a bit like the naked emperor who has just been found out by a little boy. What do I do? I could cower, I suppose - hide my precious bits behind my hands and scuttle towards the nearest hole.

I don't want to do that. I love this site. I love writing, sharing, thinking, improving. I love hearing back from random strangers, folks who tell me that something I wrote or painted or poeticized really meant something to them.

So I will not cower. I will stride on resplendent in nakedness, crowned with nothing but hair and the glory of honest self-exposure. I will walk beneficently through this little crowd of faithful friends, doing regal little hand waves and smiling mysteriously.

Just me. Naked, but real.