It will be a glorious miracle if I can make it to the grave without first losing my grip to self-induced dementia.

2012 is the year of management, thus I have proclaimed, so 2012 will be the year of constantly asking myself per Drucker’s instruction, is this really an effective use of my time for my priorities as they stand? I crow desperately that I must find recognition in my photography, and that will not happen until I have attained the level of mastery capable of laying the cultured masses to waste with the sheer power that elusive power, ART. But ah, from so many ill-conceived plans is born the mortal misery of mankind. I can’t even sit down for ten minutes and concentrate on a single train of thought for what I want to accomplish.

Perhaps this is the cause of all my trouble, over-saturation of information has broken my frail mind and nothing of any substance remains. At the very least I know that I have been writing less and less over the past few years, partially because my philosophy of media creation has been eclipsed by media consumption in the panicked search for validation. The path to success lies through the accruing of endless knowledge, everything from processor cache sizes to the jabberings of a hundred housewives.

I need focus, but one thing that is quite clear is that as Autumn Tactics celebrates its 10th anniversary it may very well be its last.

Art took a serious nosedive as well, unfortunately. When it came time to choose a photograph for my annual New Year’s card, I found I only had five shoots on file to pick from. There is film not yet scanned, but this is a dramatic regression from my peak years of shooting, as well as exhibitions. By chance I squeezed a small contribution to an exhibition in November as an invited artist, but the utter lack of creativity (and coupled with it my most dedicated working year to date), is something I don’t want to repeat. While I grew stronger in the body and in the heart, my soul was nearly choked out from a long march to the end of a multi-year project at work. I think my values have changed, and that’s going to alter the course of my life in 2012.

So, in short I am thankful for love, and thankful for health. I’m thankful to see the horizon of opportunities laying before me. As usual, I’ve realized that the motivation I need to grow is going to have to come from within, I’ve grown too jaded pouring my heart into neighboring fields that lay barren.

2012 will be the year of the body, and from the strength of the flesh will come the energy I need to create something bolder and more true than I’ve ever set out to. Here’s to 2012, the year for me and my love.

Wishing you the year to find your dreams,
Me

What is it that I want from life? How do I want to spend my time? As a craftsman? A teacher? Or an artist?

Perhaps it is not coincidence that leader didn’t come up.

So the construction continues, and on those new, pristine channels my consciousness glides over, I look at the world around me without judgement, but aceeptance, and celebration.  Here’s to investing more of my mental budget to transportation.

Physical growth is possible largely due to physical factors.  So is emotional growth based on emotional factors?  From my experience it seems like dramatic change prompts growth, however this may only be as the change is memorable, so the events immediately afterwards tend to be catalogued with more scrutiny.  Am I able to love as I do now because of thirty years of slow, accumulated caring?  Could I have realized these things any sooner if I had diverted more resources to the cause?  If that is the case, then we do have direct control over how growth as human beings.  Our free will permits us the opportunity to optimize this equation.  So it is quite true that a man is best judged not by what he has, but how he spends his time.

This is another thing I mean to understand more fully in my heart.  If I did there would be much less guilt in my life, and much more satisfaction.  Thanks to the powers that gave me the conscience to realize this.

It’s a little bit like being on a mild depressant, novel at first in the unique perspective you gain temporarily– walking straight up, your focus drifting vapidly between objects in the mid to far distance.  There is an odd sense of calm unbefitting of such a tragic erosion or one’s most precious resource, time.

Everything outside of work is sacred, and the slightest hint of compassion almost drives you to tears.  It makes me wonder what kind of man I am to live like this.

To the artist I hope to find something beautiful and more significant than all the hours in and out of the office I spend worrying about that kind of nonsense.

To loving the rocking of a train, the dew that collects in the backs of my elbows, to some kind of magic always around me that I am too foolish to see.  To finding some meaning and something truly worth investing in.

I didn’t really plan on things changing this fast, but they are. It’s a big change, so naturally I’m nervous. I’d probably be a fool if I wasn’t. Well, I’m a fool anyway but that’s beside the point.

Tomorrow I’m going to take my driving test. America doesn’t have an agreement with Japan like most industrialized nations that permits the simple conversion of a license. I’ve been talking about making this change for years, but it all came together in the last three weeks. Now I just have to pass the test, which is fabled among expatriates for its difficulty.

Bigger than this is that today it was also decided that I’m leaving Shibuya, my beloved home of eight years. Eight years of living in the shadow of the greatest metropolitan center in the world. Eight years of living alone, returning home each day after a long battle at work to spend a few humble hours in quiet. Eight years of making selfish decisions solely for my own comfort. Eight years of bachelorhood.

A new chapter begins June 14th, a new chapter of no longer running around with the freedom to do solely as I please with no one to answer to. A new chapter where I discover myself from learning about someone else. A new chapter where my worth is more than just what I can accomplish with my own two hands.

For a person who has spent so much of his life planning, waiting, and drawing up diagrams to explain it all, in the end the biggest changes are made not with the mind, but with the heart.

So I sit on the sofa, alone, in my quiet. With a microbrew in my hand and Music for Airports on the Hi-Fi, I start the goodbyes to the decade of my mind, before I start the welcomes to a decade of my heart.

There are many solutions to any one problem. Ultimately it comes down to a matter of cost, which is a subset of a matter of will. If only will were infinite and nor organic, then life would be simple. But will is a muscle that must be trained. To be precise it is the only muscle that really requires training. When will is supple, everything else falls into place.

I’ve thought, and thought, and thought about it, and I’m now at the point where the thinking gives way to doing. The kind of doing that gives way to done.

I don’t care what happens tomorrow because tonight is all the belief I need to live forever.

Over time I began to find my place, through the kindness of others and the occasional burst of learning from my own stubborn demands that the world fit my narrow-minded vision of right and wrong. I moved from writing about stray cats and working on weekends to endless, repeated praise for trance music and what I quaintly cherished as community. Then at some point I decided to start doing something public with my photography, whether people recognized me for it or not, and thus we arrived at end of the decade. In the time since ubiquitous computing (to use a word that was en vogue with SIGCHI when I was in college), the fragmentation of platforms, portals, and people has made it harder and harder to be noticed, with each microtransaction of communication becoming far and far less meaningful, any rare original thought swallowed in a sea of chaff.

Sheepishly I now realize that I’ve probably driven away the three or four actual people I had reading this public journal with the advent of my adoption of that watered-down sinkhole of information exchange Facebook. I say so much more often so much less, that it leads me to wonder in twenty years’ time will my children find interest in reading my journal or my tweets? The answer is probably neither, but just the same I’m glad I took the time to sit down and actually think about what I was doing before six months went by and I was scratching my head why 2011 felt so much more empty than any of the other years in recent past.

It’s most likely not a coincidence that the speed and density of my current background music, The Plateaux of Mirror, is likely nearly half that of the floor-rattling trance I usually have on at this time of night. Thank you Mr. Eno for helping me collect my thoughts and appreciate the last forty minutes a little more.

Now the real irony is I started this entry meaning to write about love… but there we have it, the attention span of mankind pared to a millisecond.