Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteEstate: 850-sq.ft., rented.
Gardens and Grounds: 6x9 nominal feet of elevated outdoor container garden complemented, down the hill from main administration, by a gravel track and, separately, a fire road, each terminating at a small sanitation station.
Facilities: Library--2000 volumes; Blu-Ray Theater (7.1 Surround), bar, cabin kitchen, and office.
Tuition: rising.
Orientation: cut the bilge talk and settle down.
I would like to call this my fourth year at "Princedom College," but the truth is that it's my fifth. Having arrived about six months after suffering a fire in another apartment building, but one in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor, I established myself, as it were, by first hammering together 15 O'Sullivan bookcases (don't bother look up that one--the company's gone belly-up with the economy).
The next year with a girlfriend aboard, I replaced a failing computer by building one myself--it's ageing but working fine, and my premise then may apply now: I control its parts and can swap them out or add to them as I see fit.
A year or two later, having stopped dancing (yes, contributing mightily to my motivation in choosing this town for my very own think-tank -- who else's? -- was a bit of "following the bar"), also singing (always flirtatious, that), I came to the conclusion that there was less and less and less of me, and even my Jewish identity, which I had not much embraced across 40 years, would disappear without drastic measures.
Goodbye, girlfriend.
Hello, synagogue.
With an odd misadventure or two, I've awakened in the very best writer/musician/photographer's office and studio (also bar, grill, and home theater) any "creative type" has ever had anywhere, would only that it and I were located in L.A., Manhattan, or San Francisco (or the Hamptons) for just that bit more of realspace business and social opportunity.
Of course, one might turn that minor irritation inside-out by boasting the remarkable solitude afforded by the space.
Then again: as my realspace presence--my presence in the lives of others in immediate surrounds--has all but disappeared, both my cyberpresence and the presence of the world in my space--my head as supported by 850-sq.ft. of appropriate physical plant--have grown immeasurably large, perhaps too much so, for how many others may one personality serve intimately and well? Answer today: unknown.
In any case, if "friends are the family we make", mine now extends from Alexandria, Egypt to Sidney, Australia--much good that does, however, with the flu, ageing in general, the shadow now of leukemia watching over my progress, digress, and regress.
Does one produce an economy from one's desktop as well?
Francis Ford Coppola's "virtual film studio", www.zoetrope.com reminds me that since 2000 I have written 1,052 criticisms of photographs, eleven reviews of screenplays (it takes far more energy to look over a so-so screenplay than it does an okay to not-so-okay photograph), and 12 reviews of short stories.
I've been busy sharing my thoughts at www.modelmayhem.com as well: 5,943 is the post-to-board count over there.
This blog: more than 800 posts . . . .
I fear I might retreat more deeply than I have to date and become quiet for a long time.
(Not a chance)!
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