PerpetualPunster

I've been in a creative rut for a few months now and I need to get off dead-center. Figured I'd spruce up this place a little bit with a new name and maybe upload some new photos, poetry or short stories. We'll see what comes of it.

Well, "Perpetual Punster" isn't a new name. It was my nickname in high school and college. I've just never used it online before.

Technically I'm holding down three jobs right now.  A full-time and two work-at-home-in-the-evening jobs.  And none of them are what I want to do with my life.

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living." ~ Joseph Campbell

I've known those words for two decades, and still here I am on a path that is not my own.

It's like Gandhi said, who was basically quoting Jesus, "When you know what is good, how can you do anything else?"

In the end you either work for other people, or you work for yourself.  You either find a job, or make one for yourself.

It may just be the root beer talking here, but, why the hell am I working at making other people rich?  How many of us will die having spent our lives making someone else rich?

That's not to say that our goal should be to make ourselves rich or wealthy.

I just don't think the legacy of our existence should be to make others rich and teaching our children to grow to also have a legacy of working at making others rich.

Like Andy said in the Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living, or get busy dying."

I've spent years dying, it's time to start living.

Now…if I can just get my head out of my ass and get on with life.

During the 3rd annual Reedley Railfest on October 13 & 14 I took approximately 1000 photographs.  About 12 gigs worth on my D80 in the RAW setting.

Of those I transfered 840 into my computer.  From that I need to cull the herd down to about 300 for general distribution to the crew and those to brought equipment.  I'll post on here the few that will be available to the general public.

Its been a week since the even and I figure it'll take me another week to get through all the photos.

I'm tired, but happy.

Tortured everyone of them are.  By mother, by father, by guilt, by peers, by golly.

The so called "goths" are the worst of the lot.  So many I have known and so intelligent they tend to be.  They wear their pain on their body and silently scream out to the world in the bold color of blackness.  The prision of their intelligence tends to make them a student of all and the master of none.

Painters pains tend to be subtle and sub-surface only exploding on canvas.  Sure they sometimes get in arguments and cut off their ears, and sometimes are struck with the vision of drawing people using cubes mixed with other primitve shapes.  Though generally the therapy to their pain is to find an essence, grab onto it, and put it into a medium that delights the eye.

Photographers are the most obsessive as they can carry their canvas, easels and pallet in one hand where ever they go.  Constantly their eyes are drawn to shadows and unearthly shapes of light.  Never more than half present at any given moment as their minds search for some missing element in their minds to photograph.  They train themselves to step back from reality to give room for their objective eyes.

Writers are nasty people.  Constantly they examine the human condition, striving to find the flaws that make us what we are.  They make bold assumptions and since it's their writing they make themselves right even it they are truly wrong.  Their therapy is to escape the mortal bindings.  They create the people they want to talk with and describe the surroundings in which the meal is to be had over which the conversation will be held.  Aloof at best, they hover just above the photographer.  Their pain is directed at their blank sheets of canvas like a painter.  The best know a little of everything yet totally lack the intelligence of the Goth.  For if they were as intelligent as Goths they would be one, and not be a writer.

Without the pains of this world there would be no art.  There would be no emotion.  There would be no color nor shades of gray.  Happyness is always white and sadness is always black.  Pain is the transistion between the two, it is the shadows and sublties of life.  Welcome pain.  Accept pain.  Deal with pain.  Endure pain. Survive pain.  Always remeber that you control your pain, no one else.