The times and life

This has happened so often it’s almost routine. Someone comes into my life in an unexpected way, something cool start up, we start collaborating on ideas, and just when things are about to take off, it falls apart. If you only knew how often this has happened, how close I’ve come to getting something great going, only to have the wheels fall off right at the starting line.  It’s laughable, it has to be laughed at, because it’s so absurd, and I’m tired of crying over what could have been, what might have been.

The latest Thing that came along was exciting,  it was about to be a life changing gig. I can’t talk about any of it due to a non disclosure agreement that was signed. The upside- I sold a piece of artwork outright, with all reproduction rights forever. In return, I was able to buy a computer I’ve only dreamed of for many, many years. I have a shiny new quad core machine that can grind out artwork so fast it’s scary. It’s allowing me to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so now I’m hand rolling high resolution 1080P fractal animations.  The previous computer would take around 2-6 hours per frame to render. This machine can render those same frames in around 20 minutes a frame. And cooler- I can run 3 instances of the software needed to render, so I can render THREE animation frame sets at the same time. And I can still open and work with other programs at the same time, 8 gigs of ram is a glorious thing.

The person I’d teamed up with has vanished without a trace. I haven’t heard back since the first of the year, and there was a mention in the last email that they were going to the doctor to get a heart valve issue checked out. Since then, all emails have gone unanswered. I’m quite concerned about their health, I’m surprised no one’s dropped me an email to tell me what’s going on. I hope it’s just a temporary thing and they’ll be back in touch soon.

But- if nothing further happens, well, I can deal with it. I’m looking at it as a wonderful thing, that a patron of the arts came along, and was able to provide me with the tools I’ve sorely needed for a long, long time, and for that, I’m grateful. It’s allowed me to take my art to a new level, to finally be able to create things I’ve only dreamed of all these years. But I am sad to have lost track of my partner like this, as what was being planned was going to be mighty spectacular and cool.

People come into your life for a reason, and they leave when whatever it was they were there to do is finished. I need to figure out how to accept this without questioning it.

Bipolar Disorder can really, really, really suck the fun out of life. A few days ago, I cycled from middle of the road world to a bad, hard core manic wall slam, and back, within about a 5 hour span. I’m still wiped out from it. I rarely get manic, I usually get highly agitated and irritable, but I don’t get the typical manic thing. It’s usually internalized and it doesn’t manifest itself for others to see. But this last bout, man.. my hands were shaking, I was doing crazy hard body rushes from it, waves of manic spazzitude washing over me.

I cycle way too fast. I do in hours what most manic depressives do over the course of months, or weeks. By the time I figure out what’s happening to me, I’m flying towards the other direction. It’s exhausting. But it makes me who I am, there’s not much I can do besides taking my happy little pills and riding it out. But there are days it’s hard to convince myself that this is just lies my brain is telling me, it’s not real, none of it is real, it’s all the result of bad chemical balances, it’s bad, shorted out wiring in my head that makes me feel this lousy. But that doesn’t diminish the impact it makes on your life, and those around me, when a bad day hits.

It’s a really stupid thing to have to deal with. And in the last hour, I started to feel manic waves starting to wash over me again.  I’m going to try to crawl into bed now, before it roars to full volume, and sleep through it. Hopefully I’ll wake up without it hanging over my head. What a life..

During the winter, I grind to a halt. My body goes into a bad state, arthritis and stuff just gets nasty this time of year. My online life does the same, it slows down, the holidays are usually hectic and I get lost for a while. It was a very low key Christmas this year, but as the years go by, that suits me just fine.

We have a brand new president, and the guy, his wife, and his kids are cool. What a refreshing change of pace, a guy I feel comfortable, a guy I feel I can trust, a guy that’s walking the walk, a guy that’s breaking down the barriers of business as usual in DC. I love it, I’m glad he’s in charge, I can’t bear to think of McCain and Palin muddling and bluffing their way through what this country is facing. Barack must be nuts to take on the job he’s tackling. That’s a hell of a man that is willing to face such insane obstacles.

It’s been a bad week, my sister has been hospitalized and is fighting for her life, and it’s not looking good. What makes this more difficult is that what’s left of my family are all in California, and I’m in East Tennessee. I can’t travel via airplane due to medical stuff, riding in a car that long is out of the question, and a hospital is filled with sick people and diseases, which is the last thing I should expose myself to.  So I’m trying to get through all of this via random phone calls day and night, at all hours. We’re all trying to get through this as best we can, but it’s been rough, to say the least.  Being the oldest of 4 kids, it’s sort of my job to be there during a crisis, especially one like this. But it’s just not possible to be there, and that’s hard to swallow.

I’m working on some art projects, a new set of animated fractal videos to be marketed as relaxation or meditation videos, as I’m going to record a music track for them with the midi keyboard I bought a few months ago. I’m going to send a couple out to The Square Room on Market Square in Knoxville, so they can use them to project onto the big screens and backdrop behind the stage of this new music venue.

I’m also working on releasing a CD of my artwork to be used for computer screen wallpaper, or in digital picture frames. They’re being rendered in a wide format, so they’ll fit nicely onto laptop screens or the big monster monitors some people have. I’ve been rendering thousands of pieces of artwork for over a year now, Frankenputer in the corner has been rendering day and night rendering large artwork.

I need to do another show for 2009, so I’m taking stock of where I might be able to do a show without paying a lot of money to hang on the gallery walls. Last show left me $100.00 poorer to hang for a month, and I had zero sales. It’s not good business when things don’t pan out like this.  I’m going to make a pitch to a gallery that I enjoy, and seeing if I can do a solo show. I’ve got more than enough framed and finished artwork to do a solo show, and it’d be cool to see it all in one place.