Shopping the World

I feel guilty when I get lost roving the Internet and checking out the sites that mirror my interests, which are legion! But sailing the ether waves for me is like traveling through security lines, planes, ships, buses and cars. Real time travel might even suffer by comparison for the discomfort it involves!

Visiting other people's websites whets my appetite for creating my own. So far I've finished a third of  David Morris' book on creating a Flash-based site and realizing that by the end of the book I still won't be ready to create my own site. The book only introduces me to what can be done with Flash but not what I want to do.

Nonetheless we dream, I dream, and take one tiny step each day. I have decided not to go back to my lifetime profession and stay instead learning digital imaging and Internet art. I have the time and if I don't produce what I dream of producing the intent is not so much the product as the process. That, I'm afraid, is where I'm at today.

But while quality of life and being able to pursue lifelong dreams at last are increasingly the raison d'être, I don't want to think of myself as a hobbyist. One of these dreams is to learn the business of making money from my interests. For what I do to earn money would indicate a level of mastery that by myself I could not give to my work. Men and women band together not only for the more efficient production of food but, in the modern age, other less material benefits. Money as I learned from Joe Dominguez years ago simply symbolizes effort and time from the finite supply of both that we have. But it is also founded on people willing to use the symbol of what they've earned to acquire what they themselves could not produce but would like to have in their life. Money is desire as much as necessity symbolized in concrete form.

I use the term duende recklessly. I know that in the field of art and intuitive creativity I am a tyro. I look at what others do and I'm humbled, sometimes shamed that I aspire to heights from which they already produce their works. Duende like perfection is a goal, more elevating than death that comes with little effort on our part. It's the effort that makes the aspiration thrilling and worth the ups-and-downs of spirit that taking on the enterprise entails.