Category Archives: Fear & Doubt

Fear & Doubt

Looking back to the Beginning

The coldness is beginning to set in, which indicates that I am coming full circle on the project. It began in the dead of winter and now, as I begin to feel winter come upon me, I realize this project has followed me through a complete cycle of my life. Yesterday I hit three hundred posts through the process of a year. I am beginning to look back through all I have written and created over those three hundred days, for some of the most interesting points to start to somehow work them into the new website. Although I was not sure where I was going in the beginning with this project, I knew I really wanted to go there. Now the goal seems clear and vividly laid out before me. I have never had such clarity in my life. The year began with so much doubt and a real fear of becoming lost or fading into oblivion – the fear of a man dying without ever having accomplished his greatest dream. This project has become the journal of that dream. The daily struggle and exploration in finding myself and the discovery of light, beauty, desire and art. What seemed a daunting task in the beginning now seems to have become a way of existence. I honestly didn’t think I would make it this far. I kind of expected I would end the year in disappointment, having realized what a failure my life had become, and would somehow have to jump off the Madison Street bridge into the cold icy waters in the middle of a cold winter night. But the opposite has now happened. Through the course of this year I have mended all the old wounds and have examined my life in such detail – some of it interesting, some not. I have come to the conclusion that what I have lived and experienced is relatable to so many others I have encountered along the way. I have confronted and made sense of all the nonsense of life amongst the shadows. The new website is really a gift to others who have helped me along this journey. It becomes not just a look at myself, but an examination for others who also live creative lives of desperation. To live in our time and our culture and become a creative soul seems daunting if not near impossible. It seems the world is stacked against us. I am an older man and do not seek fame or glory at this stage in my life, but look for relevance and meaning that has allowed me to live such a daunting existence. Today I feel I’ve crossed into a new arena of my life – one that is filled with possibility and hope and yes, desire. I guess it could be “It’s A Wonderful Life” syndrome – being able to see beyond oneself and find what is truly remarkable about one’s seemingly meager existence. Does everyone look back and say this is the sum of what I have become? I know the struggle is the same for all of us. I guess this is why I am so drawn to art, literature, movies and photography. I see that my seemingly rough life of living on the outside has been extraordinary and filled with a rich wonder. Today I feel lucky.

One Common Place

We have set a target to release the new website for a week from today and we are all working to get things ready to unveil. An excitement is growing within me like I have never quite felt before. The culmination of all our creative efforts is finally coming together in one common place. We have defined and redefined and tested what the process is and have learned from lots of mistakes. And I no longer function as an individual but more as a team. It’s very odd to be able to step outside of myself and begin to look at the creation of a body of work. I know for major artists they always do those sorts of 10-year retrospectives; well this will become the same. This has become of the greatest endeavors of self-examination ever. The Naked Man Project will finally find that exposure I was looking for late in the summer on the European trip. I see that trip as the catalyst that has brought this all to existence. I have recently been reading a book about building findable websites and what makes them successful and see that I have all of the essentials already in place. I now see it has been in place for a long time through the blog, it just needed to be orchestrated to make it more accessible and functional. The key components, I am learning to successful web sites are: staying on topic, filling a niche, is authoritative and certainly passionate, is trustworthy, entertaining and must be appealing to its audience interests. Yet it must be original and maintain the voice of the audience. I think I can safely say that I have met the entire criterion through the blog throughout the year, as so many people have been reading and becoming a part of my world and this project. Now I am totally jacked. I fill like I have finally found my place where I can communicate from my remote little place in the mountains of Western Montana.

I Can Always Sell Matches

Wow it is mid afternoon and I feel like I have been sucked into the world of cyber reality as I am trying to figure out how to put together yet another piece of this mysterious website. My topic of search today has been: “How can I actually protect the images I put on the Internet?” I have completely come up blank. There are no real solutions actually available out there that can or will work. It seem that it mostly comes down to choice of completely marking the images up with some sort of watermark that will completely cover or obstruct the nature of the work or just putting the images out there for free access. I am not over comfortable with either. The nature of artist is free expression of the art or images without obstruction. I would like to be able to market myself somehow, but if most everything is just for free on the Internet then we end up working for nothing and it completely loses it value. What a strange time we live in where modern media is so limitless and expendable. I feel like I am living in a world of constant frustration that I can’t seem to make work and that the only options are a loss on either end. I wish somehow I just had a limitless wealth so that I could just be creative and not have to worry about the possibilities. Am I just two or three steps behind the technological world where I live? It feels most of life has been lived in a world of dying art forms. I was passionate about theater, but in a sense as I entered that world it too was coming to a close. Overall, the next generation is not really interested in such art forms and it seem that fewer and fewer young people are going to such events. Broadway still seems alive and thriving, but the ticket prices have become so hefty that many can no longer attend a show or will save up for one or two during the course of a venture into NYC. There was a time when I would fill every possible slot with a show when I was in the city, often two a day seeing 16 shows within a two-week visit.

Then I moved into the world of my second passion; photography. I believe the downfall of this medium is has been the advent of instant capture, instant see era. Everyone with a cell phone becomes a photographer and it’s instantly on line. I have seen the images from the new I-phones and I have to say they are utterly awesome. You no longer need any kind of training or experience to get really great results and people around the world are able to share your expression within moments. Perhaps this project becomes for naught, and is just a cry in the darkness of its fading history? I guess I am still having a blast in the creative process though most of the time I have no idea where I am heading. I still love theater and the experience of live interaction. I still love photography for the experience of live interaction and the beautiful essence of what lingers in its wake. Perhaps I should just remain in the garden because of my live interaction with nature, but then again it’s also heading to its season of dormancy. What is a girl to do????? One of my favorite scenes in a movie is from Victor/Victoria, where Julie Andrews dress has shrunk from the rain, and it’s the middle of the night, she is at wits end and begins to sob, “What am I going to do?” Robert Preston replies, “Sell matches!” But then again I live in a world of eternal flame and smoking seems to be on the decline.

DENIAL!!!!!!!

A wet, cold, rainy morning, I got up and began making white bean, sausage, mushroom, and leek soup. I felt like I needed some comfort food this morning and am feeling very isolated and alone. Worked turned into I-phone nightmare hell yesterday as we had to follow and provide documentation of every single delivery and had to make multiple attempts until they were all delivered beyond all reasonable effort. I then managed to come home and completely disable the log in and all access to the new site. I was up half the night with Julian trying to regain entry. This morning I am cold, tired and very despondent so making soup seems to be giving me some comfort. I love to cook and am very creative when it comes to the kitchen. I learned to cook from my grandmother out on the ranch. She was very good cook and actually spent several years cooking for the schools. My grandmother Cyr was a genius when it came to blending foods. It always seemed so simple. She and I would always cook up a storm. My mother on the other hand could not cook at all, but then again she didn’t like food and didn’t like to eat. My mother once made chocolate chip cookies so hard that we couldn’t even eat them. My dad and I went down to the river and began skipping them across the water and they skipped too. She caught us doing it and became so furious she never made cookies again.

When I became a freshman in high school in the late 70’s, about the time Star Wars the original movie was released, I wanted to take home economics. I was already a great cook and doing most of the family meals. But, back then it was a very unmanly thing to do. I was the only boy in the entire history of the school to want to take such a class. But I was adamant and persistent and probably could have taught the class as we learned to make cream puffs and Jell-O salads with fruit of course. Hello, why wasn’t my gay bell going off then? Looking back I was totally gay. Why was it that everyone saw it but me? DENIAL!!!!!!!!! Had no idea, I , what it really meant or that a man could actually have sex or even a relationship with another man. Damn, how naive could I be? I became the manager for the school wrestling team and I remember lust and desire growing out of the locker room, but still nothing. A world of perfection designed for a kid like me and yet no ding, ding, ding. DENIAL!!!!!!!! Just a lot of spoiling the sheets and alone time in the last stall in the bathroom when no one was around. I just needed a role model and not just sneaking off to find my mother’s Playgirl Magazines hidden under her side of the mattress, and I don’t even know how I knew that???? It’s funny and how curious times in our lives become, for something that is so organic and obvious that we just can’t see within ourselves. And people still don’t think we are born this way. Hello, as a kid it doesn’t seem to be an option by choice, but a struggle for resistance. I drove my brother, a year younger out into the country, to get laid for this first time, and waited in the car all the two minutes it took to happen, but for me there was nothing? Damn, DENIAL!!!!!! I cured the fact that I just could not be normal. More time spent alone in the shed behind the house thinking about what I desired and wanted, fearful, lusting, loathing, longing, desperately trying to discover the missing link. At least this has cheered me up this morning and I can laugh thinking back and I get up to stir my big pot of soup.

The Techno Gods Must be Crazy

I am caught in the frustration of technology, banging my head against the wall, unable to move forward or backwards. I keep wondering what I have I gotten myself into and why can’t I seem to gain control of it. Why is it, our worlds are beginning to exist and rely so heavily on technology? When a few minor changes can affect your whole mode of operation and shut you down for days. For most of us it’s beyond our comprehension as to how it functions and we don’t even know how to approach the solution. Granted, it gets better each day, but still the simplest things can become major roadblocks that seem insurmountable and can consume hours and days of your time. I have a great respect and diligently try to understand the world that surrounds me and within which I exist. I have been learning this Joomla program for 6 weeks now working on this new site. It’s brilliant the way it functions and the concept of how you interact with it. It very simple, this is why I have chose it. It looks incredible. We have been building the galleries and are beginning to fine tune it. I now know this program inside and out, and can make the navigation through it quickly but for some reason, things have been reset beyond our perimeters and have suddenly brought the whole project to a halt and have made it non functional today. It doesn’t seem to be the site at all or within the site, but the server or person who controls the server who is making adjustments or changes that impact its functionality. Do I try to find a new server and begin again? We have about 800 pages built, is it possible to transfer all the work we have done? Do we have to just chalk up what we have done to a bad learning experience and move on? Or do we just try to muddle our way through the process and see if it can somehow become resolved? Yes, I know it’s time to take a deep breath, put the gun down and step away from it. It’s all just a matter of wading our way through the process. Looking back, I began this year the very first week of this project with a hard drive meltdown on my laptop and I cursed the techno gods, then there was the midyear crisis of being deactivated from Facebook for a week. I did overcome it. As I know I will overcome this too, but damn it’s sure frustrating being helpless in a vast world that rules our existence.