YU AND ME UNDER THE BLOSSOMING APPLE TREE   OLYMPIA 1995

Sorry about the title of this one Tae. I had to do it.

If you enjoy this blog you might want to thank my old friend Tae Won Yu the next time you see him because he’s the one who convinced me to get started doing it. If you must thank me, you can save your breath and send some cold hard cash my way via the Paypal button above.

So far I’ve given all the money that’s been donated to other worthy causes. It’s all part of what I call my ”pay-it-forward plan to stay broke forever”. Yes, I’m crazy and thank you very much!

I’d like to thank Tae myself, and also my friends Tobi Vail and John Goff who had both  suggested on different occasions that I ought to share my story in a public way sometime. I’m grateful to them for getting the idea of writing rattling around in my head because now that I’m doing it this project has turned out to be something of a revelatory experience for me in a few different and powerful ways. 

The first and most immediate thing I’ve learned by doing it is that I like to write. I didn’t really know this before. Almost all the writing experiences I’ve had in the last 15 years have taken place either within an academic or art professional context and while those experiences convinced me that I was capable of writing they did little to make me like writing. As everyone knows being capable of doing something and actually enjoying doing it are two completely different things.

Don’t get me wrong, I love writing grants (and not getting them) as much as the next guy, and artist statements are certainly helpful if you want to take all the pesky magic out of the mystery of creative endeavor by analyzing it to death. Writing short bios for an artist’s press release is one of the best forums I know of for condensing the infinite fractal experience of a life wildly lived into several easily ignored paragraphs, and college writing assignments have a long, illustrious reputation for producing some of literature’s greatest…bibliographies. 

I’m being silly about it of course and I’m glad to have been a part of these lineages of wordsmithery. Those writing tasks are all unavoidable, practical exercises that are part and parcel to the field I’ve found myself struggling in. I probably could’ve made some of them into something great if I’d applied myself and tried harder. Who knows maybe some of them were okay. I did get good grades in college but I still haven’t ever won a grant! 

For me the difference between that kind of writing and this kind of writing has to do with the storytelling aspect of it. This stuff doesn’t write itself but it feels like it does a lot of the time.  There is a fun, flowing quality to it and that’s enough to keep me going.

Another meaningful thing I’ve discovered while working on this blog is that I have something to say. I have some stories to tell and some insights that are worth sharing. This understanding had eluded me until now. Maybe I needed to reach some critical mass of pent-up narrative pressure before the dam could burst.

It could be that for whatever reason I just decided now is as good a time as any to let someone else, and maybe most importantly myself, in on the secret: my life has been interesting. It has been hyper non-linear, almost totally devoid of anything resembling a plan, weird as f-ck, financially ridiculous, trippy as a trippy hippie, and a completely intuitive exploration of the limits of human stamina to withstand the pressures of uncertainty, frustration, and bewilderment.

The madness of it all has bit me on the tail so many times I’m surprised it hasn’t been gnawed clean off but at least it hasn’t been boring. I am very lucky to have survived it all mentally and physically intact. It should be said I only did so with the help, love, and companionship of an army of angels, deities, and heroes…my family and friends. I love you all!

I have done a lot of sh-t. I’ve seen a lot of sh-t. I’ve known a lot of people. I’ve given it all great consideration and in doing so I’ve arrived at a few conclusions and I’ve been confronted with a hell of a lot more questions. My conclusions are living, breathing, hard-won works of art that have a life of their own and an innate desire to fly the coop. My questions, like almost all questions, are inherently worth asking.

So that’s what I’m doing here: asking, telling, listening and relating.

I kept journals for many years starting in my late teens, through my twenties, and into my early thirties. I wrote all kinds of stuff, boring minutiae, poetry, dreams I remembered, to do lists and anything and everything else. I don’t know why I stopped exactly, I probably just got sick of writing similar things for the same audience of one over and over. For whatever reason, I just outgrew the process somewhere along the line. Maybe journaling didn’t die at all, it just morphed into my current practice of sketchbookeeping.  

One of the things I dig about this web-centric  “bioblographical”  writing are all the things it isn’t. It’s not a bunch of illegible words written in blue ink that will only get musty while taking up space in the attic until  the day they’re either read or tossed out after I’m dead and gone. This isn’t an email or a letter to a friend and it isn’t a wisp of conversation floating around in a coffee shop either.

This is a public record, an account, a distillation of my experience, a love letter to my past, present, and future, a plea for forgiveness, a chance to brag a little, a chance to give some shout outs to some deserving folks and ultimately it’s a message in a bottle addressed to a mystery reader. 

Sometimes I imagine I’m tossing that bottle into cyberspace but then I realize I’m really just putting this stuff out in front of your eyes and my eyes because it feels right and because I can. Like all art forms with any vitality, its a reaching in as a means of reaching out.

Thanks so much for reading!

This photo of Tae and I was probably taken around 1995. The two of us are crouched under the blossoming apple tree in Calvin Johnson’s front yard in Olympia, WA. I lived at Calvin’s house two different times in the 90’s and it’s a place I love very much. For all you rock trivia nerds, this apple tree is the same one Beck is swinging from on the back cover photo of his One Foot in the Grave L.P. He recorded that record in the basement of the house while I was living there in 1993-4. I did an interview with him when he was staying with us but I never got around to publishing it. If I can find the that tape maybe I’ll transcribe it and make that a future post.

Photo of Tae Won Yu and myself in front of the apple tree in Calvin Johnson’s front yard.