It's difficult, you see: Seattle, for example, is filled with people who are very, very good at what they do--people who know what picante sauce should taste like, as it were. I'm thinking of the teachers of theatre and dance that circulate around Capitol Hill: intense, passionate teachers who have confidence in the power and pleasure of art and who have a rich lexicon of techniques for imparting an ability to work in their respective media.

Elsewhere, there might not be such people. Missoula, MT, for example. But elsewhere there might be excellent teachers for my chosen field, the one to which I am called: the abstract study of information processes.

This is my dilemma, for it seems tha as an artist, one's substrate is life, people, the arc and the texture of human experience, and, well, being. It can be more abstract, of course; it can be a purely social sport, and so on, but the most interesting objects for me are the ones that illuminate--by however obtuse, mysterious, or tangential a process--the life and experience in which I, against my better judgement, continue to immerse myself each day. Needless to say, this should be an endlessly valuable pursuit, making such objects.

But as a technologist, which I am, I make objects which have a more direct use, objects which, nonetheless, shall change the world, just because of their use, their convenience, their cost (low, one hopes); when I sit down to work, I easily lay aside all my relationships, all my worries, all my loves and my hates, all the minute struggles for power my world keeps generating. As some would have it, I leave my self at the door. But certainly my self, one of my selves, is ever-present—especially present—when I'm working: my desires (for clarity, for resolution, for expressibility, for power of a sort) are there, my fears too, trembling behind me (of failure, of lack of focus, of inefficiency, of inspiration's distant call).

My artistic mentors hold a proud, smug look that says I ought to abandon this "impersonal" stuff, and dwell in the world of relationships, characters, gestures, actions, all day long. I want to join them: I want to be the sort of holy man that captures each glance, each soup bowl, each fierce denial and each protective embrace, captures it, alters, intensifies, and recombines it, thus elaborating a portrait of experience, of suchness, a diagram of the forces that make up life—and a story that might inspire its audience to reach higher and do more with its lives, to once again make others' lives more beautiful—and how more beautiful?

Through structures, no doubt: through LED installations, more powerful coffee presses, more tolerable highways, cleaner cars; faster, clearer communication (each to each).

At least, that's what would beautify mine.