Vin cent

In my quest for a ideal existence I sometimes need to be reminded of this simple thought: Doing nothing is ok.

You don’t have to go anywhere, or do anything

You don’t need to enroll in a workshop to go do nothing You don’t need to buy tickets to a festival, and wait all year, to go do nothing You don’t have to fly to India, find a guru to do nothing You don’t have to go to a bar and get wasted to do nothing with your night You don’t have to go to a movie to sit in one place for 2 hours

You can do it now. Doing nothing is easy, free, and for the productivity minded, a bonus side-effect is you are left replenished and able to be MORE productive after doing nothing.

So really doing nothing is something. Something special. Something worth doing.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 8 View comments 12/28/11 — 9:52pm Filed under: #tts

I just thought of something

So I don’t write publicly much partly because I don’t want my thoughts to be immortalized online forever. Even if no one really notices or care, the fact that thoughts are out there means someday they could come back to haunt me. Or to help me…

Anyway, Since this is a blog and I’m torn about posting in blogs, I figure this is a good place to muse about such a topic. And maybe this newer blogging generation of tumblr will have some insights (so feel free to comment away).

The prose and cons of 1 blog for all, and posts lasting forever.

I like the idea of having one place to put all thoughts and having tags give distinct views as desired (photos, code, music, words are a couple). This way you give one link say, ‘http://blog.vincentcharles.com/tagged/tts’ and that is treated as the entire website. But it’s not it’s own site, one can easily look at everything. Is that good? Sometimes. I’d argue it’s good in some directions but not others. Example if one is looking at a personal site it would make sense to give links to more professional things like a resume etc. But if you want to give a prospective employer your resume it might not be a good idea for them to easily be able to see your photos of that party where you were puking all over the toilet at 4am. “I’m very responsible, dependable, reliable….burp.”

So a directed graph is good, maybe. [EDIT: this can be done by customizing my template: just show nothing on the homepage, only give out links to tags, and remove the ‘related tags’ section from each page’. There’s probably more to it than that but that’d be where I’d/I’ll start]

Now I’m losing patience so I’m moving on to the next topic. Should blog posts last forever? One beautiful thing of things like a wall or stream (on fb, twitter, g+ etc) is that the thoughts are very recent. Passing thoughts that can easily be read are very real to the person that posted them. When they fall off the wall, no one really reads them, they are still there tho…

So what I suggest is maybe having an expiration date on all blog posts by default. This post will stay on the live site for 3 weeks or while it’s one of the 10 most recent posts. As soon as post 11 comes along it will be bumped off into ‘private’ status. Not deleted because of course I want to keep my thoughts around for myself forever, but out of the public domain unless I explicitly say (at that time) actually this post is good for another 3 weeks or 10 posts) maybe you’ll say just leave it on forever. This post is timeless, for me.

These days we have so many pre-made platforms for doing stuff, sometimes entire new companies are founded on taking the same platform but framing it, or setting up their own set of arbitrary constraints that then give life to an entirely new form of expression and media.

Anyway, I’m toying with that idea. My hopes are that it will allow me to post more frequently because I know I won’t be held accountable for some random thoughts next year when I’ve completely moved on.

Ok off to actually make something do something, than describe some idealized ponderings of how things could be…. Thanks for listening and seriously, feel free to chime in.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 1 View comments 8/21/11 — 12:07pm Filed under: #meta #creative process #tts

IDGF (but I do)

As I’m trying to articulate this very simple thought it’s sounding more and more like it can be summed up with a short phrase and sound like a zen koan.

When I don’t care about something that something is easier to attain. Or when I stop reaching for something it naturally rests in my hand.

but then there are some other ways of seeing it:

When I put my ‘intention’ toward something it more easily ‘manifests’. (yes I like quoting newage dialect, sometimes it’s just easier to say things, but if I omit the quotes, I tend to not dismiss the entire phrase as unconscious cliché.)

So how can those antagonistic things co-exist? I don’t know but they both seem to happen sometimes at the same time.

Alright I didn’t really have much to say, I just wanted to post some thoughts here in my new blog, because I can.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: View comments 8/21/11 — 11:45am Filed under: #tts #meta #philosophy

I like my bike

So I finally have a bike that’s good enough to care about.

Got a good deal initially $125.

And as I ride it every day, I’ve been fixing up all the random issues that have come up: no-rear brake, no fenders, fix broken axel, new chain, cassette, larger ring for speed and since the cassette style doesn’t really come with smaller gears, and a bell-compass (for $6), oh and after I think like 15 years, I finally got a new Kryptonite U-lock. the one I’d been using was the first generation style that could be picked with a Bic pen cap. For my old clunker mountain bike it was good enough.

Not spending money on gas and auto expenses makes it easier to buy the $10 chain vs the $6.

Anyway, after all these years of riding BMX, mountain bike, cruisers, banana seats, hybrid-grandma-cruiser-mountain, I have my first street bike worthy of keeping running as smooth.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: View comments 5/28/11 — 5:47pm Filed under: #tts

Well I was going to post to the old blog. but this one is faster

If this were to be a blog posting, I would say the following.

Before I change my mind, I should publish a primal side of myself that I don’t see often enough.

So I went to a show tonight. <new band I like a lot> kicked ass. It was probably the best time I’ve had in ages. I actually can’t remember a better time. I’ve been in the center of the crowd plenty of times. I’ve been into the music and felt like I should actually be in the center before. I’ve added to the momentum of the crowd before. I’ve been the straw, the catalyst, the tipping point before.

And this time I suppose I was that again, but there was no trying, no caring, no thinking, no headtripping about my ‘role’ as a fan in a show, or any sort of predefined expectations, or meta-thoughts, self-conscious thoughts, psychobable perspectives on what was going on. I was one of the masses, and I liked it. I was a fan and a fan that was entertained. Not only by the musicians, but by the crowd, and the fully-visceral experience as a member of the crowd.

There was a moment where the singer said to us, you are the best crowd ever. And she meant it. It was true.

What else? the sweat? the bodies, the slamming around, the pushing and being pushed, the being held up by the physics of being too packed to just fall over.

Why do people keep coming to shows? Because it is a primal release that our isolationist-sepratist organic-biological-bodies crave.

I suppose it makes sense, we (I) live without much touch on a day-to-day level, so of course it builds to a point of craving going to see a band I’ve listened to millions of times already, slammed around already, but with other people doing the same, crammed in one tiny place.

Anyway, if you are one to say at home and shy away from crowds, you are missing out. At least try it if you think you don’t like it. Maybe you’ll be surprised.

Enough of my soap box. It wasn’t that amazing but at least its some sort of passion worth sharing. (I have much more, it just doesn’t get funneled though the publicplayedoutblogosphere that much.)

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 3 View comments 5/27/11 — 12:42am Filed under: #social #tts #typical post