i think something i’ve been noticing about my interactions with people the last few months is a lack of depth. it feels like it’s been a year of nothing but surface-level interactions, how-do-you do’s and how’s the weather, oh that’s nice, and the family, good i hope? while there have been notable exceptions, i even think that part of my creation of this blog had to do with a need to express what’s going on deeper inside, even if i only use it for that purpose ever so rarely.

even now as i try to look at what i’m trying to say, the paragraphs flow unevenly and without clarity. it’s like i’m fundamentally out of practice with baring my soul to others, lowering my defenses of cleverness and humor and taking a stab at brutal honesty. the most frightening thing about this is that i don’t know how it happened. like the lobster that sits contently in the water as the temperature slowly increases, so too have i sat by and watched my heart harden and my retorts become colder, my nature more bitter and salty.

of course my analogy is flawed. i have to acknowledge that i’m the one turning up the heat, as it were. i want to be more bitter. i want to be hard, impenetrable and unhurt by those around me. a snarky asshole? i was once one of the best, tearing down the best of them and always on guard for a faster gun. i haven’t properly been one in years, even approaching a decade. and now i’m in conflict with myself for dragging out those old skills, for going all clint eastwood unforgiven and pulling out the gunbelt that long ago i’d sworn to put behind me.

the only solution that i see is to try to turn that behavior around. to seek out deeper interactions where i can, and to discourage in myself defensiveness and perpetuating surface-level interactions.

that, or i could just move to barrow and hermit down.

i have a pretty substantial collection of t-shirts, (and thanks to r. stevens it just grew by three ) and every now and then i think it’d be cool to sit down and design a shirt or two. unfortunately i lack the ‘mad skills’ to turn my ideas into designs. still, here’s a few i’d like to come up with.

i love this quote:

I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft… As for me, give me a fixed gear!
–Henri Desgrange, L’Equipe, 1902

but not the shirt i found it on. so i’d like to have a better design for that.

there’s also always my desire for a point83 logo shirt, as well as one based off the starscream/wackacon logo visible at the top of my website. unfortunately, with such a crappy source image it’s going to be hard to ever get anything nice without basically redrawing it.

i also like aaron’s forum banner:

even though it’s already been an urban outfitters shirt, i prefer the wider layout and green color. also, i simply refuse to pay $28 for a single t-shirt.

oh well. even if i can’t get the t-shirts i want, i finally did get myself a cool new messenger bag. we’ll see if it actually replaces the venerable hacker timbuk2 or not. i did try out my friend garth’s bag and found it to be massively comfortable. hopefully the company didn’t fail because their bags were bad.

for me, this is video of the year. i just got dj format’s new disc and the rest is every bit as good as this song.

i also finally heard and immediately purchased the blue scholars, basically on the strength of the tracks blink and the ave. at the same time i heeled to wheelie’s advice and got the new boom bap cd. i was not disappointed. northwest hip hop, represent.