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Relaunch news! Set sail to ports unknown in Layla’s Weaker Vessel?!?. As if that wasn’t enough, Colin’s got a brand new bag over at Phrodocon Valley. It’s pretty, it’s fonkay, and it’s oh-so-good for you.

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Best. Internet Find. Ever. An internet radio station that plays all Rush, all the time. (I know: I’m such a nerd…)

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Hey Mike, how’s this for an epiphany? Your body is a biological machine. All its systems are interconnected and interdependent. That means that, when you improve one, the others benefit also, however indirectly. So when you take a weekend off to feel the sun on your skin, the grit of sand between your toes, and the awesome, soothing lull of a gently rocking beach tide mdash; and then top it off with a magnificent, pheromone-festooned bicycle ride mdash; well, you know. Juices start flowing. Good juices eventually make it to the brain and, what do you know, ideas happen. Fresh ideas. Lovely ideas. Wacky ideas. The old prudes had it right: Mens sana in corpore sano.

What amazes me is how our knowledge workers, ostensibly the most productive in the world, can pull that off while simultaneously being so stereotypically sedentary. Just imagine if all these people went for a jog now and then.

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This is close to what I intended for my “bio” to be. Splendid, those tiny glimpses. Like happening upon a stack of old, yellowed snapshots: you recognize some faces, don’t recognize others, but just for a moment, you feel once again connected to that time in the past, so long ago.

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Because looking out at the world has me scared shitless, I’ve decided to look in for a little while.

Over the weekend I watched the movie, Quills. I love stories about mad geniuses. (For those of you not in-the-know, Quills is a most lavishly-embellished retelling of the last days in the life of the infamous Marquis de Sade.) Is it a Western fascination, this love/hate of the creatively insane? In our minds we idolize him, dramatize him, write effusively about him; but in life we cage him, stare in horror, heap scorn and disapproval. We castigate, we suppress. We crucify.

It may come as little surprise to some that in my more self-aggrandizing moments I fancy myself, or at least fantasize, to be one of these misunderstood savants. So, perhaps my reported “aloofness” is a symptom with no disease. Perhaps this knot of loneliness and this dead end street I walk into, are all of my own creation. Maybe I’m trying too hard to act out the part of tortured genius.

Very well then: one would think that my every movement would, in balance, be gauged to produce, to express, to create art or music or whatever, which is what all these marvelous introverts do, right? That, however, is not the case here. It seems some time ago (I like to believe, coinciding with the rude awakening of “real life” at college) I stopped creating freely, and now I seem to have lost my way back to that state of mind. Creating now takes effort. So where’s my motivation? There is none and, as a result, there is nothing. I’m tired of the emptiness. I want to draw compulsively again. I want to, but I don’t. I buy sketchbooks, but they lay unopened, right where I put them. Why? There used to be a time when you had to pry my hands off my notebooks to keep me from drawing. What the hell happened to me? Now that I have chosen a career in a supposedly “creative” field, where I should be able to do “art” without guilt; now that I have every excuse to draw… I don’t. Fuck me.