The monster of creativity

I’m gonna take some time off from __________, I think.

I’d like to fill in the blank with homework or duty or something equally as distasteful, but I’m afraid jk.com v5 is the unlucky candidate. I hear groans.

Maybe I should clarify and say that my feverish design changes are going to slow to a crawl while work begin on Version 6. With new insight on CSS developing and the latest addition of Dreamweaver MX 2004, I can’t resist another new look. It won’t be the radical redesign you saw between ver 4 and jk.com v5, but a change significant enough to make in impact the first time the homepage loads.

There’s so much I haven’t done. Gotta keep up with the Joneses. Believe it or not I get brilliant flashes of insight at the strangest times. I’ve written entire books in my mind in the course of an 30 minute bike ride. I’ve made and broken promises and set goals and canceled plans in the time it takes me to get changed for duty.

Ok, so upon further analysis I’ve got more creativity than I give myself credit for, but I still can’t draw a stick man to save my life. Tell me to remodel a living room and every single thing will be at right angles to each other. I don’t believe in wasting space. I having serious problems with circles and curves. Take a look around my pages. Look carefully at my photos. Straight lines and sharp edges and angles dominate.

In 6th grade I tried my hand at writing as part of a partnered project. The idea was to write a sentence about a topic that you and your partner had agreed upon. You’d then hand the paper over and they’d write a sentence, give it back to you, and so on and so on. I found myself wanting to write it all. I didn’t want the help or input or interference. I still have the original from 1987.

I was actually pretty good in 7th grade art class. We drew a lot. I drew without the benefit of a natural artist’s eye. I drew because I had to. It always turned out better than I thought so I drew some more. I drew houses and cars and planes. I drew things you’d expect from a junior high school boy who still didn’t really know what a naked woman looked like. I drew wars and tanks and guns. I avoided animals and people; anything that required a truly free hand because it just never quite looked right. It was a hint of things to come.

But I stopped one day. Just hung it up. I traded my colored pencils and charcoal brushes for rulers, triangles, floor plans and rigid design specifications. I took a few drafting classes in high school and was pretty damn good at it. It suited me. I would hunker over the drafting table for hours on end, well past the end of the school day, and draft things with the most unimaginable dimensions and proportions. I would annotate the most minute, excruciating detail with micrometer accuracy. I stepped into a car one cold December day in 1992, heading back to North Dakota, and it all came to an end.

I had one thing left that followed me from the valley, across the mountains, and to the plains of the midwest: my writing. One little essay on nuclear holocaust in 11th grade garnered much more attention that I ever anticipated. I wrote letters with a degree of concentration only seen in diffusing bombs. There was no paragraph structure. My pages were filled with a flurry of random thoughts and misdirected theories and ideas. I wrote because I could do it in my head. I didn’t need paint or rulers. I wrote the way I’d talk. It’s just kinda the way things fell together.

It’s my style.

I’ll see you in Version 6…

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