ri191116  Wrapping up my story  

I am wrapping up the last two months of writing my autobiography, an exercise in examining my life. It’s a story of many failures and I wonder why I failed, where I went wrong, and what other strategies I might have pursued toward a success.

However, there are successes, too. I can, of course, remember the old chestnut, “He who cannot point to many failures has never tried anything.” There is some truth to this, but it doesn’t make me feel good about the failures.

Especially on a day-to-day basis of what the prospect of the coming day offers. Instead of looking forward to a day at the International Print Center Incubators and Workplaces, I am going to our Mini Art Gallery, there to resume my videos about publishing on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform.

The IPCI&W has always been a fantasy, a mirage on the horizon of my life. In my most intellectual view, the most rational, I see I am in a desert. Seattle – and the whole of the USA (and some might say the whole Earth) is a cultural dustbin.

What I have called the “printmaking community” is not the bastion of technical and cultural innovation and aesthetic development. It’s not the creative economy and experience economy brought to bear on my day.

Maybe in a micro-manner it is manifest in the Mini Art Gallery. There, in that 300-square foot space, I am a big fish. Like a fish, I have adapted to the size of my aquarium. However, I cannot make a larger aquarium where many fishes of all varieties can live and work.

It’s like the recording by Pinto Colvig and Billy May that I listened to over and over when I was a kid. In the song, “Honkety Hank” built an amazing soap box racer and impressed the whole town; but it was only a dream. At the end of the song the kid wakes up, scratches his head, washes his face and goes to school, “Just like any other boy.”

There’s no school for me to go to. I’ve used up all my school days.