sub-urban stress syndrome

Ah, Little Debbie! Few things have been as consistent in my life as the Swiss Cake Roll queen, Little Debbie. I think I was enchanted by her depiction on the box before I’d even ingested the delectables in the box. In her girly bonnet, she kind of looked like someone that would be in my Sunday School. Somewhere along the way, I learned that the owner/proprietor of the McKee Baking Company had named the line of snack cakes after his granddaughter (Debbie), and that we are about the same age. I used to wonder if her friends had a direct line on all free Swiss Cake Rolls they wanted, which was just idle thinking, since there was little chance my family would be moving to Collegedale, Tennessee in the foreseeable future.

It seems for a time, the treats were only available regionally (in the MidWest), and after I’d moved to California, I would bring 2-3 boxes back to L.A. every time I’d go back home for a visit. Fortunately, they finally started carrying them locally, and I could stop being a Swiss Cake Roll mule for my transplanted midwestern friends.

Kim A Gallery :: Other Drawings :: DevilDebbie.

There was a time when it was a lot easier for me to come up with some way of doing something I found interesting (whether I knew what I was doing or not) and just doing it. In hindsight, the greatest ally of my youth seems to have been not being weighed down by knowledge and experience.

The great blessings of my curiosity, busy eyes and hands have always compelled me to investigate, create and fabricate artifacts of my experiential journey. Setting off in one direction to explore an idea, the path frequently begins branching out in other directions, many of which seem worth pursuing. Along the way, I may temporarily suspend the initial investigation to fathom the usefulness of the new branch’s offering, or I may abandon it entirely for the new branch’s potential for new and shiny.

Keeping notes of things to get back to used to appear to help — but the more I take in, the more my interests seem to branch out. Computer-aided organization of these ideas and pursuits was a reasonable and logical solution, but there are more and more new and shiny things down that rabbit-hole, too. Over time, my researching has become a bit of a morass of indecision and barren of artification, or artifacting or even much annotation. “Too Much Information” as the Police so aptly put it before I realized it had happened to me (and well before ‘TMI’ was to become co-meme-erated).

Unexpectedly, I’ve allowed the variety and voracity of my unbridled curiosity to short-circuit the documentation of the process (the art or artifacts, or at least some notes). In the absence of any clearer notion than this, I find myself in the familiar position of just jumping in anyway. Okay, to be honest, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that one more pointless, meandering, whatever-pops-in-your-head personal blog on the interwebs actually has neutral valence in general, but may well be a good move in self-advocacy for me, personally. Really.

Surely, someone must have come up with this catchy title already. Gee, it’s so Web 2.0 and all.  Don’t worry, this has little (or nothing) to do that spurious web practice. If you really want to know about that, there are surely more credible resources than me, so be sure and check out Wikipedia’s take on phishing . I just needed to get a blog rolling, and this is what came to mind. Must’ve subconsciously been the Trojan Barbie inspiration.

Bearing this notion of forward motion in mind, I’ve resolved to resume my mission to seek out new life and new civili… no, wait, that’s not my mission…

Ah, yes, that’s right! It’s the old what have you done to be Bringing Art and Humankind Back Together Again lately? ploy. As missions go, it’s always seemed like a good one to me, but what does it mean now as we tread past the threshold of the 21st century? Good question, eh? Seems like there are quite a few people asking similar questions now, and I’d like to get a bit closer to where it’s happening and see what they’re up to along the lines of figuring out how to make the tangental more tangible.

So, between what may accumulate here, or certainly at kima.net (and any/everywhere else), my only agenda now is to cast my bread upon the waters with renewed curiosity and wonder. It’s not like I’m new to this Internet craze , after all. Maybe I burned out (or up) or just got bored with it early on waiting for people (read: my non-virtual friends & family) to catch up while all the developers were discarding standards so rapidly that there weren’t any anymore. (Heh. There still doesn’t seem to be any real strict ones when it comes to the web beyond its most basic, but what do I know? Dammit, Jim, I’m an artist, not a software engineer.)