Hobbyist

Inertia.  Routine.  I am becoming somewhat desperate.  And paradoxically, content.  Therein lies the danger.

I saw a magazine yesterday, but try as I might, I can't remember the name of it.  I should have purchased it.  It was beautifully designed.  I didn't pay attention to the content.  It was taken from blogs on the internet.  "iBlog," perhaps.  It won't last, I think.  It is too beautiful, too expensive.  Obviously it is funded by someone who thinks others will appreciate good taste.  That is a death knell for the naively foolish.  Look at what has happened to magazine design.  "Vanity Fair" is still fairly elegant, and "The New Yorker" hasn't changed.  But I picked up some other magazines yesterday and inside they look like a garage sale.  Everything is crammed and cluttered.  My eye never lighted on anything.  Looking at them, I felt much as I do while driving in bad traffic.

I want to design a small booklet for some of my photographs printed on rich, thick paper.  It will take much time.  I need to find a printer who is passionate about printing and who is not merely mercenary.  I will find the price of a small run.  If I do, I will let you have them for enough to cover the cost.  Well, I'll never recover the cost of all this.  I feel like a hobbyist, some fellow who spent his life carving flying ducks out of the most expensive woods he could find, someone who has filled the house and garage with the hideous things and is now thinking of building a shed in the back.  But really, with an art director and a stylist. . . well, I just can't understand why I have not been invited to contribute my talents to something.  Considerable talents, I should say.

But I should have looked at popular magazines long ago.

There is much to do.  I have to work alone scanning in images and making them what they will become. Hours and hours ahead.  I get jumpy at the thought.  There is a life out there that I think I've abandoned.  I'm afraid, though, that going into it will be like opening one of those magazines.  Here it is so beautiful and calm and peaceful.  Maybe I'll just fill the house with scents and candles instead.  The hell with carved ducks in flight.