Diablo 3!
It has been a week since the birth of my daughter and I still remember the scene at the nursery.
We, mostly fathers (because the mothers had just given birth), are staring through the nursery window. Our children have just been born.
Our sons and daughters are all beautiful. I wonder how many of us are first time dads. We all seem to have that sparkle and I wonder if it always feels like this. Excitement. Relief. Joy. Who knows what else.
I am realizing that there are some things in life, like being a dad, that you don’t truly understand until you find yourself standing right there - in the middle of everything as it is happening.
My daughter, we are naming her Summer. She’s asleep and is wrapped tightly by the nurse and is placed in a crib nearest to the window. She is perfect. I am happy. I feel really happy. The sun is shining on us right now.
If you want to make it, it helps if you surround yourself with people who want you to make it too.
Create today, peak later.
I was catching up some online reading and I saw a discussion about creativity in relation to age. Someone quoted a silicon valley CEO as having said that people don’t create anything significant past the age of forty. I have heard about this notion before and have at one point or another wondered if this was true. I think it was John Updike who said that artists peak like athletes (and grow bellies after 30). Perhaps there is some meat to this. Afterall, some of the most powerful things have created by people in their youth - when optimism has not been betrayed, when exuberance borders recklessness, when imagination has not succumbed to bitter realities.
Then people started listing names of a few artists who did their best work relatively late in their lives: Picasso. Rembrandt. Da Vinci. Warhol. Twain. Bradbury. As you may have guessed, there are countless others.
But what really nudged me was this quote from Hokusai, and I’ll share it here. For the days when you feel like your best work is behind you. (I know, sometimes, I do)
“From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.”
(the Great Wave by Hokusai is one of the most recognizable pieces of Japanese Art. It was created around 1830, when he was in his 70s)
Studio renovation day #2. Still stacking boxes. Sneezing non-stop.
I was playing NBA 2k11 and my main man Durant was going off for sixty points or something when suddenly the screen went blank and these blue men appeared. Why are they watching me? What are they whispering to each other’s ears? What is that ominous flare?
SuperBrothers: Sword and Sworcery
Jo and I have started playing this wonderful lo-fi iPad game called SuperBrothers: Sword and Sworcery. It’s not immensely complex but it is charming and has a peculiar way of telling a story. If you decide to play it, do it in a place where you can listen to the game soundtrack because that, too, is awesome.
Saw this and thought that it was a great concept. On the other hand, it also got me thinking that sometimes traveling isn’t so much about finding something different as it is to be somewhere far away.
Super 8: Equal Parts Grit and Charm
Super 8 could have been two completely different movies and they would have probably been both good. One would have been a charming small-town coming of age tale about dream-catching, camaraderie, innocence and loss. The other, a good and gritty old-fashioned horror noir laced with massive explosions, conspiracy and suspense. How they’ve managed to interweave these stories and characters together is remarkable.
At a bar that looks straight from a Hollywood movie, four Japanese tourists come in. They look like they’ve already had a few to drink and seem really happy about it. Three of them order drinks but the fourth, who looks the most drunk of them all, struggles to get up on his stool. He almost falls on his back but is helped up by another customer and is finally seated on a shorter plastic chair. “I’m sorry,” he blurts. “It’s alright, you don’t have to say sorry,” the bartender says, gently as if talking to his son. “You came to the right bar.” Then the Japanese man props his head on the high stool and falls asleep.
Dad, 65
Yesterday my dear dad turned 65. “Mark, Patrick, Mickey, Vanya, Danielle, Isabela”, he called out our names. His voice still like thunder.
