Design Mode

It snowed last night. It came down gently, without any wind accompanying it. The first snow after Fall is about the only time I like seeing its arrival, and even that moment lasts only fleetingly. I like stepping outside in the early morning, especially when it occurs on a Sunday morning (like this one), before anyone has trod any footprints on the sidewalks, or made tracks on the roads, and I just relax and mentally absorb how beautifully quiet and peaceful the world has become. The physical effect of fresh new flakes has a way of stifling and smothering out all useless, unwarranted sounds; that is until they become more packed down and compressed*. If this moment of the changing of the seasons is a glimpse into how the moment of what death actually is for us then there would be no reason to fear it. How appropriate it is that Remembrance Day is around this time of the year.

The first snow seems to automatically trigger something innate in me, just to remind me how much of a creature of the seasons I am. In the time between which the last of more tenacious leaves finally surrender themselves to wind and gravity, and the time that the ground gets covered with whiteness, I have somehow, unconsciously, converted my office space into a studio. I look around now, and I'm left to wonder how this weird collection of stuff amassed itself and escaped my attention. An auxilliary table is set up; on it is strewn rulers, How-To books, carving knives, calipers, protractors, other drafting instruments, more cutting tools, pattern templates, tracings, schematic printouts. An easel crept its way out of a cabinet; a canvas has somehow wandered down off a shelf, it's blank white face staring back at me, as if begging to look like anything else that's different from the blank whiteness of the scene outside happening now. Paint tubes want to be squeezed, brushes wish to be used for strokes. I swear, I can hear my collapsable workbench stirring, and murmuring "Ahem!" from within the recesses of my storage closet, aching, and wanting to stretch itself out after a long lapse of disuse, hoping to see some action again from its other long-neglected cohorts in another closet, who are known as the "power tools". Google Sketchup has squirmed its way into a comfortable spot on my hard drive, sticking its icon out on my computer's desktop screen, I'm sure in such a way where it looks almost neon, pulsing with a seductive, iridescent "the-party-starts-here" kind of invitation for 3-dimensional creative fantasies. All that, including this very act of writing about all this stuff, seems to be unfurling from an unconscious compulsion to do something creative during this coming winter solitude.

I would guess it's a self-preservation instinct kicking in and, as crazy as all of this sounds, I welcome it a hell of a lot more compared to the craziness acquired from mid-winter depression, isolation, and cabin-fever**. In order not to let the long hours of darkness, and the blankness and featurelessness of winter sicken me mentally and spiritually, I'm taking it upon myself to add colour, form and feature into the season by means of code, screens, paper, wood, and canvas. I have yet to determine what I'm going to produce; I guess I'll just let myself be carried away and enthralled by the mystery and surprise of this whole deal. If any of the work I finish doing is worth keeping, it will be posted in the future.

*- And exactly one second after experiencing this lovely moment; that is if you have no snowmobile, skis, 4x4, or ice-fishing shelter, winter in Saskatchewan/Canada then officially starts to suck! The prospect of the coming Christmas holidays doesn't even invigourate me.
**- Doing some exercise helped to alleviate this crap, but not to a great enough degree for the likes of me.