I’m just going to write some things that have been on my mind.
Why on earth would a nobody cue builder talk about anything other than cues?
Because you’re a nobody too. You have agency and a spark of the divine, yet we’re all nobodies and puerile conversations are being shoved down our throats so we never talk about stuff that matters. Everything everywhere is hype, hyperbole or horse shit.
Don’t fall for it. Truth exists everywhere the lie does not, exposing it. Truth wins.
Refuse to participate. Read Bartleby the Scrivener if you want Melville’s absolute best. Don’t be part of the machine. Prefer not — to your death — if need be. All those lies eventually meet the end of dead letters anyway.
So this is what’s on my mind.
First, I’m slow. I don’t hurry because I can’t. Cue building has a natural kind of “wages of sin is death” built into it. When you do things you shouldn’t, they haunt you. Most of cue building is learning to fine tune your processes to avoid future hurt.
As a beginner (starting my 3rd year) with no margin in time, health or money, I have to focus or fail. I will not fail.
Focus means imposing limits.
I’m going to stop doing custom work for a while. I – Character Cues — need the efficiency of the routine. I’ll be giving my attention to the auctions and tailoring hanging cues when people buy them before they get auctioned off.
If I don’t I won’t survive as a cue builder.
I will honor the folks who’ve discussed custom jobs with me but have not yet acted. But I can’t take on additional custom jobs until the auctions run like clockwork, my website works well, and my shop is better equipped. I’m stretched so thin I feel like I’m doing a shitty job in a hundred places. That is an intolerable situation. I’d rather be fat and pursue perfection in only one place – even knowing how fleet a target she is.
Second thing on my mind: someone I care about has destroyed himself. He’s dying and in my heartbreak I see the wages of his sin coming back for him. He’s destroyed himself by always preferring the lie, and it breaks my heart because there remains a kernel of good in him. I’ve known that kernel since I was a kid and I love that kernel. He thought he was following it but he never learned to pick up his cross. He never learned that ultimate evil is merely unbridled selfishness.
When a man suffocates his kernel of good, his body can hide his death only so long.
I mean what I say about framing God’s art. I see his brilliance in the design of wood grain. I see his love.
Because of looking at growth rings, especially in burl, I see history as an arc that includes challenge, struggle, and advancement. The evidence is art and the mind understands it as beauty.
The evidence is also a record that struggle produces strength, for a time, but ultimately death.
As lies produce death.
Death seals off a life. There’s no more adding to it. What it was is all it will ever be. There’s no saying, oh shit! I gotta go back and —
We look at our lives as a tapestry of time, a thing with continuity, and we make mental play of visiting our pasts in our memories and our futures in our dreams. But in truth you can never love in the past or in the future. They’re sealed. The only moment that will receive love is the one you’re in. Same with truth. Grace. Everything that matters.
Death locks the grain in place; death makes the record permanent. Death makes the illusions vanish. All the good you thought about doing, all the truth you were going to tell….
Poof.
But death also makes beautiful cues possible, and graduates beautiful souls to the next level of light.
No one who is strong will remain so. Some use that as a license to do even more evil now, while able, hoping dollars will love them when people can’t.
A lot of people are banking on the lie that when you die it all goes black.
You who need the dark to hide the corners of your conscience, woe is you.
When you die it goes light, and all you are is the corners you hid.
People fear so they categorize and then they hate. People want so they categorize and then steal. People are lazy so they categorize and say “they deserve what they get.” People are cowards so they do another man’s evil to another man’s category when another man says.
I’ve had a bellyful, but rather than hate in response I’ll take my hope from a seedling popping out of a rotten log.
Don’t be part of the fabric of lies. Don’t be swept away by the foolishness of this age. Don’t buy the con. When it slaps your face, as it does a hundred times every single day, turn the other cheek.
You are human. God knew you before the womb. You have a divine spark.
Feed it with truth and the product will be love.
Have you spoken to your Creator today?
