Day 276– January 9, 2015

When I quit work way back on April 4, I planned for epic rest on an uncluttered life. Yet, on the fourth day, I hopped into a car full of my belongings and drove north, east, south, and west across ten-thousand miles and through four distracting months.

When I parked back in San Francisco at the end of July, it was time finally to rest. Yet I rejoined a big Burning Man project to glue ten-thousand dollars of LEDs to the sides of a giant sheep bus while scrambling to finish my spiked Platonic Solids. During the day, I sewed fabric covers. At night, I crimped wires and hoisted panels.

When Burning Man finished at the start of September, it was time to rest. Yet I built a seahorse and installed the Platonic Solids at San Francisco’s Decompression party. I drove north to Sacramento to spend the workweek in Ruben’s apartment coding and crafting.

Well October is the start of the slow season so it was time to rest. Yet Jacob maneuvered me into a Creative Coding course. Ten hours a week, I learned HTML, javascript, and d3 graphing. I scrambled to build Triangles for New Year’s Eve, mostly by myself.

Right after finishing the Triangles, I boarded a plane for two weeks in Morocco. No rest there, as I lurched on the back of a camel, got pummeled by a nearly-naked guy with a scratchy glove, and roared at the cold sunrise locked out of our desert fort.

Early January brought fever, dysentery, discord, and a dash to finish the Fortune Teller for a January 8 installation at Gray Area. I rode a scissor lift to knot LED panels to the rafters and set up a node server so a web page could message the Triangles with fortunes. Unlike at New Year’s Eve, the Triangles shone brightly throughout the Gray Area evening exhibition. Matt the director kindly bestowed a graduation certificate on me after my congratulatory speech.

Nine months since I quit my job, I finally, finally can rest. I have nothing on my calendar. I have no obligations. I can wake up and decide where my compass shall point today.

I’m liberated. I’m scared.