Limits, specialization and realized compartmentalization are the basis of mercantile culture.  The idea that we can’t know or do everything for ourselves is the basis of the trades, professions, and academic disciplines. This fact also gives us purpose, as my propensities are not yours and likewise. However, there are those whose wits outweigh common dogma, are apt at many things. Sometimes aptitude follows aptitude and those who are really good at something are also good at many. I am haunted by thoughts of the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian gentleman scholar, a renaissance man, as skilled as he is well-read. Personally, I set a goal for myself a long time ago to know as much about as much as I could and remember at least 90% of everything I encounter. I am sure you do not need to be a neuroscientist to know how the 90% part has declined over the years, but my will is still good on the ‘know as much, about as much’ it is the ‘i can’ part that has slowed it seems.  Or has it? We are faced with so much information, and so much of it is complete shit, distraction, hassle, spam, bad advertising, and it just keeps coming at us.  With my practice of knowing unmitigated I would have gone mad like some supervillian’s backstory; ‘His only fault was paying attention. Attention to EVERYTHING! He is the Insane Omniscientro!  Driven MAD by the Details!’  No, I have a sharpened double-edged Bullshit Detector, which helps.  But, I still am inclined to get sucked into the desire of knowing, only to be pulled back by a environment staked to mediocrity and status quo.  Environment is a euphemism of course for the place I am in my life: art here, academia here, and community (which I use loosely).  My stubbornness to know is pit against time and capacity, as well as, my moments for implementation of that knowledge. If the problem of knowing is distilled down to the most basic, fundamental moment of everything we might be talking about Physics in practice or Philosophy in epistemological treatment of knowing itself.  But it is Art which parallels life and at times is knowing, or requires knowing something to make new knowledge in the form of new art.  This is not to lionize Art, but to come to terms with why Art is marginalized in the academy, yet it persists in all gradations throughout all places in our lives.  Just because we know something or transform the commonplace to a static memory (like still-life painting and photography), does not make it important.  I am digressing. My point is hovering around a personal stubbornness based on my inflated sense of knowledge interest, capacity and above all time for knowledge acquisition and implementation.

I am stymied by the narrowness of others.  The world is such a vast and wondrous place, yet we fight over two people wanting to officially love and care for one-another because they happen to have the same genitals, and deny civil rights to those we fight in the name of freedom and civility.  And these greater issues find purchase in the little moments, personal moments when it seems a broadness of thought, art practice, and caring for others is found to be a fault rather than a strength.  The world is crazy right now, as I suppose it always is, but that is no excuse to stop to try to learn and grow.  I wish at times it was in my character to make one narrow road of practice and pave it until famous and smooth like warm feet bare and rubbed over frosted ice, until the ice were a perfect flatness ready for a picture to be snapped or painting to be wrought.  I wish I could, but I want to know more about more, and fuck it, I am good at lots of things, and I hope, I mean I really keep waiting for some of this breadth and depth to payoff; breath held and fingers crossed.