dziga's blog post - Long time since I put up a blog...

Whatever. I seem to be fighting inertia in some areas of my life, particularly working. I have been fortunate enough to take a good chunk of time off and have been keeping busy doing a lot of AA's working with others stuff.

It is so tremendously fulfilling to take part in watching someone go from being in as much pain as an alcoholic/addict who has torn apart their lives despite wanting to be able to stop and watch them change in a matter of months from almost always being suicidally depressed to being full of excitement and joy to be able to live life.

Despite not working for over a year now, this period of time has felt like the most purposeful period of my life ever. Wonderful!!!

But it gets to be time to go back to work. Two ideas stand out far above all the others...

One is to do some more stuff with art. Try to make a go of an artistic lifestyle somehow. I have been playing around a little with screen printing and intend to try making and selling shirts at some point. Already have that dead head market to tap into...why the hell not, I guess? Eventually it would be good to get back a lot more into oil painting, but seems to me that actually making a living doing that would be awfully, awfully hard.

The other is to start that restaurant that I have felt driven to start for a long time. I do love food, cooking and cooking in restaurants. I have looked in the want ads from time to time, but truth be told I never see the sort of job that would allow me to do the sort of cooking that I would really like to do. Solution...start a place where I get to decide that stuff. The last place I worked in Oregon is such a model for that. Great quality ingredients, local as much as possible, a strange combination of authentic regional cuisines that are hardly ever seen with good old comfort foods...not a fusion, but two separate styles. Tea smoked duck with black currant cabernet sauce side by side with good old southern fried chicken. A big undertaking with an awfully good chance of failure, but starting as small as possible and seeing where it can go to seems like a reasonable idea.

Mmmmm...I miss being able to stick my spoons into a whole variety of exciting foods and explore the world of flavor every day as well.

Seems like you can tell you have a good idea for yourself when your excitement level rises dramatically every time you really start thinking about it...