Busier than a…..

Wow. Life gets away with you sometimes.

I have, over the last few months toyed with the idea of taking this site down because it seems I just don’t have the time to sit down and write in it any more, and it pains me to leave it sitting here unloved. This blog began it’s life as a way for me to vent and work through the slurry of emotions I was wading through after being laid off from what I like to call corporate slavery.

I wrote under the deluded intention of keeping my family and friends abreast of my whereabouts mentally and whatnot, but really it was (and I didn’t realize this at the time) more for my own sanity. I was trying to make sense of the world after getting kicked out of my middle-american, consumerist comfort zone.

Back then it was just called “Mike needs a life” because the only thing I really did know was that I woke up one day and found myself jobless, and that I had put so much energy into my job over the years that there wasn’t much else to my life but my job. I suppose that’s a typical story. I was so busy working I didn’t have time for the things I really wanted to do.. heck, I didn’t even know there was something else that I wanted to do.

When I moved to Key West I was still jobless (and remained so for 9 months) so I changed the name of the blog to Conch Tales and decided to write about my adventures in learning what it’s like to live here. That was great fun for quite a while, and it gave me a diversion from the boredom of unemployment. I envisioned an endless amount of things to babble on about. Eventually after becoming employed and settling into a routine, life picked up much as it always does when you have to go to work every day… and I felt myself slipping back into the old comfortable routine of just working. I stopped writing in my blog, I spent more time watching TV in the evenings because after coming home from working for the MAN, my brain was shut down, I spent less time working on my sculptures even though I had the money to buy materials finally.

It’s a funny thing. But it wasn’t long before I found myself pretty unhappy with life again. How could I be living in Key West and NOT be happy! I was living in paradise after all, right? I eventually came to the realization that working for someone else just was not the answer. I have too many of my own dreams and aspirations to be toiling away building someone else’s empire for a measly 15 bucks an hour and no benefits. I’ve always shunned the idea of being an entrepreneur, I just didn’t want to deal with the stresses of being self-employed. I guess maybe it’s because I’m getting up there in years, but these days I pretty much feel like there really isn’t any other avenue for me.

So you feel like you don’t have any free time?

What do you do? Start your own business? Yep. Brilliant. That’s what I did. I called it Bone Island Graphics. I partnered up with a co-worker who has supreme framing and gallery experience, we bought a huge printer, rented a shop, and now we’re in the graphic design, fine art printing and framing business. For the time being, we both still work our full-time jobs at the gallery so at least we didn’t take the hairy jump off the cliff into the great unknown. At the time of this posting, we’ve had our doors open for a month, and we have yet to make a penny for our troubles, but damn it feels good to go to work in my own shop on my ‘weekends’.

The walls are still bare, and it’s most definitely a work-in-progress, but we are functional. Now all we need is a little bit of business so I can stop paying rent out of pocket. When that happens, I will dance a little jig and probably drink a big bottle of rum… then sober up and pray for a little more business so maybe I can some day stop working for the MAN entirely.

Along with the Bone Island Graphics venture, I’m working hurriedly to finish a couple more sculpture pieces for a Steampunk art show in Connecticut that opens in October… and trying to write and illustrate a graphic novel… oh, and trying to spend as much time on the beach with Christina as I can.

So anyway

That’s my excuse. And I’m sticking with it. If you wake up one morning and suddenly Conch Tales is gone, at least you’ll know what happened

M