Charleston, SC

Cobblestones & Spackling

In late August my wife and I visited Charleston, South Carolina, a quaint city with New England and old world charm conveniently without New England weather. Charleston is a great walking city with cobblestone streets complete with some fantastic restaurants that routinely turn grits into something suitable for more than spackling a wall.

I seem to have a thing for off-the-beaten-path nooks, crannies, and alleyways. There is something ineffably alluring about places that are either too small, too dark, or too out of the way to generally be noticed. Perhaps it says something more about us as a species that we’re always looking for something bigger, something brighter, or some thing or place easier to get to.

Tick-tock, Tick-tock, We’re all just slaves to the great big clock

Though it may merely be the affordance of extra time that allows the freedom to see and appreciate these little things in a strange city. Time, the only real luxury of the developed world, is usually a more cruel taskmaster. Divorced from the usual responsibilities of a typical day one can expound on how the common drones, in their common humdrum ways, can’t see the beauties around them. Back in one’s regular routine we often fail to see how common we truly are.

But the clock is a good thing too. Without the constant reminder of passing time one might forget that our time is finite and, therefore, precious. [1] Our responsibility to leave the world a little better than we found it compels us to work harder and longer, to leave our mark. Memorable marks aren’t usually made by those stopping to smell the roses, take pictures of alleyways, or pompously pontificate[2] on how clever they are compared to mere “commons.”

Brazen & Meshing Typography

I also seem to have a thing for interesting typography, whereby I mean typography that stands out in ways that work or, on occasion, brazenly doesn’t.

Photos shot on iPhone 6; processed entirely with Pixelmator for iPad; typeface, sadly, unknown.

  1. “… death is the destination we all share… that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.” — Steve Jobs in Stanford Commencement, 2005  ↩

  2. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary unless I’m referring to the Pope, saying that someone is “pompously pontificating” is being redundant. I reject that narrow definition but fully recognize how people might see that by doing so I was reinforcing the dictionary definition. Irony or something.  ↩

Starting somewhere...

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What seems now like a long time ago I used to write.  I used to write little essays, I used to write little pieces of fiction, I used to write little epigrams. I became better at crafting a thought and a sentence. 

Somewhere between my goals with my "free" time shifting from trying to save the world to trying to clear off my desk, I stopped writing. I'd write when I needed to write, I'd enjoy it, I'd think, "I need to do this more." 

Then I'd go back to not writing.

 I used to write a little.

This is an effort to change that.   

A little at a time.