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Feeling down? Bit at odds with the world? Feel like killing all humans? Or yourself?

[Twistorati](http://twistori.com/) streams every mention of ‘I love’ on the service smoothly across the screen. Happy. Calming.

This wasn’t meant to be posh, it ended up that way because there was only posh bread and cheese in the kitchen.

David Singleton in Posh Cheese on Toast » munchmun.ch

This quote makes me smile, simply because it underlines how our kitchen used to be pretty much all the time. God forbid you ever needed some crap cheese to grate on something.

Food is Not Fuel

And from that, we come to the headline. Food is not fuel. Not to be misconstrued as an anti-biofuels slogan, this is about valuing everything you eat. Savouring the taste of every mouthful. If you’re just filling up, what’s the point? Food is not about nutrition, or fat, or calories or traffic light diets. Food is about pleasure.

# Food is Not Fuel

Slow hand clap

My two previous posts had to be separate. It’s the best way to express the bi-polar conflict that is my state of mind right now.

Usually I resolve positive/negative easily, because I err on optimism and the good of a situation cancels out the bad, leaving me some to spare. I come out contented at the least. But this is different. It’s like when I clap these hands together there’s a big flash of lightning and they repel. I can’t get resolution or balance. No matter how good my home life is, it doesn’t calm the unrest at work. It’s like trying to force the triangle block through the hexagon hole. I’m just wandering around in a state of violent ambivalence.

[Gary Vaynerchuk](http://garyvaynerchuk.com/) said something during his South by Southwest session that’s run around my head a bit lately. “If you’re living for the weekend, your shit is broken”. He spoke out against that attitude of just ‘enduring’ your day job. You have to have passion in what you do. Right now, I’m acutely aware that the passion I held for my job is gone. The passion that drove me to work silly hours in aid of building something I’m proud of isn’t there. I’m not saying I should be working until the dawn for Yahoo!, just that I should feel some connection with what I do.

I don’t quite know how to replenish it right now. I’m treading water trying to see the shore, aware that I could swim in one of many directions to find land.

>

So I took my guitar
And I threw down some chords
And some words I could sing without shame

And I soon had a song
I played it around
For some friends but they all said the same

They said “Music's for fools
You should go back to school
The future is prisms and math.”

So I did what they said
Now my children are fed
’Cause they pay me to do what I'm asked

I forgot all my songs
The words now are wrong
And I burned my guitar in a rage

But the fire came to rest
In your white velvet breast
So somehow I just know that it's safe.

‘Death of a Salesman’ by Low

… On the other hand.

For everything that happened in the past three months, my situation is remarkably positive. It’s a tale of survival, against odds and expectations. It’s underpinned by luck, hard work, and the effort of dozens of kind people who tried to catch me when the rug was pulled from under me. Some of them known to me, some of them total strangers acting out of instinct and respect. I’m someone that people want to support.

The net result is that, against all expectation, I’m still here in San Francisco. At a time when entire industries are collapsing around us, I’m employed in my industry of choice, and very well paid for it, too. No matter how gutting it is to see Brickhouse and all that potential shot down, the eventual itinerary of my new job _will_ provide good opportunities, once it all settles. It’s a good role in its own right, just not magical like it was before.

I chose to stay. I could have gone home. Back to Cambridge, or London. Back to my friends there. Someone would hire me; probably. I chose to stay because in six months my life has filled up with more wonderful things than I had before. The lifestyle, culture and environment of this city feels _right_. Here, there are people that I have grown quickly fond of. Some, very fond. It’s a place I’ve become sentimental about, and I recognise that in general, there are great things I can achieve here.

It wake up late on Saturdays, I sit in furniture I bought for myself in an apartment that I’m slowly tailoring to my own tastes and wants. I can walk to almost everything. Almost everything that I want to have nearby, is. I can sit in bright, warm sunshine in a beautiful park in _March_. I’m inspired to think and to draw and to make. I’m creatively more alive than any other point in years.

I walk down the streets of my neighbourhood and appreciate the beauty of where I live. I notice more of the subtle things.

When I walk up the stairs of my apartment building, I pull up a list of 10,000 pieces of music, on a device less than a centimetre thick, and it starts playing in my living room before I’m through the door. Sometimes the piece of music I select is the theme from Super Mario Brothers.

I don’t own a Wii for the sole purpose of playing Mario Kart only because I think it’s an extravagance. Not because I can’t actually afford it.

I live in one of the great wine producing regions of the world. I only eat nice cheese.

Today I felt my first earthquake since moving. Rather than fear for my life, I was instead struck with awe at the fragility of the Earth, and found it quite inspiring.

If I were intending to make a list of all these things, I could go on for pages.

On the one hand…

Every day I’m upset. Every day I lose three hours to a bus. Every day I’m staring out the window thinking about what I’ve _lost_. Thinking about that amazing dream job that for six months was just that.

I think about the people I used to see every day. People held in great respect became friends. Friends that have made me a better person. I think about how instead, I now spend my work day in a stale fabric box, out of sight of any other.

I think about how this wasn’t what I signed up for. This wasn’t what brought me here. I think about how anyone could ever be happy in this environment. I wonder how on earth it is that a corporate culture could develop where battery segregation is considered acceptable, _normal_ even. I wonder where it went wrong; I wonder who will burn in hell for his sick creation.

I feel angry. I feel hate. I hate that every morning I open this laptop and see clutter. I see everything left over from the night before, from the day before that, from the night before that. Stacked up; pending. Dragging my eyes all over, sitting in my peripheral vision. I hate that on this shared desktop, that which makes me happy is a distraction. I hate that on this shared desktop, that which drains me cannot be left behind when I leave.

I hate that as each day passes, and the isolation sets in, this becomes ‘normal’.

Every day I leave feeling like it wasn’t worth getting out of bed. I achieve so little, I have so little drive, I make so little eye contact, I shuffle out the doors numb and cold and careless. Care less; not care free.

I’m a drone, and I’m trapped here.

I’ll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations

[Death to Los Campesinos!](http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858689917/)

In my ongoing periodical of posting awesome Los Camp! lyrics, comes this one. I don’t see my infatuation with them dying down any time soon.

Retinal Reattachment

A few months ago I started an experiment to publish photos from my iPhone into a separate photostream, [Ben Ward’s Eyes](http://flickr.com/photos/benwardseyes). The intent was simple: I wanting to visually document more of my day-to-day life, but without polluting [my Flickr account](http://flickr.com/benward) with poor-quality, fuzzy phone-camera pictures.

The value of such a stream would be quantity, not quality. That is, the value comes of viewing the stream as a whole, not from any particular individual photograph. A grid would show days or weeks at a time, cropped to squares, or something like that. That summary would be the primary view, not each individual photograph.

In practice, I’ve not found the sweet spot I was looking for. Firstly, even with the outlet available, I don’t take as many daily photos as I thought. More than I used to, but not as many as I imagined or intended. Partly that’s a limitation of technology: The iPhone camera through AirMe initialises slowly, so it’s not as spontaneous as I’d like. Partly it’s just that I’m engaged elsewhere that stopping to take a picture isn’t always appropriate.

Secondly, some of the pictures taken for the life stream are _good_. That interferes with the ‘disposable’ nature of these images. Now there are pictures that do have standalone value. What to do? Duplicate them to my primary Flickr stream? I hate duplication. I hate fragmenting items of content. Fragmentation of content is bad, but fragmentation of identity through publishing the same _type_ of content in different places is OK; that’s how that _web_ part of _world wide web_ should work.

Add to this that it’s tedious to swap between Flickr accounts, I’m really not getting the publishing experience from the separate account that I wanted.

The next stage of this life-imaging experiment is this: I’m going to swap it right around. The compromises and conflicts that arise from running two accounts don’t satisfy me, so I’m going to try compromising a different requirement; namely my perception of ‘quality’ in my Flickr stream. Flickr has sets. I already maintain a Favourites and Abridged set. So long as I maintain them more actively, other people still have the facility to just follow my photos that I think are ‘good’. I can use another set to maintain just the life-stream photos too, and one day maybe pull them into my own user interface.

So ends one phase of this experiment, and my eyes are reunited with the rest of me.

The most notable thing I remember from art classes in school was building a model clay house when I was 15. Most people built nice houses, with smiles and flowers, and fences and a shrubbery. However, due to a mid-teens Tarantino infatuation, all the people in my house were gangsters, and half of them were dangling from windows, somewhat dismembered or missing… internal organs. They _all_ had hats.

The odd thing is that I genuinely didn’t think anything of it at the time. I didn’t even understand the perplexed look my mother gave me when I brought it home months later. In retrospect maybe it was a little disturbing for the quiet, surly boy in the corner, with few friends and self-confidence issues to be clay modelling scenes of intense graphic violence.

Oh, teenage Ben. What an enigma.

It’s been years since I last tried to sketch anything. I should stress at this point that I’ve never really been very _good_ at sketching, or drawing, or most kinds of art.

Anyway.

For whatever reason we were sitting in Dolores Park yesterday, soaking up San Francisco’s gorgeous March sunshine and looking over the Mission itself, I fancied a go.

This is why carrying a small Moleskin is important.