It's me! Born: June 9, 1972
Location: Kansas City, MO USA

Follower of Jesus. Husband of Julianna. Father of Josiah. Musician, artist, filmmaker, reader, writer, thinker.

Other places you can find me:

KC Samoffs
MySpace (personal)
Flickr (personal)
Flickr (Josiah)
YouTube (films and animations)
DoodleBug (drawings)
A Different Kind of Cop (my long-running electronic music project)
A Different Kind of Cop (MySpace)

Tim and His Guitar (listen to some of my singer/songwriter music)

August 21, 2003 at 4:12 pm

The Art Of Absence (or, where do ideas go when we work?)

Where do ideas go? It always sounds like an excuse: “I’ve been busy.” I’m perfecting the “Art of Absence.” School started on Monday and it’s been pretty draining — it’s hard to come back after having a couple of months without kids in my face all day. A freelance project has been keeping me up until 1am every night. Thankfully, I had the opportunity to do it, but thankfully it’s complete. I’ve been doing a complete redesign on my website too. It is coming along quite nicely and will look completely different from the current one. (It’s funny how most people seem to blogfast during the summer while all I did was write.) Weeks like this make me feel like I never think; nothing introspective, nothing thought-provoking, nothing deep. The weird thing is, I actually do do a lot of thinking when I am sitting in from of my computer monitor, doing a design job, but, by the time I am finished, I don’t remember anything I thought about (or I am too tired to continue thinking about it). Some days, I am so busy that it feels like I’ve been completing my tasks like a robot: here’s the check-list, I know what I’m programmed to do, and I do it. At the end of the day, all that’s left to do is oil up the old gears and plug myself into the recharger in preparation for the next day’s mindless tasks. I get depressed when I “stop thinking.” I don’t feel tuned or synced. I feel like a child who’s suddenly realized that he hasn’t been sleeping with his teddy bear quite as much lately. I feel like I’ve lost something, but I can’t figure out what it is. I feel like I’m in a dream where I’m trying to run, but everything is moving much too slow. Where do ideas go when we work? (I know we have ‘em.) I can only hope that a week’s worth of conscious thoughtlessness is processed and stored as subconscious units of future ideas. I can only hope that my ideas weren’t shoveled off onto some far away trash heap where all of the lost ideas go. I can only hope.