Long time, no blog...

That's the beauty of having a largely unread blog, I suppose...I can lay off for a little while, and nobody complains!

As much as I would like to fancy myself a logical fellow, it occured to me as I lay in bed trying to sleep last night that a great number...indeed, perhaps the majority...of decisions that I make in a given day are based on some sort of inner cue system. When I get up in the morning and I stare at my drawerfull of underwear, smelling like fresh linen and sitting idly in the dark blue light of way-too-early-morning, there is some inner voice that makes those blue boxers with the orange fish just feel RIGHT in my mind...and the red boxer-briefs with the gray waistband just feel OUT OF PLACE. So I pick up the boxers. I head to the kitchen, and, for whatever reason, sugar-heavy lemonade is the only thing that makes sense to pour over the dry lips and sour mouth of way-too-early-morning...water won't work, it tastes too much like mouth by the time it hits your tastebuds, and milk won't work because I can't help but picture it souring instantly on contact with morning-mouth, and beer won't work because, c'mon man, it's 5:15 in the morning. There's nothing more rational about lemonade...in fact, it's probably a terrible choice, that much sugar that early in the morning...but it just feels RIGHT and the others just feel OUT OF PLACE.

This feeling extends to where I sit in a restaurant, which way I face (toward the door or away from it?) in my dining booth, whether or not I take the cement walkway closest to my front door or the dirt path right next to it as I head to my car, whether or not my cell phone faces up or down while it's sitting in my car's cupholder, which pens end up in my shirt pocket, how the plates are arranged on my dinner table, and where the post-its go on my desktop. I don't think of myself as a neat-freak or compulsive or anything...I just have this feeling of what feels RIGHT to me and what feels OUT OF PLACE. That unexplainable RIGHT is where I park my car in the morning, it's which coffee flavor makes sense to me, and it's why the cups with little polystyrene dimples feel more like good coffee to me than the flat ones. I wonder if advertisers have figured this feeling out; if they have caught on to whatever aesthetic sense it is that tells a person which things are RIGHT and which are OUT OF PLACE. Perhaps that's why the blue dot over the Kix logo is positioned as it is, and it's what went wrong with the Michelin stunt-driver commercial. At any given time, it seems to me that any given decision either feels like it is more correct or more wrong, and for whatever reason, it's this internal sense that drives that distinction most times.

I've always fancied myself a logical guy, but the more I think about it, the more feeling-driven I am. Oh man, my mom would love to hear that.

Don't tell her...it will ruin years of my work.

Peace,
Justin