Rabbit Valley Road

Yeah, yeah, posting here has been light, and I have all kinds of plans, hopes, and dreams that I want to pursue with this blog…

Moving on.

I awoke at 4 a.m. today thinking that there was a fire above me on Stringer’s Ridge. Once I gained my bearings, I realized that there was no fire. Everything was ok, and it was all in my head. I’ve been hard at work on Chattarati the last 2 weeks, and I had a series of ideas I wanted to get down before lying back down for a few more hours of shuteye.

That’s been my motus operandi as of late — having nightmares that the neighborhood is burning down, or waking up in desperate need of a shovel.

Chattarati has been on a role. I called it a 3-week ass kicking spree, a while back. Hawbaker and I feasted on coffee, beer, and Niedlov’s in order to get the Cash Maps database updated in time. (BTW, financial disclosure forms really should be made public a lot sooner than one day before the election).

We have a slew of new writers that we’re meeting with tomorrow. Traffic doubled the last 2 months due in part to the municipal election today, but also because we’ve been working hard to keep the site updated. We have a laundry list of new database projects we’re considering for the near future. Finally, the word ‘redesign’ has started to float around as we look to the future.

Without trying to give too much away, here, I want to close with an amusing anecdote about Shepard Fairey, courtesy of Jack Cheng:

A decade or so ago, Fairey had just emerged from the skate-culture scene and was gaining notoriety for putting up stickers depicting a posterized image of wrestler/actor Andre the Giant and the line “Andre the Giant has a posse.” These stickers were the predecessors to Fairey’s eventual Obey Giant Empire.

In those early days, my friend Chris was in middle school. Chris would see Fairey in the neighborhood all the time, placing the stickers on signs, lampposts and the sides of garbage cans near the school. Curious about the man’s motivations, Chris walked up to him one day and asked bluntly, “dude, what the hell are you doing?”

Shepard Fairey looked back and replied, “you’ll see.”

Well played, sir.