Impossibilities

If I have learned one thing in my time on this planet, it is that Greatness flourishes in the tiny cracks of the day. If really you want to do something wonderful, if you want to create something amazing, you don’t want to dedicate your time to it.

I am put off by the direct approach to achieving Greatness, convinced that such a concentrated gaze will inevitably cause it to suffocate. Greatness does not breed under fluorescent light. I’ve realized that most of the neat things that I have done that I am most proud of, (Geek Prom, Wuda Wooch! and this website, to name a few) were never full-time positions. They required no resume, no job application. They didn’t ask forty hours a week. Heck, they didn’t even ask four hours a week. At the time, all these little tidbits of pride demanded from me were a few hours crammed into an already packed schedule, and a couple pounds of raw passion wrapped up in the folds of my brain.

Updating this site has never been a particularly painful ordeal, but over the past few years it has taken on many shapes. It has been a piece of self-actualization, a personal burden, a civic duty, a luxury, an escape valve, and a guilt trip. Despite the emotional roller coaster inevitable in such a messy relationship, I have typically erred in the direction of feeding, grooming and caring for my site, even when it seemed that adding one more activity to a day would make it explode with the fury of a thousand suns. At times I would need to squander an entire weekend, consuming nothing but Dr Pepper and Cheez-Its, just to update and release the next iteration of Cromlech, or Dane’s Bored, or Brainside Out, or whatever it was.

Usually it didn’t take that sort of time. For the most part, day-to-day posts and updates would run somewhere between two minutes and two hours. Sometimes the task was immensely cathartic, other times it felt kind of itchy, and a few times it felt like my brain was a grapefruit held in giant crushing robotic claws. Looking back, however, most of the work has been worth it.

There’s still a lot that needs to be done (large swaths of this site have been hidden away until I can somehow get them updated, or automate the update process so they update themselves) but what we already have is quite spectacular. Here I am able to browse and search through the last 3 1/2 years of my life. Whenever I have the date, month or even the year of an event screwed up (say, When was it that I met the host of Animal Planet while biking to Lake Minnetonka?) I inevitably check this site. Certainly, the weblog is incapable of capturing everything in my life, but even if only five percent of good stuff is accounted for in here, that’s still a significant chunk of information.

When it was created, this website was never intended to be a resource of any consequence. Perhaps it still isn’t for other people, but for me, it is invaluable when sifting through history. It helps clear my head of wandering thoughts, stray words and rejoinders, which increases the chances that something profound may bubble forth. We’re still waiting for that to happen, but I’m confident that it will be any day now.

It is important to keep in mind that the things you see here (in addition to all my other passions) have been realized in the off-hours of the day. Remember that those scraggly, ragged edges of time that most people toss aside are actually where the magic happens. It is hanging on for dear life at the edge of existence, with your knuckles white and your teeth bared, that you find yourself. With that, go forth and achieve Greatness. Join the cult of human power, and prepare yourself to do the impossible.