This week I haven’t been much of an artist. There’s been a different job to do. I’ve needed to get a dead van roadworthy. It needed oil massaged into it, and some TLC.

I paid some other dues too, and there’s been a small catsplosion out there in the yard to attend to.

I also tackled another big hairy mess consisting of data.

I have two laptops in daily use. On them, and on scattered external hard drives and USB storage media, there were piled terabytes of … mostly crap, and the rest … archives. I have every post I’ve written in ten years of spilling and every video that I’ve posted in two years of filming and editing, but I also have complete shit like committee notes that I didn’t even care about back when the meetings were happening in olden times.

I haven’t dealt with most of it, properly, and I pray to god I never will.

But I’ve thrown it all into neat boxes, backed them up, and taken them to a specially designed space in the basement next to the furnace.

What is left as still relevant and useful is about a single gigabyte of files in neat folders, on a single GNU-Linux operating system. Thus:

It’s slightly more complicated than that, but not by much. There is, for example, a second drive on the same machine for mirroring updates of the same data (as well as all the basement horrors). There is a scrubbed 1TB external that holds a second copy of everything and a third copy of the actual important 1GB out of a thousand.

I’m pretty much ready at any time to nuke and repave this last Linux I’m writing on tonight, pull a fresh copy of that luscious creamy gig, and begin again fresh.

It happened very fast–mere days–compared to how long the same process is taking in the real world house. Mainly this is because digital basement boxes don’t take up physical space, or weigh anything, or take calories to move.

Even so, my kitchen is about 85% perfect now, measured by square footage.

The bathroom, well that as you know is a whole ‘nother story, and that’s next.

The bedroom is waiting for the sick cat who lives in it to be finally integrated into the General Population, and that story is one of authentic but incremental progress.

A dressing room. A workshop room. A shed or two. Onward, to the vehicles.

That’s the truth, of this life.

It’s been a good year.

In the next few days I will continue to post a lot of political junk you don’t care about, because that’s easy for me, and cathartic. I’ll be on the road, and I imagine that will produce footage of some interesting kind, to be cut into, ahem, Content, later into the month.

Thanks for sticking with me through this kind of problematic time–if you are–and if you’re not, well then, ‘you’re not hearing me anyway’, insert ambiguous emoticon here.