This is David Gibson

Starting my new job officially this Friday, February 8. I just completed two days of preparatory training for it. I feel overwhelmingly ready. Only thing to do is get started and hit the ground running. It's going to be a real challenge. See how much I can achieve. It would be great if I can stay there long term. Fingers crossed.

I started looking for work again recently and lo and behold I got hired. Something new, in a different sort of place, but I am excited. The angel of necessity is smiling over my shoulder. More to come after I start, no jinxing the opportunity. Promoting culture, fundraising, etc.

My whole life has been about being present for other people. For myself I feel very small, almost nonexistent. In curating  I became professionally active with the artists, the gallery, the press, and even the gallery going public. I had a role. Now my role is much more narrowly defined. I feel the limits pressing down upon me. When I am away on vacation there is some succor from this pressure. I can convince myself that I deserve it even though I have so many regrets about a failure to be present in mynpast life as the sort of writer I always wanted to be. I am currently struggling again to do this. The good fight none will ever know.

Tomorrow, Michele and I are leaving for a little vacation in the Hudson Valley. I won't say much about the exact location but it's kind of a dream destination, it's on a mountain, and I hear the food is great! I look forward to a lot of earnest relaxation: reading and writing, local activities, and jumping in the pool. I don't know what else to say. Life is an adventure when we want it to be. My life with Michele is a blessing that never ends.

I am not given to understand everything about my life at the same time. Some truths may never be spoken, while others shake me to my core. The wellspring of my origins is always around me. The implements I use: a pen, a comb, a book I may be reading, these are all useful but they are also essential and in their own way beautiful. The stirrings of a soul in motion aptly and subtly described is the story most worth making known. 

I want to sing my heart out. I wish that sometimes I had been gifted not only with a passion for language but a desire and ability to sing. I would have been a great musician. But alas it isn't in me. I do love music however and spend many hours on iTunes. Having my musical inspiration come from the same place where I write and discover other sources of knowledge is a joy.

I find myself wanting to post more about my feelings these days. I have always been someone who freely unburdened himself, but in the era of the overshare, I find myself strangely mute. I don't want to tell EVERYONE about my life and my problems. The void doesn't care. I do however want to put these facts before anyone who would care, who would extend themselves to me. Beyond my loving wife I find it hard to know who that might be. Perhaps the writing about feelings is overrated. Maybe I should be writing stories, poems, and more. I think that over time, when we get the chance to vent constantly, we lose the ability to recognize that all our words have clarity and weight, and that they matter as self expression most when they aspire to something more. I have been organizing my library and putting things in their places. Gathering all the poetry books I own, all the drama books, the short stories, and so on. Thinking about language, about expression, about process. I am a fl...

I seem to come back to this blog about once every year and make a small stab at trying to achieve the level of honesty I see every day on social media but can rarely summon as I once did when I felt anonymous in my life. I am not sure if I will ever feel sincerely anonymous again, but in many ways I feel naked, stripped of the socially conscientious mores that once held me to a certain social circle. The people who might read this are in fact the same ones I have left behind. Because at some level I find them profoundly insincere, with agendas preceding true friendship, with a need to gather intel rather that share the true fragility of their lives. It used to be that sharing was caring. Now it's just another way to show off.

It's strange how the passing of time affects us. We see January 1st on our calendars and the urge to take on new habits and throw off old ones grips us. But life is not that simple. Our path is the same one we have been walking all of our lives. The date doesn't change it. What does alter our tendency to procrastination is an aptitude for recognizing our latent abilities, and with the aid and succor of support from a loved one, moving to the next stage in our personal evolution. For me this means seizing upon the crucible of my past, that being my lonely aspiration to write, not merely about art, but as art, writing stories, novels even, reading them publicly and getting them published. I somehow needed permission to do this from someone who cared about me, and Michele has done this.  11/20/16 Since I wrote the paragraph above, in fact just two weeks later, my life shifted irredeemably, and I was unable to focus on my own creative needs. My father had a stroke and was immedi...

It seems that more and more I have to choose carefully what I want to take up my time. There was a period in my life when I was all about socializing and seeing art openings. Not so much anymore. I have a vague and intermittent yearning for those things but I am happier to work at home, to read and write, and to live with Michele and enjoy our life together. Each day contains only so much time. A few hours can be spent looking, or researching, or writing, or making calls. I prefer to be focused, calm, and productive, as many of my artist friends surely are as well. I should emulate them rather than give in to the frenetic pace of public events or the obsessiveness of one who just sits and spins. Social media is a great distraction. I have to be inspired by both what's out there and also what's in me, which I can only discover if I keep looking. 

The reason you don't see me on this blog very often is because I am essentially a private person. I lack the desire to constantly announce myself, or to feel that what I am thinking on any given day is more important or more poetic than what anyone else feels. Do I desire to create great works of art? Yes, in my own way. I am a great lover of literature with a big "L" and I posses a multitude of books. The written experience, both as a writer and a reader, is intrinsic to my existence. Despite the range of my accomplishments I still wake every day with the aim to write. So here I am, filling up the page as best I can. Need more coffee. Hell, I need to eat. Writing seems to exist in the margins of my life, and every now and then I finish something, an essay or an article, and I can pat myself on the back for a few moments. Right now I am working on a review fo Frieze Magazine, possibly something new for Artillery, and themes for various exhibitions yet to be given th...

Once one leaves the city, all bets are off. We are in New Jersey somewhere slowly nearing our final destination of Geneva NY. We will stop in Newark NJ, Scranton PA, Binghampton NY, Ithaca NY, and then Geneva. Time on a bus seems interminable yet the view can be serenely beautiful.

It's unfortunate that such wide swaths of the American landscape are accessible only via bus. I do enjoy the great views of land and sky, and there is a serene quality to passing through all the places and non-places in such a conveyance, but at the same time, oh, it just takes forever.

Michele and I are now on the bus to Geneva. Passing under Hudson River. I have never been so glad to see NYC receding in the distance. Three days in the Finger Lakes region.

My life has taken on a special poignancy in which I want to reinvestigate every thought I ever had before and qualify it for use in my new life. I also want to be satisfied in my professional and creative endeavors. I want to curate what I want. I am tired of making compromises and playing to the egos of various artists who are not worth my consideration. I also want to allow myself time and depth of thought to write. I am looking for joy.

On Wednesday we had plans to take an extended jaunt around the Pioneer Valley with our friend Sean Greene, a painter I met at UMass Amherst when I first came here in 2003. Weirdly enough he is my only male friend up here. He is a very happy go lucky guy, ex-musician, father of two, and makes beautiful abstractions that are originally inspired by the gesturality of graffitti and skateboarding but are very much about color, tonality, and what I like to call the 'keyhole effect,' a scaling of perspective beyond the edge of the canvas. Sean picked us up at our lodging and we proceeded to take a leisurely tour of the local landscape. We ended up at Cook Farm which raises cows, chickens, and rabbits. It is mainly a dairy farm and has many young and older cows in different pens. When.we arrived a young girl had stopped off the roadside to pet them. We walked around and took a lot of adorable pictures of the various animals. We bought fresh ice cream brownies and cookies to take with ...

On both Monday and Tuesday Bird and I went to Northampton, which is the larger of the two closest towns affiliated with colleges, UMass Amherst and Amherst College here, and Smith College there. Northampton is physically larger and has a fun-filled main street. It has a homegrown mall of sorts, several cafes, dozens of restaurants, a movie theatre, a fabulous old hotel, and an art museum, among other things. We always have fun when we go there. Despite being a simple place indicative of American culture, there is always a new adventure waiting to be had. Monday was a holiday, Presidents Day, which in New York would hardly raise a blip on the workaday radar, but here in New England, the cradle of American Democracy, they take it for a real holiday. The buses were running less and very slowly so we had a leisurely 90 minute wait before our bus arrived. Luckily the weather has been sunny and bright. We talked to some crows on a nearby tree and remarked about people walking around. Maybe...

Its funny how being somewhere else turns everything around. Early to bed and early to rise, as Benjamin Franklin said, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Of course it also helps to be in a fantastically comfy bed in a great room! Looking forward to a great breakfast and to following our noses around town. Adventure awaits!

Everywhere that Bird and I go turns out to be magical. Though this is our third trip to Amherst and my dozenth, there are still new experiences to be had, new wonders to take in. We arrived at 10:30 a.m. and we were so bushed we felt ambushed. After cabbing to our B & B we checked in and crashed out. I went nearby and got us some yummy organic foods to munch on, and I took a picture of the B & B and of the Emily Dickinson House which is right across the street. We ate and slept. In the middle of the day! That's what I call indulgence. The night sky was filled with stars and Amherst opened up to us with litle lights in all the windows. 11 pm and we are ready to sleep. There's a great breakfast that comes with the room. We are looking at brochures and making plans!

Its been a very exhausting 24 hours but now we are well on our way. The bus is really moving! Its quiet and sunny and the roads are mostly empty. We just passed through Springfield MA. Bird is sleeping next to me holding my hand. Life is good.