Time, time is a killer, time kills life and life kills time. If my worst enemy were a conceptual framework, it would be the notion of time management. I’ve read, or rather skimmed through an occasional business text on the subject, something I’d have never imagined doing in my earlier days, just as I didn’t believe an artist would need any mathematical skills in my more tender years, I have been proven wrong on both counts. The skimming didn’t help, time is too cold and logical to encompass the full gamut of what life throws at us, and yet I try to break it down into more manageable components, if only for the sake of my own sanity.

The problem is I have a way of doing things, and that way has a name, it’s called "my life", and inside my life are the following:-

• Me
• People
• Other living creatures
• Emotions
• Dreams
• Objects
• Tasks
• Ideas

Everything else can be left to the side as far as I am concerned, if there is anything I have left out of this list and if there is, don’t remind me, I never was one for organizing, I rarely preside over let alone attend social gatherings in any form. I certainly could not be trusted to manage any form of business concern, unless you’re a masochistic manager who’d like to witness a small social revolution, if only to break the tedium and monotony of the working day. This statement in particular is not an over-exaggeration. On the occasions in my life I have been offered a promotion, it was for the main part due to my "trouble making", i.e encouraging a work force to think way way outside of the box, even to the degree of questioning why the hell they’d want to work for such a company in the first place?

I’ve never been good with time, it does have a habit of tripping me up at the most inopportune moments. My partner Christina has been steadily delegating more and more of her landscape architecture course work to me, essentially leaving piles of it on my desk, well I say desk, in fact it’s a laminated kitchen table with a wonky leg. Invariably each morning I am greeted by a plethora of Post-it notes and to-do lists, which are never satisfactorily completed. I’ve put my foot down a few times but I know how stressful Chris’s life can be (running a landscaping company) and how intolerant I can be of any form of stress that we have come to a strange and unspoken agreement. She does what she can and I do the rest.

Besides all of the above there are my own commitments, essentially I have just given up on a blog, a t-shirt reviews blog, it’s popularity grew too fast for my enthusiasm, and besides there is only so much one can say about t-shirts, however fanciful the design. Fortunately I have been offered a tidy sum to pass the reigns over and am i negotiations with an affluent chap by the name of Charlie and we speak. Saying that I’ve found myself with yet another blog in hand, i.e this one, something I had originally intended to proffer a few brief statements of intent in regards to each artwork as it appeared in the public forum. Yet again something that always happens to me is happening here. I do not like to be left feeling short-changed, I do not like to leave others in that unenviable state either, if you’ve bothered to come here to read my ramblings I should at the very least ramble with the best of them, offer myself up as a contender for great digressor, or something along those lines, because I do digress, habitually.

If there’s one thing I love to do it is fill the vacuum of a wasted life with the wanderings of an over-active and under-utilised mind, it’s what spurs me on to create, it essentially is the rock and a hard place of many creative beings, talk yourself to death or work yourself to death Doing both, let alone doing either will ensure an early grave I am sure of that, but in the short term, a more pertinent obstacle to life’s fulfilment, in whatever form one may assume it to be, is time. Something that no matter how much you may philosophize or spiritualize about, you will eventually be confronted with a clock, a mirror, a calendar or some other device that was no doubt invented to hurry you up and get you about your business. My business is perception, and the pitfall of my business is the perception of time and all that it entails.

If I spend too long perceiving the manifestations of time I achieve one of two things, the first is nothing at all, yes it may have involved an interesting excursion into the manifest psychology of man, or rather this man, but beyond that, there are no meat and bones on an experience. However many people tell you it’s the journey that counts, if you don’t have a photographic travelogue at hand, or a weighty report on the devastation of the over-populated regions of your under-utilised subconscious, no one will believe you. The other is a list, a list of achievements, or worse still, a to-do list and an over-inflated perception of what one individual can manage to cram into their life before it’s fateful end, illustrious or not, it will have a limit, and that limit is perceived in more than mere quantity of achievement unless one works on a purely materialistic agenda. No, the list remains beyond life, it is the all consuming fire that so many of us fear, it is the judgement by the harshest judge of all, not the supposed deity that so many in this world may still assume, whatever form it may take, controls one’s destiny, but oneself. I am my worst judge, be it for good or bad, if I think less of myself I raise the bar, a benchmark of impossibility, if I think more I do the same.

I have over-extended myself, my plans lay asunder, besides attempting to complete the Indoor Street Art print series I am planning to exhibit in Montreal this year as well as a number of other galleries that still lay on the cards, and with what you may ask? As of right now nothing. Paintings that have not been painted, on canvases that have not been stretched. On top of this the house lies in near ruins, the weather has been harsh this year, the sea’s salt has managed to tear off most of the paint from its rear, leaving it hanging like exterior white matt eczema. The front railings need repairs. The alley to the side of the house needs new gates. The basement needs another damp treatment. Besides which I have two art sites on the cards, ArtShout.net which I am hoping will offer free advertising to the arts community, plus Articstical.ly which I assume will be an arts community portal. Then there’s a fashion blog which a friend has convinced me I should contribute to, plus there’s a pile of installation works I must find the funds and time for if I am to ever exhibit beyond 2009.

But right at this moment I should be working on my 8th piece in the Indoor Street Art Series, I’ve attached some previews, it’s entitled "Spears of Destiny". I’m not a Britney fan, let’s get that straight, in fact I detest the world of mainstream pop for the main part, but what I have found particularly interesting about this subject is based upon my own experiences of mental health. The industry, the people, the corporate interests that drove this woman to the crazy house have swept the whole event under the carpet. However frightening that bald mad woman beating journalists with an umbrella may have appeared, she was the closest the public will ever get to seeing the person behind the celebrity. Fame in all it’s manifestations is mere armour. Something that can be pierced, extracted, appropriated, killed and even rejuvenated.

What you see now is not real, it’s the Prozac talking, Britney is a martyr unto herself and the unrealistic demands we as the public place upon "stars" and celebrities. She is no Joan of Arc for example, she has no message, as do almost all of those in the full glare of the media’s spotlight The famous are not people they are products, if the product is faulty we send it back to the manufacturers and it is either repaired or replaced. A product cannot declare war, start a revolution, reignite spiritual belief or tamper with the mechanics of power. It is simply consumed.

Britney is not a holy icon, nor a historical one, yet she will now continue to command the same attention in our immediate and short-term cultural view that any figure from the past could possibly achieve, and what’s more no war, no crusade, no enlightenment, no passage bar that that the A&R and PR people behind this "product" wish us to perceive will be recorded for posterity. Every product has a shelf-life, Britney has wasted precious marketing time and expenditure thinking, feeling and concluding that here life was meaningless. She has been burned at the stake of celebrity and has risen, phoenix-like from the fires of paparazzi hell to one again vend her pop fodder for a meaningless and emotionally stunted generation.

Deep breath. Calm down. Have a cup of tea. Ignore me everyone, I am just having one of those lives.

This post is tagged art, artist, Britney, Celebrity, life, mental illness, pop, time management