mountainFrugal Journal

[mountainFrugal]

My current Renaissance Capital Stack(s).

Mix. Match. Combine. Remix. Make. Live. Think. Explore.

[sodatrain]

Wow! So much happening since I last read your journal. Huge congrats on finishing the gallery, the soft open, the real open, selling art, seeing forum friends, crushing bike mechanic training certs, etc etc. It's really inspiring to read your journal and it's so helpful to see all the details about how you have arrived at this point! Thank you!!

I've been thinking about starting to assess my various forms of capital as part of a monthly review or something so it was neat to see your previous post about the various forms. This will help me structure how I think about it.

It's also admirable to hear your thoughts and approach to DW and Late DW. Also the trust established between you and DW. Really fantastic stuff. Thank you for sharing that deeply personal information. I've had a dear friend evolve into my partner over the last 7 months and we've had some radical honesty work recently. Super exhausting work, but yikes it's incredible to go thru that and be on the other side. It's opened doors, built trust, confirmed intentions and emotions, and it's really radically powerful for me to feel so deeply seen, understood, accepted, AND loved. If you are feeling that, which it seems you are, I agree with your lucky son of a bitch comment!!

You are a wonderful human full of wisdom. And my brief time with your DW suggests she is too!

[thef0x]

Pardon my language, that graphic is cool as fuck. Comfort being a strange human resonated and I like that the growth chart is not in the economic capital bucket.

I'm still getting caught up on your journal so I hope to read more about your experience with Zen. Thanks for posting.

[guitarplayer]

I also crossed 500 posts recently, but I am not FI yet, crap! Guess I will have to make up for it with some other wealth, should be easy enough

[sodatrain]

I was sharing your capital image and explaining it to Partner. She asked "how is Atheism capital?".

I could not answer other than try and draw a parallel to Meditation.

I am able to see how meditation is, or the benefits from a meditation practice are valuable like that. You must have parallels for atheism? Would you be comfortable explaining that one more?

[mountainFrugal]

@thef0x thanks! The growth that matters is emotional if you want to figure out what you want to do after FI. I have only posted a few times about zen as it is really part of my moment to moment attention to reality. I think there are much deeper levels, but they might require giving up other things in order to put in the time towards very long meditation sessions. I have opted for many shorter meditation sessions over the years. This also translates to movement on foot, running, and biking. There is significant overlap with flow in the sensation, but they are distinct things that you are exercising through the practice.

@gp - you have many forms of capital wealth that NW is becoming more irrelevant.

@sodatrain - thank you for the kind words and I am glad it is helpful to you currently. WRT atheism as spiritual capital ... I view atheism as a way of thinking about spiritual experiences. I can both simultaneously know they are figments of my imagination, just like the various gods and dieties in all religions, but that does not mean that I cannot derive personal meaning from experiences that my brain latches onto that tickle many parts of my psyche (for lack of a better term..."mysticism"). I think it is possible to hold a rational atheistic perspective on something and a mystical perspective on something at the same time. The rational part can dismiss it away, but the multi-sensory/integrated "mystical feeling" could have still occurred and it could be memorable. As an example, I took a large dose of psilocybin mushrooms in college. The trees in the park felt like they were protecting me with their underground root/mycelium network. Walking back to my house the warm lights coming out of the houses felt warm. The shitty house I lived in was dark and shades of blue/black. It turned things from good to bad instantly. Do I think the trees were protecting me? No. This experience showed me that the mind contains the duality of the most beautiful and darkest parts of the world for an individual and we are mostly blind to it in our everyday existence. The experience was meaningful and "mystical", but it also has a rationalist explanation that can provide a different perspective.

[mountainFrugal]

We are being awarded a small business development grant that I wrote. With this grant money coming in we are at -$3k net on the entire project (lost rent included). Or to put it more bluntly in $ terms, we completely remodeled and opened an art gallery/classroom/studio for $3000. Broad ERE skillsets for the win (money not the only metric of course!).

Also, taught my first art class this evening to my first two eager students.

[grundomatic]

Congratulations. Very impressive!

[mountainFrugal]

Thank you @grundomatic!

---
# yakshaving
I had a deep reorg/refine/connection building spring cleaning session on my Obsidian vault today (cough YAKSHAVING cough*). I integrated all of my academic work into my art/adventure/zine work by adding cross links between them (separate vaults for personal and work). I did a partial integration earlier this year, but left most of the connections between the notes and ideas out besides the ones I was actively working on (art studio/business, art learning, zines, Avalanche research projects). I touched all the major category notes and updated them if they had not been worked on in a while with what I would do in the next 20 minutes to get the project going again. Additionally, I added physical and digital book/paper resources prioritized for relevance for each project. I have an overview set of notes for each project and a directory with subdirectories with all the information and actual work on the project. As per usual... this follows the LIVE, MAKE, THINK, EXPLORE structure I have been developing over the last several years.

2024 Goals:
viewtopic.php?p=283215#p283215

2024-2029 Goals:
viewtopic.php?p=284213#p284213

So far I have not put up a zero yet for the Skillathon 2024 - although things have not gone completely to my original timing of when everything would get worked on. Plugging along and putting out another zine next month.

Organizational deep house jamZ for WOG notes defragment: https://youtu.be/FWFdfMO8Sao?si=Jc-si0MZVuqAIIyz

* "Does your physical desk still look like a complete dumpster fire?... "
"Why yes it does! I am SO glad you noticed that I spent 0 time today on it."

[Western Red Cedar]

Kudos on the grant. That is exciting. It is kind of amazing to see what opportunities unfold for those with initiative, who can write well, and also read the fine print in a contract/grant/tax code, etc...

I'm guessing that the experience of being a "developer" or "small business owner" may also pay some dividends down the road.

[mountainFrugal]

Thanks @WRC. All of my grant writing skills, in addition to writing and assembling the grant paperwork, came in handy with this one. Here are a few subtleties in grantsmanship: interpreting websites for eligibility and requirements for what funding call to apply to, talking briefly with grant giving office prior to submitting before wasting time writing, making a one page summary to share with the office to double check, submitting way before the deadline, following-up to make sure that everything was submitted correctly prior to the deadline, etc. In each of these cases we got some good little feedback nuggets that helped make the final application stronger.

Yes. I am sure I will use these other "titles" at some point in the future as credibility for other projects. My hope is that it is for a project that I could not imagine taking on right now.

All this is to say... the world is our ERE oyster! Get out there and do interesting (to you) projects.

[mountainFrugal]

# WINS
The gallery and classroom are officially open for business as of May 4, 2024. The opening had nearly 100 people come through during the evening and we got a large number of email sign-ups. Each of our classes (oils, watercolor/ink, youth) has at least 1 paying student (Youth class starts next week). 4 more students spread over all the three classes and we will be cashflow positive and more than ramen noodle profitable. Beautiful. Having the gallery open and operating has brought a decent number of tourists in. After doing more research collectors who actually buy art are unlikely to buy from a large group show. It is hard to compare across the artists pieces. We will use group shows sparingly from here on out.

I assembled my personal art studio for $35. I was gravel biking to the studio and on the road coming into town there was a yard sale with a very large drawing table for sale. I slammed on the disc brakes and negotiated the table for $30! I only had $10 on me and no way to carry it so I gave a downpayment and asked DW to bring the van (she was coming to the studio anyway that evening). We also found 4 roller chairs, TV trays, and a plastic storage bin for free. My business partner found me a retro movable lamp for $5.

As mentioned above a few posts ago we got a small business grant that offsets nearly all the cost of the gallery/classroom/studio build. With the grant included in our accounting we spent -$3000 net on this project.

# IMPROVEMENTS/INSPIRATIONS
Music inspiration this month is actually a DJ Clay Pigeon. He does a morning radio show called wake and bake out of New Jersey. We listen to the show while we paint fairly frequently. Clay Pigeon is a delightfully weird human with a great taste in music. The show archive (including today's show) can be found here:
https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/WA

I had a travel watercolor kit that I made out of an old mint tin. I upgraded to a larger tin I found that may have housed nail clippers? In the small tin my primary colors for this palette were mixed in with other colors in the same half-pan. In the larger palette, they get their own half-pan along with some shadow colors, black and some grays for doing quick value studies. I also added white gouache if I wanted to mix an opaque color.

# NEW DIRECTIONS
This month I started leading art gym on Friday nights. The idea with this is discussions and exercises that artists should be doing to keep up their art muscles. We had a discussion on female abstract painters, did a session on vehicles, and tonight will be landscape thumbnails (landscapitos).

My business partner is teaching me oil painting. So in addition to water color and gouache, I can work with color theory in oils for my DIY MFA in painting.

# DRAWING
I finished another E.D.C. sketchbook. I made a display with them advertising my introduction to watercolor and ink class. A few people during the opening asked if I sold the sketchbooks. Or if I would consider selling the art board that they were clipped to as an interactive piece. This was after some children helped themselves to taking a look at the sketchbooks. This started the trend of people flipping through and putting back on another page. After thinking about it more this month I do not think I would try to sell these unless someone specifically asked and had money. The reason is that they are explorations and I would not want the idea of it being sold to influence what I decide to put in there. It would have to be truly incidental. If I could sell scans/prints sure. Alternatively, if I could do a year or so of sketchbooks scan them and then sell them as a lot for some absurd price ($5-6k comes to mind). Money does make everything more complicated!

Painting IS drawing - minor non-original observation

# OUTDOOR ADVENTURE
Various exercise stats.

Spring wildflowers are out in mountain meadows! I did a "Botanizing with my Boo" session with DW. Hike slow, ID plants, generally explore an area. 10K total hike.

I started the overhaul on DW's gravel bike in earnest. I was hoping to be done, but had to order some tools for replacing the hub free-body.

# WORK
My new manager and I went through the motions of doing a performance review. I did everything I said I was going to do although the timing is a bit awkward for "future goal setting" with only 1.5 months on the contract left. Haha. I finished up the last newsletter of the academic year. This newsletter was my last official communications task. The rest were written out and the knowledge transferred to the new full-time comms person.

Taught Introduction Watercolor and Ink for 2 sessions.

I presented my "academic exit" seminar to a mix of in-person and online folks. The talk was titled: "Data Landscapes: Visual Storytelling of California’s Fiery and Frosty Extremes". The talk will blended research findings, illustrations, data visualizations, and field-based journalism to explore the impact of fire and avalanches on California’s ecosystems. This was essentially my failed National Geographic grant where I did back to back ultra-runs through a number of recent burn scars in the surrounding mountains. I brought along some of the zines as visuals in addition to my presentation. Two scientists that I really respect complimented my talk to me and to some colleagues that told me after. An executive director for another institute attended the talk and asked if I was interested in contract work for visual storytelling on a related topic. I sent her a copy of my presentation and my art business contact info. If yes, great. If not, also fine.

# SOCIAL
I am teaching on Wednesday evenings now so the group trail runs have been on hold. However, one of my friends in that group also has a flexible schedule so we started doing weekly midday runs and hill climbs instead.

Part of being a small business owner in a small community is participating in organizing events for the community. I attended two about building new MTB trails connecting the surrounding towns. This would be awesome if the project actually comes together. Then I could commute on single track. . Darmera is involved with the local art scene. My business partner and I switch off attending local arts planning meetings. This month's topic was organizing the monthly art walk. We are now on the map.

When I was in the Bay for work I stayed with one of my best friends. We walked around Berkeley looking at all the beautiful native flower gardens and found some fresh Loquats to pick. (non-native, but tart and delicious). We picked up burritos at my favorite burrito shop in the Bay, La Mission, and brought them over to our other friends place. CM has a 2 year old ball of energy who is potty training.

The next day I met up with CM again, gave an impromptu lunch talk to her research group and then we went over to The Compound in Emeryville (between Berkeley and Oakland) where she has art studio space. The Compound is an art/maker space that takes up most of an old industrial building. They have salvaged nice equipment for just about every major form of creation (printing, ceramics, fabric, painting, woodshop, etc.). An inspiration to what we are trying to do at Darmera on a much smaller scale.
https://thecompoundgallery.com/

[sodatrain]

"commute on singletrack". Dang. That would be fantastic!

Great update. Love the sketches as always. Inspiring progress!

[mountainFrugal]

Thank you @sodatrain!
---
I tabled at my first zine fest on Saturday. 11-5 pm. I made $110 or ~$82 with fuel, coffee, and burrito costs included. I learned a lot based on patterns and customer interactions. I will be very ready for a larger fest later this year or next year. I learned a lot from my table mate. We chatted and shared tips when there was a lull in the people walking by. I traded zines with a number of other zinesters. This is one of my favorite parts of this community.

Here is a partial list:
- [ ] Position on floor matters a lot
- [ ] small writing in some zines not legible for some folks
- [ ] $5 is too expensive for mini-zines- $4, or 3 for 10
- [ ] $20 upper end for larger format anything or it will not sell
- [ ] email sign-up sheet on table
- [ ] double down on fire and adventure (sadly the ERE/frugality based zines had little interest )
- [ ] change name on art and zines
- [ ] Stickers and/or pins as additional merch ($1-3)
- [ ] business cards with art on them work
- [ ] laminated - QR code for payments and user names for payments

Sunday I woke up and it felt like my brain was bashed with a baseball bat with large spikes in it (0 alcohol involved!). Interacting with a lot of very different people for that long was exhausting. It was hard to process it all during, after, and now. This means I will definitely be doing it again because it was hard. HA! Today I have been listening to music in my headphones all day and generally shutting out the world. After drooling on myself for most of yesterday, I finally cleaned up my desk today! Small wins .
---

June 3, 2029 - 5 year narrative:
Looking back it is hard to believe how far I have come with the art businesses. My business partner and I have built a thriving community of artists that meet-up, make art, critique, and generally push one another to squeeze that extra 10% out of each piece. We are both still teaching selectively, but have hired a few up and coming artists over the past year to take over the evening classes, organizing the workshops, and generally running the day to day. We hope they will continue to learn the business fundamentals and then go start their own businesses. Business partner and I have been spending most of our time taking repeat clients out for plein air painting. We have earned quite a reputation in this despite and perhaps because of our complimentary styles that focus on art fundamentals. Our classes and workshops fill almost immediately and nearly always have a wait list of eager students. We converted the warehouse/studio space into another classroom space so that we can run classes simultaneously. Business partner and I have moved our studios and personal galleries into another building up the street that we own. We remodeled the upstairs as apartments that more than cover the rent, mortgage, utilities. My business partner and I are splitting the next year half and half for running things and each taking a 6 month art sabbatical. DW and I are going to slow travel in 3 countries in Europe with some shorter trips to see some other museums and natural areas.

On the personal art front I have consistently done a gallery show every summer at Darmera. The most recent, Graphic Watershed III, sold out of every original piece. I have kept with my illustrative style and applied it to landscapes and nature based paintings that tell a story of animals, plants, or humans. These paintings are the base seed ideas and covers of the zines that I still publish quarterly. I am up to issue 20! The ideas have changed a bit each issue, but they all involve nature, adventure, data, writing and art in some combination. Three issues were essentially a graphic novel. This last year I have made enough from subscriptions to pay for an editor and an intern (paid) to help do the initial time consuming design layouts. I have been to a number a zine fests and continue to enjoy this community of makers.

[ertyu]

Amen! Haha. Great future journal entry

[mountainFrugal]

Thank you @ertyu

----
Flowing over uneven ground

Flowing through the forest over well worn trials. My heart rate matches the cadence and the beauty of the moment. I can keep this pace all day. Effortlessly flowing over uneven ground. Birds sing in the distance. Lizards scatter off the trail in front of me. Flowing through the rolling window of human experience a thought occurs. I should write this down. Something that has become so automatic might be useful to someone. Being hard and soft, being rigid and flexible. This applies equally to the mind as well as the body as it flows over uneven terrain. Doing exactly what you want to be doing at exactly the right time. The mind perspective. Doing exactly what needs to be done at exactly the right time to move fluidly over uneven ground. The body perspective. A true harmony of the two is inseparable at the right time. That right time is right now. Completely relaxed into the moment of both external and internal being. Flowing along.

Why journey here? The answer is not for me, but to attempt to share in words what is felt beyond what can be rationalized in the linear format of speech, of math, of the powerful, but limited forms of analytical understanding. True understanding goes beyond. Understanding is realizing the point in time in space that is thinking these thoughts as both impermanent and eternal at the same time. The duality of all things. The feminine and masculine. Human and nature. Us and them. These are all constructs of the mind to help us navigate via heuristics. These heuristics are only correct some of the time and from certain perspectives. They are not wrong. They are sometimes useful. But more importantly they just are. Just like I and we are.

How does one recognize this in another? There is a calm about them. A groundedness that defies a simple paragraph or biography for that matter. It takes one to know one. This is why animal encounters can be so seemingly magical. The cross species knowing and curiosity of other without a threat attached to the exchange. An understanding, respect, and deep admiration for the shared external environment and the physical shells that you are both wearing. You are not just your shells. You are both beyond yourselves and each other. You are a collective that ceaselessly crashes onto the shores of now. Sharing now and for a moment the same.

[7Wannabe5]

Lovely. I think you would appreciate "Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology" by Andreas Weber, which I am currently reading. I am attempting to head more in that direction myself, but I am still a bit too steeped in the absurd.

[mountainFrugal]

Thank you very much for the recommendation @7.

I am unfamiliar with his work, but it looks like Andreas is involved with https://humansandnature.org/andreas-weber/ and has a number of essays and blog posts on this site. Poking around...https://humansandnature.org/questions/ has a number of seemingly thoughtful questions and discussions surrounding humans and nature. This seems to be a deep vein of gold.

[mountainFrugal]

The Power of Journaling - Meta-cognition magic

With the popularity of journals around here I was surprised to learn that some folks I chat to offline do not keep a regular personal journal.

Start here:
- Freewriting your thoughts
- Make lists of things that are top of mind
- Journal about something that happened, how you felt about it, reflect, repeat.
- Write about something you are truly grateful for and how you will show that gratitude that day

Journaling practice over time can be equivalent to a good therapist*. By putting the thoughts down on paper, especially things that that you are feeling deeply about, it makes you more easily take an outside view of things. What I mean by this is it is easier to be your own caring friend that is helping you deal with some difficult situation. By putting it down on paper it externalizes it freeing up your working memory that is holding all that to actually work on a problem. For example, just articulating it in a linear way as if you are explaining it to a friend is a great way to reduce the mental burden of being you and relying only on you. You have your paper to capture all that.

This helps one in noticing patterns of internal and external states of being, how those states track with one another and how they change based on internal or external perturbations. Doing this over time allows one to draw deep insights by being able to compare over time AND having a closer recollection of the details of an event that are easily forgotten or misremembered. All of this is training to more easily make emotions and feelings as compartmentalized objects that can be both felt, examined, prodded etc. at the same time. Daily journaling also provides a rep of putting words to feelings and emotions.

The journal should not just be used in difficult situations though. It really comes into its own when you use it regularly in non-stressful situations. Just like training in the dojo before sparing before an actual attack/threat. Do this as a meditation for better daily thoughts over time and to be better able to deal with the inevitable shit of being a human.

Journals over time are a personal database of your thoughts. Because I am a fucking nerd I have done sentiment analysis many times on my text file based journals. This can add an additional layer of data just by using word frequency and choice that corresponds to a certain period in time.

Eventually one could get to a state of recognizing personal patterns of internal and external states and the internal and external triggers. This allows one to quickly form a mental object about the arising of thoughts/ideas/emotions/feelings and rather than writing it down, manipulate that object on the fly from multiple perspectives of understanding. As an illustrative example, anger can happen and quickly bubble up, but it is like, "O that old bastard! Hows it going friend?" I have acknowledged you and then he sort of gets ashamed and quickly dissipates. This might take into account your past encounters with anger, your typical thought patterns and triggers, your ways of dealing with it, your ways of letting go, etc. With training that can all happen nearly as quickly as the emotion/feeling arises. This is not that different from the practice of noting mental and emotional states. This is also a way to fully feel an emotion. No problem with that. Let it wash over you. This is a part of being human after all.

The monthly journal posts that I do here are not just end of month brain dumps, they are a daily or every other day check-ins. This indirectly makes sure I am on generally on track for what I planned to be doing without getting bogged down in excessive scheduling. I write a brief note for each of the categories and then figure out a more interesting way to visualize them... hopefully using memories from the actual event or activity as inspiration. This trains my drawing from imagination and memory.

I have read through my visual journal here 2 times. I am about to do a third pass when editing the posts and turning them into three years of a visual journal zine. Each time I have picked up on a theme that was bubbling in the background that I should have surfaced much earlier.

Hope this helpful.

Add: This can also be used to see how calibrated you are with forecasts. I do not personally do this in my journal so it slipped my mind, but is an additional tool for seeing how sure/unsure about how much you know and how good your forecasts are about events, personal and in the world.

* Not to be attempted as a replacement if you have serious mental health issues! e.g. depression etc.

[ertyu]

Addendum from your resident forum weirdo w the therapy special interest: over time, I've started to believe that you can indeed replace your therapist w DIY methods. I read this post in the middle of following an EMDR protocol by myself, using journaling as an attention anchor when there are questions to answer as you would answer them to a therapist. As opposed to doing this with an actual therapist, you can then read over your process, make additional notes for things that came up you want to do additional EMDR on, and so forth. I am doing this at a coffee shop mostly because I've found a broad field of vision works better for me (looking out the bus window, looking out the balcony, sitting at the edge of a body of water, looking out the coffee shop window and so forth vs. a laptop screen w a moving dot or a blank wall in a room). Doing this outside or at a coffee shop is ok because I've already passed through the intense bawling stage of processing crap and am now at the energetic shit arises and dissipates stage (similar to what people descibe achieving via meditation but I haven't been able to get there w more traditional tools). If you still have intense shit to deal with or are uncomfortable about the possibility of tearing up in pubic, do it at home.

Tldr, DIY therapy, esp. of the intense type as EMDR can get, is a bit like doing your own electrical work. Everyone says you shouldn't because it is very possible for someone to fuck it up. (Also, the macho "hmph I don't need therapy" is very tempting for precisely the sort of person that should be the bravest as they face and stay with their own shit). But it is also well within the capabilities of a person of average intelligence* to educate and train themselves.

*source: am of average intelligence