Before I compose a hand-drawn animation sequence with the Bamboo Capture graphics tablet and fill my future with out-of-date electronic debris, I finish sorting through the piles of debris that constitute the bulk of written material which emanated from this set of states of energy called me.

Watched a commencement speech by Laurie Anderson [I thought, for a public performance multimedia artist, her acting was rather stilted], which has prompted me to click my way to a website and order a copy of the book, “How to be idle,” which in turn opened my eyes to the reams of office paperwork stacked in boxes around me.

Here’s one from 03/24/98:

Kiersey Temperament Sorter Results

Your Temperament is Idealist: NF
Your variant temperament is Healer: INFP

Any Personality Test, including the Sorter is just a rough indicator of temperament.
You might want to look at different temperament descriptions to verify the results and learn about other types of people for comparison.

I+6 N+16 F+12 P+14

David M. Keirsey
keirsey@mail.orci.com

At that time in my life, the department manager was all about fitting us into jobs that matched our personalities.

What she didn’t account for was a chameleon like me, a people pleaser who assesses the wants and desires of the people around him and blends in, hiding his personality behind layers and layers of masks, revealing himself to a select few.

I told the manager I’m not who she thinks I am and she responded that was a normal reaction to the test results from an INFP like me.

Later, I learned that she gave the same response to everyone who questioned the test results.

I wasn’t questioning the test results.  I just wanted her to know that the test results indicated my exteriour in relation to giving her the test results I thought she wanted to see.

For instance, let’s say I find out my college History professor is a dopehead and adherent to the philosophy of Timothy Leary… I make sure my term paper for the class, a review of a book about socialist utopias, contains plenty of illicit drug references and hippy religious conversations.

My goals are not your goals.  My goals are outside of the time and place in which we encounter one another, so it doesn’t matter to me about the profit targets you want to reach or the edifices you want to build in your names.

Ideas and images associated with temporal moral and ethical practices are imaginary, as far as I’m concerned.

We either reproduce our genetic material or we don’t.

Everything else is fiction about how we decide to protect our reproductive organs until we’ve produced progeny that need our protection.

Me, I have only these works of art — the sketches and writings that were birthed by me with your influence, a part of the universe, upon me.

I have no genetically-related or adopted children.  The closest I got were the nieces and nephews who [might have] looked up to me as an adult member of their clan/tribe.

They are adults now.  My influence upon them diminishes as they decide how to protect their reproductive organs until they’ve produced progeny that need their protection.

One of my hidden goals was to live long enough to be a great-uncle.

I held up my step-niece’s little one-month young girl in my arms, making me the great-uncle I wanted to be ever since I was a little boy and looked up to my childless great-uncle and great-aunt who seemed to have extra spending money my parents never had, despite the great-relatives’ middle-class wages as a postman and office secretary, respectively.

I have grown tireder as I’ve aged, exercised less and eaten minimally-nutritious chemically-treated foodstuff.  I no longer want to be a model for others or someone to look up to.

It’s time to slow down and concentrate on the dreams and desires of the personality behind all the masks…

The boy who saw macabre nightmares come to life when his favourite politician of all time, Richard Nixon, resigned.

The boy who looked down at his plate of spaghetti and thought he was eating a dish full of bleached worms covered with red sauce to hide their little heads screaming for mercy.

The boy who heard the grass talk to him.

The boy who sailed the universe at night when no one was looking.

The boy who knew that stone gargoyles and cast-iron mailboxes were like three-dimensional photographs of a reality hidden inside other people’s heads, finding an outlet, me wondering where they came from before they appeared in people’s thoughts.

The boy who earned his Eagle Scout badge and went on into Explorer Scouts, later to become a Unit Commissioner, an adult role in Scouting, because he never thought he had gained his father’s love and trust, constantly seeking, seeking, seeking approval up until he reached his adult age of 18 where he received a full college scholarship via the U.S. Navy ROTC program, accepted at both Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, but realising he no longer had to seek his father’s approval and flunked out on purpose.

I had become the man I never thought I’d be able to grow up to be.

I never was my father and never will be.

I am me.

My hidden visions, the alternate reality that I carry in my thoughts as I interact with people who seem to like to embrace the inconsistent reality of [sub/ex]urban lifestyles and belief systems, are crawling out of me and into the world in which we meet and greet one another cordially.

They are not perfect.

They are not commercialised, plastic products for mass production and insane profit margins.

I don’t even care if others steal, borrow or marginalise my work.

My work is not me but my work came from me so I associate myself with my work but I do not tie my self-worth to what I’ve written, drawn, danced, sang or sewn.

This is the only moment in which I live and I claim this moment as mine, declaring myself absolutely insane in comparison to the insanity of boxed stuff that we only call food because the pretty picture on the outside tells me it is.

Unlike Madison Avenue marketers, I don’t have to make money from my creative redefinition of ordinary life.

I can, have been and will be me, willing to use the excess capacity of our species’ social structure that produces a buffer zone outside of basic survival to express myself here and elsewhere, on paper, in blogs and wherever I feel I want to breathe what always has to be my last breath because the next one is not guaranteed.

On to the graphics tablet, building upon my first animation!!!

As an independent filmmaker said,

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

”

—Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming[