Wow, the last two days of posting have been hard. I have had nothing to post that even remotely deserves the attention it might receive. I mean, my god, shoes? Posting this much has forced me to admit to myself that I put things up on this site so that I can hold them away from myself and admire them, and it takes a tremendous ego to invite you to admire them, too, whether it's some little truth I've realized, or another web site I've found, or a picture of my dog, or for heaven's sake I try to sell you a t-shirt.

The crushing weight of this realization has humbled me to the point where I'd certainly like to erase this whole sordid mess and that, of course, is the point one reaches in any creative endeavor, when your homemade little boat is becalmed in the middle of an ancient sea, the shore is days (years/a lifetime) away, you're out of good snacks and nothing fun's on TV so why not just lie down quietly and wait for your whole personality to disintegrate.

But instead? You post until you find something to say, you write your way out of your personal abyss, or you knit one more row or run one more mile, whatever it is you love doing so much that sometimes you hate it.

Alice recently pointed me toward the book Art and Fear, which I bought but haven't read yet, so I'm going to paraphrase a section Alice told me about where the authors talked about a pottery class, I believe, that broke into two groups: one group would produce a piece every day, and the other group would produce a piece when they felt inspired to. At the end of the experiment it turned out that the group who had to turn out something every day, despite having made a fair amount of crap, also produced more good work than the group who only produced when they felt ready to. The point being that when you have to do something whether you feel like it or not, you may be more open to taking more risks and to easing your perfectionist tendencies, allowing more happy accidents to crop up.

I'm still not convinced that personal web site blogging is an "art," although it is inarguably a creative endeavor, maybe somewhere along the lines of a collage or, depending on your design skills, one of those intricate Joseph Cornell boxes, except with a whole lot of text and links in them. Unless you have ads on your blog, like me, in which case you're building a hockey rink.

AH, THE TANGIBLE SIDE OF BLOGGING

In case you have a loved one for whom a Fussy t-shirt would be an unnervingly appropriate gift come December, I'm taking orders for the holiday model, which will be a red shirt with pink letters this year! Imagine if you will:

Yes, bow before my Photoshop wizardry.

(Pleas to click on t-shirt page to order, shirt prices are still an incredibly reasonable $20, which includes shipping!! But the price is going up come January 1, so uh, you know, act now. Especially if you want to shop early for Valentine's Day.)

AND! in case anyone wanted a "Typed It Wrong" tee but missed out the first go-round: LET'S DO IT AGAIN. We'll need 24 orders to make my t-shirt guy's minimum and if we all hold hands and sing Kumbaya they'll ship before Christmas.

(No, they will, don't worry.)

The unisex/men's is a dark blue Hanes tee with light blue silkscreening, and the women's model is the long-torso fitted tee that everyone is liking so much, except in black with blue ink.

I will even wrap and include a note for an extra $3.50 if you're shipping to a third party!

Thanks to eight years in retail I am ALL ABOUT SERVICE, especially during the holidays.