Day One - On The River

I am not going to be able to be formal about this too much if I'm going to sustain this practice!

Today is July 7, 2025.

There are many things that aren't as I would like them to be! That is why I create. Because I want to make things as I would like them to be.

I have ideas. I have dreams, you might say, about how I would like things to be.

I'm undertaking this 10 year, new decade, to make the things that I'm hoping I can make.

That's what I'm doing.

This is the beginning.

This is the first day.

I've been on the Rogue River most of today, a good long portion. I had a great trip with my friends. For the rafting trip, the guides take you from Shady Cove up to the fishery, and then get your raft in the water and send you on your way.

We were in a 14 foot raft, eight of us. It was just so so very wonderful.

One of the things that I'm going to try to do, as I mentioned, there are many things that need to be corrected.

As far as I'm concerned, technically, I still don't have the kind of skill that I want to have, nor do I have the kind of equipment that I want to have to be able to make the quality of content I really want to make.

But this is day one!

One of my awkward qualities is not enough experience speaking on camera. I'm not speaking to anyone other than you who are watching this, perhaps impatiently, for me to get to some kind of point.

But the main point is to recount what has happened that I consider as incremental steps of progress in making the world that I'm attempting to make.

So I should probably go over just the very last few days, because hopefully tomorrow I will launch this new website, 1tenyearspfcreation.com, and I want to catch up from what I’ve already I've put up.

On that day, it's possible it was the first of July, I went out to Irvine Roberts with Dave Bolen, who's doing my sound. We set things up so we could get an idea of how things would work and sound.

That was quite an incredible experience for more than one reason. For one thing, he's quite a good sound person, and I'm feel really lucky to have him, because I think we're going to be able to have beautiful sound for this concert.

Perhaps I should back up and explain the reason for the concert. The reason for the concert is to gather the funds to lay the foundation for the next 10 years of creation. That's really what it is.

There are so many basic tools and resources that I need in order to create what I'm hoping to create. So this is the first step, this concert.

The winery is a beautiful location at sunset. The sun just glows on the hills and you see this bank of very soft mountains. It's an incredible place to be able to give a concert.

A couple of things became clear over the course of doing this organizing. One is: I have a good deal of preparation, personal performing preparation to do for this concert.

This whole last week was quite a push, because the first week of July tends to be one of my busiest weeks of the year anyway, and I was also attempting to have a kind of a big birthday party in the park, and that took some preparation.

But I got through it all. I arrived. I arrived at my birthday.

I'm incredibly grateful for my life right now.

I'm incredibly grateful for what has been created. I'm clear on the fact that what has been created has been a collective creation. It's been me doing what I'm doing, but the response to that from all kinds of people who have helped me and supported me in so many ways.

This is pure good fortune, is what it is.

Some people are lucky enough to be unaccountably brilliant beyond measure, beyond the measure of most other humans, and that is not how I think of myself. I know I have gifts, but I am not brilliant in that way. What I am learning that it is just my job to give the best of my gifts To the world every day., whatever I am able to do.

That means I'm creating inside myself all the time. I have thoughts like, “this could be a song”.

I have thoughts like, “I wonder if I could move to this song that I might create”.

I have thoughts like, “what kind of computer is the best computer for me to have to support my work?”

And, “who can I talk to that can give me some sort of input about that?”.

I have thoughts like, “I want to get into this story, the screenplay of this movie I want to produce, which could be, if I do it, the largest project, the biggest movie - even if it is a little movie! - it could be the largest production I've ever made.”

So I have all these thoughts, and it's in the channel of that flow of my life that I'm also attempting to stay alive and stay healthy and stay sharp and stay strong.

I want to say none of that is particularly easy. Most of it is a challenge.

One could say that it is not of interest or perhaps even boring for me to talk on camera about what I'm attempting to do or what I have accomplished already, what I just made happen.

But I want to look at it through a larger lens and take it on faith that for any creative person, any person who's trying to make their life work, any person who wants the world to be a better place in which to live, to see a person, one man, with his own challenges and difficulties and constraints, attempting to work out those problems and challenges and difficulties from day to day - that might turn out to be useful!

And along the way, perhaps we will both be astonished by what I am able to create. That's what I'm hoping.

I think this is good for a beginning. I'll keep working on improving. We just have natural light right now in the room, you can see that the light is softening.

So for now, it's time to leave you, and I hope to be back tomorrow with something more to share, something more to offer. As I travel through my - hopefully! - next 10 years of creation.