opinios

Inspiration

Keith Robinson once penned an article about inspiration. His aim was to try and capture what inspired people, to make a "repository of inspiration", and the feedback was pretty good.

But I have to say, recommended inspiration is always a bit of a paradox. If someone tells you "this is inspiring", then sometimes it loses a bit of its shine because it has been hyped. You have big expectations, so the gap between what you are expecting and reality isn't quite as big. The bigger that gap is, the bigger the inspiration. The less you know about something, the more pleasantly surprised you are if it's great.

And so I come to the point of my article. I was stumbling around the web, link to link, when I saw that a buddy of mine in Tokyo, Darin Bendall, had spent a week as guest columnist at fecalface.com. And goddamn if I wasn't inspired just to go write again. And draw. And observe. And drink. And enjoy myself.

Darin has captured a snapshot of his hectic life in that city I miss so much (well, every now and then) and it's fan-fucking-tastic. A stream-of-consciousness that one might normally think would sound like a billion other blogs instead comes out as hilarious.

Yes, from a purist's perspective the site design uses tables and frames and is hard to navigate because his articles are listed in reverse-chronological order meaning you either scroll through a long page to find each one or read them in the opposite order they happened. And the formatting gets screwed up and the links don't work. But who cares. It's raw creativity and it's worth persisting with.

I know part of the problem I have writing for the web is that I am a bit of a perfectionist. I probably stifle a lot of creativity because I am too worried about getting the grammar right when I express it. Darin's daily brain dump is a prime example of why it's important to just say it.

And so, six months after he penned this crazy monologue, here I am recommending his week in words and pictures as a source of inspiration. Which means it'll probably be a let-down.

But fuck it, go read it anyway. Cos I loved it.

And go wish him congratulations on getting hitched while you're at it. Everybody's doin' it.