OCTOBUS Never Stop Running from Michael McClain on Vimeo.
The most reliable line in Western Wistasia, OctoBus will get you to your destination deep in the forest, high on the mountains or through the briny depths! Not only is OctoBus famous for arriving on time, they are known as the most comfortable and fastest way to travel in luxury and style.
Itâs like Iâve lost my tenuous grasp on you and youâve drifted away, into the current of time. Memory stands here, frozen, watching you drift away, dying a new smaller death every day.Â
Every moment for the last 30 years is recorded and stored. But the medium, while well-cataloged, is imperfect tending toward decay over time. I try to regularly restore the damaged, erased and lost images. Â
Sometimes there are memories that I donât want and blot out those, but find that they are particularly indelible, able to reconstruct themselves.Â
Usually the painful ones.Â
Each time I reconstruct some favored moment, slight distortions occur, bastardizing the memory. The most devastating of these events is when I intentionally attempt to eliminate some then out of panic or guilt and then try to bring it back. Like Frankensteinâs monster, the form may be there, but in substance, it is wanting.Â
A cruel and ironic master is time. It is usually the smallest, quietest moments that mean the most, and are those most easily forgotten. Only later, when by unexpected happenstance we are able to recall one or more of these gems, our hearts are broken as we suddenly realize how quickly we dismissed these precious events.Â
That is why i always come back to those i love. Even though time and space separate us like a vast sea, I build my ship and learn through trial error to navigate those waters: so that I can recreate those happinesses and possibly discover other loves that were tossed thoughtlessly aside.Â
Usually, though, it is my own memory that betrays me. Those delicious relics are not found only old wounds that had healed and are suddenly reopened only so that I can begin to mend again.Â
I have learned a valuable lesson in my journey through life however: that the moment of ecstasy or devastation is only ever enhanced and intensified in both anticipation and memory.Â
These two lenses, looking forward and looking back are a form of organic virtual reality where I can experiment and fantasize without repercussion. Will and warrant have no bearing in the closet of the mind. Or the universe of the imagined.Â
Mike and Dev. 6/21/20 - When two kind souls meet, it is no forgone conclusion that they will connect and build a life. But when it does manage to spark and the forrest fire of life together is started, we are the lucky ones to feel itâs warmth and stand by amazed at the all-consuming nature that true love has.
True love, after all, is selflessly selfish, always thinking of the other, never self and in doing so, the self is ever cared for. In the west, we talk of love as being a thing we fall into or into which we become entangled⌠but true love, souls who mate and become one⌠do not fail. It is is no accident that they succeed. Hard work and revision, determination to advance and find peace are a mission true lovers pursue all their life. A failure is not a setback, but an opportunity improve and deepen the connection, becoming one flesh one kind word and moment of forgiveness at a time.Â
Peace and contentment are not the possession of all men, nor hardly any these days. But from time to time, when you walk in the woods of life, quietly contemplating your own state of success and failure, you catch the warm glow from a newly started campfire destined to become a blazing inferno of love consuming two souls whole.
For better or worse, we donât necessarily choose who comes into (or stays) in our lives. For better, Deb came into mine in the spring of life, when I was just a small town boy livingâ in a lonely world, falling in love with her big sister. Soon after meeting them, she and the love of her life extended their friendship to me. First, they looked askance at this weird kid, then accepted and finally embraced me.Â
Thirty-three years ago they invited me to pile into their brand new 1990 Isuzu pickup with a camper shell for a road trip to San Isabel National Forrest in Colorado. It was an AMAZING trip. One of the most memorable of my life. The first time I had ever seen a real mountain, breathed alpine air, felt the chill night in the middle of summer! I never knew such experiences existed. New experience after new experience. It put me in the mind of Jean Georgeâs, âMy Side Of the Mountainâ wherein a young boy named Sam escapes to the Catskill mountains and lives on little more than his wits for a year by making a home in the burned out hollow of a tree. Every morning, I would get up early, hike in the wilderness and imagine that I had escaped my droll reality to a life there in that paradise. On one of those walks would I cut a small sapling into a walking stick. Long-forgotten, they thoughtfully saved this and recently gifted it back to me.Â
Every time I drive over Raton Pass on the southern border of the state, I remember the first time in that little pickup at 7800â with those two dear friends-soon-to-be-family. We laugh together when the trip comes up and Deborah Anne points out that I had eaten the tripâs entire stash of homemade chocolate chip cookies before we ever left the great state of Texas. In my defense: 1) The cookies were delicious and 2) Texas is HUGE! Debbie & her heart understood John Muirâs famous statement: âThe mountains are calling and I must go'. She and her family would answer that beacon many times in the following decades.Â
The second of three sisters, she has always been an upbeat, outgoing and infectious personality with a rapier observational wit. Always the constant and stable mother-figure, it took me years to believe the stories my wife would tell of her wild side before she settled down to care for a family and raise two rambunctious boys.
Growing up as I did with two sisters, it was an easy transition to include a new one in my life and as my own siblings and I grew distant over the years, she proved to be a wonderful surrogate-sister filling that emotional place in my heart. It has always brought me especially great joy that Debbie brightens my own wifeâs disposition so and their relationship is perfectly portrayed by Louisa May Alcott in Little Women. If my own love is Jo, then Debbie would be analogous to Meg⌠maybe a dash of Beth from time to time. Perhaps sisters understand each other in a way that one one else (especially brothers) can. Neither she, nor those like her, realize the feelings of envy that many women feel toward families like her own. Not perfect by any stretch, but thoughtful, engaged and always always connected. I like to say âthank God that love is temporal and not geographicâ, I have truly seen love defy time and space between my wife and her sisters.Â
Rich in the possession of a good man's heart, Deborah raised two children, drove trucks, roofed, baked cookies, worked disaster relief, started (& retired from) a career as a white-hat and now in the third chapter of life in this existence, I see her face new and terrifying realities. Always one to wear a brave face (what mother isnât), youâd never know monsters stalk in her shadows. I suppose something else she is teaching me is that it isnât the looming threats or realities that define us, but the faith we exercise when we face them, confident, as my dear sister is, that victory will be ours.Â
I wish words could heal us, they are the only power we have.Â
YAWYE (you are what you eat) from Michael McClain on Vimeo.
YAWYE (you are what you eat)
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This was a short project designed to practice the use of match-cuts. The exercise is from week 03 of Ben Marriottâs very excellent Master Motion Design.
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If you want to get into motion design and animation, I canât recommend @ben_marriott_ enough. And if you feel like Master Motion Design is maybe a bit too much, he just introduced an introduction to Motion Design course. @angieromy is on that course right now and doing great!
Budget a problem? Benâs got a boatload of really really good free content on YouTube. Again, canât say enough good things about this guy.
This was a short project designed to practice the use of match-cuts. The exercise is from week 03 of Ben Marriottâs very excellent Master Motion Design.
â
If you want to get into motion design and animation, I canât recommend @ben_marriott_ enough. And if you feel like Master Motion Design is maybe a bit too much, he just introduced an introduction to Motion Design course. @angieromy is on that course right now and doing great!Â
Budget a problem? Benâs got a boatload of really really good free content on YouTube. Again, canât say enough good things about this guy.