Leashes and Lather: Brainstorming Strategy One Dish and Dog Walk at a Time

I’m sat here staring at a blank page. The last time I had time to sit here and think about the blog and my long to-do-list was six days ago.

On the plus side, the house is shining. Which I love. On the downside I have not had any time to educate myself. Which gives me anxiety.

That changes today. Today is the day that I have been aiming for all week. A day where I am not beholden to anyone other than the dogs, who are gently snoring on the sofa. Cleaning is done, work starts tomorrow, I have dinner to cook and dogs to run but the rest of the day is mine.

It’s funny though, despite looking forward to this all week, I am now bricking it. Over what I have no idea. I think I am nervous about learning, how much time it will take, which, if I enjoy it, I suspect will be forever.

It’s also weird to be learning from scratch again when I feel like by now, I should be old enough to know some things. Alas.

March started out with giants leaps forward and has ended with slow progress. At least it is still progress.

My biggest fear is that I am nothing. That in ten years I can look back and see myself working to no avail. That horrifies me. I don’t want to be just my job title. I never have thought about myself that way. And while I do like my job title, my younger self wouldn’t settle for that, and I guess that is who I owe this to, the try, you know?

The reason I have this fear is because everything I learned in school is completely null and void. I suspect the same thing will happen generation after generation as we move through all these insane AI advancements, and we are only just getting started. I am on board, but the reality of what people are supposed to do to earn a living is scaring me.

I’m not here to complain about AI, if it wasn’t for AI, I would be months behind where I am now.

It’s just trying to predict the future, isn’t it? Trying to find new ways of doing old things.

It is incredibly frustrating that I have so little free time and that I am still figuring out how to do more, when I have no more hours left in the day.

Do you ever wonder why you are here? I do. I always have wondered what the point of all of this was or is. Knowing I’ll never have an answer has always made me interested in making a point.

The problem/s that I am trying to solve are as follows. Finding more time. That one is self-explanatory.

Making products from surplus materials – I am already on this, but I am literally unpicking it at work, which is not ideal because work is busy, and I don’t get a lot done. I need a new strategy, so this is going to live on the lounge table for a while, as opposed to my office.

Designing t-shirts and other textile related products, it is important to me to make something long lasting and not contribute to the land fill issue, but the second-hand clothing market instead.

Quality is important to me. Everything from crisps to dog treats have gone up in price and shrunk in size, and each year that goes by the quality of products goes down as well. Over-all the quality of products from our food to our clothing to washing machines has gone from twenty-year guarantee to you won’t want this by next summer.

I don’t like that. I want us to have new things, but the kind of new things that maybe your kid one days goes whoa grandma, you have a flimdaborg. I don’t know what that is I made it up.

If I am hiring someone, I want them to be part of the machine, not employed by the machine. And paid accordingly. I’ve always loved Riverford’s model, employee ownership, there are other examples it just popped into my head because they were in the new recently, and I found a video of theirs showing me what to do with wild garlic, incidentally, nothing! its fucking useless! (I picked wild garlic in the woods a few days ago)

Unless you want to mush it up and freeze it into ice cubes. I’m at a loss; all that the internet could throw at me was a bunch of hippies and witches. It’s still in my fridge. Can’t say I’ll be doing that again. No offense, I’m half hippie.

If you know what to do with wild garlic let me know.

It’s incredibly pungent, I recon if I put it in a dish that is all you are going to taste. There is obviously a reason we leave it in the ground hey.

Anyway, while I have been out walking the dogs, wasting wild garlic and washing the dishes I have been thinking about strategy. I am no closer to an answer, unless you count the tiny feeling in your brain that ‘you are getting there’.

I don’t know what I need yet to make it move. Thinking about it endlessly has given me great ideas but no solution.

I need the kind of solution that creates jobs, but where I am not the one who must be the boss. Because ew.

There are a handful of creatives I know that I would like to get involved, but unless I can package it in an appealing way, the answer is going to be no.

At the end of it all, I just end up feeling too stupid to solve the problem. It’s also something I don’t want to fully articulate here; it’s been done elsewhere and over-talking the thing kills the thing, I think.

“Some people say I think too much. I don’t think they think enough” Danny Brown.

I am going to draw something digitally today, even if it’s just a circle. Hopefully, it’ll be more than a circle. There’s one drawing, I drew it as an album cover and it’s one of my favourite pictures, whose album I don’t know but there we are. If I can replicate that then I know I am good. There are some crazy elements to it that I am excited to see what I can do with, once I know what I am doing.

The dogs are still snoring. Whoo-hoo! They had a big run and swim yesterday. Fucksake they just woke up…

Okay, Bye…