Among the most liberating experiences in my life has been the destruction of a canvas. Canvases are expensive and they tend to impose a sort of pressure on whomever is working on them to turn them into something beautiful. There is the old cliché that nothing is more terrifying than a blank piece of paper. This is true. I am quite often paralyzed by a fear that what I create will not be good. I become so paralyzed, in fact, that I often create nothing at all. I have to remind myself that creating nothing is worse than creating something that isn't good.

I'm reminded of the oft misquoted quip made by Thomas Edison in regards to the lightbulb:

"[W]e had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn't be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way."

If you keep making SOMTHING that something will get better and better even if you keep doing it pretty quickly. Today I picked up a sketch book and drew a few extremely crappy sketches, did a few mediocre passes at some layouts for a client's website, and even picked up my guitar and hammered out a new riff for the film soundtrack I'm chipping away at. None of it was very good but all of it was SOMETHING! If I do the same thing tomorrow I'm pretty sure they'll be a little bit better.

It is in this vein that I publish this new blog theme. This theme is a sketch and a failure. It is intended to be. I am publishing it before I've finished testing (or coding) it. It is what it is and that isn't Garland. I was sick of staring at the default theme (the aforementioned Garland) and now I don't have to. Here you have it world! My theme sketch: experiMental. This is a Zen sub-theme so if you want to play with it make sure you have Zen on Drupal 6.

I had spent a great deal of time on another theme for my personal site but it still wasn't right and I was fed up! So, while I was sick this past weekend I threw together this monstrosity that you see before you in a couple hours. I am quite sure it's broken in IE6 and 7 I even know about some bugs in FF/Safari and guess what else? It doesn't even look like the Photoshop file I threw together. I don't care. It's a sketch and the next one will be better. Or not. The point is there will be a next one. I'd rather have a poor body of work than no body of work at all. Now I'm going to go back to making things... or sleeping... At this moment it's hard to say, really.