traffic cone dreams

well, i think about traffic cones daily pretty much, over ten years i think, at the beginning wondered if it was silly or serious and if i'd still think they were interesting down the road - eventually have come to the conclusion that you can say they embody the paradox i see in the nature of everything - so the answer would be "yes" (silly/serious).

anyway this past week cones very high priority art-thinking. want to make a proposal, trying to distill so many projects (want to do) into one or a few (really want to do, more than the others) - it's been a very valuable exercise. what do you really want to do? what does an hour feel like, a morning feel like, a day feel like? if you say "i want to be an astronaut" that means much of your life spent studying math? or what? i don't know. but i bet it means very little time actually spent in space. if i want to make art, which i do, and it's going to involve traffic cones, which it usually does, what will my role be? painter? photographer? that is a big part of how i think. not just "i want to see this work" or "i want this art to get made" but "can i make this work?" and "what would i have to do to make this work? is that what i really want to do? is that the kind of artist i want to be, the kind of life i want to live?"

so i'm almost there. three projects could throw self (and hopefully others would want to be involved, or at least be willing to help) into, will figure out how to present to non-erik-humans over next fourty-eight hours or so.

in the meantime, let me tell you this: my sister-in-law had a dream in which i had made an experiencial art piece involving traffic cones. very much in line with some of the concentrated brainstorming i've been engaged in this week. now there's definitely a coincidental aspect, i babysat for my niece last saturday, and went and had breakfast with them, my brother and my mom today, and she knows i'm really into traffic cones, so i'm not saying "oh man we have this powerful psychic link." but i think it's neat that those things are connected in her mind at a non-waking-state level, and that she was dreaming about below and above cones, which is where the breakthroughs have been coming for me. i do find it an auspicious omen that she dreamed i had some sort of connection involving arranging experiencing traffic cones in an aesthetic manner in a very public place. i believe this will give me confidence to submit a very achievable, unique, and exciting proposal.

also in the real world (was going to say "back to the real world" but let's face it dreams exist in this universe, this is part of the paradoxical nature of everything, dreams exist but they don't exist right?) there have been some very unique cone arrangements in midtown. here are two examples from a wednesday morning stroll. mentioned recently that there had been a sudden influx of yellowish-greenish cones in manhattan, here one is seen bound near some of its orange cousins:

















and in central park, these cones seem destined to disappear, begging the question, when we walk around, or play frisbee, anywhere, how much of the earth beneath our feet contains, in addition to rocks, dirt, and worms, submerged traffic cones?