Self Portrait Volume I.5: The contents of my luggage.

       We live in an increasingly narcissistic and shallow age. Never before in the history of our species has communication been so easy. With our amazing technical advancements we are capable of broadcasting every detail of our lives, and every thought that crosses our minds to the entire world and giving it the weight of real importance. Worse still, the system has become self perpetuating. Not only are we capable of telling the world what we had for breakfast with the click of a button, but other people can weigh in with their own superficial opinions on the trivialities of our lives, thus adding fuel to the fire of our egotism.
Personally I find this crude intolerable and disgusting.

I will be damned if I let everyone else hog all of the attention!

    As a person who travels for a living, I ordinarily spend very little time thinking about packing. I just throw whatever book I'm reading, a sketchpad , my laptop, some toiletries and the appropriate amount of black clothing in a bag, grab the fiddle case on the way out the door, and I'm ready to go. Preparing for Arizona was different. I had to make sure I was ready for several different climate conditions and had casual clothing as well as "show blacks". I also had to make certain that I had enough things to keep me amused for three weeks, including endless hours in the passenger seat of a car. Perhaps because i'm working on my self portrait, and am slightly more conscious of the question of identity that I realized the assembled items actually provide insight into my personality.  Here, in short are the things I didn't want to be without for three weeks. I shall spare you the boring stuff like clothes and such. note to the makers of any of the items pictured: I will happily endorse the living daylights out of  your products. You just have to pay me lots of money first!

What I packed:
*My bike
*My fiddle
*Books: The Mythic Image-Joseph Campbell, Birds Of the Western U.S., The Tempest- William Shakespeare, Walden- Henry David Thoreau, A book of short stories by Robert Heinlein (borrowed from my roommate), 300 Fiddle tunes.
*Two packages of my favorite pens
*Large contact juggling ball
*Billiard ball (also for contact juggling. This is my pre-show warm up)
*Block of soapstone
*Several blocks of wood (Maple and Basswood)
*Selection of wood carving tools and sharpening stones in tool roll
*Tool roll with rasps and stone carving tools
*Large sketch pad
*Pad of bristol board
*Pad of watercolor paper
*Roll containing various drawing tools and brushes
*Box set of watercolors
*MP3 player
*Mouse puppet
*Laptop (Okay, its like this: My friend who sold me this computer never mentioned it was yellow until I had already agreed to buy it. It used to belong to his girlfriend apparently. So you see, I had little choice but to paint it with the Taxi cab pattern).  
*(not pictured for obvious reasons) Digital camera