Camp.

“Commart” (“commart”) has had a bit of a life online dating back to about 1995.

Before then, my fellow old codgers may remember, we had dial-up bulletin boards and, for a while, America Online helping us signal through our physical and social walls to strangers with mutual interests.

A brief stint in Washington’s small business contracting community introduced me to Mosaic and that flipped (for a while) into life as a webmaster hand-tagging HTML and moving on to “Nutscrape” (grumpy old guys know what I’m talking about).

Between then and now:

Posts at models.com: probably around 6,000 in that model-photographer (or “guys with cameras”) culture.  I probably should have paid the subscription rate, but this next came along in the same category: posts at modelmayhem.com: 6,078 (I just posted there to see what number would come up).

Posts at Zoetrope.com (the Photo Wing of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Virtual Film Studio”): God only knows, but I do know I provided critiques, generally highly-rated by recipients, for more than a thousand photographs submitted.

In 1996, a first foray into blogging with Oppenheim Arts & Letters (OA&L), a creative writing showcase and journal, morphed into punditry with focus on what I call the Islamic Small Wars, then a couple of years later, the Middle East Conflict.  As the interest in global politics continued, OA&L became irretrievable as an artist’s journal and showcase.  In its place, I produced one of those politics blogs absent of my name but equipped with a contact form.

🙂

Caution suits new frontiers.

However, for any interested in “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” OA&L may afford a glimpse into a few research-worthy ideas.

Add to the above two Facebook accounts — there’s a real person behind each of them.  🙂 The spread may be thought of this way: one Facebook for the political intellectual engaged in the Great Conversation of his day and and a second touch-base place for realspace family and friends.

In my main hangout built around aesthetic, cultural, and political affinities (and some civil enough disaffinities), I’ve no idea of the message and post traffic involved, but be assured that I am sure it’s in the thousands of exchanges and expressions.

If I am slow to crawl onto Google+, God have mercy on me for having typed so much already, often well, in the cause of helping make other people wealthy.

I’ve had to this point a terrible career life, but age, death, and time do their work, and these have set me up alone, intact as “writer, musician, photographer” in what I’ve become fond of calling “a mansion inside a cabin inside an apartment by the woods on the eastern edge of western Maryland.”

I’ve no debts, a business I would still like to see take off (Communicating Arts), few obligations — really none today in the family department — and the only job on the calendar is singing weekly (Tuesday nights) at the Beaver Creek Country Club Open Mic, which is open to the public (the date of this paragraph’s update is February 18, 2016).

As any may imagine on the basis of the “chatyping” alone, this Sunday finds me a bit tired with continuous online communicating.

I’m sure that in fine Hollywood-in-Maryland style, I’ll have my projects.

However, for the time being, with the apartment warm and an air conditioner and assorted fans blowing the warm air around, I am camped out!

Also, with a fully stocked bar, two thousand books — I’m about to dive into Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — and a garden on a balcony with a bistro table waiting for sunset and dusk, I am hoping summer camp (call me Master of the Staycation) will do what it should as regards refreshment and rest, much needed.

At the mouth of the cave and best enjoyed early morning (with coffee) or early evening (with wine) — Torenia in the basket to the left, “‘Tunies” in the two on the right.

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