“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

I hated people who would talk incessantly about their Apple products. I cringed every time I heard, “Apples don’t get viruses like your Windows machine does.” OR “Once you go Mac, you never go back.” I would always respond the same way, “Go f**k yourself!”

That’s until I actually purchased a Mac.

I remember when my boss brought it in, fresh from being shipped from China. You see, I haggled with him to get it and I had the best reason in the world to buy it too: “More and more of our clients are switching to Apple, so we better learn them so we know how to work on one.” I actually bargained my raise to get a brand-new MacBook Pro by getting the Mac instead of the $3,000 a year that I’d normally have received. I reasoned with my boss that I would get a computer and he gets the tax write-off. See, it’s a win-win!

Unboxing an Apple product is like watching porn; you slowly undress this gorgeous computer and strip away, layer by layer, the exquisite manuals and stickers, etc. Finally, you get the machine out, fire it up, and watch it say hello to you in twenty billion languages. It’s quite spectacular to witness. After that, you add the wi-fi password, your name, password, and then the fun begins. The creativity…the magic. There was only one issue…

I never used a Mac before.

I didn’t know how to do ANYTHING on my Mac. Nothing. Zilch.

My boss showed me a quick tutorial on how to get around and left me to my own devices. He directed me to the Apple store online and told me to check out the videos that helped new users get around the computer. I got the hang of it in about a weekend.

Five years later, I’m glad I made the switch. Like Tony Hawk.

Tonight, as I was visiting with my family, a special news bulletin came over the TV. I immediately said, “This can’t be good.” I was expecting something terrible like a political figure was assassinated or something equally as shocking. As I readied myself to hear the news, it came: Steve Jobs was dead.

So what, you may ask? He was just another rich mucky-muck who was in the public spotlight and now he kicked it. Big friggin’ deal, right? You’re damn right, it IS a big friggin’ deal.

Without Steve Jobs vision for Apple, this post that you’re now reading wouldn’t exist. Without Steve Jobs, the movie Finding Nemo wouldn’t have been made. Without Steve Jobs, the music that has been my entire life would never have been created. So yes, it’s a HUGE f**king deal!

Wil Wheaton said what I think many people felt about Steve Jobs today on his Google+ page:

I don’t agree with everything Apple does, but I feel like the world lost an important person today, and I feel like I lost a distant relative who I never got to meet, but knew everything about because for one reason or another his influence was everywhere I looked.

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford University. In his closing remarks, he told the graduating class to “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Those words really resonated with me.

Thank you Steve for your tenacity and genius. The world lost a visionary and you will be missed.

Periodically, I will stop by the local shop and see what’s new in the culture; I find skateboard culture fascinating because each person has a different way of expressing themselves and no two people will be the same. I usually like to pick up the local skate magazines because the artwork is really raw, as is the expression, and the photography is usually on par with those who make a living out of doing it professionally.

Today, I picked up a magazine called Focus which seems to center around Florida happenings and is almost on-par with bigger mags such as Thrasher or Transworld (without all of the annoying ads). Something in this month’s issue really got my attention because it made so much sense to me that I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it sooner; it was the philosophy of “failing forward.”

We all know the term “pay it forward”: that means that you help the next person out down the line if you were indeed helped, and so on and so forth. The idea of “failing forward” is succinctly described by Justin Heister:

Fail forward? Yes, what I mean is, if you can take something away from these failures or missteps, such as a lesson learned, a new perspective, a different outlook, an alternative way to approach the situation should it rise again, and positively apply it in your life, well my friend you’ve failed forward.

Justin elaborates on this theme by applying it to the art of skateboarding:

If you realize it or not, each time you roll up to that edge of the stairs and skid to a stop before the edge, or jump down without popping the tail, leaving your board at the run-up, you’ve failed. Every attempt that you slip out of a grind, catch a flip-trick upside down, or come up a little short on that gap, you’ve failed again. You might not look at it like that. You might just see it as progression, getting closer and closer to landing that trick, but that’s what it is exactly what failing forward is. Making those adjustments so the next time the results are in your favor. From your failure, you now know you rolled up too slow, speed it up a little. You had a little too much weight on your back foot on that grind, even it out a tad and stay a little more centered. Tada! You’re not successful in your original endeavor despite failing along the way. You didn’t give up, you learned from the mistake and you’ve now succeeded.

When one gets older, failure seems more and more scary, because if you’re a parent or spouse, the failure can affect more than just yourself. You cannot be reckless in your decisions, and sometimes, you have to travel a safer road. The hangup with this thinking is that some (including me) develop a mentality of always taking the perceived “safer route” each time a decision is to be made. It’s easy to fall into the rut of ditching the interesting parts of one’s personality in favor for what we think we ought to be: the responsible father, the dependable husband, a pillar of the community. What you teach yourself is that your life is over once you’re put in that position and soon everything becomes boring and drab. Soon, your self-imposed “law” starts getting the best of you and you find yourself taking your frustration out on the people who you love the most–your family.

What I’ve found in my lifetime is that taking the safer route in life wins you no rewards, and more importantly, not living your life to the fullest only leads to a myriad of issues. How can you tell your children to go out and conquer the world if they see that you haven’t even attempted to do it yourself? How does your spouse view you if you’ve allowed life to monotonously drift day-to-day and not grab it by the tail? Excitement is what fuels relationships and no one goes out looking for the person who seems to be a safe bet.

The fear of failure can cripple a relationship to the point of it ending entirely. No spouse wants to sit by and watch the person they love grow frustrated at all of the opportunities that have slipped by them because they were afraid of failure. Eventually, NOT trying to seize the day will lead to failure because avoiding the issue of it entirely will only invite it to your front door and you’ll be greeted with the knocking.

We must be flexible and willing to accept change no matter how hard it may be. We won’t succeed at everything we do but the experience of failure will give us wisdom and eventually we can pass that on to our children. Our kids mustn’t be afraid to fail, or fall down, because no progress can be made if they don’t try.

1. Ryoji Ikeda Trans-missions (“1000 Fragments” 1995/2008)
2. Cyclo C3 (“Cyclo” 2001)
3. Byetone Plastic Star (“Plastic Star” 2008)
4. Mitchell Akiyama Big Sur (“Temporary Music” 2002)
5. Signal Robotron (“Robotron” 2007)
6. Modul Shift I (“Isol” 2004)
7. Robert Lippok Open (“Open Close Open” 2001)
8. Mokira Palm (“Cliphop” 2001)
9. Frank Bretschneider Other Days, Other Eyes (“Rhythm” 2007)
10. Pommassl Pestrepeller (“Spare Parts” 2007)
11. COH Path#4 (“Patherns” 2006)
12. Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto Duoon (“Vrioon” 2003)
13. Kangding Ray Interrompu Court (“Stabil” 2006)

Raster-Noton is a German electronic music record label founded in 1996 by Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider. Based in Chemnitz, Germany, Raster-Noton merged in 1999 from separate labels Rastermusik and Noton (Archiv für Ton und Nichtton). The collective label’s aesthetic focus is rhythmic, minimal electronic music alternating between playful pop and introspection, partnered with unconventional and equally minimal packaging design.

Download the mixtape (right-click>save as)

Playlist

Starting Time= Artist / Song

00:00:00′ = Wander Intro
00:02:00′ = Fátima Miranda’s El principio del fin starts with Julianna Barwick’s Cloudbank
00:03:48′ = Alva Noto’s Kristallgitter begins
00:06:10′ = KRS-One’s Uh Oh begins
00:09:35′ = Celer’s Mouthfeels Of Capreae begins
00:10:00′ = John King’s Gliss In Sighs (1985) begins
00:11:01′ = Giuseppe Ielasi’s Untitled begins
00:11:14′ = Giuseppe Ielasi’s Untitled begins again
00:13:08′ = Alva Noto’s 2x = 2x + X (X = 1,6,18,54) begins
00:13:24′ = Steve Reich’s Clapping music begins along Henri Mancini’s Jackie’s Theme
00:15:20′ = Achim Wollscheid’s Flatware 1 begins
00:15:36′ = Fovea Hex’s Don’t These Windows Open? (True Interval Offering)begins
00:16:13′ = Ibuki Yushi’s Rural Landscapes begins
00:16:46′ = Caetano Veloso’s Viola, meu bem (excerpt) begins
00:17:52′ = Caetano Veloso’s De Conversa , Cravo E Canela begins until its middle
00:18:03′ = Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint begins
00:20:48′ = Prasad Bhandarkar’s Dhun-Folk tune on Bansuri (excerpt) begins
00:21:41′ = Alva Noto’s 747 begins
00:21:58′ = Fátima Miranda’s Sobre saltos begins
00:22:08′ = Arrington de Dionyso’s Tundra- moving glacier begins
00:23:40′ = Fátima Miranda’s Percu VOZ begins
00:25:07′ = Flanger’s Music is Our Secret Code begins
00:27:17′ = Caetano Veloso’s Giberto Misterioso
00:29:24′ = Caetano Veloso’s De Conversa , Cravo E Canela continues
00:32:04′ = SND’s 14 begins with Black To Comm’s Laccifer Lacca
00:34:09′ = Julianna Barwick’s Cloak begins
00:34:53′ = Erkki Kurenniemi’s Improvisaatio begins
00:37:52′ = Fe-Mail’s The Horizotal Density Of Humanity (excerpt) begins 
00:38:48′ = Hessien’s Impatiens begins
00:40:49′ = Misel Quitno’s Golden Ears For One Trick Pony begins
00:41:17′ = Joe Frawley’s (Rachel Rambach, vocals) Angel Box Two begins
00:41:50′ = Joe Frawley’s (Rachel Rambach, vocals) Angel Box Five begins
00:43:07′ = Hessien’s Impatiens begins again
00:43:26′ = Ulrich Troyer’s Romantic Dinner begins
00:45:27′ = Jimi Tenor’s Vexations – Version 3 begins
00:46:59′ = The Karnataka College Of Percussion’s Ghatam Quartet (Clay Pots)begins
00:48:19′ = Black Dice’s Greenhouse Tune begins
00:50:07′ = The Gasman’s Overtone begins
00:50:42′ = Murcof’s Ulysses (Fax Mix) begins
00:54:07′ = Nikolaienko’s Blue soup №3 begins
00:54:36′ = Comfort Fit’s Something To Do begins
00:58:06′ = United Sacred Harp Convention’s Hallelujah begins
00:59:01′ = Kouhei Matsunaga’s Hand With Possibility begins
00:59:40′ = Celer’s In Characteristic Form begins
01:00:39′ = Steve’s Reich’s New York Counterpoint – 1. Fast begins
01:03:35′ = Celer’s Compositions for Cassette A1 begins
01:05:12′ = Nôze’s Le Spleen Du Lemurien begins
01:05:33′ = ( hidden ♥ message )
01:07:38′ = Library Tapes’ Fragment VIII begins
01:08:49′ = Holger Czukay’s Boat-Woman-Song begins
01:09:25′ = Glen Velez’s Bendir begins
01:13:06′ = Celer’s The Separation Of the Two-Phased Apple Blossoms begins
01:18:07′ = Celer’s The Separation Of the Two-Phased Apple Blossoms begins again
01:20:17′ = Américo Rodrigues’s Voltar begins
01:24:42′ = Oren Ambarchi’s Happy Endings begins
01:26:05′ = Max Eastley’s Two 150 Kilo Blocks Of Melting Ice With Layers Of Stones Embedded Falling Onto A Metal Plate For Climate Change Project Farewell begins
01:31:28′ = Wander extro begins

Assembled by Wanderlust

The cop left the area and I began to relax but in my periphery (that means out of the corner of my eye-ha!) I saw a small pickup park in the front of the motel. “Fuck”, I thought to myself, “We’re gonna get hassled out of here.” I quietly told Molly that someone was coming, but she had already turned around and said hello to the stranger. He asked us if we were property investors, to which, we both let out a laugh and said no…we were journalists and that this property was our assignment. Interested, Molly began to deliniate the project to him and all the while I kept thinking to myself, “so that’s what we’re here for!” After a few minutes of discussing the corruption of the city officials and how we all thought that the motel should be leveled, he bid us adieu and went on his way.

I was trying to capture as many different angles of what was exposed because a fence kept the rest of the property off-limits from vistors but it appeared that quite a number of violators already did what we were already thinking. So without a thought, Molly stepped over the fence and deeper onto the property. I asked her matter-of-factly, “This is trespassing, isn’t it?” She gave a hearty “YEP!” and we both walked forward.

A photo-op presented itself almost immediately when Molly pointed at a cute stuffed bunny rabbit lying in a pile of leaves. How perfectly tragic, I thought to myself, and click! went the shutter.

“Back in its heyday, this place must’ve been huge” I said to Molly as she was already scoping out the individual rooms that lined the corridor. Every single inch of the sidewalk was riddled with pieces of glass and there was even a mattress bed obstructed the path on the sidewalk. Each room was different, yet the same: the ceiling was filing in places, furniture was overturned, clothes lay scattered all over the floor, etc. I couldn’t but help to try to imagine the crack addict smoking from a Coke can or a smack fiend trying to find a vein while sitting at the edge of their bed. These rooms each told a story and I felt quite uncomfortable, reflecting on my lily-white suburban life.

An RV was parked in the middle of the roadway, right-smack in the very epicenter of the motel. It looked like it was attacked by vultures but these birds weren’t hunting meat, rather, they were feeding off of destruction and metal. The side of the vehicle was ripped from its hinges and the windshield looked like it was somehow kicked in and its final resting place lie on the steering wheel of this beast.

To the east of the RV was an abandoned pool that had nothing more than a layer of sand at the bottom and a warning that a security dog was present. “Pity,” I thought to myself, “This pool has no trannie so it isn’t even skateable.”

On the other side of the courtyard were two couches, just sitting there with no purpose. Molly commented that the back fence was flattened so you could probably drive a car into the place. Looking over my shoulder, I could see that she was absolutely right. We walked towards the check-in area of the place and the window of the door leading in was absolutely smashed. Across from it showed that there was a lounge complete with a sign that read something along the lines of “21 and over only.”

We decided that we’ve seen all that we needed and we made the decision to not walk all the way around the property and come back the way we came, instead, we decided to try to squeeze between the opening in the fence. Molly joked that crack addicts must be damn skinny to get through the fence, to this, I laughed. All I could think about as I squeezed through were if I was going to rack my nuts.