Hello…. What’s This?

And…. who are all you people?

For the past ten years or so, I have been using  MailChimp to send out an automated “Weekly Digest” of things I posted to my personal (i.e. vanity) website/blog, CohesionArts.com.

When I looked my MailChimp account recently, there were ~500 subscribers to the list.  I found about 150 obvious ‘bot’ subscribers.  After purging those I still have about 350 names on the list.

When I look through that list… I have no idea who most of the subscribers are.  And I suspect a lot of them are still bots.

I mention this for a couple of reasons.  First, I got off Facebook last year, and now I am making a genuine effort to find my tribe outside the feudal (and futile?) estates of ‘social’ media.

Hence the question… who are you people??

If you’re real, this might be a good time to identify yourself somehow.  Try sending message to this email address and I’ll make sure you’re added to the ‘Dunbar List‘ (no need to resubscribe if you’re already getting the automated emails).

The other thing that’s going on here is a rebranding.

I’ve dropped the “Cohesion Arts” domain and now everything has been relocated to IncorrigibleArts.com.

“CohesionArts” was something I came up with when I thought my then-future-ex-wife and I  were going to do photography projects together. Well, that never happened, and the marriage itself went the way of 50% of all marriages three years ago.

Besides, I’ve never been entirely coherent or cohesive (if you doubt that, read my second book).

But I’ve always been incorrigible.

My current obsession with the word really started settling in… well, three years ago (and no, it’s not a coincidence), when I got a Mustang convertible and, trying to come up with a personalized plate for it, came up with this:

It’s fun to watch people pull up behind me at stoplights and squint through their windshield and try to make sense of it.

C’mon, people, it’s not that hard.

One time a woman pulled up alongside me and said “does your license plate say ‘incorrigible’?”

“Yep, you cracked the code!”

She smiled and drove away.

My affinity for the word  started back in the 1980s when I ran a yacht charter service that was named for the boat I sailed in the sheltered waters outside of Lahaina, Maui, the  Scotch Mist.   There are stories to tell about how I came to own that business; For now it’s enough to know that because the Scotch Mist had been serving tourists for ten years by the time I acquired the business, it didn’t make any sense to change the name.

During those years, I followed the America’s Cup races.  Those big 12-metre boats always had names like “Intrepid” or “Courageous” – and I just started thinking “if I ever own a boat I can put my own name on, I’m gonna call it “Incorrigible” – that has a nice 12-metre ring to it!”

Then there’s the whole Ted Turner connection.  Ted Turner won the America’s Cup in 1977 with the 12-metre yacht I mentioned above, “Courageous.”  When I lived in Hawaii, his cable superstation WTBS was the only live TeeVee we got out there, and I started watching Atlanta Braves games – the team Ted Turner owned on the cable network he owned – and felt a certain kinship with the high profile media mogul, yachtsman and baseball owner.

Turner’s appeal at the time was aptly described in  The Lords of the Realm, a history of baseball I read recently, in which Turner is described as

…an incurable romantic, studying Greek classics and naval history at Brown University. He was an incorrigible carouser, suspended as a sophomore for his part in a drunken fracas…

In other words, my kinda guy.

I never did get a boat that I could rename and I’ve been landlocked now for 25+ years, so this is the next best thing:

I’m using a definition in the masthead for this new site, but there is a deeper reason for adopting ‘incorrigible’ as the log line for my eighth decade.   I found that idea when listening to an author named Simon Brent say on a podcast,

Can you remember who you were –

before  the world told you who you were supposed to be?

 

THAT’s what “incorrigible” means to me. Reclaiming my original self – the who-I-was-supposed-to-be before my father died, before I got sent to the principal’s office, before I spent endless silent hours when I was 8 years old in a psychiatrist’s office, before I just decided, ‘OK, whatever it is they want from me…’ – which, frankly, I never did a very good job of anyway.

So consider this new site – Incorrigible Arts – to be dedicated to the art of reclaiming our original selves – at whatever point in our lives we can or are able to.  As long as we’re not dead yet, it’s not too late.