Deschapelles Coup, self-defeating behaviour, its all starting to make sense...... break the mind stop it playing over and over like a broken record..... long term happiness is obtained by forgoing short term fixes...... life is a game, a game against the self. Take away self imposed obstacles.... the ones where we have an excuse if we dont get it right..... lifes hard enough without also having limiting expectations from a society gone mad with sameness. The place where I am going if I win my game  isnt self deluded purgatory,  it is a harder yet a more forgiving & insightful place....... the self esteem that can be gained by such hardship makes up for all the times I took the hand fed short term fix..........Empathy I shall always hold for you and in times of need I will do my best to share in your journey. To those that insist I conform to the social norm, deep down I say fuck you..... for your game isnt winable or even remotely understood (it never was), I have laid the foundations for my own game and I dont give a fuck if you learn the rules of my game or not...... power to the self.

After the concrete finished with a water wiped finish, the boxing was stripped 2 days after. On the 3rd day a very fine sandpaper was applied to the benchtop surface to remove any slurry that was leftover from the water wipe. As I am not grinding this benchtop to expose the stones, my only concern is not to break into the top surface by sanding as this will cause the exposure of courser sand grains and fuck it up. Basically at the end of the light sand (P240 grit) is a glass type finish with the natural look of plain concrete. As this is a workbench of sorts for the creation of my artwork I dont want to use polyurethanes or 2 pack epoxy. The reason being is that if I scratch the surface it wont show up like dogs balls, I want to use something that will waterproof and resist acidic staining. I chose tung oil, mainly used for the sealing of timber, this product is excellent for the use on concrete.

I have a large pile of sand and gravel sitting right in the middle of the studio. Looks surreal however I need to have it close to the benchtop I'm pouring tomorrow. Fuck I cant wait to have tis all done...not beause I'm sick of it, I'm excited! about having a purpose built benchtop to finally organise my studio practice around. Right down to having my computer custom fitted with all leads and cords hidden through a network of holes through the concrete. Also up above the work bench will be a 42" LCD monitor that will be hooked up to the computer so as I can bring work up on it as I'm creating my artwork.

Just completed building my ebook library that can hold over 640 ebooks. The bookcase wasnt hard to put together however gathering the art ebooks and images over the last 10 years took quite a while. I have at last count about 300 of both ebooks and countless image files of well over 250 artists and should be a great reference library for my studio. Why didnt I save them on hard drive? I did however theres just something about going to a bookcase and being able to pick out a book or some reference. I have become used of reading from PDF format and dont require a paper version anymore (thats not to say I dont treasure my paper versions)