Open Wavelength

I built out my office myself. Tore up the old carpet, pulled the flooring, threw up a staggered stud wall with a pass through window in a living room that was too big for what it needed to be. Bought a door at Habitat, built the frame around it, then had to modify the door itself to make it fit. Vinyl flooring, trim, baseboards, drywall over textured walls, a concrete fire brick wall too thick to drywall and too hard to remove, so I puttied and sanded it instead. Painted the whole room, ceiling included. Everyone who sees it is amazed. I never once drew it out the way an architect would. I am not an artist. I decided if I did not start, it would never happen, so I started cutting, and looked things up as I went.

What I keep circling back to is that I do not see images, not really, not the way I know some people do. Every now and then, in a dream, or if I close my eyes hard enough, something flickers through. But most of the time it is not a picture at all. It is just knowing. I know where the stud goes before I can see it. I know the door will not fit before I have measured why. That knowing has always felt strange to explain, because everyone assumes building something means picturing it first.

Turns out that is not actually how building works, even for people who do see pictures. The picture is not what does the work. There is a structural layer underneath it, the relationships, the distances, how one piece sits against another, and that layer is what carries the reasoning. The image, when it shows up at all, is closer to a rendering pulled off the model after the fact. I was never missing the picture. I was just always working directly in the model and skipping the render most people rely on.

The same thing seems to be true of how I hold onto information. I do not carry everything I have learned at full resolution. What I keep is the structure, the map of how it connects, and a pointer to where the detail lives if I need it back. That is probably why I do not lose much, even though I know I am not running anything close to a photographic memory. I am not storing the file. I am storing the index and the route back to it.

I love sitting with this. Every time I turn a piece of my own mind over and look at how it actually runs, I learn something new, and some part of me expects it should have run out of new things to find by now. It has not. Fascinating and random and structured, all at once, and somehow all of it mine.