MegaFishbein is a collection of lessons, life-hacks, and lifestyle: A journey of a creative hell-bent on perfecting his process.
Pathologically curious and never satisfied with the "norms".
All in Vignettes
That mindset followed me into Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return: a seemingly playful, Victorian-style home concealing a dense, obsessive, multi-layered interactive narrative system—part immersive art installation, part archival puzzle, part alternate-reality fiction engine disguised as spectacle.
Me oh my. What a brain fuck.
I was deep in another edit session when a message blinked onto my screen:
“We’ve heard about this thing called FEST. We might want to go.
Would you want to shoot it?”
I actually laughed. Heard of it? I’d been circling this scene for years. Friends With Benefits—the FWB DAO—was the first collective where I felt my weird tangle of polymath proclivities made sense: art, music, crypto, tech, film philosophy. Every summer, they threw a gathering in the redwoods of Idyllwild.
FEST.
The phone alarm blasted into my brain like a jackhammer-tipped freight train. Out of context the chime could be described as sweet, even soothing, but the tone had been corrupted and now elicited only fury. I swung my legs out from under the cozy covers and fumbled my toes around to find my slippers. On they went. My first moment of triumph in the last four hours. It was eight o’ clock, I had been awake since four, and this was not normal.
Years ago in the 90s I worked at a hell hole of a call center. It was my first "office" job and I tried really hard to be professional. What I didn't know was that a call center is basically the same as a restaurant. Everyone was sleeping with each other, on drugs/alcohol, and the managers were idiots.
The hill sloped steeply down from the mountain. Sharp black crags faded to green as the meadow ate its way up the foothills. The story is the same as far as the eye can see – emerald valley marching into the blue-grey haze of atmosphere with its river spine snaking chasing the horizon.
This is Ireland, he says quietly to no one. This was a good idea.
Oh lord, I’m sooo tired! How looong can this go ooon?
My Dad’s baritone reverberated through the concrete corridor of the 4th Avenue underpass like Zeus cursing Greek mortals. And then the chorus:
Workin' in a coal mine
Goin' down, down, down
Workin' in a coal mine
Oops, about to slip down
There’s just something about working with your hands.
Especially when you’ve been too long working with your fingers.
When day in day out you’ve been tip tapping away on screens and keyboards, it is a soulfully welcome departure to do a bit of carpentry or construction (or destruction for that matter).
Hammers and saws and sanders and stain. I’ll be damned if I ever go desking again.
I met (name) yesterday.
Fluting around on the NW side.
He passed by and I said “Hey, that’s beautiful.”
He said “Thanks.”
It was only after he walked around the corner at the end of the block that I’d remembered a little snippet from Rick Rubin’s interview on the Broken Record Podcast: “Yea, I’ve just been really wanting to soothe people with my instrumental music, so these days I often go to the park and flute around.”
Goodness, that was (name) that just walked by…
I hacked the sucker.
I broke him wide open.
Put the screws to the mammajamma.
Or rather, removed the screws from the mammajamma, did some wigglin’ and a snippin’ and then screwed the screws back in the sucker.
Apologies for the abstraction. I am illustrating my morning battle with my Keurig coffee maker, and the resultant hack I was forced (nay, willingly embarked upon) to correct its character and insubordinate behavior.
But first, why was I battling with the caffeine machine?
There they were, gold-glittered and gay.
The bass thumped and the mass of dancers throbbed and pulsed along with the rhythm.
At the same time the whiz of a hundred coasting bicycle gears ripped through air behind me.
Today the mountain was alive with hedonism.
