I always thought that with age comes the great spiral descent into the darkness. Today I realize that age brings many things and that the darkness can be all consuming long before you make that last gasp.

Without knowing it I have been, for years now, in a very dimly lit place and that came to an end today in a small room, where I worked away on a computer finalizing my second coming out. I have been a very frustrated artist for decades now, working hard to achieve the trappings of financial success as the world around me got darker and more chaotic. You only have to turn the news on to see a world quite different from the one just twenty years ago. I have always joked that I want to know where my flying car is, you know the one that  folds into my briefcase, because I never seen it. My way of pointing out that the promises the world held in my youth have not materialized. So rather disillusioned with life in the big city my wife and I packed up our belongings three years ago, stopped chasing a mortgage, and left Vancouver behind. Regina was our new promised land, where we could slow down by casting off the treadmill and reconnect with ourselves.

My reawakening, and journey out of the Vancouver gloom still pervading my soul, started with the release of my ninth album, Ten Years and Counting. More daylight came steaming in with this new website and the desire to start selling my art to the public, I was on my way to where I was 21 years ago. Today the dawn broke and life here in this small room feels better that it ever has. I finished my first piece of art for sale, a limited run digital render output to photographic paper. The new love of my life is art and it started with a woman I created myself, Sondra.

So age does bring wisdom, or rather the ability to be smart enough not to repeat your mistakes. It brings the grace to realize your principles are still worth fighting for, as well as knowing when to embrace them. Today I am reminded of that great artist who said "O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives." Thank you Jim Morrison, because today was a good day and I'm old enough to realize it.

That was the working title and one of the first suggestions for the name of my new website but a more reasonable approach was taken and here we are basically back at the beginning.

In the past three years I have built and closed two fine websites aimed at web development and graphic design. This was primarily because I chose names with the word Sask in them, SaskMedia and then Saskanet. I have come to realize that either God hates me or I just should lay off the Sask web names. Both those names, by the way, are close enough to other established companies or organizations to cause me enough legal grief that I would be paying till the cows come home, and in my vegetarian world they are one nasty group of party animals, so they never come home early. In the end it was time to stop using website names with Sask anywhere in them.

The next step was easy, most people know I am the person behind those sites, and since I came here to Saskatchewan, and Regina in particular, to slow down a little and live better, which was recently driven home in a big way, the solution was to use my own domain stevengauci.com. The slow down part means I will be doing far less web development only about 30 hours a week instead of 65 and I will be doing all the things I personally like to do.

I have always considered myself an artiste, musical and otherwise. In the mid-80s I was working with sculpture, photography, music and paint, then came the graphics arts movement, computers and websites. I am returning to sculpture, painting and now 3D illustration, photography and music. My new website will have those finished items for sale to the public alongside the web development and graphic design projects I undertake for clients.

This new website carries my name and will be just as irreverent and eclectic as  I am an artist, hence this blog and my new found passion for sugar-free lemon tarts.