Art Attack Central
Fixing stuff, myself included…
Christmas 2001
When I was a little kid, late on Christmas afternoon we’d leave all our presents behind, except for the new scarves, hats and mittens (“don’t forget your mittens,” Laurie Anderson), and we’d walk up and over the hill to my best friend Trish’s house to celebrate the birthday of Jesus. We’d sing happy birthday and eat birthday cake as the sun sank over the small lake behind the house.
Isn’t that kinda boring for a little kid adventure?
You’re right, and that was certainly not the best part of Christmas from a little kid’s point of view, unless you happened to be a very religious little kid, which I was not, and I didn’t know any religious little kids. However, I had to go to Sunday school every Sunday throughout my childhood and adolescence; sometimes I went to the drugstore down the street from the church and played the slot machine instead. This flagrant disregard for the rules has plagued me all my life; the tiny guy in my head has always told me not to follow the rules to closely. Not following the rules led Trish and me to heat the dead dog. No, not beat a dead horse. Heat a dead dog.
Heat a dead dog?
Initially we started off with smaller animals and with a different approach. The first animal we attempted to bring back from the dead was a crow. We found him behind the hedge directly beneath the large picture window which looked out over the South River. Obviously the poor misguided fellow had tried to fly into the house, “kerplunk” and down you go. Our first thought was of a funeral; we found a shoe box and lined it with black velvet, then we gently placed the crow in the coffin, but the crow was still warm and the only obvious injury was a somewhat wobbly neck. It was at this point we realized that with a little effort we might somehow revive the crow. The effort was small indeed; we placed an aspirin in his beak, closed his beak around it and placed what had now become his hospital bed in the shade under a fir tree. We checked his condition for three days before we returned to our original plan for a funeral.
But, what about the dog?
The crow incident happened in the spring; it was the winter of the same year that we found the dog. That year was colder than usual in the Chesapeake Bay area, and the entire South River was frozen solid. After school we played and skated on the edges of the river. We found the dog late one afternoon, frozen solid like the river and lying against a cement seawall. Trish already had a dog named Mike and I had always wanted a dog, but my father wouldn’t let me have one, because he’d been bitten by a dog with rabies as a child. Well this golden retriever I thought would be perfect; once she was thawed out my dad wouldn’t be able to resist her good looks, One significant problem was that she was heavy, and thus difficult for 2 small girls to lift over the seawall. We met at the seawall religiously (perhaps I was a religious kid after all) for 4 days, and tried in vain to heft the dog now known as Goldy up and over the wall. On the fifth day we enlisted the help of our friend Joanny; she brought her wagon just in case we were successful. Perhaps it was the availability of her wagon, or the extra help in the hefting that finally allowed us to get Goldy over the wall. Into the wagon she went and then the thee of us headed up the hill to Trish’s house. The destination was predetermined by the fact that Trish’s house had a large heat register in the floor. Goldy had been happily thawing out for about an hour, when Trish’s mother got home from work. She was kind considering the circumstances. She called the SPCA, and she told us they would be much better able to take care of Goldy once she thawed out.
Why do we Blog?
My lover asked me last night, “why don’t you just keep a journal?”
Why would I want to put “everything” out there on the internet for all to see? Is it because in my heart/mind I’m an exhibitionist? Is it because I have to think a little more before I commit and hit the publish button? Do I really put “everything” out there, and if not why not? Actually I think that for me blogging is somewhat constricting; I don’t put “everything” out there. Being someone with a tendency to push the limits, which is probably why sometimes I’m a non-recovering alcoholic rather than a recovering alcoholic, I would have to say that the constricting/restricting nature of my blog adventure is a positive Band-Aid on an open wound.
Oh my, where are you going with this?
Whenever I have the opportunity to jump on a swing, my instinct is to swing higher and higher. Legs pumping air, arms pulling hard against the chains the swing meets my every challenge. I always stop before the swing enters what I imagine would be a continuous loop around the fulcrum of time. Yes I know it’s an odd idea, a swing around time, but just imagine that instant between going up and coming down that instead of coming down you continued to go up and around. I remember one of my favorite things as a child was jumping car shadows. There is a moment when your body is off the ground and the car shadow glides uninterrupted below your dangling feet; that is the moment when time stops.
What do you mean time stops?
It’s not exactly that time stops, but rather that time is suspended. Suspended in such a way as to allow you to perceive a tiny piece of it. All those pieces strung together add up to time minus the invisible space in-between time and my experience of time.
Okay now you’ve lost me
Yeah, I think I lost myself as well. But, isn’t that the case that you would find if you traveled forward in time; you would have a difficult “time” remembering who you are without the continuity of time as a guide.
FYI: there are 2 meanings for the word Balthazar 1. one of the three Magi. 2. a wine bottle holding 13 quarts (12.3 liters).
Rationalizing
Well, forget the “glorious details”; I spent a great part of yesterday trying to make an audio tutorial for interface design work as expected on Barrysworld.net. NOT… so, I figure anyone coming here through Blogger is not going to care if my other pages aren’t complete as of yet. Rationalizing, in a heartbeat/artbeat I can do that with my hands tied behind my back.
Why is it so easy to rationalize?
Because it’s human nature to seek an explanation. We especially like explanations that fit with our point of view, or coincide with our expectations or wishes. Furthermore, we like those explanations to find no fault with decisions or choices we’ve made. Our first inclination is not necessarily Occam’s razor (the simplest of several hypotheses is always the best in accounting for unexplained facts).
What’s wrong with rationalization?
All at once
If your inclination is always to provide yourself with the explanation most closely aligned with your point of view, then you may miss the opportunity of traveling to far off places and destinations of great mystery, because you are too busy keeping your ducks in a row. However, if your inclination is to entertain all the possibilities (a universe juggler of sorts), the world retains it beauty, and you may find yourself moving in streams of flowing colors around brilliant islands of elegantly constructed theories, which may or may not be true. The view from the position of the juggler is vastly improved by his/her ablility to keep it all in motion, while deciding which ball to stop on. I think I’d better add another hat to my list: psuedo philosopher.
Alignment
Task of the day for me is filling in the unfinished pages of this site. I’ve become so obsessed with blogging that I’ve failed to complete this site in all it’s “glorious detail”. However, that said, I still have something to say before taking off for the hinterlands of the design galaxy.
What craziness are you willing to share today?
There is no light without darkness!
So what, anybody knows that?
Yeah, but do we really ever think about it? Only in a rearview mirror sort of way, is it part of our consciousness. The relationship between mirrors and reflection is odd in itself; rather like a film negative:
if you don’t know, or can’t remember how you took the picture it’s hard to tell from the negative which way is forwards and which is backwards unless there are words in the picture.
Well then, why do people say a picture is worth a thousand words?
Hmmmm, now that’s a good question. Perhaps it’s because some of us can’t read, or maybe because it only takes a second to look at a picture compared to the time it takes to read a thousand words, or it could be that pictures elicit more of an emotional response than words do, or it could be a thousand other reasons and each reason could be described in one word. Now if the last were the case and each word could be represented by an image, then what would you think? Now maybe you see convolutedly how one could become obsessed with blogging!
“Designated driver, on the information highway.”
Christmas Ghosts
Does everyone have a tale about their worst Christmas, or their best Christmas? Do the tales revolve around gifts given and received, or around emotional events and people linked forever with a season? I used to have a cat named Jane who kept track of all the lovers who had passed/past through my life. When Jane died she was twenty two years old; that was a few years back, and now I’ve lost track of who went with what, and which was which, and what happened when. The living of a life sometimes occurs without conscious participation. You rummage through a drawer looking for one thing and find another instead. Memories flicker, flame and extinguish; years compressed into one smiling moment or one brief sigh are much easier than living in the moment.
Why is it hard to live in the moment?
It’s a paradox, because living in the moment in one sense requires being unaware of the moment (totally present in whatever) and in another sense being totally aware of the moment. As always the key lies in awareness. Perhaps it’s the scope of ones awareness that is paramount. Must rush off to “real world” concerns …finish looking through the drawer later today.
Well, as I come back later and read over this, I think I’ll just say, “happy solstice” (when the sun reaches it’s northern most point on the celestial sphere: Dec. 21 or 22). FYI = all was perfectly aligned with the direction to the center of the Galaxy at the turn of the Millennium (2000), and yet we have the topsyturvy world of today. On September 11th living in the moment was a given for many of us in the western hemisphere. Is celestial alignment of little consequence, or did we failed to see the significance in the gathering darkness?
Gathering Darkness?
Girl you better put that black crayon away!
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Another Road Trip
The trip was not without car incidents, although the lack of a viable radio (see yesterday’s post) made no difference whatsoever. While parked in the lot in front of a Kmart in Cambridge MD, my car was sideswiped by an old guy with alzheimers. He had been left in a car alone and was driving from the passenger seat at 40 miles an hr. He crashed into at least 8 cars; mine was the one with the least damage thank god. She’s an old car, but much relied on and needed. If she’d been totaled I couldn’t replace her based on the Blue Book value (see how much your’s is worth). Who knows what will happen, when? Fifteen sec. before he hit my car I was getting out the driver side door; the door he hit.
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