Early Rising for Easy Raving

Get some rest pup

Were that these writings be a journal or an exercise in creativity. I supposed they’re just a place for me to dump an overflow of thoughts. I did some stretching last night that I would like to make routine. The idea being similar to this writing, that I move my muscles and it pushes any excess out of the system. This writing is different than just stretching because something is left on the table afterwards, specifically the words I’ve used. I can say writing this doesn’t matter so I’ll just put down anything and sometimes I do, but that is also saying that I don’t matter because these words are me. Nearly everyday I’m faced with a thought that this is the last thing I’ll ever write and I better say everything I want people to know, I’ve done that so many times that the list of things people must hear is growing quiet long. Maybe a lesson people should learn is there is only love. If an action is done without or in conflict with love, I doubt it should be done. It’s a hard nut to crack because hitting person A to defend person B is done with love for person B, but the hitting is not done with love. Should everyone be a pacifist and allow themselves to be walked all over? I might say so, but who’s going to swallow that pill. I think the pacifist is happier being a pacifist than the average person is when they slug a baddie. Perhaps violence is like cursing, it shows a lack of vocabulary. I like to think of violence not only as hitting, but an eruption of energy. In my previous scenario, there is overwhelming lover for person B, so a reaction to protect them comes forward in the mind without thinking. We have few choices before us when we’re not thinking.

Can’t get rid of me that easy

There’s no Spiderman if uncle ben lives

I took some time off to think. I had talked to Ben about working more, then I got a strange message from him that made it feel like I was expected to work more. I didn’t like that. I understand where he’s coming from that he wants to get his work done, but I want to get my work done; that’s ultimately why we can’t work together. On Monday I’ll message him back saying I’m not going to come back so I at least have the weekend to think about this decision and if its what I really want. While working for him and going to my painting class, I’ve been at my lowest level of drawing production since November, that tells me what is good for me and what is bad. I talk with Ben about isolation and the dangers of it, I agree with him a lot, but we’re different people and some degree of isolation is healthy for me. I struggle because society says we should all be extroverts and socializing is valued. I think a sense of community should be valued over socializing and we can’t have extroverts without introverts. Some people thrive in a crowd and some work alone. My wife and I have everything we want. Maybe we’ll build a castle around ourselves and have a wonderful life for awhile until one of us dies. It will be hard, maybe impossible by then to step outside of the castle, but you can’t have a good place without a bad place. I know what makes me happy and what doesn’t, I’d be willing to wager I know these things more than the average person knows their self, so I won’t be told I need to live differently when I’m happy and not hurting anyone else.

Not till the appropriately sized woman sings

Tomorrow will be a good date. 2’s and 0’s flying all over the place. Today went really well. The exercise Ben started me out on was thought provoking. As I was leaving he said, “Sometimes it’s harder to figure out what needs to change than it is to change it.” Then he mentioned Yoda. Now that I notice that I’ve called him Ben, Ben Kenobi, would be great because then I get to be Luke which is at the epicenter of the Hero’s Journey for me. I can’t believe how much we covered in our conversations, I performed him my Rap God verse because I figured he had probably never seen anything like that; He’s 70 years old. I know Shady has mass appeal and Ben is hip, but he was putting kids through college instead of popping molly. Which makes me think about my life. Is he what I could have been if I went another route? Both timelines leading to art. He got a business degree.

Oh man, I caught him checking stocks! I told him about my crypto currency trading. I was thinking that I should talk to him about my day trading. Today we only talk about long term stocks. He gave me advice I’d never heard before and told me how I could check for myself to see if its true. He asked if I’ve ever written a novel and I feel like that’s not a question a lot of people would ask, then I felt ashamed for never getting around to writing my book. I’ll see if he’d like to help me write it because when I showed him my raps he mentioned his recording equipment and OMG I almost asked if he ever made an album! If he said no we would have been on the same page. Anyway, what I was trying to say was the exercise had me only drawing the dark parts of a picture. More important my lesson is that I didn’t get it right so I have to keep working on it.

Serenity in Troubled Waters

This is a clever repurposing I came across this weekend

The veil is lifted and what is seen? Fortune and fury. We bury the dead and cheer the child for walking. For what can a child do but follow in the footsteps of their elders? My footsteps will lead to Humbaba. When Baba is you Barbara Ann is too. Shakespeare wrote so well, it’s hardly worth saying anything at all. That’s why I should be reading him to write my wrongs. You’re only as good as those you surround yourself with. I search for giants with broad shoulders. Raising the bar too high can cause despair, but it’s only temporary. Stay focused on that star and it will reveal a mirror. Do good onto others.

I suppose I’ll return back to English, I mean, what is that stuff? I guess what I’m trying to do is pack as much meaning as I can into what I’m saying. There is a sacrifice to a coherent story, but that only shows a lack in my skill. I have to keep trying at it if I am to succeed in saying more. I had the thought that in trying to have multiple meanings to everything I’m saying, I went from having a conversation with myself to having a conversation with my-selves. I’m not very good at characters, I’m sort of unidimensional in my morality, so I struggle to put myself in a characters head who has goals other than the greatest good. I suppose I could if I think about the thief that steals a loaf of bread to feed his family, you just scale it up to promoting sub prime loans to short the housing market. I don’t like playing those characters though, I see myself in them, but I want to know what’s at the molten core of my soul. Tomorrow I’ll begin learning from Ben, I hope it goes well and that I will test my metal.

From Pharaoh to Frying-pan

It’s morning, my wife said she didn’t understand what I was saying yesterday. When I feel like I’m making the most sense seems to be when I’m at a loss. I’m trying to think about my word choice more selectively. Its possible I’ll get lost down my own rabbit hole. When tripping I say everyone is having 3-5 conversations at once. What those conversations are will differ for each person, but there’s usually one conversation everyone agrees to and that’s the one that is had out loud with words. Words have multiple meanings, an artistically good sentence intentionally tells two different stories when the word is looked at from two different meanings. That would be called a double entendre.  I’m not yet good enough to scale this up from words to sentences to paragraphs that tell a coherent story from select avenues of approach. Taking it up another level would make a good book. Maybe someday, but it depends on challenging myself with focusing on these words.

There’s so much I want to do and I have so little time, I feel I should push myself to do more, but I can’t yet. I’ve chosen art to focus on and that’s what I’ll do, but I know I can do more without crashing. I have to build up to that strength. BEN will be a deep resource if I use it properly. I’ve been told of the attitude shift I need to have. While this past week I’ve wanted to tell him, “Let’s get to work”, I needed time to prepare myself to learn. Casting off my pride so I can absorb as much knowledge as he’s willing to share with me and to be grateful for the opportunity to be here, also that someone thinks I’m worthy of their time. He’s going to invest in me with the expectation that he’ll get little or nothing in return, that’s a miracle.

Every Word Counts

The flowers were scratch and sniff

All kidding aside, I’m trying to be grown up about this. Serious solutions surrender themselves to soldiers of salvation. When the sun reaches it peak, it’s job is only half done. Day is only half of a day, and night has its own beauties. A tree will grow in the night or day according to the temperament the fruit. Amide waxing and waning of the earth, we revolve around the sun. There are lands that receive too little light, while others burn from over exposure. Still the trials continue. Mountaineers build motivation beyond movement by making beautiful magma boil mankind beyond material beliefs. Focus and effort do the body well. “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” A parable we’d all recognize as true on some level, yet do we make use of our best gifts so we may hold onto them? 

If I’m ever complimented, it is from a stranger because to know one’s self is to know what one could be. This world is not Edan and cities should not be defined by where they put their walls. Knowledge hurts, growth hurts, we accept it with weight lifting, it should be just as obvious with the brain. To know one is not actively trying to be better is painful knowledge, but its better to go through the work of jarring fruit so one may eat through the winter. When the roster crows it’s third time, to whom do we pledge our allegiance. There is good in this world as long as there is evil. All metals tarnish with age, but polishing can bring back the sheen. People will believe lead is gold so they won’t have to perform routine maintenance, but the stomach of a human cannot survive on a diet of lead. If you understood this, you don’t need me.

That cloud looks like a bluejay

I’m afraid this morning page has a bit of a prompt, I wanted to write about how much I love my wife and was thinking that it would be fun to go through Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs as jumping off points for what she gives me. I do worry though that maybe I love her too much. That sounds like a joke, but what I mean is an idea that I shower her with the sort of love that we see in movies because my judgement of her is she likes that sort of stuff, so I want to give her what she wants. Here I’m giving her a love she wants. If what she liked was spiked necklaces, black lip stick and really baggy pants, I would do that stuff to make her happy. I mostly like making her happy, but if she was into that stuff, I probably wouldn’t care about her enough to go through much effort to make her happy. The idea is I shower her with stereotypical love and she feels bad for not reciprocating that. The thing is I don’t like stereotypical love, I like leave me alone love. She’s planned tomorrow to do a bunch of stuff I’d like to do, or at least a museum is scheduled and that’s enough to please me for a day. I got her flowers today which yeah people think that’s cute, but she could care less about flowers as a material object. She cares about the meaning and I’ll get the material object. Well I guess I didn’t have time for ole’ Maslow, maybe I’ll cover it tomorrow or next V-day. I just had a thought that I can safely bring my laptop with me tomorrow because she gave me a sleeve with Calvin and Hobbes on it. Very smart, very cool; just like my wife.

Oof, that took a turn

You can’t tell me what to do, I’ll fly where I want to. There’s nothing to talk about, I’ve exhausted ever single combination possible to make with words, these are the last sentences on earth. I always said I would like my last words to be, “bury me alive.” That way either we’ll already have that business taken care of or everyone around me will feel like they let me down by not fulfilling my last wish. If this was the last sentence of humanity and some how only one sentence could tell our story I think I would say, “We were explorers.” There was no word count so I should have gone with a run on sentence. That’s my point though, if all this came down to one sentence, what would it even be? All that thinking just leads to nihilism, so I have to stop there. Nihilism sucks kids, don’t mess with it, not even once. Honestly the position I take nowadays is that pure reason leads to nihilism. If The Scientific Method became a being and was trying to make rules for us to follow, it would get no where. A very important idea people glance over was Karl Popper showed that science doesn’t prove things. All we can do is disprove theories. In all of our time on earth, not a single thing has been proven. That’s the sort of idea that makes you want to hide under your blanket and cry for God to save you. Good thing I love my wife, what else would be the point. Without her I might move to the woods and explore painting for awhile, but I’d probably stop taking care of myself. Maybe I’ll get type II diabetes and die from a disease she used to cure. That probably won’t happen tomorrow though.

A Piece of Myself

Lot of 2’s in today’s date. Speaking of which, 2 things I learned from BEN(Boss Executive Neighbor) today was that I need to pay attention to the big picture values and the other was that I should be spending more time learning from him. Ok so I showed him my most recent painting and he showed me a painting he did of me. First off, when I arrived he had me planting bulbs and it had just started to rain, so dream job. His critique of my painting was that the values were all the same. My first thought was the values of the inside of the flower that shows the curvature because I struggled with that, but he meant with the whole thing, everything that was in relation to everything else. I’m getting lost in the details thinking about local values and not checking the effect on the other parts. I’m having to describe a good painting vs. a bad painting using only words, but he’s totally right and when I look at my work it suffers from that. You’d think I’d take his offer for free painting lessons right there, but no I told him I’ll think about it. I’ve got everything covered on my own right? What a duffus, we’re pretty honest with our speech and while working I asked what he thinks my flaws are. When we were talking afterwards he flat out told me that’s a flaw. I’m thinking that I want to improve at art and he’s having to convince me to take free advice. In my head I justify going to his house by saying I can miss out on drawing for 1 day every two weeks, but instead I should be thinking that I could be getting free art lessons as often as I want. I’ll probably take him up on his offer, but I’ll get back to him next week.

That recent event everyone is talking about is ground breaking and life will never be the same

Staying warm on a rainy day

I just finished my daily drawing and wanted to get down some of my thoughts while they’re ruminating. I was tired of drawing today, it felt like the work was pilling up and that I’m not cut out to do this. A couple of factors I’d say go into making that feeling. First, I hadn’t drawn since Friday; I’ve been painting. That’s the big one, after that there are things like I’ve been drawing the same style from the same book, I’m sort of coming off this wall I hit last week that’s making me reassess what I’m doing, the painting class last night leaves me tired and I’m meeting the boss neighbor tomorrow. All that extra stuff is extra, I don’t need it and I might cut it out if I can’t manage doing it with drawing. I stuck with the drawing to get through my work today and I feel great, as if I could take on the world, but it’s the other stuff that brings me down. I worry that I can’t get my work down before visiting the BN or how I dropped group therapy  because it starts at 1:30. I find it hard to work when I have an appointment later in the day, my mind gets stuck at 1:30 and basically only wants to count down the minutes, this is why I can’t live a normal life. I can’t have schedules because all I think about is the schedule. On the first day of my painting class a guy asked why I paint and the first thing I said was, “It feels good.” Does it always feel good? Hell no, painting is the cause of some of my lowest feelings in life, but I feel like I belong there. I don’t feel like I belong with the people or the environment of art, so I’m cutting out what I feel is unnecessary; instagram probably being on that list. If all I do everyday for the rest of my life is the art work I assign to myself and stare at squirrels, I’m happy. I don’t care what anyone else is doing, they’re all idiots anyway.