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As a kid, I did nothing but sit and draw if I could.  Of course, since mom was deaf, dad was gone, and we were somewhat poor, paper was a problem.  We had some friends, actually, who ran a boarding house in downtown LaCrosse that were fairly comfortable, and indeed, that’s where my dad stayed when he first came to town, and met and married mom.  But he was long gone again, working construction in Alaska, far away, and had stopped sending money.  Anyway, one of the family members worked for an office that had tons of paper invoice stock they replaced, and I got a huge stack of invoices right before Christmas one year.

What a thrill!  Paper!  So exciting!  I could sit and draw for hours and hours and not have to worry about running out!

Other neighborhood kids were out racing around pretending to be cowboys and Indians, or Nazi’s and American soldiers and playing war, and shooting each other.  I would participate when I felt like it, but prioritized sitting around drawing.  One could draw after dark, even.

We would play pretend so well, we even held hostages in the garage, tied up, and others were charged with their rescue.  We held funerals for dead squirrels and birds, and since the grave yard wasn’t far away, we could even find small bits of good stone to use for grave markings.  There were piles of them just laying there near the swamp, as I recall, rejected by the stone cutters.

Life was so different from today.  How kids grow up now doesn’t prepare them for survival, or for reality at all.  Without a phone or other electronic device, they get bored.

I was often boring, still am, but, hey, I’m never ever bored!  I know my own brain has such stuff in it, and my brain wants more!  I’m curious!  Nosy!  And I see things art training taught me to see.

I see reflected light.  I see values, light and dark, that most folks never notice!  I see reflected colors everywhere.  All the shades of green, so many.  Painting landscape is difficult, because green is so very varied in shade, hue and value because of the way light hits it.

I wish I could find a few of my old paintings.  There were some that got hung in a real estate office that offered to share local artists work, and then shut it’s doors and went away.  I’ve lost other art as well.  My large scale plywood sculpture disintegrated and began to fall apart, and I had to take it down.  Only have one decent picture of it.  Well, maybe there are more, but I’d have to go through boxes of pictures hidden around the house, God alone knows where.  Under the basement stairs?  In the attic?  Under my bed?

Someday, I keep saying.

 

Fighting battles, carrying on arguments was never my forte.  I spent my childhood quietly listening, because I was sure if I opened my mouth in a heated discussion I would say something wrong.  I always know when I’ve said something wrong, and tend to run it through my head for days, kicking myself.

Yet the experiences I’ve had with Fidonet and also later on the internet, in forums, and facebook, I have learned that some of the best arguments are merely questions.  Properly done, a well worded question will cause someone to think.  They tend to stop their usual platitudes or ad hominins and think.

That is my goal.  I have no desire to dictate to anyone what to think.  But, making them do that difficult task is a worthy goal.  If someone adamantly does not agree with some ethic or high purpose, just telling them they are wrong, or stupid, or whatever will have no effect that you would want.

However, a well aimed question, guided by repeating some useful fact, and asking their thoughts on that may achieve that goal.

Make them think.  Make them look at their motivations, their intentions, etc., in the light of a set of facts different from those they visualize themselves.

Well, sometimes it works.  Sometimes you lose friends.  Thinking is hard, and most folks avoid that like the plague.  But, it’s worth a try if you know they need to reevaluate.

My mom always said you do no one a favor by allowing them to believe you agree with their bad decisions.

I learned from two Echomail conferences that were quite busy, and quite contentious to think about everything I thought I knew differently.  I read the arguments back and forth in Politics and the people arguing in there were not just democrats and republicans, but libertarians and socialists as well.  They would pick apart an issue, arguing back and forth.  I was very interested because on most issues of the day I had not been following or paying attention, as I was working and raising teens.  My daughter was not interested, and spent her time on the computer chatting with folks, or writing interactively with strangers, and discovering poetry.

I, on the other hand, learned what a logical fallacy is.  I then researched and discovered how many are constantly being used in these discussions.  I noticed, too, that while one side would argue facts and history, the other invariably seemed to twist, get emotional, or use ad hominem attacks to change the subject, or withdraw.  After a while, I was even able to discover that side was the left.  Libertarians came at everything from a much more even approach, and the right was very factual, and highly accurate, pointing out where language was being used to change a meaning of what was said, injecting adjectives where they were clearly leading.  Without those adjectives or adverbs, or without the inclusion of some phony motivation, “because” statements, things read completely differently.  I could read a clearly reported description on an event and form my own impression of what occurred, rather than having the writer tell me what to think about it.

Made a big impression on me.  I realized I wanted to know facts, and make up my own mind.  It was an eye opening experience, and I wish young folks had this chance today to wake up to how they are being manipulated by language.   We might all be happier as a result.

Controv was another conference in which flame wars were a constant daily occurrence.  Flame wars were interesting.  I could read for quite a while, get all sides of a hot issue or controversy, and sit back and make up my own mind who was making or forming the more sensible arguments.  It was an education.  Today, on places like twitter, everyone is so focused on having their say, they aren’t “listening.”  And following a discussion thread is close to impossible.

Yesterday, someone blocked me, and made a thread impossible to follow, as I had no idea what was being argued anymore.  And people jump in who weren’t involved, and you get lost.  Read a response, and have no idea what they are responding to, so why bother?

A real forum is a different story.  I like forums.  Freerepublic.com has been one of my favorite hangouts forever!

When I was young, and spending hours escaping into drawing, art to me was escape.  It was crafting my own version of what I wanted to be, what I wanted to see, how I wanted to look, and what I wanted to look at.  As I grew older, and raised a family, it all changed.  What I saw wasn’t anywhere near as important as the family.  What I wanted wasn’t important.  What I wanted to see wasn’t important.  What I was interested in didn’t seem to matter one bit.

There’s something about having a family, raising kids, that expands ones vision, makes the “I” so much smaller, makes the needs and wants of others so much more important.  It’s a growth experience for the parents, much more than even for the children.  You discover not just the word, humility, but the meaning.  You internalize it, and it becomes a part of you.

To truly care for others, to aid in their growth, to bring to others all the good you can find in you actually causes you to do just that, find good in you.  Create good in you.  Makes you realize how really unimportant things like fashion, and socializing, and all the assortment of extraneous activities we think are so important when we are young.  God is good.  And His creation and all the wonders of it are so much more important than “I” and anything I wanted or desired as a youngster.

Now, I am so grateful for the birds singing in the morning when my dog takes me out for a short walk.  The breeze in the trees, the shade they provide, and their incredible beauty I couldn’t even imagine capturing with paint.  The squirrels playing and working so hard for a bit of birdseed, the foxes that still come for breakfast!

The smell of coffee brewing, bacon cooking, the feeling of the comfy socks and shoes on my old achy feet, the cat I have to shoo off the keyboard and mouse…. these are the things of life that I have now.  The wonderful guy who has always provided for me for 60 years, and what do I feed him today!

You can draw pictures….or if a reader, like I am, you can find and see all sorts of magic and beauty in the written word.  There’s nothing like a good book that is so well crafted you can smell the setting, feel the breezes blowing, hear the birds all just because a great writer can paint much better pictures than I can, but with words that capture your very essence for a few days and take you from troubles to somewhere else.  Not just for an hour of someone else’s images, but for days of your very own.  Nothing like the inside of your own eyelids!  Really.

Writing, a greater art than drawing or painting, and music, now music is the ultimate.  Takes your soul and makes it dance, or float, or it can caress and soothe, depending on instrumentation, tempo, tune, rhythm.  Ah, yes.  So much better than just a drawing.

While perusing fidonet echomail conferences, I discovered something I though was of critical importance.  One side used primarily facts, history, and logic while the other side got all emotional, used feelings for arguments, and wound up calling names and ad hominem attacks as their technique for arguing politics.  Took me a while of reading to discover even what “ad hominem” meant, and I had to do research myself to see that the logic side was actually using facts and reason.  I found myself often on a side of a discussion I had no clue I would be on.  Who knew?

And someone posted a little test so you could find out just what your political ideology really was.  Where you really stood on political issues.

I wound up being conservative, leaning libertarian.  Who knew?

I didn’t even know what a libertarian was!  So, more research!

All told, it was a real learning experience.  What I learned besides the issues, was myself.  I learned about me.  I learned I wasn’t what I always thought I was.  It was an eye opener.  An education.  Well worth the time and effort.  Exploration!  We were on the cutting edge of online interaction, and all even before the internet!  Stunning.  Loved every minute!