The February Creative Challenge: Watercolors with Kimberly

I admire my friend Kimberly. I think she's an inspired artist and I often aspire to be more like her. She has this uncanny knack of making little doodles into very cool pieces of art. She pays me compliments on the things that I'm doing, and just knowing how she feels about my work eases my insecurities a little.

We first did the Inktober challenge back in October. We did the prompts independently and then took a pic and sent it to the other. Inktober wanted us to post a pic of our work and post it to social media. We just posted it to the other. I got to know myself as an artist better during the challenge. I got to know her a little better too.

On Gift Giving and an Experience

I have way too much stuff. I know it's too much stuff because there is no way I can justify it. I guess I keep a lot of the stuff that I have because I figure it's better here than in a landfill. Sadly, if I could flip a figurative match over my shoulder and walk away, I would.

There was once a literal match. When I was a young man, a college student, I lived through an apartment building fire. That was a long time ago, and I'm still a little skittish around fire. I do not allow candles in my house. The fire left me homeless with only the clothes on my body. For years after that incident, I did not have much more than I did on the night I crawled out of the fire. Years later, while still working at summer camp, I marveled that everything I owned, including my bike, fit inside my 9' x 9' tent.

Am I Interesting?

I never thought of myself as being an interesting person. Over the course of my life, I have done interesting things, I've read interesting books and I've been both delighted and disquieted from interesting thoughts. I often think about dinner. When it comes to dinner, there are just so many ways you can cook something: you can fry it or broil it or boil it or bake it. The real trick to dinner, plainly speaking, is to search out those raw ingredients which delight the finished project.

My background is writing. I made the decision to become a writer on a sunny day in November. I was with my penpal, before we became penpals. She asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn't know. When I asked her, she said she wanted to become a writer. “Me too,” I said. “I also want to become a writer.” Perhaps I only became a writer to impress a girl.

Being a writer, for me, was a great way to experience and express myself in the world. If I met an interesting person who worked an interesting job, I would always ask questions. I've met flour millers, radio personalities, air traffic controls and once a sex worker turned tarot card reader who had so much to say that I'm still thinking about the conversation.

Higher Laws: Compassion Part II

I don't need to tell anyone in this country how hard it is to communicate with 50% of the people you meet. I have people in my family who voted Trump. And since that statement pretty much means that I didn't, you can only image how it's been. We think the other is either misinformed, stupid or trying to destroy the country. Am I right? Both sides see the other as the enemy. I will not spout off my beliefs because it doesn't matter. I don't want to lose half of you right now. And the half I don't lose, I don't want to add to your flames. The truth is it's hard to have any compassion for either side.

These last few years no one seems to be listening, no one seems to want to listen. No one is talking and coming to middle ground, rather, everyone seems to raise their voices. Nothing gets done.

As a point of reference here, I work in the service industry during the administrations of George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I can tell you that the tips were higher, generally speaking, during the democratic years. Incidentally, having to hold my tongue happened the most during the Trump years. Too many people thought that I was a good sounding board for all sorts of stupid shit, after all, if I was rude, I would not get a tip. My whole frame of political culture in America is as a waiter, and there is no refuting that. I still believe that servers can tell you the health of the country with a great amount of precision.