Sick Days

I am happy to say I finally got the stent taken out of my...you know where it went, right? The kidney stone removal seems to have gone well and the doctor is pleased. I am not as happy as he is, but that might be because he is not bleeding and screaming in pain every time he goes to the outhouse.

There may be a bit of the Rock of Gibraltar left but the doctor was content to let it lie and see if it will pass normally. I agree. Yes, having a stone pass can be one of life's little joys and I am not looking forward to it with any great delight, but it means no trip to the hospital and for that I can put up with a great deal of pain.

So here I sit drinking water and dreading the results but knowing that this is what has to be done so that the healing process can work its magic. If you hear mysterious animal sounds in the dark of night don't be alarmed, it's just one old guy making trip nine hundred and forty-seven to the little artist’s room.

And why do you care about all of this? It isn't your pain in the plumbing and you mean to keep it that way and since it isn't and you don't need to know as much as you all ready know why should you keep reading this column?

Cause I want you to think about dedication.

Yeppers there is a big Laz-y-boy with my name on it and a blanket for my fuzzy slippers and maybe even a hot beverage and it would be so warm and pleasant to just go sit and wait for tomorrow.

But that won't get the job done. Sure I could claim disability and say that I need down time to recover from my ordeal and that would be true, no jive. But it would also be taking advantage of a slight ache to waste time that can never be recovered.

Now I have mentioned that I was a writer long before I was an arter and most of my work habits come from that discipline. Writing is a lonely business, you sit in a dark room, cause if you had a window you'd stare out of it and never get anything done so windows are out and music can be had but only if it is pleasant and not too interesting, like elevator music cause any excuse will do when you re trying to avoid the solitary work that has to be done when you are in the creative arts.

So you sit in a window-less room, with no lights on except for a desk lamp to put some light on the keys cause you never learned how to touch type and have to see the keys to be able to get the right ones and if you couldn't see the keys the article might be more interesting creatively but it wouldn't have much structure and it is hard to follow another person's thoughts when they aren't arranged in a logical manner which is why you need the desk lamp in the first place and if you didn't that would be another excuse to just sit in the dark and get nothing done dontcha see?

So you sit with a single light and hit those keys until you get a certain number of pages locked down and then you can turn out the light and go eat ice cream.

Why do you have to do it. You have to because there is no boss telling you to get your ass in gear and produce something or you will be out at the curb by nightfall. Yes, even tyrannical bosses serve a useful purpose. They get the butt-kicking engine of success kick-started.

But if its just you doing all of the bossing, you have to take responsibility and do the motivating. You mean creating art isn't enough? Not by a hair. You have to work at your craft every day if you hope to compete with all of those artists who are much hungrier than you and will drive right by Mickey D's and not even think “Big Mac” so that they can get back into the studio and get cracking.

You are both the CEO and the Creative Director of your art industry and if you don't do both jobs you'll wind up with closet full of beauty but no light because you couldn't pay the electrical bill and had to sit in the dark out of necessity instead of creative sloth.

So why do two jobs when you have so much more interest in just the one? There are all sorts of reasons but lets' look at just a few.

No one else is going to do it.

That's right, your mother isn't going to call from the kitchen and tell you to get a move on because she moved to that nice retirement village in Orlando and met that silver fox who had just gotten over the loss of his wife and now they have gone off to play golf every day or maybe they are doing something you'd just really rather not know anything about cause it is just horrible to think about your mother doing that with any one and even though you are pretty sure she must have done it once cause otherwise you wouldn’t be here that was a long time ago and somethings are just better left in the past.

So your mother won't do it.

And if mom won't do it then it is down to you cause you know for sure that the lump on the couch or the hormone housings hiding behind those closed doors with the music which sounds a lot like racket aren't going to give you a good word any time soon, so you have to do it.

And you have to do it when it would be a lot more fun just to wrap up in that blanket and let the heat and the drone of the TV send you off into Never Never Land.

And you have to do it because this is a skill which can only be learned, perfected, honed by doing. Writers write, painters paint and if they don't they soon wont be writers or painters. One of my favorite writing coaches, Lawrence Block, long time columnist for Writer's Digest and multiple best selling novelist says, “Writing can only be learned by doing the writing. What you learned in school is fine for resume writing and even report writing but writing for people to read, that has to be learned by doing. And all of those rules Mrs. Dullard told you would be so important when you grew up and went out into the wide world, will not get you a read at a publishing house if the story the words are telling isn't worth flipping a page."

Same with art, you have to catch the eye of the public and to do that your skills have to be in their battle ready state all of the time.

Which is where doing it every day become so important. You don't want to have to think about every brush selection you make, you want your hand to grab the right tool without any input from you at all and that ain't gonna happen unless and until you do it so often that the hand knows more about where and what it is doing than you do.

When I was starting out as a photographer we didn't have auto focus or meters in the camera, you want a meter reading get out the meter and take a reading. Things not sharp and clear, why don't you twist the barrel of the lens until they are?

Took up a lot of time that twisting and metering did, and there was no cure for it for about twenty years so you either did it and got a good picture or you shot anyway and hoped like hell you could save it when the Lab printed it.

There was one other thing you could do, take hundreds and hundreds of pictures. If you take hundreds and hundreds of pictures at all times of the day and night and in all kinds of weather and you meter them all before too long your eye starts to learn what the meter is doing and if you keep at it you can train your eye to meter just about as well as those prehistoric meters.

Took me ten years and a bunch of bad frames but now I know within an F/Stop what the meter will say when it does its thing. Silly me, now the cameras are so smart they can focus, set the exposure and whistle Dixie, unless they are firm republicans in which case they probably whistle the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and do it faster than my old brain can figure out what I want to try and accomplish with the shot. But if that apocalyptic future that all the movies are so fond of ever happens then I'll still be able to take pictures.

And in case you hadn't noticed my writing has gotten better for doing this blog almost every day, even when I've just escaped the clutches of the Croaker.