From our Department Of Oversharing Yourself…

[Note…this has been edited massively since I first posted it. Maybe read it again?]

The other day I shared a post on Facebook about something that interests me very much, and touches on a muse that informs my artwork to a large degree. And it was just to share something that interests me but was also, in a way, like everything I put up there or on my blog, about me. The response was not exactly what I expected, but weirdlings like me get that periodically.

It was a post about the geology of the east coast and how it shaped the history of european migration into north America…

“So there is an invisible line that’s just going through the eastern US. You probably haven’t noticed it, but this line is important. You’ve crossed it again. You didn’t notice. You didn’t even know existed. But this line determines where the cities are when the rivers start getting all wonky. It’s called the fall line. Not because it’s where people fall, but it’s actually. Well, it’s where the rivers fall. Like, they. They stop being chill rivers, and they fall violently. So the fall line is the boundary where ancient hard bedrock meets softer coastal sediments. This means this is where rivers go from being chill and navigable. Navigable to white knuckle chaos. This all happens within a mile. And that’s because we have the Appalachian Mountains right there, and they’re pretty old. And over hundreds of millions of years, they eroded and dumped to this sediment along the coast, gradually dumping it eastward, creating this coastal plain. So now we have solid rock on one side and soft clay and sand on the other. And water hates this transition. That’s why every major East Coast city sits on this line. You know, you have Philly, you got Baltimore, you got Raleigh, you got Atlanta, Richmond, DC, Columbia, you name it. These are all the furthest points that settlers could reach inland before the water turned to waterfall chaos. So they stopped there, they said, that’s good, built cities, installed Mills, collected money, and the rest is literally history. Fall Line created a hydro power. Before electricity. It created trade routes. And this fall line is important today. You know, soil chemistry, flooding and seismic activity.”  (post by Active Earth on Facebook)

As you can see it has a bunch of awkward language in it that I just glossed over for the fresh take on the information in it. I’ve seen badly constructed sentences like that before and it’s not always an AI artifact. People will often fiddle finger a keyboard and/or express themselves awkwardly. I can relate, I have thoroughly mucked up language in my own text from impatient editing and re-editing and then posting it somewhere I can’t fix what I later realized I mucked up. Now I try to let the words simmer a while before clicking on PUBLISH. But I understood the facts presented to be correct so I shared it. Because the artifacts geologic time and human history leave behind have fascinated and enchanted me ever since I was a small boy wandering around on foot. I just assumed everyone else I know on Facebook would be enchanted too. I make that mistake lots.

Here’s the image of the invisible line that accompanied the post…

It’s not exactly invisible, in fact it’s pretty obvious once you know it’s there, but you have to have driven up and down the east coast to figure that out. I’ve been pondering it for a long time. Ever since I got my first driver’s license actually. The thing is, you don’t have to drive the roads of North America very much to appreciate how its geology has shaped human migrations and history. What gets surprising as you learn more about it is how deep into the details of our history that goes. 

Well before I was old enough to really grasp what it was I was seeing in things like a meandering creek beds, highways, or rows of storefronts, I was thinking to myself, why is it like that? The different scales of time, human versus geological, and then to the astronomical, was a source of deeply felt awe even at that age. Mom eventually gave me a Little Golden Book Of The Stars And Planets that I still have, because she kept seeing me looking up at the night sky in wonderment.

Now I take long road trips. I remember one moment I was driving through a little town called Mexican Hat in Utah and saw layers of rock in cliffsides not far from the road, bent like liquid waves in an ocean.

It was amazing. I had to pull off the road and get my camera out, and I just stood there for I don’t know how long drinking it all in. I tried to get a sense of how long it must have taken to bend that rock above the town into those shapes. I later learned that the rock was uplifted and tilted on its side, and then it eroded into those shapes, something like what happened in Arches National Park. I was staring at evidence of time on a scale I knew I could not grasp and it was thrilling. And then I remembered that was sedimentary rock. How long did that take to form? Right…this was all an inland sea at one time wasn’t it? And now it’s how far above sea level?

Every time I take the drive to Florida and Disney World I think about how I-95, at least from the part of it I know well from Pennsylvania to Georgia, practically defines the line between the piedmont and the coastal plains. The first major north south highway wasn’t Route 1, it was the Atlantic Highway, which brought people and settlements that they kept building because that’s what humans do. To expand, add new pavement and towns, they had to do that west of where they built that first auto trail because to the east was the sea. So that’s where I-95 eventually ended up, right along the boundary line between the old mountains and the coastal plains the erosion of those mountains helped to form, because building it there was cheaper and by then there were already local roads, like route 301 (which I still want to drive one day).

I have walked and driven it lots, that sudden transition from piedmont to coastal plains. Those shots of Great Falls in that article…

…I’ve stood there, hiked Billy Goat trail. The Potomac River is still cutting its way down to the coastal plains as you watch. Back in the day it made the river unnavigable, so they built a canal with locks on the Maryland side. An attempt to build one on the Virginia side was made and then abandoned. Then the first steam powered railroads became a thing and a railroad was built along the river that killed off the canal, which is now a park and tourist attraction. I used to hike the towpath lots.

Every time I swing around the Baltimore beltway from US 40 down to I-95 I get to see a lovely view looking down from where the Maryland piedmont drops onto the coastal plains. Early on the B&O Railroad put a tunnel under Baltimore because they figured it would be cheaper than trying to do it over the Maryland piedmont or crossing the Patapsco and it nearly bankrupted them. Baltimore straddles that divide. I live in the piedmont part of the city and can walk and few blocks and look down on the coastal plains part. I’ve seen the drop even more spectacularly whenever I went south after a visit with mom in Hillsville, down I-77, but even much more so on route 52 next to it, in the place they call Fancy Gap.

That natural barrier, one of many across North America, changed the way people migrated and you can still see it in the maps of highways, railroad and cities and towns. And here’s the thing: he past isn’t really past. It’s still there in the old main streets. In the earth beneath our feet. In the atoms and stars.

You can visualize towns forming like crystal growth around a sweet spot in the earth. Then as time goes on there is evolution. Old buildings retrofitted and made new again and again, and if you look closely you can figure out what they started out as. There’s a pest control company in a building not far from my house that was obviously once a trolly car barn. But that would have been before Hampden was part of Baltimore city and The Avenue was third avenue, not 36th street.

The story of humanity is laid out in front of you as you walk or drive, or just look at the map. It is also the story of the Earth. Which is also the story of the universe.

But this muse is something, I reckon, that sets me apart. Even among the freaks and geeks.

I get a paper cut and pause while dripping some antiseptic on it to consider how it’s red because of blood cells that hold the shards of an ancient sun. Some decades ago in a science magazine I saw a schematic of the atomic structure of a hemoglobin molecule and it indicated four iron atoms. Those iron atoms are what make it work to transport oxygen throughout the body. My weirdness tells me that, in a sense, we still burn from the heat of that ancient star. Okay, its ash. But still…

I know where you can look up and if the sky is dark enough see a fuzzy blotch of light that took two and a half million years to reach your eyes, which themselves evolved from the first mammalian eyes two-hundred million years ago, made of stardust that’s billions of years old.

That sense of the scale of time informs my art…weirdly.  Where you really see it is in my pure art photography galleries. But I can see the weirdness of me in all of it, even in the photojournalism galleries. For a while I was doing oil paintings that were weird imaginary landscapes that were my musings about the infinite disregard of space and time.

I have a friend who gives me the same lecture practically every time we’re together, about how it’s okay to be crazy as long as you don’t let Them know it because you might lose your freedom. I’m not sure exactly what he’s trying to tell me but in these Donald Trump days I feel like I’m not crazy I’m just ahead of the curve (that was a Heath Ledger Joker reference). But I’m fine with me. It took me decades and finally reaching my 70s, but I’m fine with me. Mostly. I’m not hurting anyone by being me. I do my work, I pay my bills, I keep my promises and the trust of others. I look out for my neighbors. Yes I’m stubborn, I have a temper, I get impatient over trivial things. I take things to heart that maybe I shouldn’t while other things I maybe should pay attention to go right over my head. I hate being talked over, and I don’t socialize very well with more than a few people I know at a single time. Sometimes what comes out of my mouth is the tail end of a train of thought no one else in the room was privy to. Which is probably why I get Those Puzzled Looks from time to time. I make strange art.

And sometimes I toss things out there on Facebook because something about it completely enchanted me. Like that video of the blue grey gnatcatcher, or the one of that alligator attacking a painting of a deer, or the musician playing Vince Guaraldi on his electric keyboard accompanied by the clothes dryer. Cool stuff. I’d share them here but embedding videos in your blog has become a lot more problematic now that they’re business assets.

And that post about the line between the piedmont and the coastal plains.

If you don’t get what I’m sharing or why, just keep scrolling…swipe left…whatever…

[Edited Massively… Apologies if you read the previous version I put up here while I was still feeling stung over the comments I got on Facebook. I’m still feeling stung, but I think I’ve handled it better now]

There are moments when commercial social media, and especially Facebook, really weirds me out. Facebook has this “People You May Know” list, which is where Facebook helpfully tries to get you to “friend” other people “You May Know” so it can data harvest your life and theirs more efficiently. 

Yesterday this came up in mine…

I stared at this recommendation for I don’t know how long. What the hell Facebook?? 

(I’ve blocked the image of the person in question because I don’t think that’s the real name of the person in that profile, and probably he doesn’t want his mother knowing what he’s up to…)

This isn’t him, this isn’t anything even close to him, he would not use a nom de plume like that or anything close to it, and anyway he’s always insisted he isn’t on social media and never will be. And at moments like this I really don’t blame him. It gets very weird in here from time to time, and he can’t deal with weird.

There are moments I have a hard time dealing with it too, and I’m weird.

What the hell Facebook???

…is my favorite winter activity. We just had a band of pretty fierce snow flurries pass through Bawlmer hon. Moderately large flakes being driven horizontally by the wind. Seems to have stopped as I’m typing this. Forecast is for a bit more snow this coming Tuesday.

When it snows I enjoy hanging out at home in just my cutoffs and a t-shirt, drinking hot coffee or tea with the heat turned up a notch. Yes it adds a tad to the heating bill but I keep the heat low most of the rest of the time and I can afford it. Heinlein said to budget for the luxuries first. I budget for the utilities first. I suppose there’s some overlap there.

From our The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same department…

Facebook helpfully gives me a memory from 2017 that involved a letter to the editor that I should have noted here too. So let me correct that now, and also for a few certain someones I know on both sides of the Gay/Straight divide who still don’t get it.

It was the first thing I saw in my custom Google LGBT news feed. It was an editorial, but more like an extended letter to the editor, in the Michigan Daily Journal titled “I’m Not Gay, I’m Normal”. It’s from a gay guy proudly proclaiming his normalcy against the great Gay Lifestyle of sex, drugs, glitter, and dance clubs. Wow. I hadn’t seen one of those in a while, and seeing this one that morning was almost kinda reassuring. In a time when proud of itself ignorance and laughing knuckle dragging jingoism are strutting around everywhere en mass, it’s oddly comforting to see the common everyday little jackass stupidities are still dutifully carrying on out there.

Listen to me: normal, in the sense you are using it, is a mirage. It insists that it’s something real but it is completely relative. Your Michigan (the writer’s) accent might seem perfectly normal in Michigan, but plop you in the deep south and everyone will notice that you talk funny. Suddenly you are not normal anymore. And yet, you are still you. Go back to Michigan, presto, normal again. Think you dress normal? Maybe for an American. Long hair? Short hair? Beard? Clean shaven? Christian? White? If normal was a point on a compass it would change directions every time you took a step.

And here’s the thing: if your problem with urban gay club culture is it seems shallow to you, consider that conforming to a chimera of normalcy is just as shallow. Taking your measure against something you are not is the embodiment of shallow. Never mind who you aren’t.

When I was a wee lad, just starting to take an interest in painting and drawing, I had an intuition that style was something more related to how your hand is wired to your brain than anything else, and to just let mine happen on its own. I worry about the mechanics of drawing, perspective, light, anatomy, that sort of thing. To the degree I worry about composition it’s how mine flow and what sort of emotion is evoked. My style is what it is.

That works for more than art. Your style of living has a lot to do with how your brain is wired, plus the experience you gather as you walk through life. Experience changes us, but it does its work on the bedrock of our flesh and blood biology. Forget normal. Be a decent person and let your style be whatever it is. And never forget that normal is just a passing coincidence. It’s not important. Decency is important.

I’ve seen this I’m Not Gay I’m Normal argument in one form or another over and over and over and over since the ’70s. And as someone who experiences being in a scene like it’s an itchy sweater, I can appreciate expressions of discomfort, even resentment, over being given one default scene you either fit into or you don’t. But that’s an illusion of choice. There are many scenes. Infinite variety. You will not fit into most of them. That’s okay. If you’re worrying about what scene you fit into you are worrying about the wrong thing.

Some weeks ago this Times Article came across my news stream and provoked some thoughts…even some visualizations…

Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All

Scientists are finding new ways to probe two not-so-rare conditions to better understand the links between vision, perception and memory.

Dr. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images.

Over the 16 years since that first patient, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia, and millions more experience extraordinarily strong mental imagery, called hyperphantasia.

I would probably fit pretty well in the latter category. I can almost completely zone out into a daydream that’s almost like a vivid dream in its detail. And I can do that at will. It’s a two edged knife. And I think I’ve met people who have no mind’s eye at all. They’re the ones that mystify me when they tell me that they don’t dream.

When working on a cartoon, be it a political cartoon or an episode of A Coming Out Story, I do next to no preliminary drawings. I might draw out a figure just to make sure I can actually draw it the way I want it on paper, but I already know how I want it to look on paper. I can visualize it clearly, in detail. I think out a cartoon or a painting, sometimes off and on for days. I can see it vividly in my head. By the time I sit down at the drafting table to actually start drawing it I know exactly what I want to put down on the paper. It’s very rare that I have to change direction once I begin to see it on paper.

In episode 19 of A Coming Out Story, I made reference to my ability to disappear into my own alternate worlds…

My daydreaming really is this vivid…

I used to think everyone can do this. And there are times it’s helpful in a practical way. Like when I’m thinking out a home repair job, or something I want to build for myself. But it can also be a trap. As I point out at the end of episode 19.

Bunch of friends tried to help me get a vaccine appointment today. I got leads on almost half a dozen possible locations/companies/mass vaccination sites. I love my friends!

Were any available where I was pointed to? Not a single one. It seems by the time knowledge gets to me, however it does, they’re already booked solid. But I really do appreciate the thought.

I’ve had some almost excessively good luck in my life. But there are these recurring situations where I am always falling through the cracks. My love life for example. Mental health not being so great, but not so bad as to warrant any support. Not artsy enough to be taken seriously as an artist, and not nerdy enough to be taken seriously as a computer professional. I tend to bore people and I get talked over a lot. I feel most of the time like I’m some sort of misplaced inventory. Like I’m really not supposed to be here. This seems to be another one of those things.

This came across my Facebook stream today, forwarded by a gay friend. It had resonance for both of us…

Elgin Park from Animal on Vimeo.

The man, Michael Paul Smith, is the creator of dozens of magical photographs that seem to be images from another time long in the past. But they aren’t. He’s following in the method of the great special effects artists Howard and Theodore Lydecker, whose work stunned audiences all through the 30s through the 60s. While others also used scale models in their effects, the Lydeckers perfected a technique of forced perspective and filmed in natural sunlight. Smith is masterful at it, and his images have attracted fans all over the world.

It really resonated with me on one level, because the scenes of him working on his models brought the memories back. Modelmaking was a childhood hobby. Throughout most of my grade school years I had shelves in my room full of the models I’d made. Most were from plastic kids when I was younger, but also things I made from scratch. When I was 7 or 8 I watched my first episode of Gerry and Sylvia Andersen’s Supercar when mom took me on a Florida vacation and I was immediately hooked. But no Supercar toy was to be found in the stores so I began making my own from paper and cardboard. After the show was syndicated back home my model became a hit with the other neighborhood kids and I found myself making them for everybody.

Later in my life all the things I’d figured out how to do with models, plus the things I’d learned teaching myself how to paint in oils, led me to a job as an architectural model maker. So the scenes of Smith working…all the tools and tricks you could see him employing…it brought the memories back. But its how he came to be doing it that resonated deeply with me.

In the video he says..

“I was bullied in school, and I was bullied because I was different. (wheew…) I think I’m still…dealing with that, still struggling with what that means and all that. I don’t think about it a lot but it does bubble up.”

I know that feeling. More than I care to. And this one…

“I come into this reality at a slightly different angle”

I found myself thinking as I watched this, Oh gosh that guy is so much me. His experience with being gay and being different…not just different because you’re gay but different on top of that because you come into this reality at a slightly different angle…and the bullying that comes with it. I knew that too. How recognition when you finally get it after going through all that makes you very uncomfortable. It brought the memories back, and all the feelings that come with those memories.

I still have my modelmaking tools but it’s been ages since I’ve used them. I moved on to a different thing. I had to because the modelmaking jobs suddenly dried up when the savings and loan scandal in the 1980s killed off many of the firms I made models for, and I was back to job hunting again. And that’s the other thing about this video that I really related to. He talks about all the jobs he had before, and how his resume looks like “what’s available in the job force.” I could say the same. He goes through and lists all his jobs and and then he says…

“Everything you do you will learn from it and you’ll use it later on in life.”

Yes…so much Yes. Time was I really hated how I kept having to go from one job to another, often when my employer found out he had Teh Gay working for him. Looking back now I have to realize that haphazard pinball ricocheting here and there path through the work force gave me a lot of intellectual tools I can still call on whenever I need them. Sometimes I catch myself doing something…maybe it’s at home maybe it’s in some other context…and I remember where I first picked up that odd bit of knowledge I was using just then and it takes me back for a moment and I find myself thinking…yeah, I guess it was worth it after all. Time was I’d have given anything to have had the comfortable life others did. Now I count my blessings.

The weirdo, the outcast, if they survive the wilderness end up having seen so many things others haven’t, and knowing how to navigate through strange territory others can’t. Because they had no choice. And sometimes because of that they end up doing pretty well. Sometimes.