Desert Journal

Excerpt:

On Interstate 8 [in Arizona] there is a brown sign that announces a petroglyph site. Exit now. And so I obey that instinct that is slowly coming back to me, the one that says, “This is your road.” Eleven miles, the GPS announces when I punch it up. There is no need for the navigational device: the road cuts across a llano between shallow fields. There is nowhere to turn, nowhere else to go, but to follow the road to its ending.

Mountains rise up on the right and left across fields dotted with cacti, tall and thin, their arms raised in praise or surrender. Some farmers are at work on big machines in a field, but I wonder where they have come from. No house or shelter can be seen as far as my eyes can see.

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Verses Extemporized To A Painter With Whom He Had Lunch

(All in good fun.)

Your canvases, Terry, are white as a virgin,

and places for ochre and cobalt to merge in.

But attach some importance in the future, I beg

to the fact that a sausage is not like a leg.

Nor (I must argue) is the bridge of a nose

Built like a bridge tapered down to a hose.

The hand that you’ve painted is much like a fan,

the head in the shape of a watering can.

Your coloring’s brilliant, your brushwork a dream;

composition is heavenly, subject’s a scream.

But your form is the thing that has stuck in my craw:

you’ve learned how to paint before learning to draw.

On Creativity and Narcissism

A close friend and reader tells me this: 

I hate it that you have to be in so much pain to be so creative.

Like a lot of creative people, I can be a tremendous narcissist.

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Culture / Create

One of the silliest things people say is that if everybody grabs a paintbrush or a guitar that the world will be a better place.

On the other hand, we'd probably be better people.

Imagination and The Autistic Spectrum

The effortless imaginative furniture of "normal" is learned in autistics, and sometimes I think there's something almost approaching a second-language issue in my son's writing, a sense that he feels more than he can quite say.

But there he goes, clattering away on the laptop, page after halting page of meandering dialogue, gradually growing sharper, gradually painting the world as he has been told it is.

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Shout-Out For Pictures

Updated on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 3:20PM by Otter

Updated on Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 8:57AM by Otter

Many thanks, Michelle, for the free use of some great work.We Bow To You, Michelle. Thank You. Picture Copyright Michelle Garza

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