Open Road, Black Sabbath and Two Sleeping Dogs

Did you know that I was only (7) years old when AC/DC released Highway to Hell?  Me either.  I guess I always knew it was earlier than my memory of it but have never put those two facts together until tonight aimlessly rifling through liner notes.  Today, I heard Shot Down In Flames on the poorly conceived and executed excuse for a radio station I listen to at work.  (Yes, I still listen to an actual radio in my office: No, I do not have a plausible excuse for why.)  I was as far from AC/DC in 1979 as is humanly possible.  Eddie Rabbit was my favorite “artist” then (I know, right?).  At some point I became aware and all of the crappy music I had in my mind was replaced with a desire to find the next amazing thing.  It only strikes me as something now because I would have assumed, outside looking in, that “it” was always there but “it” wasn’t.  I came to be me on my own terms.  What exactly that means is debatable and certainly isn’t encapsulated in any music, but it’s a part – a big part actually.  There was a moment, I’m sure, when it all clicked.  But I don’t remember when and that’s what’s troubling. 

I recently completed my yearly November sojourn to Mississippi for turkey and family and whatnot.  I have an odd affection for that place that I can’t deny.  It’s where I grew up.  I lament and relish that fact in equal measure.  I can’t imagine the cataclysmic event that would put me back in residence, but at the same time I can’t imagine not going back there occasionally.  There are good people in that state but they get drowned in the secessionist and racist bullshit that makes it to the national media.  It’s a shame really, because I have known some peace there – and still do from time to time.  The sad truth is though that I hesitate to be honest when someone asks me where I’m from.  I don’t lie, but I don’t offer the truth readily either.  The going and coming from Mississippi has taught me more than the living there ever did for damn sure.  You can’t really see a thing until you are no longer in the thing and you can’t even see that until you go back.  Again, there was a moment when that realization hit me, but I don’t recall when it was.

At some point on said journey, and I don’t remember whether I was coming or going, I realized this thing.  I was about that many miles west of somewhere that only exists in someone else’s memory when I became acutely conscious of this fact.  I had these (3) perfect things in no particular order – open Road, Black Sabbath and two sleeping dogs.  End of list. It was a perfect moment.  I’m going there or I’m going here or whatever or wherever.  It’s comical now that these three disparate truths crystallized for me that which I have never been aware of before:  being aware is all that really matters.

I recognized a moment.  That moment was my awareness of what was that Friday’s perfect (3) that made that Friday a perfect day.  That’s a powerful thing, right?  I’ve spent a lifetime trying to identify and capture it on a canvas but never really comprehended what the “it” was I was after.  That specific moment, that “it” was simply about understanding why I was smiling.  There is always a moment when I’m painting that I see an "it", and as quickly as it appears it’s gone.  That might seem discouraging but I find it to be an invigorating, perpetuating fact.  If I’m never able to capture “the moment” in acrylics at least I will know that I waged a noble war, at least I will know what I was trying to find.  There is always a piece in every piece that is near perfect – that does in fact, illustrate the idea I’m attempting to illuminate.  There is always a “moment” in every painting that is close, but I haven’t been able to make the whole piece be the whole idea yet.  So I will keep trying.  When the whole of the painting represents the whole of my thought then I will be an artist.  If that’s not art imitating life imitating art, I don’t know what is.

It’s not the destination but the journey that gives you wisdom.  It’s that you are going that matters, not that you are getting there.