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Monday, July 30, 2012

My blog for 7/230/2012 The Random Access Mind


Thoughts from the random-access mind.

On my walk this morning at 6:30, I pass by the horses who live across the street.  Their corral has about 200 feet of road/driveway frontage.  It’s filled with a workout arena, a barn, decomposed granite dirt, some scrubby sage and cactus chaparral and white board fences. Two sorrels and a bay appear to ignore me way off on the other side of their roaming acreage.  I’m silent in my tennis shoes, but a gelding whose tail is to me, suddenly pops his head up from his ground search for goodies and turns to look at me.  I know that horses’ eyes are placed on the sides of their heads, and know they can see almost to their tails while facing front, but I didn’t know their vision was so adept as to see me across an acre of land.  If I don’t learn anything else today, I finally learned that.  It only took me all my lifetime so far.  The apple tree in back is still making fruit, bless its heart.  Mostly apples fall on the ground and make the rabbits happy.  We’ve eaten them until we’re loaded for the year.  I might pick some apples to take to the horses tomorrow, even though their owner is paranoid about anybody even talking to her horses.  I guess she's worried people will cause them to wander to the dark side.  I wonder if I could go to jail for feeding a horse an apple.  She’s the kind of person I really don’t care if I offend.

I notice the other side of the driveway/road, which has about 500 feet of frontage and is an award winning winery orchard.  Rows of grapevines are almost full in season.  All at once half the orchard has white netting draped over the rows.  I don’t know if this is to keep the birds off the fruit, or to keep the sun from damaging the crop.  And why only half the crop?  Maybe different grapes.  I’ll ask somebody if I get a chance.

I’m currently sending what we call Query Letters to publishers to seat Chattahoochee Dead, my new book.  This is a tedious process as each publisher requires different information in addition to the manuscript.  I’ve sent it to three publishers, have heard back from none of them, which is routine.  Each will take a minimum of eight weeks to respond IF they like the book.  If they don’t like it, I simply will never hear from them again.  So I intend to send it to several more publishers, but I get depressed and have to split up the organizational time as I find it disheartening.  Ergo, I paint.

Since painting for me is such a goofy process, I think I’m going to put this new one in my blog as I paint it.  I hope nobody thinks less of me for it, because I don’t sit down and whip out a painting one time through.  It remains a process of becoming until one day I pronounce it finished and simply quit working on it.  Until then it gets pretty ugly sometimes (usually) before it starts resembling a snapshot of life.  In actuality, I think it goes from abstract to impressionistic.  I usually stop there.  Sometimes try for really fine art and usually disappoint myself when I do that.  But my point is, the beginnings of my pictures nowhere near resemble the finished products.  At one time this was very upsetting for me, not knowing this is how my brain has to do it.  I’d get part way into a painting and couldn’t find the picture in there anywhere.  Very frustrating.  But I learned to persevere and the picture would show up eventually.   So now I just keep painting, no matter what it looks like and eventually, there it comes.  I'll post this tomorrow.

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