"Weapon"

I discovered my yardstick collection in my garage this weekend.  Local businesses used to advertise on these handy measuring tools.  I like that the businesses were often selling paint, and as an artist, paint is good.  I'm especially pleased that I have a yardstick from Morse Graphics and one from Fredericksburg where my great grandpa lived.

A giant praying mantis climbed onto my window screen while I was staring out into space thinking about all the other things I'd rather write about than "weapon".  Did you know the females often kill their male partners during sex?  I suppose violence exists in a lot of species, and doesn't even require weapons.

It's a little ironic that I have a yardstick collection because Mom used them as a weapon.  The yardstick broke once when she smacked it on the back of my bare legs.  I laughed.  She went from mad to really mad.  Things went downhill from there, but I had a sudden realization that she couldn't keep hitting me anymore.  Sometimes the lesson learned isn't the lesson intended.  On the other hand, I don't display my yardsticks in the house.  I'll keep them in the garage.

I've spent a lot of effort lately in cleaning out the garage and rewiring it.  In some ways, I think this is a waste of time since I don't spend much time in the garage anyway.  At the same time, it annoys me that I couldn't use the garage because it was crowded with too much stuff, dirt, and cobwebs.  It becomes symbolic for other things in my life, a large, unnecessary, rotting appendage.  Bro3 re-sided it, so at least it isn't rotting anymore.  Mostly, I'm just working off excess energy and getting some exercise.

I took a class in stained glass when I was managing a fine arts program at the local civic center.  Making something intentional creates a lot of unintentional wasted glass.  I used it to pretty up my garage windows.  Reglazing these windows is still on my to do list for the garage.  It was far more important to get rid of every unnecessary nail, screw, and hook that the man who lived at the house before me put in every few inches on every rafter and stud.  I ended up with a heavy pile of rusting iron and bashed my hands and arms pretty badly in the process.  A friend accused me of "domestic violence", pointing out that it doesn't always take 2 people for violence to happen in the home.

I don't regret these scrapes and bruises.  I've had this garage for years, and for years I had to put things where that disorganized man had left me a mismatched shelf or hook.  I ripped out the shelves on one wall and replaced them with orderly shelves that actually make sense and let me store long pieces of lumber.  I'm tired of settling for what is instead of what I want it to be.

The point of all this is that whatever you do, it's better to strive to improve the world than to just rot with the garage or take out your aggression on someone else.  Look for the beauty.  Create it.  Share it.

"Nest"

I'm not going to make excuses, though I do give you my apologies.  I just dropped off the web in August after faithfully posting every week since 2010.  I didn't get a horrible disease or die or anything.  Life just got stressful and I wasn't in a good head place.  I actually wrote posts the last few weeks, but I didn't post them.  Who wants to hear me whine?  I don't.  I'm sick of it.

Yet for all of that, I think people often post only the good stuff in their lives and I sometimes think that maybe we would all grow if we understood that other people have struggles to face even when their lives look perfect and wonderful to us from the outside?

Maybe some of those people actually do have perfect lives.  Good for them.  My life has been more of a challenge -- though the other day I was trying to have a good sulk and kept thinking of people I'm fortunate to have in my life.  I was very cranky that I couldn't even work up a satisfactory pity party for myself.  I decided to take out some of my frustrations by organizing my garage.  It's not going very well organizationally, but I have been burning off some excess anger issues.

There's an irony here too because I recently cleared out a friend's attic, basement, and office/bedroom.  There was a lot of stuff and I happily broke it down into categories and either stored it in better places or eliminated it.  It was so easy and satisfying -- at her house.  It's a lot harder when trying to clear out my own nest.

I'm a secret hoarder.  If you come to my house, you won't see that I have every significant object of my life, countless treasures from ancestors or garage sales, and of course, every art supply that I may need for the next masterpiece.  I'm just really good at stashing things.  I think it comes from having very limited personal space when I was growing up and sharing a room with two sisters.

I think I can be exactly the same way with my mental inventory.  I remember everything.  I've got all those memories stored in compact places in my brain, stacking things on top of each other and hiding them in a pretty box.  There's good things about that.  I've written a lot of posts about happy memories.  There's bad aspects to this kind of recall too.  I remember every awful thing that people have said and done to me.

In my garage, I have a lot of lumber stacked up to maximize the space.  It's mostly stored by size -- which is sort of useful, but not really if I have to unstack it to find wood for a project.  Think about that in terms of memories.  To address a past issue, I have to sort through ALL of my issues to find the thing that I can fix and move beyond.  It's as overwhelming as my friend looking at her basement and not knowing where to start because that was her memories and stuff.  Sometimes I think my brain could be fixed easier by someone else.

Back in May, I told you about a painting I started.  I've worked on it, but not very much.  That too is part of the reality that I don't see on the web very often.  Procrastination, other priorities, laziness, whatever, are a real part of life too.  I'm far from perfect, but I'm working on being better than I was.  I think that's all any of us can do.  I might even get a clean garage out of the process.