admittedly guilty

Ok….So now that I actually admitted it, I should take it to heart, I blog.

Oww… that still hurts.

The problem here is that I am not a “good” writer. I mean I have tried, back in school, one might say that I was even quite enchanted with the idea. Yet, I always trip up on the mechanics of grammar. I never retained enough correct compositional knowledge. Sentence structure, paragraphs, prepositions and modifiers barely soaked into my visual orientated personality, and always landed in the wrong places. Yet, time and again, I have struggled to flay myself in penance for forgiveness. So that is that and this is this.

Far beyond actually believing in any sort of destiny, I do not feel that I have had a choice in the matter. Writing is just another expression of creativity, one that I use when my visual representations just won’t do. Though it’s not perfect, it’s just one different decomposing fruit.

There was a time that I worked as an Art Director of an Activewear Specialty firm. It was in this old beat up factory in an old depressed downtrodden mill town. My office, sort to speak, was directly on the factory floor. It had twelve foot cracked and broken windows, some panes covered with plastic and duct tape. During the winters the large hanging furnaces would make so much noise that it would drown out the 100+ non-english speaking women who sat there for 10 hour days sewing the cloths together. On really cold days the inks for the silk-screening presses would freeze and I would have to remix gallons of fresh colors. All the time while wearing gloves and all the women sewers wore winter parkas. Yea, sweatshop would be the term I would use.

I saw this football from the third floor factory window. It floated down the stream behind that sweatshop, one day at noon, many autumns ago, during a rainstorm. The sky was cold and grey, but not a steel grey. Moreover, it was the grey of a nickel platted garbage can that has been weathered for years, with the bottom almost rusted all the way thru.

The football, surrounded by leaves of yellow and red, became trapped to swirl around and around in a pool of muddy water before a rock. For three stormy days it visited, with a mechanical clock beat, counting off the minutes of my hell. Then on the forth day, a tall Egret appeared at the stream. The egret slowly paced down stream looking for fish, until it came to the pool with the football. Thru the crack in the window, I could see the egret watching the football as if it was a zamboni. For a good two minutes it watched the football. Then it stretched it wings and dove into the sky. The egret’s sudden departure left a wake in the pool of water that upset the football's path and sent it over the rock and down the stream, never to be seen again. And just like this, in awhile it will all be forgotten.

Someone once said that we do not pick the things that we love, but that the things we love choose us. Yet, just like when I was a small boy playing baseball, I was always the last one chosen for a team. Besides, “loving it” is not necessarily the term I would use for this.