Observations on Guns

The more I thought about what I wanted or needed to say about guns the more notes I had and the greater the threat of some massive post that made no sense to anybody. I decided I would break it into two parts. There is just too much swirling around in my head so first I'm going to get out some basic "facts" about why I think about guns the way I do. Maybe in the end it will be that long awkward post broken in two but I have to start somewhere.

At times it is a very emotional issue for me, at other times very fact based, which is very hard to explain to some people. Before I go any further let me get this out of the way, it has to stop. Every year more Americans die in this country from gun violence than died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Yes the second amendment guarantees the right to own guns but that right shouldn't override the most basic of Jefferson's rights, the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." When the Constitution was written muskets couldn't hit the side of a barn from 100' and there was no such thing as a semi-automatic musket. Does the second amendment give me the right to a nuke? I don't think so, so why a semi-automatic assault rifle with a hundred round magazine? Nobody needs to go to Cabella's for armor piercing bullets to go duck hunting. It's just insanity.

I grew up in a small town ruralish county in Pennsylvania, a state which has more NRA members than any other state other than Texas. In the fall the thoughts of a large part of the state doesn't turn to Penn State football but to hunting. Pennsylvania has more hunting seasons than I can remember. Small game, deer, bear, archery, and musket come to mind. All my uncles hunt and my dad does too although I always had the feeling he hunted more to be with his brothers than for any other reason. I love my uncles but I argue with them all the time and doing that has taught me two things about gun control. Like global warming it's just a bad term and if there is ever going to be a rational gun policy in this country it has to soothe the very real, if somewhat irrational, fear of rural Americans that somebody is going to come and take there hunting rifles.

For years I owned gun, a completely legally purchased and licensed hand gun. My one uncle taught me how to shoot it, took me to a safety class, and often took me to a shooting range where, to be brutally honest, I quite enjoyed shooting it and did much better than hit the side of a barn. Why did I enjoy it? Have you ever played a shooter computer game? If you have you and enjoyed it you understand even if you don't want to admit it to yourself. It's the same feeling just a 'real' feeling and not a 'virtual' one. Beyond that I wont get into it because it's one of those no win emotional issues of the gun debate. One extreme will say I'm evil because I enjoyed firing a gun and the other will say I'm bad because I got rid of my gun to prove a point.

Why do some people react with near hatred of the right when it comes to gun control? Because they have to deal with people like Texas Governor Rick Perry who yesterday told a wingnut meeting that teachers should be able to carry guns. Then there is former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who thinks a mass shooting in an elementary school is the natural result of taking god out of schools. If his god is that spiteful it would allow twenty children to die to prove a point I'm so glad I don't believe in it. As for the National Rifle Association I'm not sure I can discuss them, least at the national level, without a touch of loathing. There answer to everything seems to be more guns. Guns in school, guns in church, more guns everywhere as if 300 million weren't enough.

But now it all comes down to one simple fact, twenty small children died in a way nobody deserves to die. As I wrote somewhere last Friday, what does it say about a country when it kills its children?

So you can see that, even when I'm trying to not be emotional, when it comes to guns in America emotion is never far away for anybody.

Observations from the Window 3.31

Sometimes I read my horoscope in the morning, sometimes. I don't often mention it because there people out there that think the habit is just another nail in the coffin of my sanity. The thing is I read it yesterday morning and it said that I was in need of an attitude adjustment. Well actually it said an attitude adjustment could change everything, what everything it could change was not specified.

Google Chrome and I have been at war as I tried to sync my bookmarks on two comps and I thought maybe that's where my attitude needed adjusting because I was totally geek pissed. As the day went on I found I actually was adjusting but not in the way the stars seemed to mean. I fell into one of those death spirals of emo arrogance that Ash so subtly describes as being bitchy. I have no idea what the lesson to be learned is here but I'm sure there is one. Maybe it's just that sometimes the stars are wrong even when they are right.

But anyway I'll just dwell on those little bits of happiness that make the mood go away. Page 280 in the new issue of Vogue. The dress on the back cover of the Express flyer that came in the mail today, a must have even though I don't wear dresses. The buy three and get three free sale at one of my fav stores. Paris Amour, Coconut Lime Breeze, Black Raspberry Vanilla, Midnight Pomegranate, Black Amethyst, and Into The Wild. You can guess the store.

Finally, as I look at my print of "Almond Branches In Bloom" hanging on the wall, I want to wish Vincent a belated Happy Birthday. Wherever he is I'm sure he is creating a masterpiece. The man may have been insane but he was a total genius.

And the rain begins to fall.

Observations from the Window 9.20

I always carry a real paper tablet in my backpack because I like to scribble, doodle, and sometimes just plain scratch. I also have a terrible short term memory so I write myself notes telling what I should but won't do. Somebody actually asked me today why I always have one, well it's to save these momentous thoughts. I did do a little editing and added some explanation so they make some sort of sense.

I love waking up and seeing Mika Brzezinski on my TV but lately Joe Scarborough has been pissing me off so I tend to turn the sound off until somebody is on I want to hear. She used to have competition over at CNN but I forget her name but there still is Stephanie Abrams on The Weather Channel.

Best tumblr titles I saw today, "Love Ends Hope Dies" and "Shit You Need To Know." In saying 'today' I'm saying I look at too damn many tumblrs. I wonder what happens when somebody reblogs a photo I already deleted? I wonder because that happened today. And why do so many tumblr blogs disappear the day after I find them? I'm getting a complex.

Sanity is relative but insanity, well, the jury is out on that.

Blog ideas.

List of food I should buy tonight but won't. I never seem to have food in the apartment, coffee and alcohol but no food. What's up with that? I drink way too much coffee, DP, and beer and nowhere near enough of that watery thing.

I sketch my own tat designs that I want to get and know I never will because I have a thing for needles, which also means I can't sew or knit worth a damn. Not that I ever really wanted to do either. I have absolutely no fingernails left, where have you gone my long black shiny nails? I miss you.

Mary is just hot, straight as the proverbial arrow but so effing hot.*scribbles this line out quick before anybody sees it.

Notes to call my sis, dad, Ash, and the paint free sample salesman guy sometime today. New paints are sweet but the dark shades seem a bit dull. I have to so get around to finishing a couple of art posts I was doing for somebody. Call Karson and see if she had enough shots, she would prob call me but it doesn't hurt to follow up. Talk to Ash at dinner about her internet art idea.

The whole Troy Davis thing make s me want to hurl. Seriously a former FBI Director, and President Reagan's no less, pleads for his release and the good ole boys of Georgia shrug and get out the needle. Pathetic.

Why do the Phillies just suck all of a sudden? Yeah I know the games don't matter at all but still. Wouldn't it be awesome to have Charlie Manuel as a granddad?

Chinese, Mexican, or burgers?

And this goes on every day.

Moby - New York New York

Observations on Art 7.12

Artists, particularly painters, as a group can be self-centered, arrogant, vain, egotistical, and in some instances simply brilliant. But hiding beneath that favorable surface lays a secret. A great many of them are just insane and I'm not even talking about myself. Of my own favorite painters Van Gogh and Picasso were debatably insane while Goya and Pollock suffered from depression. There is even a term for it, outsider art or art brut was first used by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created in an insane asylum.

The idea of a 'mad genius' actually goes as far back as ancient Greece, where Socrates dismissed any poet "untouched by the madness of the muses." Socrates warned that such poets are doomed to find their "sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the inspired madman." In Phaedrus Plato wrote that artists were bestowed with a divine madness, and Aristotle was in all probability the first to connect creativity with depression.

In 1991 Dr. Arnold M. Ludwig, a psychiatrist at the University of Kentucky, did survey of 1,000 famous 20th-century artists and writers, comparing their mental health with those of normal professions. Ludwig discovered that artists and writers had two to three times the rate of psychosis, suicide attempts, mood disorders, and substance abuse than did successful people in business or science. Freudian psychiatry offers an explanation in the theory that people who are creative are much more in touch with their unconscious which makes them more creative which makes them think in crazier ways which makes them more creative. God, no wonder we all need therapy.

Once again I have taken forever to get to my point of writing this. I have been in a very artistic mood this week to the point that I was thinking about painting something. Always my dark guardian angel Ash took it upon herself to remind me of what I'm like when I paint. Pretty much it involves days of isolation and copious quantities of tequila, nicotine, and caffeine with very little or no food at all. Totally immersed I will paint until that moment comes when I stand back and realize that one way or another it's finished. Hopefully what I saw in my head is on the canvas because one time I did take a scissors to a painting and I have been known to burn others.

So those thoughts led to all the insanity thoughts which led to this post. I started to write a post about art and my thinking of painting again but I finished this post first so when it seems I'm out of order here, well, just another sign of my insanity.

Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds

(Love the coloring of that vid.)

the Loner

"We are the ones who know how to entertain ourselves. How to learn without taking a class. How to contemplate and how to create.

Loners, by virtue of being loners, in celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave—like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels, and sole survivors.

Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before, and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the cabalists.

Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarified. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline.

A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions."

Anneli Rufus, "Party of One, The Loners Manifesto"

Observations from the Window 4.15

I’m sitting in the window indulging my passion for Philly sports, NY teams be damned. Luckily the Flyers playoff game is on cable because I guess I have to get used to not watching the Phils. Hell I’m going to miss that, their best start in years and i can't watch. At the same time I'm catching up on some reading too.

So than I ran across a column on drug addiction that just pissed me off. I know I have mentioned my addictive personality before. My drug probs and trip to rehab, all water under the blog bridge I guess. But something in this just grabbed me by the throat and shook me a bit. This is the exact quote ….

‘Most people who take up drug addiction ….’

Huh? Or to be more precise, WTF ?? Take up drug addiction. How can anybody in their right mind say something like that? Yeah take up drug addiction, like you take up knitting or fishing.

I didn’t want to ‘take up’ something that stole a month of my life. Stole that time so completely that at times I can’t remember any of it at all. From a trip to the shore, to driving my car into a ditch, and than landing in rehab, most of a summer of my life gone forever. And the thing is the addiction is never totally gone. Not really. Some people think you can cheat, just once, one line can’t hurt. But it’s not like that at all. One line could send me back into that dark pit, that little corner of hell I was in, and this time I might not climb out. So I guess I live with that till the day I die.

So ‘take it up’?? What the hell are you thinking?

For the record the Urban Dictionary defines cocaine as "A drug that is so important that you lie to the people that you love and steal from the people that trust you." Sounds about right.

I guess I’m just rambling here. Pissed off by a written line. I’m not sure but I think this is why I started this blog in the first place. Sometimes I just need to ramble, vent, and blow off some steam so my brain doesn’t implode.

Life goes on

'.... I only want you to see
My favorite part of me
And not my ugly side
Not my ugly side ....'

tuneage, Blue October - Ugly Side

Sara, part I

“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.” Alvin Toffler

When you spend any amount of time in rehab you spend a lot of time thinking. Hopefully thinking about what got you there and what it’s going to take to keep you from coming back. Sometimes self-pity creeps in because this has never happened to anybody before and it wasn’t your fault in the first place.

The facility I was in didn’t allow TVs in your room. There was a big common room and they would do anything to bring everybody together. But being at my antisocial worst, the summer’s events hadn’t helped matters, I spent a lot of time alone in my room. Besides nobody was going to tell me I had to socialize.

My dad was always an avid collector of music and at the time my ipod was filled with 70s and 80s music. I would sit in my room for hours listening and thinking. Constantly thinking about my past, my messed up present, and my hazy unsure future. Wrestling with my demons that always seemed to be getting the upper hand.

Than one day Fleetwood Mac’s song Sara came on. As I listened I whispered to myself ‘fucking Sara’. And in an instant all my demons, torments, and hatreds had a name.

Sara ….

tuneage

the Mood

As long as I can remember it’s been called ‘the mood’. It comes from a time I was a little girl, yes I was, and was throwing a fit of some kind. My mom asked me if I was in a mood and it’s been called that ever since. It’s as if a dark cloud descends on my brain. It can build over time, so I have some warning, or it can strike without any warning at all. It can last for an hour, a day, or once a whole summer.

Sometimes when it happens I just want to left alone to sulk. Just be my anti-social self. Not talk to another soul and maybe feel a little sorry for myself. At its worst I just hate the world and everything around me. It seems to feed on itself and loves the darkest most depressing music it can find.

Once I tried to describe to a friend how sometimes I can literally see emotions in my head. Not just feel them but see them too. It’s really hard to explain. Almost as if somebody grabbed the contrast knob in my head and gave it a spin. That being said the whole idea of this post was to try and describe what I see when I am in my mood. Now I’m not so sure I can.

Other than a doctor friend of mine I have never tried to put it in words before. I’m not so sure it’s possible without seeming a bit crazy. But than again I have never been one to consider myself normal. I have never tried acid but, ill tell you what, it has to be something like this only in a darker way. Everything is clear and heightened but somehow darker. I guess I just can’t explain it. I read about van Gogh and sometimes wonder what he saw.

Maybe one day Ill paint my own Starry Night

tuneage

A Starry Night

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."
Vincent van Gogh

After years of studying this artist and that I find myself drawn more and more to van Gogh. He believed art was a form of expression in that it was an emotional and spiritual experience for him. Maybe that’s what draws me to him or maybe the fact that he was insane. Van Gogh was a heavy drinker and tobacco user which exasperated his mental illness. He didn’t get along with other artists.

A Starry Night is a perfect representation of the Post-Impressionistic style of painting. With its swirling colors and lines it incorporates not just the color and light that is found in the earlier works of these painters, but shows how forms and feelings also came into play. Swirls were applied so thickly in this painting that the paint itself cast shadows. His heavy brushstrokes and vivid colors portray the night sky as crazy and chaotic and the village below as peaceful and serene. It’s been debated whether the swirling sky represents his state of mind when he painted it. For van Gogh art was not a black night sky over a small town art was a personal expression of how he felt when he looked at the sky over the town. This is significant in that his ‘interpretation’ made him a pioneer in the modern movement of artists.

A Starry Night was painted in June 1889. Just over a year later, in July 1890, van Gogh walked into a field with a revolver and shot himself in the chest. He died two days later.

It’s been said there is a fine line between genius and madness.

A Starry Night

tuneage