art is hard

Sorry I’ve been away so long dear readers, for the moment I’m done with all the big projects I’ve been working on so I will be back much more! No pictures today but I had to share this poem from my brother’s blog, Musings From An Educated Hillbilly Iconoclast. He writes compelling and hilarious articles about everything from the racial implications of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire to the history of Shurons (the glasses Buddy Holly wore), as well as some poetry of his own. There is such a great voice and humor and about his writing that really echoes his personality. This was definitely my favorite poem…

on making art
art is ethereal
it cannot be measured or quantified
you can’t weigh it by the pound
it cannot be stored in a vault
or it dies like a crimson orchid locked in a dark closet
it cannot be caught in a mason jar like a firefly on a warm june evening
it cannot be tamed
sometimes it can’t even have a name
it simply appears one morning like a baby in a basket on your doorstep
a serendipitous apparition
it comes with no instruction manual
and even if it did the manual would be wrong and clumsy
full of typos and punctuation mistakes
it would say ‘insert tab a into slot b’
but there would be no slot b
and maybe tab a would turn out to be a reuben sandwich
making art is like trying to roller skate underwater
mistakes will be made
but they may be indistinguishable from graceful acts of brief genius
and in the end
if every cell in your body is bursting with life
all the while
it makes no difference