Every time I hand out my Sunshine card, there is no instant response. There is always a pause, perhaps its confusion, that I don’t rush into to relieve… but they take a moment to orient themselves. As I draw it from my business card case…
…they are flipping it around, to see if a name is on the back, then back to the front, and their face says, “hmm… what the heck is this…” lately they’ve been holding it upside down…
…and keeping it that way, it isn’t immediately obvious to them how to negotiate the blue and yellow, and the black lines.
The poetry for me screams so loudly. This soul I’ve encountered, they don’t know which way is up, and neither do I!
I go to a coffee shoppe or two in my travels from A to B. In one or two there is always art on the walls, and in the washroom. When its just me alone with a room, locked in behind a door. I play games sometimes. I’ll take a quarter or a loonie or a twoonie out of my pocket, and tuck it between the canvass and the wooden frame of the picture… and next time I’ll check if anyone sees. In the CMBC washroom at Chatham and 2nd, there’s a quarter inside the housing of the urinal flush handle, unless someone has finally found it.
One such coffee shoppe has an expressionist type painting, by a local artist. Beneath its unframed self, hanging from a nail tapped into the drywall, is the artist’s name, and I think the price to walk away with it, and place it on your own wall. Its free decor for the shoppe, and a chance at being see for the artist. But this one in particular I’m mentioning, is a sandy shore, waves breaking upon that shore, and a blue sky. No sun is visible, but its a daytime pic. Just cuz I am what I am… and cuz I wanted to… I gently hung it upside down, and each time I returned for at least a week, amused myself that others had:
- noticed
- noticed but didn’t do anything about it, they didn’t know how to right the wrong
- noticed, and felt it was too bad that folks just can’t leave stuff alone
- make your own list, I’m running out of room here
- but nobody had corrected the situation
One day, I went in, and it was right side up again. I went out to buy my coffee, and the barista (somehow) mentioned it during our conversation, made no nasty remarks about the perp… but said she’d noticed, and made things right. I didn’t confess, but noted that she was a gentle soul, who does good, if I knew more about Don Quixote I’d tell you if she was he or no.
My collection of Blog posts and pages before you here is me honestly venting, and sorting out my soul for all the world to see, hiding in plain sight. It began with It’s Over, on November 5, 2020. I wrote that on my notepad of my phone, and it was a kind of waking dream prayer. I was pretty topsy turvy at the beginning of writing it, and I was heading toward right side up again by the end… and it’s a short post! The posts that follow are not anything more or less than me doing what I’ve always done. I’ve had many moments wondering why I’m doing all of this, and moments of trying to show others… but my stats tell the tale… there’s been no explosion, no announcements on BIG MEDIA about the new saviour on the scene with my URL scrolling across the bottom of the screen… no agent necessary to refuse all calls, and to answer the door, “Mr Genius isn’t taking any visitors just now”
I would try to share my work, and found folks were frustrated by the adverts, and being required to signup for their own blogstyle account. So, I purchased a domain, which I keep updated annually.
Recently I began to curate it with the help of my son, and a recent advent of AI named ChatGPT. So, as time goes on the organization is the result of that collaboration.
Running Down Vimy 