Ordinary Can Be Extraordinary

Life is a dangerous journey, and, more often than not, ordinary. If life is a movie, it is one where everyone dies at the end. Your only choice is to take the next step, and the next step, and then the next, until the inevitable and final misstep.

My mind always tries to persuade me that I am nothing important as I am right now. I’m like a common acorn. My mind is telling me that the only way I can be happy is if I become a bigger shinier, fatter, acorn, but acorns are only interesting to squirrels. What the squirrels like is not exactly what I was aiming for, if you know what I mean.

Why is it important to me to be important? Am I like some lazy ole lard ass nerd who wants to be a figure skater,but I’m not willing to lose weight, buy some skates and practice like crazy every day of my life. I want what I want, but I want it to be easy, to come to me effortlessly? I’m just me. I’m not particularly talented. I’m not smarter than average. I wasn’t born into money, or to a famous and talented family, so I get no benefit from the light reflected off of my famous talented parents. I am just an ordinary person. Hell, I may be less than ordinary.

There could be some evolutionary reason for my wanting to be famous, or important, or unique. The thing is, if you are famous, important or unique it means you look that way to everyone else. If other people think you are special, then they are more likely to participate in efforts to keep you alive. It’s the old survival of the fittest thing. If humans are to survive they must do what they need to do to live. Being famous, loved, treasured by others makes you, at least in some ways, the fittest.

Maybe my urge to be important, talented, creative, special, etc. is shared by everyone else. The being special stuff may be the very thing that makes me most like everyone else.

It does something else, this I’m special yearning. Wanting to have an extraordinary life causes me to miss out on the fact that even ordinary life is extraordinary.

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim
cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

~ Huston Smith

Finding Meaning in the Meaningless

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of
ways, legislate in all sorts of ways. ~ Plato

I was walking out of 50 Penn Place. My wife and son were with me. We’d just visited the Full Circle Bookstore. It was bright outside as we emerged from inside the building. I took my glasses case out of my pocket. I’m trying to slow the growth of cataracts with a consistent use of sunglasses. I was in the process of switching between my regular glasses to my prescription sunglasses when I failed to see that step from the building to the parking lot. I was distracted. My focus was divided between walking and glasses transfer.

The step was a little bigger than I expected, and when my right foot took on my weight and there was no step beneath it, the foot went down to the blacktop, my center of balance was worse than it would have been had the step not been so deep and that is what turned a stumble into a fall.

Next I did that DON’T LET ME FALL dance. I threw myself into flailing contortions, but instead of helping, it seemed to put me even further out of balance. I sensed that recovery was impossible.

In about two-tenths of a second I was sprawled on the asphalt of the parking lot. On the way down I had time to think, “I have two knee replacements, and a shoulder replacement. I sure hope they don’t shatter from this fall.”

With no conscious effort, no cognitive command from my brain, my left hand moved forward to break my fall. My left pinky finger did all it could to slow down all 260 pounds of me as I fell. It wasn’t enough, so the rest of the impact was absorbed by my head. My head hit the blacktop right at the hinge of my glasses and my left eye socket. My body crushed my glasses case.

Then the fall was over. I looked up and saw that the glasses I had been wearing were bent oddly. I had pain in my left hand and wrist. I didn’t want to fall in front of my son. Ryan lives in New Jersey and so he can’t really monitor me that well so far away. A fall like this will make him think he has a tottering old guy as a dad. I feared he would think he had a dad who falls all the time. It turned out that that is exactly what he thought.. I don’t want him worrying about me. I was embarrassed by the fall.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances. ~Aristotle

In literature a fall always means something. When Phoebe is on that merry-go-round at the end of the Catcher in the Rye it symbolized something. A fall from innocence maybe. Even the title was from an image in Holden Caulfield’s brain where kids would be playing Red Rover in a Rye field located near a cleft, but he, Holden, would catch the children before they could FALL over the edge. There was that famous fall in A Separate Peace.

But life is not literature. Literature is not a reflection of real life, but an invention, a myth written to convey something in the mind of the myth maker. My fall was part of mundane, ordinary daily life. There is a big difference in a young man and an old man. Young men sing in the shower while old guys look down and think, "I should put some of those glue down treads there to keep me from falling." A fall is part of life. Thousands of people tumble off steps, over curbs, over a wrinkle in the an area rug, over a dog that was sleeping, but decides to arise just as its owner’s foot is in mid-step. I want my life to be meaningful every second. Piped in music in the mall makes me feel like I’m the protagonist in a movie and the music I’m hearing is from the sound track.

It’s not true. It was just a fall. I keep trying to make this tumble mean something. I search for clues. If life is important then every part of life is important, isn’t it? But why look for meaning in a life event that is basically meaningless. Maybe most of what happens to us is meaningless. Maybe everything is meaningless. Every fall, and every recovery from a fall, every war, and every negotiated peace and all that happens to humans, and every human act is just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Marge: The moral of this story is a good deed is its own reward.

Bart: Hey, we got a reward. The head is cool!

Marge: Well then... I guess the moral is no good deed goes unrewarded.

Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn't written that nasty letter, we wouldn't have gotten anything!

Marge: Well... then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.

Homer: Exactly! It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Marge: But it certainly was a memorable few days.

Homer: Amen to that!

Pardoning My Emotional Adjectives

When I was a kid I had two imaginary friends, Hudabatcher, and Hanelbug. Recently, Hudabatcher showed back up, sort of, and he is a blue porcupine who forces me to debate ideas in my brain. Hudabatcher is right, I might be avoiding doing what my shrink wants me to do, and I’m dodging my emotions by analyzing the word or the concept of emotion.
We use the words emotion and feeling as synonyms, but if you think words matter, then it is important for me to know exactly, (or exactly enough) what the term emotion means.
In my Googles I found out that Darwin actually wrote about emotion entitled: The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal. If evolution is true (in concept not necessarily in detail) then emotion has something to do with survival for human beings. That would mean emotions are important right?

Next, I Googled the derivation of the word emotion:

Emotion is derived from the Latin word emovere. The E part of emovere means OUT as in our word Exit. The movere part of the word connected some way to our word MOVE. Hell, it has move right in it. The movere also has a connection to our word MOTIVATION.

So, by looking at the derivation of the word emotion we find that it indicates motivation to move out. But to move out what? Feelings of course. The word emotion means that the emote-er has taking feelings on the inside and moved them out to the outside. Emotion mean conveying thoughts attached to feelings so others can see it, That’s what we mean by emotional expressions.

But now I wonder, could emotions exist without words? I mean, if thoughts cause feelings, and if feelings expressed become emotions then there is a link between words and emotions.

But we know emotions do exist apart from words. Babies can be scared and scared is an emotion and most of the babies I know have very limited vocabularies. I also remember Helen Keller was deaf and blind from babyhood, and Helen Keller clearly was having feelings and expressing emotions. Of course even deaf and blind, Ms Keller did have sensations. She could feel things (touch , temperature and vibration.) Perhaps she had a language made up of sensations rather than words.

You know, another derivation of that movere is also motivation. Without emotion we have no motivation to do anything. Emotions cause us to move toward pleasurable stuff and away from un-pleasurable stuff. If I stay unemotional, if I remain all closed off, numb then I won’t move away from hurtful stuff and toward pleasurable stuff. I’ll be too passive to take another breath.

On thing Ms. B. (my shrink) has asked me to do is find adjectives that describe my emotions when various things happened to me. Ms B, keeps delving into my childhood and asking me to use adjectives to describe how I was feeling when this happened or that happened. Maybe she doesn’t know me well enough to know that I don’t have any pleasant memories of childhood. In this case, I guess emotion was motivating me to move away from feelings, of tucking them down inside me. But I’m nearing 60 years of age and my feelings have been in my mental dungeon so long they are all emaciated and nearly unrecognizable to me. I couldn’t pick out an single emotion in a line up.

So I’m pardoning my emotions. I’m releasing my adjectives, one by one. Each one needs to shower, shave, and soak up a little sun, but here are a few parolees:

dispirited bitter afraid worried worthless uneasy surprised puzzled hopeful relief awed eager distressed cautious resolved somber ardent helpless hopeless disappointed cheated nervous panicky cynical

Father by tex norman

I wish I could capture my father
on the page. I wish I could
recreate him, no, reconstitute him
like instant potato flakes. I wish
sometimes I could whip up a batch
of daddy, and butter him up, recreate
him, like a Star Trek teleported being,
only this time I would leave the sharp
edges of him lost in space.

My father is still alive, but he is
dissolving, he is becoming a tincture
of time, a distillate of dolorous
disappointments.
I wish he could be
reconstituted like beef consommé,
only instead of water, I would
prefer to use words.

I’ve read what others have done when
they attempted to place there father
on a page, and some do a decent job.
As you read along the magic of the page
seems almost to fall away
and what was left was ghostly image of
the man that made them. There on the page
I can see their fathers alive, speaking,
the muscles of the neck and throat
contracting, words, like a heart,
causing the life to flow, through the words
their father moves and lives and has his being.
I ask myself why write about him?
Why would I want to write about
my father? I am a father as flawed
for my son, and he was to me.
Why go on this word search knowing
as I do that words would only firm
up my memories. I have the objections
shouting in my head, nevertheless this
nagging urge to write about him is constant,
consistent, unrelenting and as unavoidable
as gnats in the summer. I am what I am,
and I am how I am, because he was
what he was, and did what he did.

Was he like the Great Santini dad?
No, Santini was a drinker, a military
man who raised his child as if he were
a military recruit, a drafty from the womb.
My father was more like Mozart’s father
in that movie Amadeus.

My father wanted me to succeed, and
because he demanded perfection, and
I was not perfect. I was so clearly
imperfect my dad was always disappointed
with me, and perhaps, at times,
a bit disgusted by me.

“Well excuse me for living,” was more
than just a sarcastic phrase, it was my mantra.

Was every moment mean and monstrous?
No. There were good times? Yes. There
must have been good times, some time.
I’m certain there were good times.
There had to be little pockets
of air, a green oasis to sustain me
through and arid and unhappy journey
through childhood. There had to have been
a Kings X place, a hidey hole, a nook,
some niche, some cranny where peace
was secreted away. There must have been
such places in my past, of that I am
certain, it must be so, it just had to be.

Why Should I Trust?

Like AA the first step is admitting you have a problem (i.e. I am closed off, guarded and have lost touch with my emotional life.)

Recognize that you need to trust again. Human beings are relationship creatures. Everyone needs meaningful relationships, and they exist only when everyone IN the relationship trusts everyone In the relationship.

You need to acknowledge that there are areas in your life where you already trust. If you find the trusting relationships in your life, you can build on that base and expand your realm of trust.

The more betrayal and hurt a person has experienced the hard it will be to trust, but even the most jaded, callous person generally trusts the waiter to bring him food in a restaurant, or the mail carrier to deliver the mail to his mailbox. Trust does exist in your life. Build on that.

Accept this fact: No one is ever going to meet all of your needs. Searching for a ONE SIZE FITS ALL relationship is doomed from the start. We all need a variety of relationships to address the variety of needs within you.

Do look for attractive, interesting exciting people to form relationships with, look for people who are trustworthy.

Keep the word GRADUALLY etched on your mind. Ease into a new relationship slowly. Trust in incriments. Open up slowly, like a boding flower, not like an umbrella. Sharing small confidences. If you are not betrayed, then share a little more.

If you are betrayed, then trust yourself to be okay. You fear to trust, you avoid being vulnerable, because you fear not being able to handle a betrayal. If you think you will be crushed by betrayal, you won’t risk relationships. If you can tell yourself and believe yourself about being ABLE to handle betrayal, that you will get through it if that should happen, then you arfe able to ease into relationships and learn to trust again.

The longer you hold back your feelings, emotions, and refuse to be vulnerable, the more you lose touch with your emotions. Over time, you can become so numb and closed off that you don’t even know what you are feeling. You can’t tell someone how you feel, because you have forgotten what feelings feel like.

Getting in touch with my emotions

A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
~Òscar Wilde

Shaped Notes By tex norman

He moved into my room. I felt the pressure
change, as if he were an angry thunder
storm, about to rain down hail upon
my head. He was a churning cloud of pent
up charges looking for a place to strike.

I remember that, that day, my room was hot.
My sweating made my church clothes cling to me
so tight that taking off my pants was like
the peeling of banana skins — no lie!
I still had on my church shirt as he rolled
into my room, but, down below, my legs
were bare.
“I’m going to teach you how to read
music, like the kind we sing in church,”
he said, but it was like a speech that he’d
prepared himself to say. This was rehearsed.
“You know son,” said my father, “singing is
Biblically commanded by God’s Word,
but only singing, never instruments.”

“I thought that angels played on harps up there?”
I said.

“Yes, I guess that’s so,” my father said,
“but, I’m sure you know, or you should know,
we speak when the Bible speaks and we
are silent on all subjects where the Bible
is silent. The New Testament of Jesus
Christ says seven times that we should sing,
but never mentions using instruments.
Since singing without instruments is hard,
that’s why we have developed these shaped notes.
Once you learn the shapes and learn the scale,
you can, without piano, learn new tunes.”

There was a tiny blackboard in my room.
My father drew five horizontal lines,
a treble clef, and then he drew shaped notes
and put them on the lines or spaces there.
He pointed to the first shape singing do,”
and then to ray and mi et cetera,
but I was five years old and didn’t care.
My room was hot like mama’s oven, but
without the smell of risen, dying yeast,
and I’d endured a morning spent in church.
All I wanted was to lay down on
the slightly cooler hardwood floor and draw.

He quized me on the shaped notes, but I failed.

“Pay attention, boy!” my father said.
“You’ll please the Lord if you can learn shaped notes,
but boy you’ve got to listen when I talk.”
Worry crawled around inside my shirt.
The fear inside my stomach seemed to rise.
I thought I might vomit up those fears.
Again my father’s finger pointed out
each note. He sang and talked the lesson, only
louder, like a sudden thunder’s slap.

My father pointed to a diamond shape.

“Which note is this note? Do you have a clue?”
My father answered for me, “No you don’t!
Because you do not listen when I speak.
I’m trying to help you. You don’t even care.
I could make you famous, if you just
open up your stupid ears and hear!
But do you listen? You don’t even try.
You’re just a stupid, brainless, sinful boy
who doesn’t care enough about his dad
to listen when his daddy teaches stuff.”

My fingers trembled like the leaves before
a storm, yet I felt rooted to the floor.

“You don’t listen. You don’t even care,”
my father said, “I take my time to spend
with you, yet you don’t have the courtesy
to listen to your father when he talks.”

Then like a thunder bolt he shouted out,
“DO YOU?” Let me hear you say it, NOW!
Let me hear you now say to me ‘no dad.’
Say it right now. Say it to my face.”

I looked down to my toes and said, “No dad.”

“I thought I said to say it to my face?
Can you see daddy’s face down on that floor?
Look me in the eye and say, ‘no dad.’”

I looked him in the eyes and said, “No dad.”
I said it soft, because I didn’t want
to say the words at all.

“What was that?
Did you say something to your daddy, son?
Well, how do you expect your dad to hear
you mumble like a moron? Tell me that.
Now look me in the eye and say real loud,
‘No dad, I never listen when you talk.”

I forced my face to face his face and said
the words he said I had to say. My father
moved in close. Our noses almost touched.

“I can’t HEEAAR you, boy,” my father yelled.

“No dad, I never listen when you talk,”
I yelled.

“The Bible says to love and honor
dads. But you don’t love or honor me.”

“I do!” I said.

“You don’t! Don’t lie to me.
When you lie, it only makes things worse.”

My eyes wandered towards the door.

“Don’t look over there,” my father said.
“Look at me. Look me in the eye
and tell me you don’t love and honor me.”

I didn’t want to say it, but I did.

“I hope someday you’ll know what it is like
to have a kid that will not show respect.”

“I do too love and honor you,” I said.

“Don’t lie to me!” he shouted. “Don’t you lie.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I really, really do.”

“If you cared the way you claim to care
then you should know the shape and name of do.
After all, I taught it to you twice.
So show me that you love me. Point to do.”

I had to guess, because I didn’t know.

“That’s WRONG, you stupid knot-head. Wrong, wrong, wrong!”

Unbuckling his belt, in one swift move,
the leather slipping through the loops, is free.

“I’m going to teach you not to lie,” he said.
“Next time, you’ll pay attention when I talk.”

He looped the belt and swung it at my thighs.
I tried to step away. He grabbed my arm
and pulled me up toward heaven, ‘til my toes
were all of me that touched the earth. And then
he rained down lashes on my legs.
It wasn’t like my father wound down
but more like he was winding himself up.
I must’ve cried and surely I cried out.
I don’t remember that. What I recall,
what I remember, is my mama at
the door. Her voice is shrill with panic as
she’s screaming to my father,
“Dick,” she yells,
“you’re going to kill him. Stop it! Stop it, Dick.”

WASTE TIME WONDERFULLY

I got up this morning early and finished another painting. This one is for my old boss. She is a wonderful lady, she happens to be black, and she wants black themed pictures. I’d painted her a scene of a little black church in the background, and the tiny congregations at the river doing baptisms. There is a shaft of light coming from the clouds bathing one of the still wet converts as she is raised from the water.

I did a tiny, inferior copy of a painting I first admired when I watched the Cosby show many years ago. That picture is called The Funeral Procession, and it is by Ellis Wilson. My copy is not even trying to be exact. I put patterns on the cloth and because it is so much smaller than the original, the impact is minimal, but I only had two canvases left and so I used up the 16X20 piece as a give away picture.

My last piece of canvas is a 24X36 and my plan is to do a copy of the Norman Conquest of October 14, 1066. I find it amusing that my last name is norman and I was born on October 14th. Anyway, I want to do a this in the style of medieval art. There is a famous tapestry called the Bayeux Tapestry. That tapestry is located in Bayeux, France. I won’t try to copy the tapestry, but use the style.


Some, and sometimes I include myself among the some, think I should be always doing original work. If I am a serious artists, a serious painter, that I should do original work. The work I do most often might be considered a waste of time. Here is where my mind is now: the words WASTE OF TIME sound so negative. WASTE seems bad, at the least it is stupid, and at the most it is a sin against the planet. In today’s drawing I team up the words WASTE OF TIME with the word WONDERFUL.

I keep going back to resignation, because when I resign myself to certain things, it actually steers my life, activity and mood in a particular direction. What I am resigning myself to now, is the fact that I am not a great artists. I am an artists. My work is so much better than the work other people have never done. All the time, people come by, look at one of my paintings, and the typical response is something like this:

“I wish I could draw [or paint] but I don’t have that talent. I can’t draw a straight line. I can’t draw stick figures. God didn’t give me that gift.”

I don’t believe in gifts. I feel sure that anyone could do what I do, IF they did what I have done. Even so, there are millions of people painting pictures. A lot of people consider painting a hobby. It isn’t something serious they do, it is something they do to pass their free time, and something they enjoy doing.

I suppose what I do is a hobby. I instinctively shy away from the word hobby, because it disrespects the seriousness I have toward what I do. To me it is not something I do for fun, it is something that defines my life. I am a serious artist, not a hobbyist.

Nevertheless, I know there are perhaps 50,000 hobbyists doing better work than I do on the best day of my life. I am a serious artist, but I am not a great artist. I am not outstanding. It is likely that IF I live to be too old to paint, that at that point not one of my paintings will have escaped the trash bins of the world. My work is serious to me, but no one actually takes my work seriously. This fact used to bother me, but now I find it freeing. Since my work is not going to be Van Gogh quality, and at most I can hope some people will hang my work because the green in the back ground matches the fabric on their couch, it really doesn’t matter what I paint. I can paint anything I want and feel no obligation to my portfolio, or the catalogue of my life’s work, or to collectors (I have none), or anything else. I can paint what I want. It is not the final product that matters to me, it is the process. What matters to me most is the feeling I have, the zone, the altered mental state I experience while I paint. The joy of my life, at least one of the joys of my life, is the sensations I feel while I paint.

When I was a kid taking creative writing in West Springfield High School in Springfield, VA I wrote a short story about a guy painting a picture. As the guy painted I tried to convey the zombie-like ecstasy one feels when painting a picture. It probably wasn’t that good a story because it is impossible to explain the feeling to someone who has never had that feeling. If someone has had that feeling, a few words will hit the mark in their mind and they will know what you are talking about. If they have never had that feeling, there are not enough words in the world to convey that experience. The point of the story, however, was placed at the end of the story. The artist finishes the painting, steps back to admire it, sees that he has done something that, at least for the moment is acceptable, and then the artist takes that painting and tosses it into the fireplace and burns it up. Why? I was trying to explain that the important part of creativity is the creating, not the end product.

I think the way to enjoy life, to make the most of life, is to FIND THE MOST WONDERFUL WAYS TO WASTE TIME.