The Planet Earth Is Just An Art Project … ?

The Planet Earth Is Just An Art Project … ?

Is it possible that this planet, maybe the whole universe as we know it, and this whole life experience as we know it, is just an Art Project.  It is all just a class assignment by some even greater creator than we can imagine, for his or her students.

All of this is just a class project, an experiment, and the whole thing is going to be graded.  The greater creator, the Art Teacher is merely a member of a larger faculty.  Over him or her is some other entity, an Administrator or Dean.  And on it goes up  and up, or maybe down and down.  In speaking of this concept, could there even be an up or down?

I find this idea is not so difficult to wrap my own brain around.  Being an artist myself, whether I am any good or not (who knows, really?), I can sort of just feel it sometimes.  This doesn’t mean I am completely on board with it as a faith, as it were.

But, why else do there seem to be so many loose ends hanging off this cardigan of life everybody is wearing.

And, why does one individual species appear to have the ability to screw the whole thing up?  It’s as though some kid is doing a painting and a bit of … say, ugly kind of yellow starts streaking into every brush stroke.  Just a bit, by accident, and as the kid tries to get rid of it, it gets worse and worse.  No matter how many times he or she cleans the brush and scrapes his or her palette, the damn ugly streak finds it’s way back.

Say this paining is a landscape.  Streaks of this yellow, and it’s not a nice yellow, more of a sickly brownish yellow, muddy up every stroke of the sky.  Even the clouds look diseased.  And so on throughout the whole effort – painting.  But let’s say this project is not a painting, it is a diorama.  This same yellow gets on everything and the little plastic figures of animals keep falling over because the glue is cheap and the cardboard base is all warped.

Or maybe, the project is a one act play and the somebody in the audience keeps heckling the actors.  And when the heckler shuts up, one of the actors seems to be having a digestive disorder and has a tendency to fart.

The project is just not a good one.

Now as to the universe and all scientific knowledge as it accepted as fact amongst those of us who are sentient enough to be self-aware is any, even a tiny bit of this, in fact fact?  How can this be known if none of us involved as little parts of this whole project know?

We can’t.

How does a dog know that it is a dog?  We all know, and have heard many times, that dog doesn’t know what it is.  All it knows is that it isn’t anything else.  For instance a dog knows that it isn’t a squirrel and it knows, if it is a wild dog, that a squirrel is food.  That’s about it.  As, what we believe are sentient self-aware beings, we humans honestly perceive that we know what we know. 

It is the experiment business that is really the BIG question here.  That and the Art part.  If the whole thing was a science project, I think more of it would be more successful as a self-sustaining on-going result.  But it obviously isn’t.  Seems to me it’s far more random and interpretive.  Despite all the intelligent design people, I get the impression that whoever, the big kid, that’s making it, is not all that bright.

Have you ever seen a manatee?  Or a giant spider crab?  What the hell is that?  Human beings wearing mullet hairdo’s?  Huh?  On a global scale, there are now ocean islands, miles across, of garbage. 

The student knows it, the teacher knows and everybody else in this great celestial School of Art can see it.  “The universe, as we perceive it and, in particular, the planet Earth art project is a dude.”  It’s not a total failure, but the best grade it is worthy of is maybe a “C”. 

***

******

If you enjoyed this blog, and/or found any value to you within it, please do subscribe.  I’d really appreciate it.  And feel free to write to me, or add a comment.

Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014

Please check out my new book Drawing Blind (Learn to draw without looking) at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/426600

It’s free – all I ask is that you post a review.

You can also get any of my books for Amazon Kindle at:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=dale+clarence+peterson

My website:

http://dalepeterson.us

I Ride 300 Miles on a Bicycle in 24 Hours

I Ride 300 Miles on a Bicycle in 24 Hours

(I Meet Myself In Person)

When I was 32 years old … a long, long time ago … I was a member of a bicycle racing team.  Kind of a racing team, we did race (each other mostly) and we did have a team name (which I have forgotten – some French water bottling company).  I was the oldest guy on the team by about five years.

We had been racing (each other – did I say that already) for about two years and one of us got the bright idea to ride a triple century.  A Century Ride on a bicycle is a hundred miles, in one go, all at once, on the same day.  If you’re in good shape and experienced, this can take, give or take, six hours.  Depends on the terrain and wind, among other factors.

As a team we had already done a goodly dozen century rides (races).  So a hundred miles in the saddle at one go was not a big deal to us, at that time.  We were very young – we were passionate about bicycles and riding them.  What can I say.

This was when I was living in Arizona, right in the middle of the Phoenix Valley.  Now the Phoenix Valley is huge, maybe as large as the state of Rhode Island.  However, the valley is surrounded by mountains – really big mountains.  Some of them very steep mountains.  Grades of seven to ten per cent grades (which is actually very steep for a road) and they can go on for miles. 

Now on this day, on this triple century ride (300 miles) we gave ourselves 24 hours to complete it or we were getting into support van (known as the sag wagon – because when you are racing bicycles and you carp out … maybe, you sag?  Get all saggy??)  This ride included climbing uphill to the Kitt Peak National Observatory.  Which is located on the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation and just happens to be 8,675 feet above sea level.  And this is … oh, a good 7500 feet above the Phoenix Valley floor. 

This is all part of the Mojave Desert, which on the east side, appears to be flat – very flat – part of this natural wonder.  You wouldn’t think there would be this much of a huge difference in elevation as you stand anywhere within the hundreds of miles surrounding Kitt Peak.  Doesn’t look like any kind of a mountain, or Peak.  It looks flat as a table. 

As you leave Tucson going towards the observatory the climb begins.  Twenty-two miles of it.  A deadly slow, soul grinding climb that doesn’t even give the bicycle rider any sense of accomplishment.  I have ridden in Colorado and the steep mountains of New England.  On mountainy mountains, even though it really hurts, burns the thigh muscles and cramps your back into a horseshoe over the bike, you can see the grade.  You can see you are on a mountain climb and it gives you that sense of accomplishment, which keeps you pushing with all you have on the pedals.

Melt it all down and this is what is happening with this little jaunt on two wheels: you leave Phoenix and for about 200 miles you physically drain your body totally against a mountain you can’t see.  Lord help you if you also run into a head wind.  Then … and then when you crest the peak, you can’t even see that you are cresting the bloody thing!

One of my teammates encapsulated the experience, “You know you are grinding in your lowest gear when somebody is walking alongside you and they are passing you!”  Now that’s discouraging. 

We did make it, however, and began the descent.  What would seem to be enough of a daring feat, that is riding a bicycle for two hundred miles up a mountain, is not enough though, on this task.  This incredibly naïve challenge we had set for ourselves.  Oh NO! Now we had another 100 miles to ride after that climb. 

We had figured it be a 100 miles downhill though.  We hadn’t seen the mountain going up and now we couldn’t see anything vaguely resembling a downhill.  It looked just the f---ing same – flat!  A gain of 7500 feet in altitude and other than being really shortwinded – nothing!  WTF! 

And that was when we did run into a headwind!  So, this was a desert, in that there were no trees, nothing at all to break the wind, just wide open spaces of nothing.

Nothing that is, but a strong wind right in the face. 

Here is the cast of characters.  Me, short, skinny (at that time) and the oldest (as I said).  There was my best friend, let’s call him Mike, who was very tall and even skinnier than me and a full on type 1 diabetic.  Then there was Joe.  Joe had a definite beer belly because Joe definitely drank wa-a-ay too much beer. Even so he was an incredibly strong rider.  Then we had Benny, barrel chested with chicken legs.  Strange physique for a bike rider.  Those lungs gave Benny a huge edge on the mountain climbs even if his legs didn’t look like they could keep up. And there was Josh, the youngest, who was still in college and was a varsity gymnast.  Even shorter than me, Josh was … like … 100 per cent muscle.  Small, but possibly the strongest rider on the team.

And Officer John.  John was a cop (Police Officer) and even though not the strongest rider, it’s always handy to have a cop along on any kind of dumb thing like this.  Big Ken was the giant on the team.  A good six six and so strong he had actually broken the pedal cranks off bikes.  However, on a bicycle, being big tends to mean weight and the more weight you have to push against the wind and up-grades the mathematical math starts to reverse the advantage you might have in other sports – like the shot put.  But if you wanted to get out of a headwind for a few miles, Ken was the guy you wanted to get behind.

The only reason to know the team members is that once we did get to the top of Kitt Peak, the team began to break up into groups.  And you need to understand that after a 200 mile mountain climb it is the brain that makes the greatest difference.  We had stayed together on the climb.  We had set out in the late morning planning to be on the climb in the dark.  Figuring that riding at what we had hoped would be lightening speeds on the downhill, we wanted to have daylight.  Just safer that way, we had thought.

End of part ONE …

*****

Your graphic for this week:

And your video:

Painting the Lily

*****

If you enjoyed this blog, and/or found any value to you within it, please do subscribe.  I’d really appreciate it.  And feel free to write to me, or add a comment.

Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014

Please check out my new book Drawing Blind (Learn to draw without looking) at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/426600

It’s free – all I ask is that you post a review.

You can also get any of my books for Amazon Kindle at:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=dale+clarence+peterson

My website:

http://daleclarencepeterson.com

I Don't Have Time ... Oh, C'mon!

I Don’t Have Time for (Insert Anything) … Oh, C’mon!

THE excuse for anything any person does not  want to actually do. 

 Whether it’s truly important, like voting, or say … reading, or just about anything that takes somebody out of his or her comfort zone.

And by comfort zone, I mean anything that requires effort, mental exercise or simply a teensy-eensy tiny tiny tiny bit of discomfort.  Did I say teeny-weeny-itsy-bitsy bit of discomfort? 

How many of us use Netflix?  Google says 29.2 million people use Netflix.  In this country there are give, or take, 100 million people.  Some 3^rd grade math tells us then that, oh, about 60% of the people in this country do not use this convenience. 

So let’s do some political type math, which is math I wrangle into my own purpose (also called cooking the books).  Add this, subtract that, divide by the other, add back in some more, a little oregano, some mozzarella, and on any given night of the week, estimate there are … like … 20 or 30 million adults watching television where commercials are forced upon them.

Live sports games or contests, like American Idol, etc..  Nobody wants to watch these when the results are already common knowledge.  You want to see them LIVE – as they are happening.  It’s just uncool to show up at work or school and not know that the Dallas Cowboys were beaten, in overtime, by the Des Moines Cumquats.

During any live nationally televised 60 minutes of football, which takes about three hours to show, you get (do the math) 120 minutes of commercials minus, say, 15 minutes for the Halftime Show.  So now using religious math, we get about 100 minutes of, “Buy this beer, soda pop, car, truck, insurance, toilet paper, some more beer (or other beer), a different truck (this one can pull a 707 jumbo jet – we all have one of those laying around we need to pull places, right?), I dunno. 

Commercials on enhancing your maleness, for some reason, well … I can see that just might be important.  For at least some of the viewers…   Hmm … I don’t really have a call on that one.

Just imagine all the most useless crap it’s possible to manufacture and while sitting there, in one place, not really moving anything but your hand (plus arm) from the chip bowl, to the dip bowl, to your mouth, you get 100 minutes of absolutely useless visual and auditory bullshit forced upon you.

AND YOU HAVE TIME FOR THAT!!! 

HEY!!! I find time for getting a haircut and I’m bald!

But you DO NOT have time for – say – driving safely.  Let’s be honest, at the root of road rage is the “I don’t have time for this shit.”  When traffic slows slightly, or somebody is … like, doing only doing the speed limit plus five.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TIME to go to respect someone else’s life.  You can’t just take a deep breath and tell yourself, “I have time to not kill someone else by just finding the time to not be an assehole.”

Somehow there IS time to loll around in front of the TV with Dorito crumbs all over your shirt, or blouse, watching middle-aged guys whine about limp biscuits.  In-between five minute chunks of super-dumb sitcom drivel.  BUT, not enough time to do any of a hundred things that would make someone else’s or your life, or even the whole planet, a better place?

The point being that even with something that makes a non-activity like watching television very convenient, and removes all the commercial boloney, the vast majority of sentient beings STILL choose to waste an enormous amount of time.  On doing nothing and even wasting most of that time with something even more worthless.

sigh …

Don’t get me wrong, I love television and I DO watch a lot on Netflix.  In fact there are a number of television shows I could not stand with the commercials in them and really love without the commercials.  I find it quite surprising how good a lot of television programs actually are without the commercials.  There is a lot of good writing and acting out there.

I use the phrase, “I don’t have time for (insert whatever) very sparingly.  Actually I rarely use it, because I have determined, within my own value system, what it really means.

What “I don’t have time for ???” really means is, “I don’t wanna do that.”  And, “It’s boring.”  “It means I have to think about something and make a decision – a decision I will have to live with and what if I’m wrong and everybody makes fun of me  because I was wrong.  I hate that!”  And, “It might make me sweat.  I don’t like to sweat.”

“I don’t have time.” also means (and this is the worst one) I am more important, MY life is more important than anyone else’s.  I am a King/Queen/Diva/Big Shot and anyone who gets in my way or tries to slow me up is going down.

I would much rather have somebody respond, “No, I just don’t want to do that.”  Or, “I am uncomfortable thinking about that right now.”  It may not be what I would like from them.  What I hoped to hear.  But, at least, it’s honest and we both can move on.  I’m not expecting anything and they are not lying.

A suggestion for the one about driving; “This situation really pisses me off, but better to deal with it, rather than make excuses and wind with somebody getting hurt.”

Even admitting, “Nah, I’m just too depressed today.”  I use that one a lot.  (And it’s true –most of the time.)

If you don’t want to do something, say that.  Don’t weasel around with the “I don’t have time … etc..”

******

This drawing will be the subject of a video coming out soon.  Stay tuned to my video channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCul-hKF7pWsaLZruFwlTcdA

Your video for this week.

A masterful guitarist and personal friend of mine

******

If you enjoyed this blog, and/or found any value to you within it, please do subscribe.  I’d really appreciate it.  And feel free to write to me, or add a comment.

Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014

Please check out my new book Drawing Blind (Learn to draw without looking) at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/426600

It’s free – all I ask is that you post a review.

You can also get any of my books for Amazon Kindle at:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=dale+clarence+peterson

My website:

http://daleclarencepeterson.com