What was the last thing you took a picture of?

As I read the comments, I was more and more excited by both the photos and the discussion.  When I came to the comment Healing Artist Entrepreneur posted, I got stuck and lost track of what I was doing; is it wrong of me, to want to put “budding” in front of Healing Artist Entrepreneur's nick? 

On her post, Healing Artist said, “a picture is worth a thousand words and makes life more simple.”  I completely agree with her, certain pictures are worth a thousand words.  Any pictures of George Bush, or Milla Jovovich will send a cascade of words and expletives tumbling through MY mind. Mine is a poor weak mind.

But leaving aside for the moment that I was an art major and saw a lot of pictures that were only worth two, or three words, such as, “No damn good! or "My god, what is that?”  I sincerely began to wonder whether some pictures really do “make life more simple.”

Not to be rude, or to discount, or to demean, Healing Artist’s viewpoint in any way, but when I read her comment, MY mind said, Some pictures make life a lot less simple and not only do some pictures complicate life, but sometimes a picture, or a work of art can complicate lives across millennia, or for multiple generations.

How’d YOU like to be stuck with that mind? 

One of YOU wonder-hippy-wannabee-gurus prove to me I ain’t stuck and I’ll send ya a BIG box of locally-grown, good-for-you-and-tasty, apples and YOU can sit around wondering whether to eat them, or not.  Like it, or not, after fifty years of working diligently to deal with that mind, I have come to the wonder-filled and uplifting conclusion that I AM “stuck” with it.

Back to pictures that complicate reality: When I read Healing Artist’s comment, pictures started coming into the other side of MY mind, so I am told.  Like MY mind had sides!  IF MY mind had sides, there’d be a tennis match and a television drama going on all the time, but that doesn’t get US any closer to the pictures that Healing Artist’s comment dredged up from the vast empty recesses of MY little pea brain, does it?

The very first pictures that came to my mind, as not simple at all, were the photo of the little girl running with the napalm still burning on her and the hooded fella at Abu Ghraib teaching US, once again, that Amerikan patriotism proceeds as usual.  I thought, WOW!  That shit ain’t fucking simple, is it?  I told ya I was stuck with this mind.  I really think with them sorry expletives – just like they was real words which represented a dynamic way of speaking among a certain, assumed to be rather pathetic, in OUR culture, sub-species of humyn BE-uns.

 Then I got a show-stopping picture of Guernica in my mind and that led to a series of drawings of Picasso’s early experiments in non-representational art.  Nobody was calling those experiments “cubism” yet.  I got out MY little Picasso book.  It’s actually a BIG artist’s book and I looked at Picasso’s disturbing pictures, which have not simplified MY life, or MY mind one iota, once again. 

And I thought, Thankx, Budding Artist Entrepreneur!  Then I sat down and wrote this: Sort of!