This month’s Socrates Café question:

“Can we hold two totally contradictory beliefs?”

Well, what type you?

Computer Embellished Drawing

A tee design, designed for a charity sporting event, sporting a sport I don’t undestand. Understand?

Black Lines on Things • Here and There

I made a variety of doodlings on a variety of things in a variety of places this weekend. Every once in a while, I showed ’em to my iPhone.

Ink on Paper • 12″x18″ • Private Collection

Proper sumi-e materials used improperly.

Visionary Contemporaries Contemplating Vision

One day, I fashioned a freakish fella with pie-hole eyes. Days later, a talented e-pal refashioned the fella as the first inhabbitant of Nether Netherland. I feel like a proud uncle.

A few years ago, the Mrs. and I donned backpacks and scooted our backsides across Europe. One evening, on a train ride through Germany, I had a German beer and Dramamine-fueled epiphany. Luckily, my wife captured the bloated bloviation on film.

I’ve transcribed it for your reading pleasure, prepare to be underwhelmed:

“Come here… I get it… standing here, drinking my beer, looking out the window in a train from Prague to Frankford… I get it.

All that stuff that we see out there from the window seems like unimportant, little values and shapes and sizes and colours and blips and blops… large pockets of dark, some of which have been slightly industrialized or settled, some of which have been left completely natural… but it means nothing. It’s just kind of a backdrop. It’s the ambient noise and the ambient visuals that go on in the background of a train ride.

BUT, how many times have we found ourselves, sitting in a small town or city… or in the countryside and we see a train go by? …and that is the ambient noise of our afternoon… so we’re now impeding on their peacefulness.

So, we are taking a single line, from point A to point B, and all we see are the Infinitesimals and complexities of life, lower and higher, for hundreds of thousands of miles, stretched out on either side… and we sit by a little train window and look out… and they are next to nothing to us and we are next to nothing to them… except for a little yellowish light that stays still as we whiz by or a yellowish light that whizzes by as they stay still.  Get it?”

Marker on Post-it® Notes • Main Line, Philadelphia

A self-adhesive, artistic ensemble punctuated Sweet Mabel’s Sideshow Spectacular. Props to Putty Aaron for a proper Polaroid of the proceedings.

A sign of things to come… tonight.