Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

very nice - just yesterday I drove past a few sites that triggered memories of a lady from my own past who's since crossed over. She, too, had a mole, but at the corner of her left eye - and another in a more intimate spot...

ah, she looks swell. Thanks, Steve.
Roy, I guess flashbacks are in the air.

my mind wanders quite a bit to the past these days.....all good stuff for the most part.....I hop on the cosmic scale at times, see how things balance out.....but mostly just enjoy the ride back through time.....for this piece I used the face of an extraordinary talent that I admired as a metaphor for all those trips back through the years......allow her to symbolize the highs and the lows.....the struggles and joy......we humans are complex

I've been spending a lot of time there, too. Good times, bad times - successes, failures - regrets for the ones that got away - exhuming & exorcising a lot of buried anger - and ideas for new creative projects have been popping up a lot. The energy to realize them, not so much. All part of the Old-Timer's job description, I guess.

I believe it is natural to review your life as you age.....part of living for most ,at least in he back of their mind, is finding meaning.....so we search the memory banks looking for the clues that Must be there...now....at our advanced age.....and with each memory emotion is dredged up....I wonder often is this the way things actually happened or did I sanitize it or create a more appealing version in my favor.....guess i'll never know

I think it's also a matter of viewpoint. In physics, the location of the observer is all-important to the interpretation of events - in real life, too. During one of this past winter's many storm-induced power outages, I crashed with my sister for a few days, and the subject of my social awkwardness arose. I mentioned off-handedly, "Y'know, sometimes I feel like I might be on the spectrum!" To which she (to my surprise) replied with a laugh and "Gee, ya think?" It wasn't meant unkindly, nor did I take it that way - in fact, it was a revelation. So many past encounters have since snapped into focus. I guess this new vantage point has made retrospection even more fruitful.....

i'm beginning to understand that like the gender conversations so very prevalent, so is the 'spectrum' conversation.
How wide does it flow? does one withdraw from others by choice or by nature?

Interesting questions. Recognizing that neither gender nor neural architecture are necessarily as rigidly defined as once supposed is probably a good thing - but the proliferation of social media seems to have encouraged a bandwagon of self-diagnosis. "I'm not gay - I'm transgendered!" "I'm not just introverted - I'm neurodivergent!" Clearly, these conditions are real - I'm personally acquainted with 3 who have medically changed their gender. But while coining grand words for them has reduced the stigma associated with them (another good thing), it's popularized them as well, made them trendy. Since that moment in my sister's car, my studies at the University of YouTube have revealed that I (as well as my brother and probably our father) share some of the traits typical of autism and/or Aspergers. Ergo, we are autistic? Hardly. But it's somehow comforting to be able to rationalize so many behavioral quirks that so far I've preferred not to broadcast aloud. And "spectrum" is inspecific enough to accommodate just about any trait one chooses. We're all on a spectrum of some kind or another. Parting my hair on the left and loathing beets probably put me on one.

The "spectrum" conversation may or may not become the accepted paradigm - but it's how science works. Formulate a model - try it on for size - wear it for a while, see how well it fits - then decide whether or not you want to buy it.

and meanwhile, since nothing is permanent, by trying on the label, everything changes.
Fascinating thing this being alive (or in Amy's case, inspiration for being alive)

Yep. And with one passing comment, I seem to have hijacked Steve's thread - apologies for that. Seems we're not as far removed as we'd like from hunter gatherers huddled around a fire, whispering about the noises from the darkness without. The technology invites a whole lot more people to the circle, and disseminates speculation a whole lot more quickly than it did a million years or so ago..... not sure if that's good or bad, or either.... although it short-circuits peer review, giving sketchier notions more traction than they merit...

Oh well. One thing seems not to have changed: old men seem to like rambling as if wisdom were bestowed automatically with age....