Thursday, April 14, 2011

Scrabble as Therapy / The Art of Suffering


This is what Tess and I did today. Its not all that singular in itself... nearly every day we go outside together to embrace nature and each other. It is a particularly good example of how we manage our pain and our lives as two disabled people, and unlike most things we do, it provided a pretty picture. That's what makes it a suitable subject for a blog post.

(You need to understand that scrabble is about the most romantic thing we can do in public and not get arrested. We took scrabble on our honeymoon- we have the pictures to prove it! )

Our original plan was to take our scrabble game and go to a state park which is just 5 miles away. We go there as often as we can, however today it wasn't possible. I was in no shape to drive, and Tess was only going to get in a car were it taking her to the E.R. So rather than give up on our planned date, we improvised, and this was the result. We are fortunate enough to live with my mother whose flower gardens are extensive and beautiful. Even when we can't drive somewhere, the yard is beautiful, and always provides us the opportunity to feast on the beauty of God's creation. (You can't see it in this picture, but the yard is bordered by two creeks, it really is idyllic.)

That's the moral of the story for anyone who is facing the challenge of living with disability- don't let the challenges of life overcome your ability to live it. What ever it takes, find some way to embrace and express your core self. Tess and I happen to be scrabble fanatics and nature lovers, so by means of a card table and chairs and my mother's flower gardens, we were able to have our nature/scrabble date. It didn't go exactly as planned, but it happened.

Being disabled calls for a lot of ingenuity and creativity. What is easy for "normal" people can be a nearly insurmountable challenge. None the less, its worth surmounting it. Little victories are still victories, and you need these to survive and even thrive.

I have so many blessings and advantages in my life as a disabled person. I have my wife who loves and understands me thoroughly, who is also disabled- so my misery always has company. I have my mother's beautiful yard to go out and be in, take pictures, do some light yard work even. I have my camera, and I'm fortunate that my fibrofog is rarely so thick as to interfere with my ability to use it.

When I was first diagnosed with fibromyalgia almost a year ago, I started the blog "theartofsuffering.blog.com" in order to encourage other suffers to use art as therapy and as a means of expressing themselves. Well, art is not just a static thing like a picture or a painting, sometimes there is an art to how you go about living. Encouraging others to practice that art is the point of this post.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

4 day old papillon puppy in a shoe video - Stills set to old "Armour Hot Dogs" radio commercial


I recently came across a treasure trove of stills and video I shot of our most recent Papillon puppy, Ambrose. I may have posted some of this material earlier but now I have much better editing software.

The radio commercial is from the "Old Time Radio" collection at Archive.org - Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

The video is likewise.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Can't get any salt- use a torch to melt the ice! - Dealing with ice without resorting to violence


With much of the country socked in by major storms, salt has been hard to hard to find. Heavy hand tools are an effective way to deal with the ice, but they are hard work, and aren't ideal for those who are disabled to use. This video shows an effective and fun alternative to beating at the ice with a sledgehammer- using a propane torch to melt ice.

Obviously: Be safe, sane, sober (durrr!)

This was the most fun video to shoot since before my atraumatic femur fracture, it hearkens back to "splitting wood while balancing on a bongo board." So yes, even after fibromyalgia's soaked my body in pain, osteoporosis has rendered my bones brittle, and TIAs have taken away my steadiness, I still have fun with life.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Poetry: Pain is NOT my enemy | Pain is NOW my enemy | Evil is my enemy (the most personal, profound poetry I've posted)




I composed this poem about 10 months ago, but I kept it to myself until now because it is so deeply, INTENSELY personal. Its like an MRI of my soul!

I decided to post it because I've found that direct discourse is utterly inadequate to describe what my life has become. I also thought it might help give voice to what other sufferers experience, and those to whom I've shown it have confirmed that it is quite apt of their experience as well.

I posted it as an image not text because when I composed it, I "saw" the white space, the indentations... they were there from the start. More, the poems on the left and the right HAVE to be right next to each other, in apposition. (That is why they are in inverse color.) While they are seemingly opposite in meaning, both are true.

So I will never post a pure text version of this, though I did have hopes to do a video of it. My recent computer crash and the horrible weather here have sapped my energy to the point where that's now nothing but a fond hope.

I've written other poetry which is also deeply personal and is similarly intense which I do intend to post in due time.

Of interest to fellow artists... it was hard to find software which would present the text and photos as I wanted to. Photo editing software failed, pretty spectacularly. I wound up using Open Office, the superb open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Just my experience in using it for this poem has convinced me to switch to it. I got it into image format by printing to PDF and then doing a screen capture of it. The final step was cropping it. (So I could have posted it as a .PDF were that allowed on the blogs and facebook.)

Friday, February 4, 2011

Word Pictures 2010 as 5x7s

Oy... why is it that CVS and Walgreen's insist on cropping every photo, and don't give you the option to opt out? Because of that, I needed to create versions of all my Word Pictures so far in 5x7 format such that the butchers at the pharmacy photo counters can't chop them.

I didn't do my monochrome images, and a few of my color ones which were variations of a theme aren't included either.

Still, this does serve as a nice overview of the project so far, and a handy quick reference. I'm not putting the large Multiply thumbnails in this post because you've seen all these before, but here are the smaller ImageShack ones.


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Wednesday, December 29, 2010

1 Peter 4:12-13 - The Fiery Trial - sharing suffering and glory with Christ (Word Picture)

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Most "Word Pictures" I do because someone else requested them, or because of an event in someone else's life. This one sprang from one in my own.

A few weeks back, my dear wife was in the hospital getting treated for her migraines (she'd spent the previous 3 weeks never getting below "8" on the pain scale.) My mother was visiting family. I was home alone.

The fibromyalgia pain hit me harder than any pain had since I was walking along and my femur snapped. Even for someone accustomed to pain, this was INCREDIBLE.

I took all the meds I could, talked to my wife on the phone as long as I could, brought in Ambrose the Papillon. All through those dark, scary, lonely hours I kept thinking of this verse and its sister in chapter 1 (verses 6 & 7), and I kept thinking to myself Either this is true and its what is going on, or I have died and gone to hell.

Its hard for those of us who live in suffering to find meaning in it, much less hope or proof of God's love. This is one of the texts which most speaks to us in such times.

While my suffering was physical, it need not be for this text and this Word Picture to be applicable. I've known emotional and spiritual suffering of equal intensity to my current physical suffering. (I greatly prefer physical suffering to the other kinds!)

The 4x6 and other standards

This is now the 2nd Word Picture I've done which is standardized to print correctly at 4x6 without cropping issues. Since the original image was a stitched together panorama, this took more math than I thought I'd ever do in my life!

Similarly, it features the smaller file size and standardized credits information first seen in the Psa 46 Word Picture. The credits are differently placed in this one because the source was a panorama not a still picture.

Monday, December 20, 2010

The life of an icicle - set to Vivaldi's "Winter" (Video)

This is the first "art for art's sake" video I've done in a long time. I enjoyed doing it. If you enjoy watching it, that's a bonus.

The original video was an hour long. Except for the 10 seconds at the start and finish I sped it up almost 10x.

Note especially the water running along the large icicle on the left, and most of the way through the video the little icicle forming in the upper right.

The music is played by the USAF band and is available at musopen.org and archive.org - it is public domain

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

This has nothing to do with suffering or angst or anything related except insofar as it was a distraction from them. Its always good to "stop and smell the roses" but when your life is constant suffering, its VITAL.