Here's to Creativity

I'm sitting on the front porch feeling the wet breeze and watching the rain fall on the pond. I'm thinking about distressed furniture, vessel sinks, those flowered pitchers and basins my Grandma used to have, and creative writing. I have a piece of writing about an imaginary encounter with Jesus that I don't dare print because Christians are weird.

I wasn't around when Dali painted the misshapen, bent clocks so I don't know what kind of reaction he got. I don't know if Dali was a religious man or if he went to India once a year to meditate and get high. But I imagine if Dali was a "born-again Christian" the reactions would have been just as weird as his painting. Some Christians would have loved his painting and taken their own clocks off the wall and tried to figure out how to bend them like that. Maybe if I apply some heat? The smell of burning plastic would have filled fringe churches across America.

A whole 'nother group of North American Christians would have rung Dali's phone off the hook demanding interviews so they could grill him and then prove to the world that clocks don't bend that way. Then they would have shown entertaining video clips demontrating what happens to the clock when you try. Hundreds of teenagers would have re-created that part on YouTube, with blow torches and melting plastic. It would have been very cool. Youth pastors everywhere would have explained to ludite parents how to block 'melting clocks' searches on their kids' computers. Moms of pre-schoolers would have stressed and resolved to stay vigilant to protect their precious young minds from corruption.

Dali's personal belief system would be created, summed up, put in print, condemned and torched by left-brain Christians until even Christians who bought the painting would start to back up and look at it slitty-eyed and wonder if they should take it off the wall when the in-laws or the Pastor came to visit.

I don't know William P. Young but maybe he has a huge Salvador Dali hanging in the front room of his cabin in the woods. And I think he should stop trying to explain his clock painting to the (Christian) world and go home and paint another one.

I raise my morning coffee and give a toast "To Young and Dali, to beauty and balance, to cool breezes and rain that breaks heat waves in summer. May your nose never be assaulted by the smell of burning plastic. Cheers!"

This train of thought calls for scrambled eggs instead of my usual two fried in butter, and maybe a dash of chipotle.