Pizza delivery is an interesting job. It affords one much time to sit and think as you drive about town. It also introduces you to many a strange and peculiar folk. As you can well imagine delivery experts such as I have seen just about all there is to be seen. I've been witness to filthy houses, naked people, attacking dogs, angry customers, and just about everything else you can and can't expect. In short order I developed a detachment wherein I slip into an almost zombie-like state of routine while working. Since surprises are now rare to me I exist in this almost dream-like state for 6-8 hours a day. This allows me time to focus brain power on more important issues such as: video games, remembering my name, remembering to blink, writing lyrics, and so on. Occasionally, though, some newly introduced stimuli will snap me out of my happy place just long enough to bake my noodle over something else for a minute or two.
And so it was I came upon a curious bit of art.
I was standing in the cold outside a customer's doorway, waiting on them to find money, when I beheld the crude scribbling of children's crayon drawings scrawled across said customer's living room walls. For a mere instance a part of me wanted to dismiss this is nothing important, but something about the drawings made we wonder. You see, the dark green lines etched on the living room walls depicted, much to the dismay of the parents I'm sure, a scene of animals and people. Considering the age of the child, the fact that you or I could easily identify these drawings as animals and people I find to be quite remarkable. Usually, child wall drawings are nothing more than chaotic lines with no semblance of forethought, symmetry, or pattern. Was I in the presence of a future Michelangelo? Would the art of this child live on as long as Brueghal's angelic rebels? Will this child construct a triptych to someday find its way onto the wall of a church ala' Bosch?
I thought to myself while blankly staring at the art, "Could this be more of an insight into human history?" Perhaps it shouldn't be the future, but rather, the past I should contemplate.
This bit of art certainly had more in common with simple cave drawings than that of a grandiose chapel fresco. Furthermore, this line of thinking led me to consider, could we be wrong about what our cave dwelling ancestors left sketched on the walls of their living spaces? What if cave art was merely the aftermath of pre-historic children misbehaving and drawing on their walls?! If so, then what we once thought was a story of a god offering his people rain was really nothing more than a spank inducing act that led to a bone club beat down.
Perhaps we have looked too long and hard at that which was left behind. Sometimes we try to attach an overblown and overly grand meaning to simple pointless things.
Could it be Egyptian hieroglyphics were nothing more than punishment imposed on an incorrigible Egyptian youth? He or she was simply writing over and over again a story of what he or she did wrong and why they will never do it again, like a school child upon a chalkboard.
Just think about how truly primitive writing with chalk on a blackboard is anyway. Are we really that removed from the ways of the ancients?
And so it was I came upon a curious bit of art.
I was standing in the cold outside a customer's doorway, waiting on them to find money, when I beheld the crude scribbling of children's crayon drawings scrawled across said customer's living room walls. For a mere instance a part of me wanted to dismiss this is nothing important, but something about the drawings made we wonder. You see, the dark green lines etched on the living room walls depicted, much to the dismay of the parents I'm sure, a scene of animals and people. Considering the age of the child, the fact that you or I could easily identify these drawings as animals and people I find to be quite remarkable. Usually, child wall drawings are nothing more than chaotic lines with no semblance of forethought, symmetry, or pattern. Was I in the presence of a future Michelangelo? Would the art of this child live on as long as Brueghal's angelic rebels? Will this child construct a triptych to someday find its way onto the wall of a church ala' Bosch?
I thought to myself while blankly staring at the art, "Could this be more of an insight into human history?" Perhaps it shouldn't be the future, but rather, the past I should contemplate.
This bit of art certainly had more in common with simple cave drawings than that of a grandiose chapel fresco. Furthermore, this line of thinking led me to consider, could we be wrong about what our cave dwelling ancestors left sketched on the walls of their living spaces? What if cave art was merely the aftermath of pre-historic children misbehaving and drawing on their walls?! If so, then what we once thought was a story of a god offering his people rain was really nothing more than a spank inducing act that led to a bone club beat down.
Perhaps we have looked too long and hard at that which was left behind. Sometimes we try to attach an overblown and overly grand meaning to simple pointless things.
Could it be Egyptian hieroglyphics were nothing more than punishment imposed on an incorrigible Egyptian youth? He or she was simply writing over and over again a story of what he or she did wrong and why they will never do it again, like a school child upon a chalkboard.
Just think about how truly primitive writing with chalk on a blackboard is anyway. Are we really that removed from the ways of the ancients?
Love,
Smiley Grimm
:)
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