Not Crazy After All These Years

There were two possible titles for this post. The one up there and the other which was exactly the same, except that "Still" would replace "Not." Hence, Still Crazy After All These Years. Choosing "Not" was the result of an experiment that was part of our recent 3 day getaway at The Drake hotel in downtown Chicago. The city is particularly lovely this time of year - lots of holiday lights, a Christmas Market we had explored with my father and daughters many years ago, lovely decorations in the restaurants and hotel lobbies. But my experiment had nothing to do with that.

First we need to explore what it means to be crazy. It can be a tendency to believe you are better than everyone else - narcissism, megalomania. Or that you can make something be true simply by saying it is so - delusional disorder. Forgetting what you just said or where you put something, or a host of other "Damn, what did I . . . ?" issues - dementia. But let's forget politics for the moment - I'm talking real "insanity."

A relatively common definition of insanity - which may or may not have been coined by Einstein; who remembers, right? - is that insanity can be defined as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." I was worried.

You see, whenever we go on a trip - big, little, local, domestic, international, doesn't really matter - I always pack my drawing stuff fully intending to "do some drawing." Alas, I never do, never had done.

When I create some foreign scene like Grand Canal:

Or Gondolas:

While there is drawing there, they were both based on photographs I shot on a trip to Venice. But the actual drawing - marker to paper - wasn't done until I got home.

So as we prepared for a little 3 day R&R sojourn to The Drake hotel downtown, I, once again, packed up my drawing materials planning on "doing a little drawing" on the trip. And, amazingly, did so, producing this image:

Counselor 

Now, this is really just a first step - producing a differing result from a previously repeated but never actualized, set of behaviors. Ta Da! I'm not insane! Well, at least not according to this little experiment.

However some clarification is needed:

First, I call this image The Counselor because it reminds me of a non-gender specific entity from the movie The Planet of the Apes.

Second, I don't like it very much and don't know when, or even if, I will spend time adding color. 

But either way, I achieved a differing result from an oft repeated set of behaviors! The notion of liking the result isn't really there in the definition , so "Hooray! For Sane Me!"

Now if I could only remember to address those pesky memory issues!