Thrills Through The Night

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You never know the end of a sentence you speak until it is over. You're listening right along with your audience. Meantime you're assessing reaction. You look at body language, listen for telltale sounds, and wait for interaction to shape your next sentence, even before it's spoken... or heard by anyone - including you. Well, a lot of art's like that. The process is mysterious.

I captured this retro car made from stiff paper from its perch on a child's antique bedlamp. The boy inside of me loves this guy. And as I listen and read what I write about him, I'm finding out why. What I feel about the time he is supposed to be from... About messages that mold our dreams. About color and fantasy and how my eyes still pop wide at things that are charming and sweet.

And I recall as a boy dreaming about driving, and piloting, and doing other super things. Right, "super" because to me driving and flying were indistinguishable from the stuff that superheroes did all the time in my comics and in my books and of course in the movies. At night, as I drifted off, they'd blur together with things that the grownups could do. I'd fly, I'd hit home runs, I'd leap tall buildings, I'd run touchdowns, I'd lighting-draw my six-guns, I'd drive like the wind through the night - in a hot rod that was round and strong and the sort of thing that hard-boiled detectives drove to foil the bad guys... and... and...

"Foil?" Does anyone say foil anymore? And do any adults have lamps with fantasy tough cars which are the last things they see before the room goes dark? And... and... We should. We should foil the bad guys and drive sweet works of art... If only in our dreams.

And that's the end of my sentence about that.