On Buzzing and Bacon

  I inhaled one or two times. I've gone through phases where have polishing off the better part of a bottle of wine at card night was taken for granted. but I have never understood real addiction until he started playing with watercolors in earnest.Now I understand that addiction keeps you up all night, encouraging you to blow off your daily schedule so you can do it again the next night. It clouds your judgment so the paint on the paper right in front of you looks like poo. Which is generally why I wait until morning to decide if the paintings going to make it onto the blog or into the bookmark pile.I used to throw away a lot of drawings and paintings - when I was young, it seemed vain and pointless to save my own work. Now I even keep the rough drafts so I can remember what I've learned from mistakes. The rough draft usually turns into bookmarks when the final copy is framed, But even the bookmark is a reminder that mistakes can be pretty too.Some paintings end up in the bookmark bin, not because I wasn't happy with the piece, but because, at the end of a late night watercolor-induced fugue, I've developed a nasty habit of falling to sleep with the brush in my hand. Which usually results in the odd dark green dot in the middle of an otherwise dramatic sky or a bright red dot in the middle of the lawn.At one point I thought about hanging onto the paintings of blemished skies and calling the dots your photos. Today, at breakfast, however, a friend had an even better idea to save or even show the botched paintings under the theme "Head Case" (my head and brush usually hit the paper simultaneously).Which brings me to two observations about addiction. The first, watercolor  addiction is real, and if you insist on doing it all night you will have the munchies, and they can only be managed with bacon, preferably cooked by somebody else. Second is that cleaning house (or your painting inventory) while under the influence of a watercolor buzz is a bad idea (let's face it cleaning house is always a bad idea) because even a dark green dot in the middle of a vivid blue sky may actually be a happy accident.