Sunrise Drive

In a trade-off between sleep and punctuality, I’d always choose the latter. But there is a fine line for how much sleep I’m willing to give up. So every morning, I’d pull out of my driveway before sunrise, and makes it to work just briefly before the factory bell sounds.

Before the red of the sun, faintly, the red of the stop signs, the red of the traffic light, and the red of little icons on the speed dial all glow in the greyness of dawn. There are very few people out at this hour. This makes the reds pretty insignificant.

The beats of the turn-signals turned my car through the gentle bends; winding suburbian streets soon turned into laser-straight country road. 70-90-100 I went. The engine rev’d like an angry bull as it charged through the fjord between walls of fog. Two worlds crossed into one; the North-bound Highway 6 seemed like a stair-case to heaven.

I’d rolled down the windows, and pop-on the radio for some morning tunes. My body came alive to the oxygen-rich air and the oomphs of the bass stereo. The sky became bluer, brighter. Over the corn fields, the sun appears in bright orange. Two skies, one above, one in my mind. This is my way to embrace freedom, before the crisp morning air turn into crisp sounds of metals clashing. I press down on the acceleration pedal, as if I were escaping the infinite shadow cast from the horizonal sun.

PicStory: Many Uses of Gum

Picasso's Guitar

The security guards must’ve chuckled between themselves. “That guy has been there standing for hours like a tree.”

If I were a security guard at the Ontario Art Gallery, I’d probably make a joke about it too. After all, my job is to browse/examine/study people, while they browse/examine/study Picasso’s paintings. I never understood what is it about art that encapsulate a person’s thoughts like a mind magnet. And I still don’t understand it, but I surrender before the power of art nevertheless.

This afternoon I lost myself in front of a Picasso painting that supposedly a guitar. I like guitar. Except I don’t see the guitar. I see rectangles, triangles, angles with no names. I thought, perhaps I should see it from a different angle. I bent over, looked under, turned sideways, back and forth. Looking closer, I see the fine lines and edges and marks and cracks. Still, no guitar.
The harder I look, the more I see, yet the less I see.

People came and went. I stood there. The Picasso’s guitar disguised itself behind episodes of confusion and obstruction.

My vision blurred from the mid-afternoon dreariness. My mind began to drift. I still stood there. For minutes, maybe hours. I stopped looking, but kept my eyes fixed on the shapes and let my mind wander.

I saw Picasso’s guitar.
Beautiful.