Monday, February 15, 2010

They slithered away from the glowing key as the light switched on...


I'm going to introduce you all to a fellow named Harris Burdick. Or if not introduce, then re-acquaint. Now, I've mentioned before that imagination is huge in my life. Things that make my imagination go crazy are like... um, I can't think of a good metaphor. I almost said like catnip is for cats, but that implies crazy like Salvador Dali, and hippie acid trips, and not so much just crazy awesome cool.
Anyway, I think you get the point by now. A really good, cool, mysterious story or picture is pretty much the best thing ever. One of the first times I could really label this anomaly was in an art class where we had a Harris Burdick day.
Our teacher brought the picture book "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" to class. At first I thought it was a normal picture book with a simple story and cool pictures. But nay, nay. This book, well, short of changing my life, at least helped give it direction. Which I desperately needed. (And continue to need). As I tell this story, I really wish I could put up the illustrations that go with it, but that would both be breaching copyright, and less effective than just looking at them in the book anyway, because a picture of the pictures hardly do them justice. This is the official website, though. http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/harrisburdick/introduction.html
Basically, this is what happened. There was this guy who worked for some publishers. One day a fellow named Harris Burdick shows up with a whole bunch of pictures that each have a title and a mysterious caption. There's one pic from each book that he's written, and he says he's interested in getting them published. He shows these pics to the guy, and he's totally astounded. They're really really cool, and the captions are SO mysterious that he just absolutely has to know more. Harris says sure. He'll go get some of the other ones and come back in the morning. Morning comes... no Harris. Next day, still no Harris. For years this guy has these crazy cool pictures with these captions that just tickle the imagination, and no Harris. They're so cool, and leave you just dangling. His kids grow up writing all sorts of stories to go along with these pics. No one knows what happened to this guy. The publisher tried to find him with no luck. Did he have something tragic happen on his way home that kept him from ever being able to come back? Did he leave the mysterious pics on purpose? It all remains unanswered.
To add to that, twelve years ago they discovered another picture hidden inside an old mirror that they are quite sure was done by Harris Burdick. The style and format was exactly the same, and the title of the book it came from matched one of the known pictures. It's absolutely insane. Like way super crazy. Even people with like negative 50 imagination cells can't help but try to fill in the blanks.
So that's the story. Now on to mine. In my time after high school, I've been very much trying to figure out what I should do with myself. I went through so many different majors. I'm still kind of working on that, but in that time I've come to discover that everything that I love to do all goes back to feeding my ravenous imagination. Like I said, this art class was one of the first steps on the way to my self discovery.
The reason I mention all this is because I just got out my picture from that day in art class. It's really one of the few things I did in art that I'm really proud of. I mean I always felt like most of my stuff was pretty ok. Like better than lots of the girls in there who literally didn't have an iota of imagination. But this one was one I really liked. I apologize for the pic. I don't have a scanner, and taking a picture of a pencil drawing is tricky at best. But here it is. The caption, as you may have guessed, is the title for the post.
I really just can not express in words how awesome these mysterious cool things are. They make me just giggly happy. It's almost embarrassingly exciting. I really feel like this story is a huge part of me finding my niche in life. And if you really don't care about my personal journey of life, then the point of this post, for you, is to inspire imagination and awesomeness in you. I want to say so much more, but it would not only be redundant, but ineffective. This is one of those things that further explanation is just not going to clarify.

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