Imagine coming home in the afternoon.
One of your neighbors is sprawled out on their porch with a can of
spray paint in one hand, two more on the ground next to them, and a
box about a foot and a half from their face. What would you do? In
this situation, most neighbors went on their way never saying
anything. Nobody ever did say anything to the man laid out on his
porch, but one did report that there was somebody huffing paint on
their porch in front of God and everybody. That neighbor demanded
the management of the complex serve an eviction notice immediately.
The manager sent someone around to check. Sure enough, there I was
fanning a box where the inside was painted black with three cans of
paint sitting next to me.
As some of my posts can attest to, I
will occasionally paint miniatures. Part of that process for me
involves spraying primer at the start of a project, or applying
varnish at the end. As this blog can also attest to, I am physically
disabled. I am unable to sit up on my own.
That day I had crawled out of my
sliding glass door onto my porch which is open on three sides because
it offers ventilation where I do not have that luxury indoors.
Because of my physical limitations I was using one arm to prop myself
up, and the other arm to alternate between spraying the models,
fanning the models, flipping the models, and turning the box. The box
in question this time was actually the Savage Orcs unit box sitting
inside a shallow box that used to hold packs of ramen noodles. The
clearance between the top of the box the models were sitting on and
the sides of the ramen box was less than three inches. It's nothing
fancy, but it keeps the paint off of the porch without having to go
through the trouble of laying out a sheet or spreading papers.
Most of the time my face was probably
about a foot and a half to two feet away from the box. There were
moments I was shoving my face right in there to get a good look at
how the models were being covered with the primer. I was also
experimenting with priming in black then using a brown spray paint to
create an undertone over the entirety of those models. It did not
work for me as the spray paint was too smooth for my purposes, but
that was the explanation for one of the spray bottles. I always take
out at least one can of either grae or white with me when priming
black as well in case I decide at the last minute I want to preshade
without having to crawl all the way back to my room then to the porch
again.
I am not mad or upset the neighbor did
this. It makes perfect sense to me how someone could perceive my
actions as an attempt to get high. I do the same thing. One of the
things I do on this blog is share my opinions. I take the information
I have available to me and offer my viewpoint. It is extremely rare to
have all information on a subject. Even if I did, my opinions are not
facts. I realize this even though it does not always occur to me to
state this each time I share an opinion. My opinions are my attempt
to make sense of the pieces I do have at hand. I try to find more
pieces when I realize I am missing pieces. I also like to share those
pieces as my understanding changes with them. I try not to make
demands or assume I know what is going on based on my perceptions,
but my opinions are formed by them.
I am sharing the story to illustrate
how we interpret what reality presents us with. Not once did any of
the neighbors who passed by my porch inquire as to what I was doing.
Neither did the person the office send by to see what I was doing. In
fact, none of the people that passed me as I laid on the porch with
my head shoved in a box of fresh paint uttered a single word to me.
They saw what was in front of them and applied common sense in order
to determine what the reality of the situation was.
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