text: THE PROBLEM WITH CREATIVE PEOPLE I happen to be one of those type people. Right now it is 2:15 AM.....yeah, I am one of those guys. For the past few weeks I have been working on a painting and hitting the sack at 4 or 5 AM with my dog Luther, he sticks around when I do this stuff. I also play the guitar and will start playing at midnight and go until I fall asleep on the instrument. Normally this is not a problem until I keep my wife Janice awake. She already has a problem where she gets up a couple of times a night to pee. Thank God that is not me; tomorrow she is going to get a cat scan to check that out. Anyway I will stay up until the wee hours of the morning working on something like this story. For a few weeks I was working on a fake receipt to return a stereo to Target. This was an attempt to get over on them. I finally gave that idea up and dumped it at a store where I got a tax credit. When I get going though, I will put on some quiet music and type or paint. When I was working on the painting I would put on a cheap boom box which also I had gotten from Target. This worked well; I would put in something like Segovia or some classical music and keep going. When I was working on the painting this was the result of a photo I had taken in Key West about five or six years ago. The original painting had been printed out on and 8 1⁄2 X 11 piece of paper and looked me in the face for several years. I finally decided to try to do this with watercolors. I have never been too good with that medium and the few good ones got sold off immediately. I had done that one using a photograph and carbon paper. I traced the design onto a piece of watercolor paper and then used watercolors and India ink to pull off the card. I have a friend who makes custom greeting cards by cutting out designs and pasting them to make 3D cards. Very cool stuff, her name is Janice just like my wife. I have always been a creative type as my twin brother John. He is mentally retarded but the man makes the best abstract art work I have ever seen, he makes mine look like crap even though I have an art teaching degree. I can kick his ass with realistic work. I will stay up working on a website, or an idea for a painting or a piece of music. The only problem with the music is that it sometimes gets stuck in my head and I have problems getting rid of it. I have sort of solved that problem by taking deep breaths and thinking of good looking women at the same time. I am sure these women would feel a bit put off if they knew I was doing this. Right now I am in the back bedroom doing this; normally I would type on the laptop in the front bedroom but the LED bulbs kill any chance of Janice getting any sleep so most times she is back here. When I had my first home in Beechwood NJ it was a small place 26 feet square and I am not a TV watcher. This is why we don’t have cable. When I lived there the reception was bad so when Lorraine moved out the TV went in the attic and I lived without it for the next two years by playing guitar all night or painting or doing some other kind of artwork. Now I don’t really need money from artwork but I have a ton of old hardware that I am working with to make abstract sculptures that I am gonna put into art and craft shows or online stuff. It is a matter of getting rid of this stuff and at least making a few bucks while blowing off some creative juices. I had a friend of mine who used to do art work her name was Rose Brancati. I met her in college and dated her for a few weeks until I started with Lorraine. She turned out some incredible ink work and many times at night she would call me at midnight to talk about artwork, her problem is that she had gotten MS which left her with only the use of her left arm and her head. She was like that for at least 25 years and I would visit her and help her put work into senior art shows. The last thing she did was a drawing for calendars I still have this in my music books. Speaking of music books I have played guitar since I was 11 and I am almost 76. I taught it for 45 years and have a bunch of videos on Youtube. I was doing that before and came up to the bed rooms and found Janice in the front one because I was being too noisy. In recent times I have built a PVC fence from fittings; and a stained glass window that went into the front of my home. Even when I was home I was always fooling around with some type of creative or technical work. When I was in high school I was into model trains. I have the set under my Christmas tree right now and in the next week or so that is coming down. I am also in a writing group this is not the first one I have been in. When I was in college I used to drag a guitar around so in between classes I could get in practice time. I get this bit from people that I don’t get enough sleep. I am wide awake right now and I don’t see that is gonna change in the next five or six hours. From what I can see I will be here typing until the sun comes up.