
Downwards I stared, mind blankly comprehending the view in front of me.  Unemotionally, silently, with a practiced awareness that studied but refused to relate the object of study to any abstract understanding my mind analyzed the picture before my eyes.  Thoughts slipped into my mind and slipped out again almost faster than they appeared.  So smoothly and so cleanly my consciousness worked that it seemed I had no real thoughts of my own, just an active and liquid experience of what I was looking at. 
Once, on advice from an artist I worked with, I purchased an art instruction book called The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.   I had wanted to learn how to draw ever since I was six years old and this book teaches everything from understanding what a pencil is to processes the brain uses to interpret lines.  One technique the book teaches is to place a square frame around any picture the artist wishes to study.  Thus transforming an overwhelmingly detailed picture, for instance a bowl of fruit sitting on a table located in a kitchen that is connected to a dining room, into an easily grasped picture, that bowl of fruit sitting on a simple plane.   
At the time, staring down at the bowl in front of me I could not mentally project that artist’s frame.  I was so overwhelmed, so awed that I could only stand and gaze in wonderment.  Picasso went through his blue phase, Monet loved greenery, Italian Renaissance masters displayed a rainbow of colors. If I had any pretensions of casting my perspective as worthy of the title Artistic then before me were the beginnings of my picture, the start of my story, Work in Brown.  
Fingertips alighted on my chosen implement of artistry, muscles tightened and relaxed as my hand passed through space, my mind’s will given shape and form in what could have been the most creative moment of my life.  Water swirled, serene and smooth, crystal clear and clean.  Flakes of matter broke away from the whole and were carried away to nothingness.  Muscles tightening, jerking and spasming a little more quickly and anxious the second time, my hand smacked the handle of the toilet again.  The offensive brown package refused to move, stuck like a slug on the bottom of the toilet.  
Mop gripped loosely in hand, feet set a foot apart, green tie knotted uncomfortably around my throat, I frowned slightly as I stared at the rude bundle of processed animal and plant matter someone had left as a message for the suckers who cleaned the bathrooms at Rite Aid.  A few flushes more, a few more tranquil introspective moments to myself, then my hand moved towards the wall to my right, gripped the sheet at the end of the toilet paper, and began mummifying itself until it resembled an oven mitt.   Standing up straight, then bending at the waist, my hand dipped slowly into the bowl, like a mother going into an oven for the Thanksgiving turkey….
