Honest Communication

I've been thinking about honest communication lately. Conveying the right message takes more than language; honest communication also takes action and timing, atmosphere and mood. It takes design and implementation. I find that I can be hilariously inept at communicating the personal while simultaneously being an expert critic of others and their works. (By works, I mean that objects and also labor are means of communication.)

If I hang a piece of art in my home in the worst spot, I am likely not to notice the misshap. If someone else hangs a piece of art in my home in the same spot, I will immediately sense the error. To continue with this example, if I hung a piece of art in a stupid spot and someone else points it out to me, I hope that, through the art of self-criticism, to be capable of recognizing when I am wrong. And I think that that is the key to honest communication, ie. being wrong a bunch, and knowing weaknesses.

However, the complications to simple, honest communication are manifold. If you hang a picture on a blank white wall with nothing else in the room, you'd put it in the center, but check it, let me paint this picture better, cuz the center isn't always the right way to deliver the message.

The first time I went to Uncle Rosen's house I was immediately reminded of my college days. Picture a bachelor in his 60's that spends 80% of his time outdoors. Picture a lifetime like that spent in the same house you were born in with previous generations of kin and their accumulation on top of your accumulation. The guy has got a buncha stuff. Cool stuff, old stuff. And he doesn't even like stuff.

I had never actually been inside, though I had been there a dozen times before cruizing with him on his golf cart and talking about stuff. I walked up the four stairs, careful not to lean on the broken handrail that he had warned me about. At the top of the handrail was a broken watermelon and three halved oranges for the birds, but I only saw a buncha wasps. The top of the stairs enters into a screened porch that is stuffed full of tools and broken birdhouses. A swallow flew out of its nest above the front door as I approached. There's a sign, written in sharpie on a piece of computer paper tacked onto the door that reads: "I'm in the back," meaning he's out in the sunflower field doing something or other and if you need him, go out there. Today it's folded up, indicating that he's in the house. I knock. He hollers to come in. The first room is the kitchen. You can't see the top of the table, it's covered in junkmail, paperwork, dry goods and field guides. The sink is filled with dirty dishes. One of the faucet knobs has busted off, so there's a vice grip there instead. The walls are all hanging cupboards peeling their lacquers. Don't step in the dog bowls on the way into the living room. Uncle Rosen is on an old gray barcalounger, but he gets up to move the pile of clothing off the loveseat so I can sit down. He's been watching a soap opera on a tube TV and doing a J with his lunch. He snubs it out into an ashtray full of joint roaches on a tin side table covered in more field guides and books. The door to his bedroom is open, and I can glimpse his bare mattress with a sleeping bag on it. He apolgizes for the state of his house in a way I can tell he's not sorry. I sat down and chatted a bit, and then notice that there's not a thing on the walls except the awesome stencil portrait I mad of Chuckie Darwin that I gave him last winter when we were drinking by my woodstove and talking about religion, the best stain for soft maple, and evolution. So he's got this framed portrait of Darwin hanging left of center on the wall, maybe a foot from the ceiling, and crooked. It's as if he threw it at the wall when he got home that night of drinking, and it just stuck there. Now in this case I would argue that had he hung it middle center, it wouldn't have kept with the practiced honesty of his housekeeping, and therefore would have been a miscommunication of his personality. Honest communication is always either natural, designed with direct simplicity (like a stop sign), or in the form of an apology for poorly communicating just a moment ago.

So there you guys go. A very convoluted and poorly communicated thought that I prolly owe you all a round for.

Collect up,
Tibs

Below is the very worst designed font I could think of for important words in order to confuse the message: