Finding beauty in the simple things like floating trash bags in the sky is either Zen enlightenment or an early sign of Alzheimers

I've been sculpting multiple versions of those triangle shaped ships from the Transformers cartoon and working with this shape so much has me falling in love with it. I've been messing up a lot but every time I start a new one I find myself appreciating the simplicity of the basic concave triangle with one flattened edge I start out with. One time I just stopped working the clay any further once I had the basic shape because I thought it was pretty. I'm not smart about art but I do know that my favorite piece of sculpture ever is "Bird in Space" by that Romanian guy Constantin Brancusi. For "Bird in Space" Brancusi captured the very essence of flight itself in one sleek elegant shape. The raw tetrajet shape I'm working on strongly resembles Brancusi's bird, maybe if it died and splatted on the ground and broke its neck at a 90 degree angle to the rest of its body.

I know it's presumptuous of me to compare what I'm doing to one of the greatest artists of all time. My homemade clay spaceship based on a throwaway design from a toy robot cartoon isn't anywhere in the same league as real art. I'm not even sure it's art at all. I remember I had a friend once who told me that all the little things I sculpt in clay and make from plastic were not art. I held his opinion in some regard as he was studying to be a Zen master. He read the Zen books and went to the Zen websites and did other Zen master stuff you do if you want to be enlightened. He even sent me Zen e-cards. I never knew the meaning of humility until someone practicing to be a Zen master told me my clay robots sucked.

In a recent How To Be Happy strip, one fly tells the other fly that "Happiness stems from process and achievement". I could understand the achievement part, but I didn't quite understand why he included "process" too. Until now, the work required to get something done was always a drag to me. When I'm working these resin casting projects my mind is always thinking about how great it will be once I'm done. I love that sense of accomplishment upon finishing, but with this tetrajet sculpt I find myself enjoying each little part of the process right from the beginning. I'm appreciating every little bit of progress along the way and not being so focused on finishing that I overlook the fun that I'm having right now in whatever rudimentary step I'm on. Finally after 34 years I understand what "It's no more fun when the work's all done" means. I don't know if I feel dumber because it took me so long to achieve this understanding or because I achieved this understanding from reading webcomics about talking flies.

I feel like I've achieved a level of enlightenment comparable to Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty. I always thought that movie was sort of dumb the way the characters were finding beauty in floating trash bags caught in the wind, but now that I've been staring at clay for hours on end I think I understand (what it must feel like to be high on marijuana all day). Occasionally I read obituaries of people and their survivors are always bragging how the dead guy "could see the beauty" in even the most mundane aspects of life, similar to the floating trash bags from that movie. Well now that I have beautyvision I guess yay I have something else in common with crazy old people that are close to death.