The Whole Shard

I  have this obsession with shards.

You can take a pot and break it, purposely or accidentally, and you end up with pieces.

Breakage is truth because it records stress.  It records an event, the object has a historical reference point that is after the moment of initial creation!

People don't break shards down into smaller bits. Hey! They're broken already. You throw away the pieces. They end up in a landfill.

A 'potter's yard' was the place where makers of pottery thew away their sub-standard stuff. Archaeologists love them. They're treasure troves of pots, that can be painstakingly put back together. Museums slowly match up piles of shards, glue them up, fill in the areas they can't find. . . and they have these reconstructed pots that are beautiful.

What if the shard was the whole work, a complete creation, that asked and answered more QUESTIONS than a pot could ever. If it is not a piece of something else, it is guaranteed survival!

So runs my logic.  Take a piece of bisque, break it, then glaze the pieces. then fire it. Any archeologist will know, hey this guy's working on just the shards . . . . it's not part of a larger pot. They'll press the no fair button!

Such a shard . . . is complete.

My Printer's a Scanner

I've owned a device that prints on paper, for at least six years. It's a Canon, has performed admirably, albeit at quite a cost for cartridges and ink. It's one of those dual function machines, except it was entirely impossible for us to get the scanner working.

I'd print stuff for my accountant, my resume, etc. Twenty years ago when you wrote something, you printed it. There weren't those nice places on the web where you can tuck a daily diary entry, or photos, or remember someone's birthday.

Suddenly today, for some inscrutable electronic mystery, my printer died as a printer, but was reborn as the scanner it was always meant to be.

Printing documents is such an undesirable chore. But drawings! Drawings done with pen and ink can be scanned, made digital, combined with text, flow towards a digital life!

My printer died, but his head is up; he scans the world around him. . .