Epiphany?

I don’t believe in fate or anything like that.  Coincidence is exactly that - a chance occurance of something that relates to something you already know or have experienced.  The human brain is designed to look for patterns, so when we see something, our brain searches for similar experiences and if it finds one close enough, we get that warm sense of familiarity that makes us feel comfortable.  All of which makes the next bit sound like I’m completely condradicting myself.  Ah well.

A few years ago, towards the end of 2004, I started a band.  I actually think we were quite good, though the whole thing was a bit of a disaster.  Strangely though, it ended up being a fairly important event in my life:

- It led to me starting my current band, which I think is probably the peak my musical creativeness will ever reach (and is one of the most fun bands I’ve played in), and also provided a lot of the lyrical inspiration,

- I met the bassist, who is now one of my best friends (and is also in my current band),

- I met a girl who is… well, a total nut to be honest.  I became very good friends with her, then stopped talking to her for nearly 3 years, and at the beginning of this year rekindled my friendship with her,

- I stopped talking to the rhythm guitarist, who was at the time one of my best friends, but then made the mistake of thinking he was smarter than me and carelessly lied to me about said girl.  I literally haven’t spoken to him since January ‘05 (though oddly he nearly ended up recording drums for Irukandji),

Anyway, when I first started up this band with the singer I did some artwork for it, including prospective website layouts.  The one that me and the singer liked best in the end was pretty simple, but I still like the idea (to the point where I’m tempted to use if again).

It was a basically a comp. of a white butterfly (actually two photos of the butterfly stuck together to get both whings, so it looked kinda disjointed in a good way), on a red background that was covered in scratches/chips/dirt.  I dres all the scratches on this thign by hand, it tooks ages but the effect was cool.

So how does all this link to the epiphany thing?  Well, the other day I was tired of having ranted at my computer all day, and as it was broken I had no internet or TV, so I went downstairs and turned the telly on down there whilst I cooked some food.  I sat down to eat, and out of the blue I suddenly thought to myself “the walls in here are exactly the same colour as the artwork I did for that band”.  It was pretty odd - I haven’t thought about that band for ages, and to be honest I probably couldn’t have even remembered what the artwork was if someone had asked me.

You know what happened then?  At 10pm, on a wet day, with all the windows closed, this huge white butterfly appears out of nowhere.  I swatted at it a few times, as it merrily danced around my head.  Then it flew straight at the wall in front of me, and plonked itself down, flattening it’s wings down.  It was almost a perfect replica of that artwork, and it looked incredible.  Beautiful even.  I raced to my room to grab my camera, but I didn’t manage to get a picture - when I got back down, the butterfly had disappeared.

Mad stuff.  Does it mean anything?  Of course not, but I do now feel inspired to get back to doing artwork.  I miss it.  Oddly enough, the last proper drawing I did was of the singer in that band.  If I could find a model I’d be doing the Orchid Fixation stuff right now, but I’m failing so far.  If nothing else, it did give me that warm feeling inside.

NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY