Joe's Art

This story appeared in a slightly different form on another blog, This version is perhaps more concise:

Many years ago, Joe lived in a modest home he owned. Well, actually the bank owned it. He had a reversal of fortunes, and now lives in a small apartment. This didn't bother him. He never had an attachment to material possessions. He didn't mind the lack of space.

He did miss his privacy, but his neighbors were pretty relaxed. He wasn't really very noisy anyway. He did like to play his keyboard very softly in the evening. In what was left of his spare time, at night before bed, he liked to paint.

There were times he considered putting his music or paintings on the internet. He decided against it based on privacy concerns, not too mention he viewed the current state of the internet as problematic. He believed it was filled with miscreants up to no good.

He used it like everybody else, but was cautious about his use of it. To him, it was a good source of information, which was only because the other sources were beyond hopeless, with nothing but the most vapid propaganda to offer. So, he refused to upload anything, and as a consequence, his music and paintings were private to him and a few close friends.

Then, one day, he decided to make a JPEG image of one of his paintings, create an account with one of the smaller blogs, and put it up online. He was curious to see what would happen. He worried about doing it, but decided for it eventually.

He wondered what would happen. Days and weeks passed. Just as he sort of suspected, not much anything happened at all. A few people seemed to be seeing his painting, but that was it.

He went back to playing his keyboard softly in the evening, and painting at night. He did this each night until he was tired enough to fall asleep for the night.