Pictures in the Wall

Shane Prendergast, age 51, applies a coat of orange peel texture with his spray hopper

Have you ever seen an image of a face, or a demon, or an animal in a wall or a ceiling? I'll bet you have. Nearly every human on the planet, with the exception of a substantial hunk of the male Anglo-Saxon population in the American south and Midwest, have seen elaborate, beautiful pictures hiding in the cracks and creases of their wall and ceiling textures. Carpets are also a great source of these images. Animals, skulls, demons, and even dragons are just a few among millions and millions of the things you will see when you look at almost any flat surface, preferably with some sort of orange peel or knock-down texture applied to it. Berber and shag carpet work nearly as well.

Why do we see these images? Simple. Because they're there. It's as easy as that. When these textures are applied, the individual who's responsible for doing so subconsciously projects his/her inner feelings through the spray-hopper or the thing or machine that sews the carpets together. Most of these people who're are in this menial sort of position are day-dreaming about skulls, dragons, elves, or many of the other images previously mentioned. An eight hour day of wiping goop on a wall or assembling floor coverings is the most boring line of work there is; so it's quite obvious that when the surfaces are being created, the images are inadvertently transferred through the medium of imagination and rhythmic muscle memory . The muscles receive the images, without the knowledge of the individual, from the brain, and they accidentally leave their imagination on the wall. Literally! Take a look at any shoe made by Reebok or Nike, do you think all that squiggly shit and those plastic nodules get there by chance?

It works nearly the same way with airline pilots and clouds. If you were to ask an airline pilot to apply a layer of orange peel texture on a wall, it would be just that, a layer of pasty slop on a wall with nothing to see. Now, put that same pilot in a jumbo 747 airplane jet, and he'd paint with clouds his dreams and aspirations on a canvas of sky. And these cloud images would be vastly more detailed than any knock-down texture picture, due to the pilots higher I.Q. and greater understanding of spatial temporal reasoning. The contrast in these pictures would be, say, the difference between a Frank Frazetta and someone's nephew who can draw. Both very interesting, regardless of sophistication. 

I challenge you to lie down in a room and look at whatever surface you like, find the images and jot them down, then do the same with the clouds and compare the two. You'll see the benefits of an education and an interesting, stimulating career, as opposed to a dreary, proletariat low-wage position.

-Luther