I'm not sure whether it's a blessing or a curse, but a few of us writers tend to be burdened by a parallel muse that doesn't give us a moment of peace. In my case, it's the fine arts. For me, writing was a way to earn a paycheck; it blossomed into an obsession where I could sit in front of a typewriter and spend the whole night typing out something that I might rip to shreds the following day after asking myself how the heck I wrote something like that. But I always carried my other muse around with me like a tattered old wallet. Some people love to speak, love to debate, argue, analyse, investigate, research, catalog, compartmentalize; I love to paint, sketch, cartoon. This puts me into kind of a unique position because when I story comes at me, I usually don't tend to see it as being a discrete event but oftentimes as a three dimensional entity that I can visually see in my mind's eye. More than that, I tend to see things stretched out as part of a continuum with no distinct beginning and end...where element a may be indirectly linked to b or possibly connected to c. I happen to think, too, in the quantum approach, that even my observation of the event may serve to change what is happening in some kind of unquantifiable way. Why do I mention these things? Because I think we all tend to believe what we see and read. And that is not always the case. Sometimes you have to factor in the writer, the director, the editor and all of the other factors in the equation and consider how much their input is in danger of changing the factual content or at least your impression of that content. We have all been torn by such issues when we see the president telling us that things are going well in the War; yet, we see before our eyes, accounts of stepped up bombings and increasing numbers of dead and wounded. Therefore, what the president tells us is in conflict with what we see and feel. It is the job of people like me to tell the story; it is the responsibility for those who receive the messages to put us to the test by exercising the judgment of an intelligent reader--to question the veracity of what they read and ask themselves whether that story is credible and should be accepted as part of your personal archive or whether it raises so many questions, that it should be discarded and supplanted by a more factual and reasoned account. It is in the exercise of such judgment that we differentiate ourselves from all others and assert our independence of thought--a very necessary precondition when lying, distortion and misleading accounts have become a common occurrence.