Painting by Numbers, a la Holden Caulfield.

I hated paint by numbers when I was a kid.

Not because I didn't enjoy doing them, in fact I had never even tried. I just thought that if you couldn't draw or paint, that a thing like paint by numbers was stupid, and you could totally tell how dumb the person was who did one. I hated paint by numbers. It was't even real painting, right? It's phony. It took no skill whatsoever. I would see paint-by-numbers in the toy section of the pharmacy or whatever and thought, who even does those? They're stupid.

Somebody gave me a paint-by-numbers set for a birthday present or something when I was 9 or 10. It sat on a shelf in my closet for a year or two, and I would think, why do I keep that thing? I hate paint by numbers. Then one evening, I was bored and I thought, OK, I'll find out just how dumb this stuff really is. I opened the box on my shelf, saw that there were brushes, two plastic arrays of paints, maybe ten or fifteen colors total? I dunno. And there were four or five 'canvases' with the outlines of some picture, numbers that corresponded to paints in the array trays, so you put color #7 on all the little spots that were marked ' 7.' So I started with a picture of a cowboy riding on a horse in the low desert. There were cactuses and scrub brush in the distance. It took a few hours over a few days to finish the whole thing, not letting the colors bleed over into the other number spaces.

The finished project looked sloppy. The horse's mane was kinda tough to master, because it had so many similar clors and it was hard to get enough but not tooo much paint in one little flourish of mane hair, and not have it blend with the others. So I thought, well, even though these are dumb, I'm gonna do another one, and I'll do it better than this last one. I tried using different colors, but that looked dumb. I ignored some of the spaces, and did what I wanted in others. This went on until I had finished all five of the paint by number canvases in the box. Then I had five pictures that were . . . OK . . . and what do I do with these things now? Roll my eyes at them and think how dumb paint by numbers is, at least now I've done them to be able to say they're dumb? Hmmm. I had enjoyed some of the painting, and because I enjoyed it, I couldn't say I hated paint by numbers anymore. I just thought they were still kinda stupid, even if they give you some experience painting stuff.