"Words in an unknown language."

In a short story I read recently, called, "Easy Street," by T. Jefferson Parker, a character was experiencing a harsh trauma, and it nearly paralyzed him. As he sat, Parker writes, "Objects passed his vision like words in an unknown language." Well, I thought, that's how the world looks to me every day. I have to continually make the effort to place things I see, and interact with them as merely useful, or somehow practical, objects. It takes work just to function in this world of strange objects that continually pass me by "like words in an unknown language." 

These are the only two images from my grad school days (c.1991) that I still have hanging in my studio. They are oil stick on rag board, in the neighborhood of about 18 x 24 inches. I haven't worked this way in a long time, but one day, when the time is right, I plan to apply myself to expressing my visual experience in this way again, to depict what the world looks like when objects pass my vision "like words in an unknown language."
​The short story appears in 2001 Best American Mystery Stories.