Hey, now wait a minute. This is fun, although I really wish I had some idea of what I’m doing, but how often do we get to fully do something in life without having to worry about repercussions or lack of finesse? I just like the smell of oil paint and turpentine in my bedroom. I like paint on my clothes and under my fingernails. I can paint my own little world and not worry about the big world. I can paint a picture over and over and over again and make it worse and worse, then take a piece of sandpaper and scrub it all off and start over. Eventually something appeals to me and I leave it alone. I put it on my bureau and look at the painting and it comforts me. It feels like a message from myself to myself. A present. A whimsical side-show. An alternative reality. A photograph of the inside of my brain. The less it looks like something the better. The more awkward, quirked, wrong it is the better. I stand tall next to my lousy paintings. They signify a part of me inside me that I lost track of at age 3. The paintings take me directly back to that me in me and it’s great to have visitation rights, finally.
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Dumb- Ster
The cop looked in the dumpster and noticed a picture of his wife. He had just received a complaint from the Olympic Sports store that someone had dumped bags of garbage in their dumpster. That someone was me. I’d cleaned out a few drawers of hometown memories that morning, – high school notebooks, graduation pictures, diplomas, clippings and headed into what I thought was a free-for-all dumpster tucked behind a strip mall. After I threw the bags into the dumpster I took a walk with the dog and when I returned to my car I was met by the policeman and the assistant manager of the Olympic Sports store. Read more »