COMIX SOLUTIONS

 As a means of reducing the size of Humans, to prevent Human overpopulation of Earth, by utilizing the mass of a White Dwarf Star, that Dr. Ray Palmer had discovered, controlling the miniaturization process via a handy high-tech tool belt, worn by his alter-ego, The Atom, the Future of our planet was arrested from Mankind's 'Progress'.......In 9th Grade, I was confident that Flash and Atom, working at a sub-atomic level, would save the Universe from the failed efforts of other superheros like the 'caped' Superman and Batman...... Going through some old boxes of DC and Marvel comic 'books', in the basement.....this "Cover" brought back the memory of my having ordered a Venus Fly Trap, from an ad within one of the comics...and the 'fantasy evolution' tank that I made from one of my old aquariums....to replicate a miniature world, within it's confines.....I suppose, to gain some sense of control over my own Life, which seemed, at that time, to be moving forward via the wills of others.....Give me a minute, while I fly, backwards, around the earth, at the speed of light.....to stop....and feed Gertie, my virtual dinosaur.....'Don't you want to go outside and 'play' with 'Butch' and 'Charles', honey?', asked Mother....."instead of making that big stink with a bunsen burner, boiling vials of potassium sulfide? Or making tire rubber and aluminum foil rockets to launch stink bugs into orbit?.....and, please, don't wash your hair with peroxide and ammonia!"

The Last Referential Attempt at Emotional Correspondence........To No Reply....18 years, 8 months, and 2 days ago....with shared, coded literary allusions

From a draft of a letter sent to someone, to whom I had some prior attachment, who was, and is, incapable of expressing, with words or images, either their thoughts or feelings......of innocence, or experience....regarding their 'loss'......and my own.......

"I was just watching the "dance" scene from a film adaptation of a 19th C. Jane Austin novel. ....... the conversation, both polite and telling...... direct, yet distant.... another time, in which i would be more comfortable....... and you, i think.... i am such an obsolete device of nature......and, frustrated, cast aspersions to the deaf and the blind, who, diverted by simpler conceits, beg the answers in the questions.......fallal reason insuring the needed delusions.....i have lost your parents.....soon, they will be quite distant.....must life be such a catered affair, with each guest bringing the old, dead arrangements from ancient parties? sigh! i hope that you and i do not drift apart, as we have not yet established a foundation that would support the types of relationship that either of us would prefer......a tip of the hat is for passersby on the boulevards of civilized society......i prefer a telling glance, forever renewed by change of course and the redirection of dreams by the truths of Life..... as maddening as this way of life can be... sometimes i am Shelly's Prometheus, drifting into the endless enigma of this temporal jungle; yet, in a second, and for one, i see the all that 'is' in a moment of plastic inevitability, and nothing more.....i have my eyes wide open, though somewhat near-sighted by age; my ears tuned to the timbre of voice, yet listening to the lark's calling and the titmouse in the berry bush...... the great, voracious birds circle, eying my stumbling, and still i tip-toe across the River on stones left by those who went before........instructions, written on the wind, blow 'bout the world of dreaming and i awaken where i was before the world changed.....i've lost the sextant and must travel by intuition.........i've heard tell of a golden compass......... the magic stones, lost in the pool of an ancient waterfall..... the maps hidden in an uncharted desert........of gods in the clouds, on mountains and far away.........but, i was told in a dream from who knows where......that all we need to know is embedded within the helix changed by countless mix..........today, the sunlight draws the crocus and hyacinth into the cool air, then the cactus blooms of summer, the musty autumn and then the frozen realms beyond, from which the breath of tomorrow emerges......."

 hmmm.... the room is 'plumb' and I, who is 'plumbing' the relativity of perspectives, only appear to stand on a tangential thought......'start' the World, and I will fall... or grasp to hold the squareness that we think is 'Reality"......Where did I put the bubble level......It will keep things 'straight'......

ART REFLECTS LIFE, OR....IS 'IT' THE OTHER WAY AROUND?

January, retrieving a package of 1969 correspondences between George Wallace Ruckert to Mr. & Mrs. Ephraim R. McLean......'The oddest materials from the 'basement boxes'.....and my written schematas about Universal Consciousness, pretentiously inked, during my 'letter-writing' days of the late 1960's......just to 'practice' the writing skills, learned from Refuge Poet/Vanderbilt Profs, during my 'stay' in Nashville......then, continued into my first years in Atlanta........ Why keep them? They have little meaning, now.....So.....many letters and critiques will be wrapped in the brown 'wrapping paper' that has been 'frustration-slashed' from the doors to reveal the vistas, momentarily obfuscated, as the afternoon sunlight floods the rooms.....for my 'admissions portfolio' for Virtual Jerkoff Art School........ Now....to melt a few boxes of Crayola's into the cracks in the driveway....then pry, with Edwardian silver lobster pics and claw-foot sugar cube tongs..... the random waxen encaustic conceptualizations from the rubbly surface fissures.....frame them....then.....my favorite part......melt all this in an old oil barrel......as I dance around this cauldron of 'Art'....... pouring the mixed-up contents to still other surfaces........Isn't "THIS" how the Elements got stirred up to make 'what was'.....'what is'?

Art Reflects Life, after all......

LISTENING TO THE STULTIFYINGLY BIASED ELECTION COMMENTARIES BY THE TWO MAJOR PARTIES' REPRESENTATIVES, ENTRENCHED IN SYSTEMIC DOGMA AND RHETORIC........ALL WEARING BLINDERS, AS THEY ONLY SEE THE PATHS OF PREACHING POLITICIANS' EFFORTS TO SWAY THE SHEEP......

When perplexed by the goings on of the World......my thinking reverts to more philosophical, theoretical thinking, which allays my anxiety about how incredibly stupid "it" all appears to be........"NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES IT IS DIVIDED, THE UNIVERSE IS STILL INFINITE, FOR EVEN WHEN LEFT WITH TWO PARTICLES, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN THEM SEEMS TO STILL BE INFINITE, RELATIVE TO POINT OF VIEW, WHICH IS ALWAYS OUTSIDE THE INSIDE......" Veristes

Everyone 'sees' "it all" from his own apprehensively limiting consciousness....and believes that the view though his own fixating prejudices is, somehow, some absolute Reality.......Fashionable thinking is, and has always been, just a miniskirt that will, in the blink of the Cosmos, be as embarrassingly out of style as the once accepted belief that the World is a flat plane at the center of the Universe......or the pop song that was once thought, with certainty, to become a classic.....to be revered for replicated generations to come......but is now forgotten, except by those intellectually imbred whose offspring never left the contexts of that Time or the Religions that are but plasticized concepts, best left in the dark caverns from which they emerged, with the glowworms that inspired the primitive brains that spoke to those who could be both placated and controlled by the nonsensical dogmas that postured as the Reality of a few ever-repeating words.....the interpretation of the then unknowable.......Slice it, dice it, then kick around the pieces, like the stones of Babble.....each, subsequently picking up his grain of sand from the rubble, thinking it must reveal within the narrow view through the blinders, the Grand Enigma... or be a righteous clue to some Plan for Eternity......when, in actuality, it is but a fragment from which little can be extrapolated by even the most reverential observations, of the relative vastness that it was once a part of.......When one considers the possibility that from something even smaller than this grain, whole constellations of galaxies evolved.......Well, all this seems presumptuously inane and simplistic......

RELATIVELY INNOCUOUS CENSORIAL ART, AS 15,000 RAGING HUMANS WATCH LIVE WRESTLING TO THE DEATH ON PAY-PER-VIEW.....AND WOMEN IN MOSLEM COUNTRIES ARE SENT TO PRISON FOR 25 YEARS FOR SHOWING THEIR LONG HAIR IN PUBLIC.......

Hermeneutic glamour posturing....... '1970 self-portrait' for a group showing of ambiguous 'art school' self-portraits......my full-frontal nude portrait was censored.....literally, with a big "X", so I replaced it with a 'tucked' photo....but was thrown out of the show for that......for a while, I pinned nude photos of myself and friends to the inside of my raincoat, and would 'flash' them at attendees of Art Galleries that had highly-censored showings.......This led to a big 'Art Show' at a private gallery at which Harold Case and his then girlfriend, Alison McLaughlin, appeared as nude bride and groom.......This led to some 'censorial' problems for the Republican Atlanta Art Gestapo, that soon began to shut down bars, bath houses, galleries, book stores and 'health' club facilities all over town......Then, everything got 'disco'd' over with meaningless tawdriness, and I began to over-dress in baggy clothes, in revolt......

John Herrmann........

I 'lifted' a post of an old, faded 1975 kodacolor photo of John Herrmann and 'revitalized' it in Photoshop.......I remember our first meeting, as he descended the stairs after his bath at a friend's house........the next day he was climbing the 3 flights of stairs to my apartment...and voila! we became friends.....as John was 'finding' himself, we played as children play, in places where children are told not to go......But when you finally 'get' there, the same people are so proud of who you always were to begin with! Here, an inward, searching John, bravely determined to find what he's not sure will be...but, he has a pretty good idea....oh, yes......

ELBOWS OFF THE TABLE AND KNIVES IN THEIR SCABBARDS.........EYES, FRONT.....

After WW1, with millions 'dead or wounded'.....Edith Wharton wrote The Age Of Innocence and Emily Post wrote Etiquette......Watching a few minutes of QE2's 'Formal Funeral'......as pompous as it 'seemed'......I thought of how Diplomacy and Etiquette serve to 'tame' Human's more bestially instinctive combative behavior.... But, where does one 'begin' when the scenario is both highly complex AND was never designed for the common man, to begin with? In this 'picture' of a 'place setting'......are the instruments for courses of hors d'oeuvres, toast points and cream soup?.....and the prerequisite hygienic tools,,,,linen 'lap' napkins, finger bowls and gauze-covered lemon slices? Yet, when animals are aroused, its a combat zone......daggers, unsheathed.....dogs, snarling over 'floor' scraps......ants and rodents, making 'off' to their lairs in the walls...., 

INCREASINGLY, I'M SPENDING MORE TIME PLAYING IN THE KITCHEN THAN IN ANY OTHER ACTIVITIES, ELSEWHERE..........

 

PERHAPS, THERE MAY BE A 'COOKBOOK' IN THE WORKS........

A 'JUST DISCOVERED' SKETCH OF ME....BY STEFAN JAMES SCOTT....MID 1990'S.....

STEFAN WAS SCRIBBLING IN ONE OF MY OLD SKETCHBOOKS AS WE WERE HAVING AFTERNOON TEA  AT MY ANTIQUES STORE, SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH.......

ANOTHER 'GET OUT OF BED AND WRITE THIS MESS DOWN' DREAM...THAT, OTHERWISE, WOULD HAVE BEEN FORGOTTEN....THEN, LATER, MANIFEST IN SOME OTHER DREAM.......AS SUBCONSCIOUSNESS LEAKS INTO PRETERNATURAL SURREALISM..........

 Within seconds, chunks of this Dream had already left....returning to the cloistering of similarities within whatever storage areas of my brain that semi-conscious sequences of images and sounds allow residence to them......From the bits and pieces that remain in short term memory:    

"It' is, simultaneously, both a quarter of a century ago and "Now', which is just an assemblage of 'Thens', 'Perhaps', and "Inventions of Artful Recollections"......as I exit the passenger side of a 1966 Chevrolet Caprice, driven  by my absent-minded Mother, who hands me an umbrella, exactly the color (blue-green-gray) as the vehicle,  admonishing me to 'not get the chair wet.."......Then, I am aware that I am lugging one of my parents' mahogany dining room chairs....for unknown reasons.....from the car...now parked in a 'parking area' next to a popular restaurant in Huntsville, Alabama.......sorta like "Fisherman's Wharf", although that is just a nomenclature that pops up to satisfy my Mind's prerequisite to 'label....thus know' what 'Is' and 'What's going on"......So.......as my mother parks the car a couple of blocks away, to avoid having to pay a parking lot attendant $6 to do so, then after lunch, having to validate the meal receipt to save the $5/hr parking 'fee'......I enter the restaurant....carrying the heavy dining room chair.......Within the 'restaurant' is a desk, behind which is a cashier holding a big, rubber stamp in one hand and an ink pad in the other......Above the cashier's head....a sign,  saying:  "If you have a chair, please take the elevator....otherwise,  wait to be seated.".......So, I press the "UP" button,  and after an 'elevator-full of people' exit, enter the elevator, which is an exact duplicate of the first elevator that I 'rode'.....at Dunavant's Department Store, in 1949......the same elevator operator, suddenly, appears.....seated on a black enamelled swing-out seat.......looking just now....in this dream, anyway, like Lily Tomlin as Ernestine....the elevator operator.......'Going up?' she asks......odd, since there was not evidence of either a 'down' button outside....although, within the elevator compartment there was a bronze lever that could be moved to 'up' or 'down' via a bakelite knob, held in 'Ernestine's white-gloved hand......{bits of the dream forgotten, missing, repressed........the story proceeds},,,,,the mechanical doors open to reveal a big sign that says 'THRIFT STORE LEVEL......EMPLOYEES AND DONORS ONLY!'........I exit, carrying the chair, and walk down a long, straight corridor, lined with many identical doors.....some open, some, ajar, and some closed.........Dozens of women and gay men appear,  with arms full of old clothes, toys, sculptures/paintings.....well, all sorts of 'old, discarded stuff'......I recognize just about everyone of these....they are familiar faces of people that I've seen, working, in the many Thrift Stores that I've 'been in' during my Lifetime.......Immediately, all of these people transform into hospital-uniformed doctors, nurses and attendants wearing little caps and hats.........I become anxious and enter an open door, where I discover, seated in a tiny room, an old tap dance teacher from Elementary School, reading a huge magazine entitled, boldly, "A Novice's Guide to Surrealist Sculpture and Dynamism", from which he......now the only 'real' friend that I had in 2nd Grade.......looks up and declares 'fancy seeing you here....nice chair..'......Aware of the heavy chair, I drop its legs to the floor and drag it, as it gets heavier and heavier, from this cubicle to a large room, lined with tall,  draped windows, within which the thrift shop workers, having replaced the 'hospital crew',  are arranging furniture to move into the 'Sales Area'......Tired of carrying around the chair, I hide it behind a velvet drape, that...when I move it to cover the chair, allows some bright light into the cavernous room......{more bits, forgotten/deleted.....}  I journey down the corridor, taking paths suggested by the seeming/suggested  itineraries of the increasingly populated area.........exiting through an arch/door into an immense Arena, full, will thousands of people carrying chairs of every kind.......Then,  realizing that I was...now......'chairless'........I tried to remember my way back to 'where I'd left the old mahogany dining room chair'....Arriving 'there'......the curtain was still drawn back, it's 'too long' length preventing its closure, since it's bottom was piled on the floor where the chair had been........Then, I awaken, with great anxiety, perspiring and breathing heavily.......and begin typing the detritus of dreaming......

 

125 Drafts....to work, toward 'completion'.....This morning, working on a dozen of these writing/imaging Projects....I fell into slumber, from not having slept the night 'away'......During this brief tourney between awakening consciousness and slumberland 'dreaming' .....it 'seemed', to the 'always awake' part of my brain, that the 'always asleep' part was trying to erase the prestidigitations of Art, and replace these remunerations for creative Thought...with more mundane considerations.......In the Dream, within a dream, contained by the 'freezing' of my body's involvement with sleep-walking and semi-conscious scribbling, by the light of a 2 1/2 watt yellowish light, coming through the galley windows of a childhood metal ship's portholes.....enough interplay between light and shadow passed through my thin upper eyelids to initiate a sequence of 'dream images' and faint, but 'present' motion......Then, within the dream that was being 'disassembled and obliterated', arose another dream, that....awakening with startled apprehension, tearing off the cloak of repressive chemistry that the New Brain casts about the old, reactive gizzard of the 'Old Brain'....I emerged from the imagined respite of Slumberland, with a clear and highly-detailed story, complete with pictures and sounds, but lacking dialogue.....but, as I reached for a pen and a notepad to scribble the shorthand trail of crumbs...back to the 'Story', now retreating to the dark, unconscious inner sanctum of electrically-charged tissues, wrapped in that bony cage.....It was gone! Nowhere to be 'seen'......I am determined to 'get There', nevertheless.....Already, even awake, under the influence of Java, bits and pieces are coalescing....Then, I will manifest all of 'this/that with the glue of creative imagining....The agents of repression and sublimation will, I'm certain, demand that I immolate the product of such expression....paper in fire...or just in frustrating 'crumbling'....tossed to the trash can......

1945-6...... MY INTRODUCTION TO MECHANICAL MOTION ASSISTANCE....AS I HOLD ON TO MY KNITTED CHAPEAUX...WHICH I STILL HAVE, THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY LATER........

FROM A 16MM SCANNED NEGATIVE THAT I JUST DISCOVERED IN AN OLD KODAK ENVELOPE, DATED OCT. 14, 1946.....WITH 'RECEIPT' FOR $1.20/2 ROLLS OF FILM.....PRINTED......THE PRINTS ARE 'LONG GONE', BUT THE NEGATIVES WERE STILL IN THE ENVELOPE.....

MY FIRST INTRODUCTION TO POETRY.....WE HAD TWO VOLUMES OF CHILDREN"S POETRY BY ROBERT LEWIS STEVENSON IN THE SHELVES AT THE HEAD OF MY CHILDHOOD BED.........IT WAS POETRY THAT I READ OR WROTE.......A COUPLE OF YEARS BEFORE "PROSE".........

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

BEFORE IT'S ALL FORGOTTEN AND NO SEARCH CAN REDISCOVER THE LOST VOYAGE WITHIN SEMI-CONSCIOUSNESS......

Already, but....fortunately, not 'completely',  the surrealist 'momentary journey' through the illusory clouds of last night's dream.....well, that part, before the dawn of awakeness, anyway....(and, I can tell, already, that this is going to be both difficult to reassemble and uncertainly vaguely  twisting and turning back into the folds of my old brain's convolutedly semi-comprehensible foldings, short-circuits and dead ends) {c'mon, c'mon....cold-dripped coffee, octane-boosted with black strap molasses, cinnamon bark and honey-drippings}.....No!  Stop!  (while it's still in unsustained focus)    A scene:   Annette Bening, in her Merteul drag, alternating/looping and oscillating/channelling Barbara Land, Sarah Turner and Myra Langtry.....desperately going through a rusting rack of my old theatrical costumes that  hanging, within this sequence,  in tall, vertical trunk drawers...imaged from an old Cocteau/Bunuel-Dali Film .......her tight, aubergine pig-skin gloves with enormous pearl buttons through failing fabric.....attempting to remove a medieval laced restraining corset, overlaid with Battenburg lace.....as it disintegrates in her gloved fingers,,,,,The revolving door, one side of what had been the 'closet',  responding to Annettes desperation, turning transformationally,  into the World on The Other Side, as the Frame falls away....and I am 'camera-drawn' into The Interior.......disappointedly, a Suburban Model Home of Vast Size, performed in synthetic marble and plastic granite, plastic pilasters and painted foam-core Renaissance Arches.....Arletty flashes by, wearing her costume from the Funambules' crowd scene of Children Of Paradise,  where I first met her......Annette had 'become' Garance.....and was distracting me from Concentration by magically changing Baptiste into Peter Turner, oscillating with scratched, fading 16mm frames with disintegrating acetate sprockets....of all the beautiful men whose images are recorded in the lizard memory folds of my 'old' brain.........THEN, awakening with moist forehead and crusty eyes, in this morning's 'real world', having rolled in the turmoil of soon-to-have-been somnambulist wandering across the clunky robot watch that I'd taken from my wrist and tossed to my mattress.......Ouch!.....right on that festering mole on my back!.......So....up, to get a tube of analgesic to quell this refocusing of attention.......hearing nightbirds singing through the gaping hole in the walll....I realized that I was NOT awake, but STILL within the Dream Within A Dream, when Annette, now calm from her frustrated attempts to don the antique corset, gathered me up in her Aura, as I spun in some opium cloud, falling through the clouds, hand-in-hand with 'Smike', whom I had to protect from injury and we were directed, via megaphone,  by Nick Nickleby.........The Marbles were rolling.......a Voice....that of an annoying 'narrator' in some Pop Film that had not the intelligence of good screen-writing, so required constant plot explanation from Reese Witherspoon and Matt Damon, co-joined, like Tweedle-De and Dum.......Of course, this is a Dream.....and, occasionally, aware....even within the dream or the Dreams within those......I could, semi-consciously, redirect the Confusions to simpler paths of Forking Paths rather than incomprehensible metaphoric, seemingly random excursions,  each falling from the cliffs of others, through the countless opening/closing doors/windows into the kernal of repressed memories and suppressed emotions.....Fuck!....I must be Awake, now!.....I'm beginning to analyze this Mess that I awakened from, just in time to hear the mounting wall of vehicle noise, vibrating the loose tin flashing on the other side of my bedroom wall........I'll go down and 'write this down'....which I'm doing, now.....before it vanishes....and is replaced with some memory of having spent the night peeling radishes and stuffing celery stalks with cheese and pimentos........The Stomach Rules........supplanting Emotional Hunger.......Sliced, candied beef tongue with roasted yellow corn!.......Whew.....that was in the 'other feature'......with Julia Childs, played...in drag...by Andrew Zimmern......O.K.  I'll give up that memory, if I could fill the emptied space with the rest of the Annette Bening Saga........

hasty scribbling of youthful thoughts, for later processing.......then forgotten....now excavated with little intentions...1966....written, during a lugubriously philosophical period, while still in College...

MY FIRST "POOL"....an oblong, enameled steel pan.....for lounging on a hot afternoon....looking around for bugs and other critters.......

scanned from an old negative that tumbled from an old book in the basement......It's 'me' on a lazy summer afternoon, in my Grandparents' back yard.......c. 1946-7     

 

WARTIME FODDER.......HIPPIES or VIETCONG? JUST 'SUBDUE THE ENEMY' HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE RULE, BY LAW.....

When I moved to Atlanta, in the Fall of 1968, the Po-Lice were 'on the hunt' for 'Hippies'........but, 'mostly', they just stood around and 'watched' the goings on of long-haired, bell-bottomed 'freaks', loaded with pot and psychedelic drugs.....Within a year, however, it was 'shields, batons and riot gear' that grappled with the 'Love Generation'......At that time the 'pigs' were a frustrated lot....but, compared to today's paramilitary styled police....they were far more passively involved with their 'jobs'.......the 'trained killers' were, then, sent off to Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia to garrote, club, shoot and napalm 'other "not like us" people....in other lands'......After the brain-washed 'soldiers' returned to America....many becoming 'law enforcement officers'......they channeled their trained for combat aggressiveness into forcing 'compliance' at any cost.....

AND.....NOW.......

.

HUMANITY'S TECHNOLOGICAL UPGRADES..........

As short-term memory becomes more of an impasse', I'm eager to have a RevoDrive 3 - PCI-Express (PCIe) SSD implant.....Implants will become a part of our lives in the near future, as we evolve with technological innovations....Our genetic progeny, in a thousand years, will be very unlike the humans that we are now.....O.K., Data, watch that hand sweeze, some of us are, still, fragile homo sapiens, you know.

BUT HE's SOOO CUTE!

 

Shopping, online, with a friend that is decorating her infant grandson's new 'room'.....I noticed the preponderance of creatures, that would just make a meal of a baby, 'cartoonized' as lovingly cute 'friends'.....a talking, laughing shark; a T-Rex; a pack of 'cute' wild wolves; a lion-King; a cereal-selling Tony Tiger......So? The baby 'grows up' and is told, later, to fear all these Creatures......I did 'nix' the stork, in a top hat, carrying a diapered infant in its beak and a poster of a blue-eyed blond 'Jesus', seated on a jeweled throne, with half a dozen gratuitously Anglo-Saxon children (and one Asian, one Black and one Native American)......at his feet....."Pink would be a great color for the walls." I bemusedly commented........"NO!.....'it's going to be a BOY!", she replied......o.k......o.k....get the candy-eating reptile, then!

JUst as i was about to pull some vines from a tree.....I realized 'THIS IS POISON IVY!!!".....and I'm BAREFOOT!

pulling up weeds in the driveway and yard.......I kept this photo of my 'contact dermatitis', the modern day 'leprosy', episode, 7 years ago.....the poison ivy and oak are just sending out their leaves, but the prickly holly is ready to cause some serious issues with my sensitive, thin integument......time for another hot, soapy shower, and some epsom salts in a warm tub, later......and, to think, my ancestors lived in the jungles and plains, beset with poisonous 'stuff'......then, we travelled further North and our DNA must have forgotten about the 'poisonous' plants, nearer the equator.......You'd think that 'living in the South' for a dozen generations would have established a better immune system to deal with this issue....this oozing issuance......

1951.......Meeting Mrs. Layman, Tom, Dick, Jane and Spot....and, thankfully, Miss. Hazel Robinson and a set of steel taps for my Buster Browns.......

The piano seat screwed down too low, did I care? That idiot should have ducked under the camera's cape before he pressed the automatic shutter release......Maybe both of us were just born this way.......Time to take the bus for the first day of school, careful to be the last to enter, to avoid all that commotion and shrill, unchanged voices, but just in time to hear Mrs. Layman making those noises with that dusty chalk on the huge blackboard......and what were her first words?......."See Dick.....See Jane and See Spot and Puff, Sally..."......duh!.....It's going to be a while before This gets interesting.....[I think I'll sneak out of here, go to the auditorium and practice Piano......Well.....all the luck!..... Miss Hazel Robinson's in the Auditorium, recruiting boys who want to learn to tap dance!.......Yes! This'll be better than chalk on the blackboard...for sure! Will there be satin and sequins in this deal?]

GREGORY HOUSE SYNDROME

At age ten, i was in a terrible bicycle accident which caused shearing of the anterior frontal lobe of my developing brain......after this, it was determined that i may have had a lesion in the orbitofrontal cortex.....after I demonstrated, by my behavior, that impulse control was inhibited......the Gregory House Syndrome....Years later, after yet another brain damaging episode, in my middle twenties, i was unable to fare well on the Wisconsin Cart Sort, perseverating on socially established rules of behavior and exhibiting frustration and confusion when sorting out external stimuli that would affect modifications in responses or behavior.....and, since damage had occurred within the left brain, my mind was quicker to process negative emotion; consequently, i was compelled to channel more energy into the right lobe to balance the temporal lobe processes, even though i was taking the then experimental drug, encephabol, to counter my inability to process new memories, making me a loose canon, socially......such is Life! Nevertheless, I have a reasonable excuse for my critical personality......

What we think we "know" depends on how we are taught and how we learn to interpret, against the background chatter of our internalized egocentric preconceptions of what we think we comprehend; thus, our idea of what the outside is becomes but a representation of how we are taught to tag and process, comparing ever more complex data to the simple sets of constructs that we utilize in order to categorize unknowns and place them into tidy prejudicial formats to avoid feeling completely lost and incompetent....Ironically, the less one comprehends and understands, the more this process becomes necessary, inevitable, futile and stultifyingly meaningless.....

it is not possible to see without prejudice, since this is how the brain has learned to interpolate and avoid confusion, while simultaneously ignoring the paths of wisdom; consequently, rendering the entire process virtually retrogressive and pre-telencephalonal.......Do I think in this manner because I have re-routed many relays in my grey matter? I feel great floods of emotion, but quickly...usually....relay them to a processing center that was created to avoid the stress and anxiety that form from their incomprehensibility.....intellectualization, perhaps?.....This is the opposite of the 'standard operating procedure' whereby emotion is immediately acted upon, reactively.......I've found this old manner of dealing with feelings to be troublesome and will always create even more predicaments and dilemmas...in a domino effect, so to speak.......I was very fortunate to have discovered R.D. Laing's poetry of psychoanalysis.......

"THE ENIGMA"........I was filing through a series of pen and ink 'scribbles' that I drew in my middle twenties......and, still, have but ideas of what was in my mind at the time....the outpouring seemed, at the time, very compulsive...as I spent ten hours a day, for months, doing them.....after a near-death experience that left me in a coma in a Soest, Holland hospital....When I awakened, I was obsessed with these strange drawings.......In Amsterdam, I was prescribed a drug, illegal in the U.S., to facilitate brain cell regeneration, whenupon the 'visions' that I was trying to depict with ink, suddenly vanished!

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds." R.D. Laing

randomness, mathematically-defined......that's my game...if there's a plan, I have no visions of it...yet, I'm certain that it will compute exactly in a theoretical equation....

1967's "NOTES FROM A SHEET OF LINED MONTAG'S 'BLUE HORSE' LOOSE-LEAF FILLER PAPER", AFTER THE DISCONSIDERATION OF LEGIBILITY......LEFT MARGINS, OBSERVED, RIGHT MARGIN DISREGARDED, BUT....STILL....BETWEEN THE LINES OF CONDITIONED RESTRAINTS......

 

CHILLUM ON A CHILLY DAY........

RECOMPENSE

 I watched a documentary on the Roman Colosseum....all that bloodbath.......I have a 'fantasy' take on the Colosseum, done by British Artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.....which has 'none of that'......it depicts jugglers, entertaining a well-dressed audience of Romans......I added my own collection of animals.....in memory of all the tens of thousands that were slaughtered for entertainment a couple of thousand years ago.......

ON THE DEPTH OR HEIGHT OF LANGUAGE

 

If he'd labeled his 1971 album, COPACETIC, would the World have tilted on its axis? Word Choice and intention are often lost in neglectfully peripatetic inattention to subtle meaning, as popular vocabulary seldom expresses much depth at all....."Have a nice day."......and, by the way, I did meet Karnock, and thought him a hopeless case of Irony. It's not just the bones under our flesh that keep us standing...For tens of thousands of years, our species could only grunt, growl and gesticulate......in black and white....... Are you covering your ears or just posing?

INNOCENTS IN THE PATH OF DESTRUCTION........UKRAINE 2022

WEST HUNTSVILLE HIGH SCHOOL........CLASS OF '36

Scanned and retouched from a vintage photograph.......a small 'graduating class'.....6 guys and 14 gals....  During the Great Depression many Southerners were not fortunate enough to graduate from High School.....In Huntsville, many went to work in the 'Ragland Cotton Mills' of West Huntsville.....and, later, in Armament Manufacturing at the local 'Arsenal'......My mother is standing in the back row, '3rd from the left'.......making a 'face' for the camera......

REMEMBERING BERENICE SHIREY..........A MOST, SEEMINGLY-NOT-LIKELY, MENTOR....

I met Berenice when I was with Saks Fifth Avenue, at Phipps Plaza...in the late 1960's.....where I would haunt the piles/racks/barrels/walls/floors of Oddities, mostly....unclaimed 'salvaged' items.......My 'Collection' of Stuff, eventually, became fodder for opening a Gallery/Shop at The Atlanta Flea Market, on Piedmont Road, where REED SAVAGE ANTIQUES evolved from 'pickings' and Estate/Yard Sales last day leftovers............Berenice......aka 'Big Red',  was only interested in 'the bottom line'.....'PROFIT'!.....and knew absolutely nothing about 'Fine Art' or 'Antiques'....so....over a period of about five years, I exchanged my rather arcane knowledge with Berenice.....for some 'first sightings' of 'Fine' Art, high-end electronics, Couture and "Oddities", before she dumped them into piles on the floor of her Brookhaven 'Salvage Yard'..............   Memories of Berenice flashed in my memory, this morning, after reading her Obituary.... 

SHIREY, Bernice BERNICE RALEY SHIREY Bernice Raley Shirey, 81, of Atlanta died April 29, 2009. The fiery redheaded basketball star from Avera, Georgia, moved to Atlanta in 1944 to attend cosmetology school. She married in 1948 and opened a tiny beauty shop in her home in Chamblee. By 1955, she had three children and moved to Doraville opening The Bargain Store with her beauty shop in back and her new real estate/insurance business next door. In 1958 she had expanded her family to four children and her businesses to include Quality Value Clothing, The Village Antique Shop, Shirey's Beauty Shop and Shirey's Beauty College all located on Peachtree Road in Brookhaven. In 1966 she moved her Quality Value Clothing up the street to a larger building which became the first Peachtree Quality Salvage. She eventually had eight locations operating for twenty five years. In 1987 she built a new headquarter store/warehouse in Cumming which later became Freight Surplus Sales. In 1998 the business transformed again into an auction house known as At The Auction. Through the years, she purchased and leased houses, shopping centers and retail buildings which became her biggest business. Not only was she a successful business woman, she was a top notch mother, wife and matriarch to her very close family. Her door was always open and there was usually one or two cousins living with the family. Every morning, before work, Mimi (as she was called), put a full breakfast on the table and every evening she tended her ½ acre garden before preparing dinner for her family and extended family. Weekends were family time with Friday night fish fries, Saturday night cookouts and Sunday picnics and fishing. She loved her work; she loved her family and she excelled at both. Bernice Shirey was preceded in death by her husband, John Leonard Shirey and grandson, Joseph Wayne Shirey, II. Survivors include her daughter, Pam Shirey Cannon, sons and daughters-in-law, John R. and Robley Shirey, Wayne and Pat Shirey, Mark and Vicky Shirey, grandchildren and their spouses, J* Shirey, Jonathan and Heidi Shirey, Kate Shirey, Rebecca Shirey, Hilary and Levi Shepard, Mallory and Frank Reid, Raley E. Shirey, Nicholas Shirey, Matt and Jennifer Shirey, Erin Shirey, Daniel Shirey, great-grandchildren, Raley L. Shirey, Jonathan Shirey II, brothers, Melvin Raley and Elton Raley. Funeral services will be held Saturday, May 2nd at 1 o'clock at Oglethorpe Hill Chapel. Interment Arlington Memorial Park. 

sentiments on Valentine's Day

 

My chest heaves with Merlin aboard, purring, nose running, in contentment.......and, for now, this must be enough.......A romantic youth, I deamt and longed for the most intimate and trusting Love......In waning, and weaning of this futility, I have both lowered platonic expectations and raised the value of my heart.......Love dwells, intact, in the clouds of dreams and art........what other mortals, who move to the beat of their heart's palpitations, feel and desire, I know little of.......https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojKKCRLEdYM

SORRY, MRS. SHACKLEFORD.........

 

I may have not done well in a sophmore "Statistics and Probabiities" course because the day before 'Finals' I received the EICO Amplifier kits for a make-it-yourself 'Stereo" system to replace the old GE "Swing out" crap that I lugged to Nashville a year before.....I coundn't resist dragging out the components and wiring an amp up for action.....forgetting, entirely...which wasn't that difficult, if you know what I mean.....to even attend the Mid-Term Test....As Punishment, I was told that I could not possibly receive higher than a 'C" on the test that I had to take in my Professor's office, with her glaring at me....the whole time....Sorry, Mrs. Shackleford!......can YOU write a good poem or short story???!!! Bet Not! At least, the $160 that I spent on these kits was a reasonable investment......I sold them, recently, for almost a thousand bucks....so there! I donated that old 'Statistics and Probabilities" book to a Library sale, where it garnered $0.50......Seems no one else was very interested in it, either....

through other sets of eyes, a Strange world co-exists with the Ordinary....... this is one of five 'bloody' drawings that I did, while waiting in 'the delivery room' for a friend to have a dead fetus removed from her uterus......an 'automatic' drawing......done in my mid-twenties.......and, here.....in an old sketchbook, a half century later........The new bottle of black Parker 'quink' arrived, recently.....and a box of fountain pens........Perhaps, I should finish that story...on some new paper......

 

BABO 73........

Before 'Toilet Gator'...... Before "A Coupla of White Faggots, Sitting Around Talking".....Taylor Mead demonstrated that 'There Is No Such Thing As Gravity', as free-associates, with friends, in the Cinema Verite Style of the New York Underground.......Richard Lester was but one of others who utilized the b/w madcap style of "Hard Day's Night"......Robert Downey Sr. did this in, among his other work, BABO 73 (1974), with Tom Gaines, Taylor Mead and Jim Antonio......three of the first 'Beatiks' that I met in NYC, on my "Senior Class Trip".......after which, I felt a bit freed of the handcuffing, wrist-twisting, hand's behind the back repression of my previous Life in North Alabama.......

Brrrrrr....

 

5 pm....and I'm already under the covers, to watch the latest NOVA episode.......in 'old guy' mode.......then, at 3 am, will be ready to play, as the Nation sleeps......I noticed some daring wrens, gathering twigs and tufts.......so, soon, Spring will be in Atlanta, and I will come out of hibernation mode......we hairless humans have not evolved to play in the cold!

A LITTLE HIGHTOWER IS A POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS THING FOR A DULLED BRAIN, HUNGOVER FROM A SINGLE BEER LAST NIGHT

6:30 .....awaken the dead....so much for my plan to get a 'good night's sleep'.......caffeine and pastry fix.......with some arduous 'hands adjustments' on some antique vest pocket watches.....distracted, easily enough, by a 1951 adaptation of Patricia Hightower's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY......and, some Gabriel Yared and Nat King Cole.......wafting from the kitchen radio.....toppling dominos of not quite random poetic juxtapositions........

I felt particularly fragmented after re-reading some Hightower ....... Fragmentation seems to be a Theme of her novels; consequentially, I made a rather unflattering self-portrait of myself as one of her pathetic characters...

seque into abstraction.....reflecting on Patricia Hightower's studies of personality fragmentation......before returning from the Twilight Zone to the rising sun on a cold morning......10 am....time to 'get it together' for more mundane preoccupations......but first......another cup of java, I think, before burning some useless books in the fireplace......."431" on the new baking thermometer... I've not lost my Mind......Just letting it ramble about in its bony cage for a while, before the rather dull and disincentive organization of stacks of Paper......