MORE NOSTALGIA, TODAY.......AS I VIEW THIS PHOTO OF A HOUSE THAT WAS ALMOST IDENTICAL TO THE ONE I LIVED IN FROM AGE 4-9.....

REMEMBERING MISS BUELL DAVIS, WHO TAUGHT ME BOTH 'PIANO' AND 'ART' IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 20TH CENTURY.....

                                          "MISS ANNIE BUELL DAVIS.....(1895-1984)"

Third cousins....well... a first cousin's grandchildren...whatever that makes them........

 Anyway......the tradition of not particularily 'masculine' boys appears to rule in the Family genome...Playing 'dress up' is...still....a rather 'agenderish' activity.......These three kids are all boys, of course.....       

SIX....OR LESS....DEGREES OF SEPARATION as I view, again, this old 'family photograph'.....a Dandy man and a couple of Stong women....a family tradition.....

another laborious photoshopping project......Edwardian relatives......The Gattis 'girls', my Great Aunt Lillian Cook...on the left, flanking another male relative, name..so far...unknown....but wearing what appears to be a Montgomery Ward mail-order suit, that..I suppose....he 'grew into'..with pants, not yet hemmed, but rolled up for this photo shoot.......i knew my friend Jimmy Cook and his wife Julia Chabannes for a many years before discovering that my Aunt Lillian was his grandmother......small World, sometimes.......remembering the adage, 'six degrees of separation' exists between just about all of us......This over a century old photo also depicts the types of strong-willed 'frontier' women and sorta pansy-ish dandy-men that they love, in my bloodline..... note: men are seated......ladies, standing......typical of the sexist attitudes that were seldom questioned before.....the photo was taken on the eve of President Wilson’s inauguration, which coincided with Alice Paul's organized Suffrage Parade and Black journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells's protests...in the more abolitionist North..........i'm taking some observational historical liberties of course, and interpolating them into what i perceive in these old photos, which are silently passive, posed and posthumous to the subjects of the photography.......and the viewer....

A NEW GIZMO FOR 'COLD SHOULDERS' DURING THE UPCOMING WINTER.....

AN ELECTRIC SHOULDER/NECK WARMER FOR MY AGING BODY.....ATOP MY PRINTED 'SNAKESKIN' NIGHT SHIRT.....ALL OF WHICH WILL BE ENVELOPED WITHIN A FLEECY ELECTRIC BLANKET.........NOW, WHERE DID I PUT THOSE BATTERY-OPERATED HEATING GLOVES AND SOCKS?   

The World Stasis is dependent upon the unyielding fixity of inheritable Attitude Posturing and Unreflective Opinion....

I KNEW THINGS BEFORE I'D EVEN HEARD OF GANJA, DWAYNE......DO I NEED TO 'PAINT YOU A PICTURE'?

 

WHEN I WAS 40, I OFTEN WONDERED WHAT MY IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER, WHO DIED IN INFANCY, WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE....AND WHAT HIS PERSONALITY WOULD BE LIKE, WERE HE ALIVE AND WELL.........

 

My mother, vacationing with my father and me....in New Mexico....in the 1960's.....Almost a teetotaler, she's getting a bit rambunctious, with a Margarita, imbibed with a straw, of course....not one to leave a lipstick mark on her glass....

    or, was she just going under that 'salt lick' with that straw; and would have preferred a frozen daiquiri? 

THE PLAGUE OF SQUAMOUS CELL CARCINOMA......

The Dermatologist informed me that this ugly 'thing' on my cheek, below my right eye....was, likely, a result of childhood exposure to ultraviolet rays....probably, during 'summer camp days',when I was 10-13....This crusty, inflamed mess of cellular material has been removed...twice.....with chemicals and with laser....but persists in 'returning'.......I've 'painted' it with Wart Remover creams, picked at it with tweezers and surgical sizzors.....even camouflaged it with a circular bandaid.....not eager to shell out another $1200 for ten minutes of the dermatologist's professional time.......again!      

each replication produces Prop 'changes'......countless repetition is 'evolution'......a trillion cell divisions produce nothing, apparently, the 'same'.....thus, the one-celled 'thing' with little organized genetic material...eventually, manifesting the complex, not quite random, organization of elemental electrical charges that we perceive as Matter.....

AWAKENING AT THE 'REGULAR' 5AM, HALF A DECADE AGO, I JOURNEYED DOWNSTAIRS TO MY ALMOST INCOMPREHENSIBLY CONGESTED KITCHEN, WITH THE INTENTION OF PREPARING THE 20-STAGE B'FAST THAT I HAD JUST DREAMT OF......NOTICING ALL THE DETAILS OF THE MORNING 'ROUTINE'......THIS SEEMED TO BE A LOOPING OF MOST, OTHER, MORNINGS......THE GRINDING OF COFFEE BEANS; THE LIGHTING OF CANDLES IN THE DARKENED ARENA; THE ORGANIZING OF INGREDIENTS; WARMING OF SKILLETS; THE PREPARATION OF MERLIN'S B'FAST....AND HIS ROUTINE RUN THROUGH THE KITCHEN.....CHECKING HIS FOOD/WATER BOWLS, ON HIS WAY....BEFORE DASHING TO THE LITTER BOX FOR HIS MORNING 'DUTY'.......SUDDENLY, I WAS ANNOYINGLY AWARE OF THE EXACT REPLICATION OF THIS ROUTINE AND, AFTER PREPARING A MUG OF CAPPUCCINO AND RIPPING OPEN A 'SUSTAINABLE ENERGY' CRUNCHY PEANUT BUTTER CLIF BAR, RATHER THAN TOIL TO PRODUCE AN ELABORATE B'FAST.....STILL 2 HOURS BEFORE SUNRISE.....DESISTED, AND SAT IN A CHAIR.....CAT ON LAP, DOING HIS 'ROUTINE' FUR LICKING/GROOMING, & 'CAT LITTER-BETWEEN-HIS-TOES' CLEANING, BEFORE FALLING ASLEEP, ACROSS MY LAP....WHILE I CONTEMPLATED ALL THE 'THINGS I OUGHT TO DO, BUT USUALLY DON'T'.......AN EVERY MORNING 'REGULAR' SEQUENCING......I WANTED TO BREAK THIS ROUTINE BY CHANGING ALL OF THIS UP! HOWEVER, EVEN THE THOUGHT OF THIS PRODUCED A HIGH LEVEL OF ANXIETY...EXASPERATED BY THE MORNING 200MG CAFFEINE 'FIX'.....THE SUGARY WHIPPED CREAM FOAM AND A 100MM BALKAN SOBRANIE SMOKE INHALATION.....SUCH IS THE CHALLENGE OF ANY DEVIATION, BY HUMANS.....OR, LIKELY, JUST ABOUT EVERY CREATURE......AS THE MORNING SUN ROSE....SITTING ON MY BACK PORCH....ANOTHER ROUTINE.....FINISHING A SECOND CUP OF JAVA....ANOTHER ROUTINE....AND SMOKING A MARLBORO RED....FORTUNATELY, NOT A REGULAR...BUT FREQUENT....ROUTINE....I WATCHED SOME LEAVES UNFURLING TO THE MORNING SUNLIGHT, BIRDS AWAKENING TO CHECK OUT THE DRIVEWAY, WHERE I, ROUTINELY, TOSS BIRDSEED, OLD BREAD AND CRUMBS FROM THE TOASTER....AND ON AND ON........LIKE A COMPLICATED CLOCK, MADE OF THOUSANDS OF TINY PARTS....ALL SERVING TO INDICATE THE 'RIGHT TIME', AS THOUGH THERE WERE 'A RIGHT TIME'....CHILLED A BIT BY THE 45F MORNING AIR, I RETURNED TO MY 'ROUTINE MORNING'.....WABE ON THE RADIO, AS I RE-ORGANIZED THE KITCHEN COUNTER TO MAKE ROOM FOR THE DELAYED B'FAST THAT I HAD DREAMED OF MAKING, EARLIER......THEN, I RECONSIDERED ALL OF THIS ORGANIZED RAMBLING THAT WAS REINFORCING BRAIN NEURONS TO 'FIX' THEIR CIRCUITS.....ISN'T THAT WHY ALL THINGS DEVELOP 'ROUTINES'? FRUSTRATED, I RETURNED TO 'UNDER THE COVERS' OF MY WOMB-LIKE BEDDING TO WATCH "5 MILLION YEARS TO EARTH', THE ALAN QUARTERMAINE SCI-FI MOVIE.....WHICH SEEMS....SO APPROPRIATE FOR THIS MORNING......HAVING, ONLY YESTERDAY, EXCAVATED A ANCIENT TRILOBITE THAT WAS, IN ACTUALITY, NOTHING MORE THAN A GLOB OF CONCRETE/MORTAR MIX WITH A WHEEL BARROW IMPRESSION ON IT......ALL OF THIS WORD-RAMBLING IS, OF COURSE, JUST ANOTHER 'ROUTINE' NOTE-TAKING FOR FUTURE ASSIMILATION INTO A LONGER DISCOURSE ON 'DE RERUM NATURA'........AND, NOW, A FEW YEARS LATER, 'THIS' REPEATS ITSELF, SANS CIGARETTES....FINALLY...PERHAPS....ABANDONED, AND LACKING NOW-DECEASED MERLIN'S COMPANIONSHIP.......

Photo from the Manly Era of zippered, striped Beatnik sweaters

I found an old, scratched slide from around 1960, when I was 15, with dark brown dyed hair and a zippered striped sweater.....hardly the 'Fashion'.....Of course, I wouldn't have wanted to be 'in fashion'......or look 'just darling' or 'sweet' or 'cute'......I was 'playing' being a 'Man'.....at that time, boys were always being encouraged to 'be a Man'......I suppose this to be my best effort,,,.....I had 'zero' button-down oxford cloth shirts and 'zero' rep ties and 'zero khaki, cuffless trousers......yes, this was as close as it got in 10th grade!

When asked what TV SERIES' cast consisted of Characters that I would have wanted to be friends with, when I was 25......immediately, QAF came to mind....

            

                Interestingly, the British QUEER AS FOLK Series, which predated the American Series, was even racier, although it's characters were less likeable.....excepting Charlie Hunnam,  perhaps....who set the mold for Randy Harrison's later interpretation.....

alas...when I was 25, the Celluloid Closet was big enough to contain all these characters, behind 'closed doors'........

THE TENDRILS OF TIME.....

awakening from a dream, in which I and many friends.....still alive at that time.... were frolicking in the garden behind my home.....exhausted, from play, we passed out in the grass.....then, I awakened.....over a half century later....and looked in the mirror........all the memories, compressed into my brain's labyrinthine memory circuits, began to unravel in the light of present tense, probably a result of having heard of 2 friends that had stokes, recently, and getting the results of a neurological test that showed octopus-like tendrils wrapping around nerves, binding them to tendons in my fingers......after some psychological adjustments and time-tempering with sudden reality, I'm back in the Now.....tearing up a bit, as Sandy Denny's recording of "Who Knows Where The TIme Goes" plays on the under-counter DVD player.. Well, it surely isn't slowing down for us old folks......At least, I've always been a good Dreamer......If not much of a Sleeper.......

MR. WILENSKY'S 'PAWN SHOP'.......UNCLE SAM'S LOAN OFFICE

I visited with Mr. Wilensky just about every Saturday morning, from 1955 until 1963....then, sporadically, afterwards, when I returned to visit relatives and friends in Huntsville.....Mr. Wilensky helped me to establish an antique jewelry business in Atlanta over 50 years ago, by selling me some antique wrist watches, then $12-$15ea, that he retreived from his safe at UNCLE SAM'S....I went to school from 1st grade at West Clinton until 12th grade at Huntsville High....with his son, Raymon....

THE REULEAUX MATHEMATICAL SIMPLIFICATION OF YOUTH AND THE FLORAL EVOLUTIONARY COMPLICATIONS OF AGE.......

LEST I REPEAT MYSELF....AKA 'VERISTES'......OR SOMEONE ELSE........ SOME CONFESSIONAL REMARKS WITH RELIABLE QUOTATIONS FROM THE MINDS OF OTHERS

"Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls." Kahlil Gibran I DO NOT RESPOND TO "FRIEND REQUESTS" FROM TOTAL STRANGERS, WHO DO NOT EVEN BOTHER TO INTRODUCE THEMSELVES....... AND....Inane comments WILL be deleted! my interests are in the details, sometimes disassociated from the surround, sometimes oblivious; other times suggestive of a view of imagination sprung from the obvious, through the arcane, to veiled super-reality, frequently to mindless and unexamined places that remain obfuscated by ambiguity. “It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise” – Henry David Thoreau Cynics are simply thwarted romantic idealists with awkwardly high standards “There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” -- Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004). "Those possessing the most Power are the most corrupt.....that is the Nature of Apes"........Veristes "Free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.".......Robert Frost At best, I am a Concoctionist, not a Simulator.....a Johannes Factotum Dilettante,,,, Veristes In a Nutshell....a very large Nutshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o&fbclid=IwAR0rFYFcyLNOrCYth7zaMjmFy9klx15d650eP7FWpa5l9KgLnlm_VxoqJwI "Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream." Malcolm Muggeridge Life is a sexually transmitted disease. R. D. Laing “If you don't know where you want to go, then it doesn't matter which path you take.” Lewis Carroll "Immortality is short lived" James Bidgood Empath....not by choice, but genetic destiny........ "He who is not busy living is busy dying" Bob Dylan "I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. It's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor ... and surviving." Apocalypse Now "Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before." W. H. Auden "I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can, Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all. Lifelong Insomniac" Walt Whitman "Always, no, sometimes think it's me But you know I know when it's a dream I think a "no" will mean a "yes" but it's all wrong That is I think I disagree" Strawberry Fields, Forever......The Beatles Ex nihilo nihil" A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices' William James Retrospectiveness is just the relative rusty dull past redecorated with icing and sparkles......such is the nature of Memory.........does anyone remember their childhood as less glamorous than it was when they were formulating memories of it? So....if you're under 30....don't worry too much.......when you're in your lazy-boy recliner, reminiscing about your Wonder Years in the interstitial spaces between memory granules, the Present will vaporize in the laser-focus of false memory and fallalery of wish-fulfillment after the facts dreams...........Now, is the only time there is........Let us be "all for one" in this moment, for it is this moment that brings the next.......... Anti-Social Commentarian ......Veristes (Aesthetic Nihilist, Provocateur, Neologistical Convolulus ) "We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." --- Tyler Durden (Fight Club) "Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair" - Joker ....(The Dark Knight) "How fearfully good. How frightfully nice of you." __ Gudrun Brangwen (Women In Love) “I write to discover what I know.” ― Flannery O'Connor“ Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.” ― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You (Moral Psychologist at heart..........) "We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present." Victor Hugo admittedly, I am a fustilarian whiffle-waffling, frecking jargogler.... my interests are in the details, sometimes disassociated from the surround, sometimes oblivious; other times suggestive of a view of imagination sprung from the obvious, through the arcane, to veiled super-reality, frequently to mindless and unexamined places that remain obfuscated by ambiguity. I specialize in "post-attributorial nomenclating" ....make Art, without too much processing, look back...from a broader perspective.....decide what it is....name it......'Mona Lisa'. just a girl with a wry smile, after all..... I can't make a 'fake' smile appear on my face!......and 'settle' for a deadpan demeanor, unless I'm really feeling 'that way'...... “The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.” ― Michel Foucault "Love never arises from guilt or obligation" Old Buddhist saying FACEBOOK IS MY "PUBLIC" DIARY....... even a broken clock is right twice a day.... Insanity: "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Albert Einstein "I am tetrachromatic, seeing fine shades of color"..... "Yeah, I have plenty to say!".......Reed Savage "You get smarter as you get older.". Bill Gates "No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him." Viktor E. Frankl "I'm sick of Rap, especially after thinking "Lingua Fraca Rapper's Hot Corner Hip Hop" was "THE Lingua Fraca Ensemble' " Reed Savage "And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost." — Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men) "well, then....o.k., I'm a creative fiddler with no strings attached......does that make you go for me?". Enigma's Palindrone “Ninety-nine percent talent…ninety-nine percent discipline…ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It is never as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.” ― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury "I'm a diehard Glamorous Grammarist".... V. "“Why don’t you just start with the second paragraph?” Lucien Carr "I was gender-fluid, before it was fashionable, unlike Zayn Malik, who is a pop-fashionista stylist , but not gender-fluid. Gender is between the ears and in the genes not on the Pages or in the jeans" Veristes "works of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality......" Court's decision in the trial of Gustave Flaubert..... “If you cannot define what you are doing as a process, you do not understand what you are doing.” -- W. Edwards Deming ......phones, televisions, radios, cameras, mattresses, decorative attire, huge circles of friends and acquaintances, kitchen gadgets, lawnmowers weedwhackers and edgers, jewelry, tablecloths, ear swabs......the list goes into the thousands........the one thing that we definitely do need, though, can only be had by giving it away...... I'm exactly who you think me to be.......depending on what you think you "see".....sometimes more...sometimes less! “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” ― R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise "War is old men talking and young men dying". Odysseus “To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.” ― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine "going downhill's an uphill job!" Alan Bennett "Authority is the mask of Violence" Ralph Steadman "When you've got nothing to say, say nothing at all." David Byrne I avoid crowds! "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent: it is the one that is most adaptable to change." -Charles Darwin I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering. "Civilization is just a temporary failure of entropy." Christine Nelson, Cray Research, Inc. Humans have a natural propensity, reinforced by societal customs and the need for congruent validation, to structure their thinking in ways that mimic the constructs that they see employed by those around them....."monkey see, monkey do"......among the conservative of humans, this extends to the rejection, even the annihilation of those who do not fall into these molds and even to the restructuring of natural instincts for membership in the hive, passing the detectors engineered by dna and rigid indoctrination to become ones with the great spirit of mediocrity and sameness.........I continually meditate on my uniqueness, but still fall to conformity in unthinking ways.....we are not so unlike other social creatures.... ants, bees, prairie dogs and chimps....i've never felt that i could afford the expense of conformity and have given shape to a rag-tag existence of pretty much my own creation.....or, perhaps I've merely tuned in distant stations to get modelling instructions or have failed to replicate, successfully, some of the basic structural components of hard-wired genetics........maybe I pissed them down the sink... "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 (Hipster critic, poet, photographer, chef.....well...dilettante ) My interests are in the details, sometimes disassociated from the surround, sometimes oblivious; other times suggestive of a view of imagination sprung from the obvious, through the arcane, to veiled super-reality, frequently to mindless and unexamined places that remain obfuscated by ambiguity. A pragmatic sensualist, motivated by really deep instincts, actualized by willful imaginings and perpetuated by other's desires. Abstract, yet clear in purpose, honest, but abstruse, my moods change like winds and water with my confidences, and when ungrounded, i am both guarded and vulnerable, leaning, in darkness, to the Light, nurtured by instinctual feelings arising from a deep gene pool. Prognosticator/Tarot Reader/Luminous radiation detector.....

WHADOYAMEAN BY 'YOU'RE NOT GOING TO GO OUT WITH ME....DRESSED LIKE THAT....ARE YOU?'

                      This is what I was wearing when you called.....and, I'm not going to don some jeans and a T-shirt, so that you won't be embarrassed!   

DEEP SOUTH PREJUDICES AND RIGID CONFORMITY IN 1950'S ALABAMA......'DEVIATIONS FROM "NORMAL" WOULD MEET WITH SEVERE PUNISHMENT, TO INSURE THIS UNYIELDING CONFORMITY....

A friend recently mentioned a Prince performance from 1985.....which made me think of a beach visit, in the 1950's......Southern guys, in Huntsville, wore big legged "swim attire" with drawstring waists......except for one!.......When my "artsy-fartsy" friend sported this sexy bikini....I was inspired to hit the men's department of Black's, in Birmingham, where I found a blue spandex bikini with drawstring sides.....even more provocative.......Eager to sport my new suit, I wore it.....covered with a wrap-around beach towel....which fell off as I exitited my father's car........Shocked, he insisted that I wear a cabana set with sailboats and beachballs printed on the really 'square'....(the fashion in Alabama, then.....)It took lots of courage to do anything different in the 1950's South! But...I didn't want to wear anything that the kids in the second photo would have worn then..........Of course, those Birmingham kids, my age, would have lynched me....just for wearing my blue bikini, wouldn't they? Well, that was an oblique lesson on Alabama History, wasn't it? Even more reviled were 'fags' and 'yankees'.........these guys are all wearing penny loafers, white socks and solid color (khaki or denim) pegged pants, shortish hair and either white t-shirts or solid, horizontal stripe or plaid.......the Rigid dress code of the 1950's South......in 1958, I did not own a pair of penny loafers, woud not wear horizontal stripes OR plaid clothing........shopping, by then, only in Army/Navy surplus stores or Thrifts.....I returned the back-to-school clothing that my mother got from Brooks Bros. in Nashville (1963), getting a cash refund, that I later spend on horse races and gambling........I became a "clothes horse" out of Rebellion, I think.........

FIVE DIFFERENT 'ME'S' .....PRODUCTS OF 'AI', OF COURSE..... DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE....THESE ARE ALL FABRICATED WITHIN A COMPUTER.....

 

DYED HAIR ERA......FROM AGE TEN UNTIL AGE 25.....NOT TO MENTION ALL THOSE 'COLORED' CONTACT LENS......

I returned from a summer in Fayetteville, Tennessee, where I had dressed as a Choctaw Indian with bleached platinum hair for 'Indian Dancing' around bonfires......Returning 'home', my mother was 'just over this'.....and, immediately, ordered me to 'get in the car', then ordering me to the Rexall Drug Store to get some hairdye to restore my 'normal' hair color......Pissed off at being 'ordered around'....I was 12, after all....I purchased 'Black Rage', returned to our house and dyed my hair 'jet black'.......as shown in this photo......the next day, I was 'ordered' to Wildma's Beauty Shoppe, to have my 'natural color' restored.....after all this processing, my hair 'came out'......Green! A few days later, I watched a late 1940's movie on 'the tv'......'The Boy With The Green Hair'....and felt that, now, I was....again....making a 'Statement'...which was, after all, my original intention.......'Why don't you want to look like 'other boys?', Mother asked.....My reply....I remember...."Why do you dye YOUR hair to match the color of your horse's......'Chestnut Brown'?" The next year...I was a 'redhead'.....Hey!...it 'worked' for Lucille Ball!......

THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT.......

My pencils and pens only draw vagaries, lifting, only to await the next wave of expression...I've yet to draw any conclusions....and have only witnessed them in theory......finite conclusions are generally high, fortified walls to open thinking......like consensual conclusions that the world was flat were impedimental to what was thought to be a search for succinct Truth and Reality......like wearing blinders and blind men's spectacles to explore the Cosmos, while simultaneously having decided what is being sought.....Yet, I place a period at the end of a sentence!

SIGNS

 

Young, and unconscious of repressed emotions,
certain cells of comics may stick in one's memory.
It seems so obvious what they mean.....later..
Emerging consiousness is denied to so many,
nevertheless, who play out their lives with
little comprehension of their real identity..
like masked figures relating to other masked figures...
Few really want to see the secret identities,
trapped in the shadows of longing and desperation,

as they assume the socially-appropriate roles of Adulthood.....

xmas 2007

at leonora's
with a blue paper
crown......looking
rather mad....

I SOMETIMES WONDERED, DURING MY TWENTIES........ 'HOW MY LIFE WOULD BE DIFFERENT, HAD MY IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER NOT DIED IN INFANCY'

 

                                    AND MADE THIS PHOTOGRAPH FOR A COLLEGE ART CLASS PROJECT, 

HOMO SAPIENS INVADE AND APPROPRIATE TERRITORIES THAT OTHER CREATURES HAVE DWELT IN FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS......BUT.....

 ONCE THESE CREATURES DO ANYTHING TO OBSTRUCT HUMANS ......THEY ARE ELIMINATED BY EXTERMINATION...... MANKIND USUALLY DESTROYS BOTH COMPETITION AND 'OTHERNESS'....UNLESS, OF COURSE  'IT' IS A FLUFFY, COMPLIANT 'PET',  SUCH AS A LAPDOG OR FLUFFY KITTY OR CAGED CREATURE, KEPT FOR HUMAN AMUSEMENT....

A MEMORY OF THE TRAGIC EVENT OF JULY 29, 2019..........AND A TOTALLY IGNORED EXAMPLE OF CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE

Moments ago, I "felt a disturbance in the 'force'", and walked to the street to see a firetruck, ambulance, police vehicle and half a dozen paramedics at my long-time neighbor and friend, Evelyn Fortier's home. Minutes later, Evelyn was being 'hauled' from her house, hands clasped in anxious prayer, as her old, blind dog barked behind the front door. Evelyn was being 'handled' as though she were a bag of garbage and a couple of young Emergency Medics were commenting that that old dog ought to be put to sleep!........No one would answer my questions or allow me to console my neighbor, who was terrified by all this impersonality. She lifted her hand, as if to beckon me to hold it, but attendants placed her hand back upon her chest and shut the ambulance's door.........I was still trembling, half an hour later....... I was thinking that Evelyn would die that night.........

Evelyn, after her 'fall' from the stretcher, when one of the guys that were holding the stretcher dropped Evelyn... to answer his ringing mobile phone, died....hours later, after having a concussion when her skull was cracked open by her fall to the concrete driveway of her home........ I noticed, recently, that her old run-down home had been lifelessly gussied up (sterilized) and was for sale....again...and her beloved arthritic dog had been euthanized, since it was deemed "unwanted and too old to adapt to a new home." .https://www.estately.com/.../1151-briarcliff-road-ne...

It has been 40 years since Petroushka, at 16, took her last breath in my arms.............

 

I still have her bones, wrapped in an old silk scarf, in an Archibald Knox casket of brass and copper....and the striped cotton  chaise lounge pillow cover......

the End of Atonement.......retrospections of what we wanted to do, what we did, and did not......and the gift of corrective words

Back to the keyboard, today, yet again......inspired by two 'surface-dissimilar', half century apart influences..or congruencies......Patrick Dennis's LITTLE ME (1958) and Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT (2007)...and the recent announcement of Christopher Nolan's DUNKIRK......After my aborted and discarded 'true life adventure' outline for a novel that depicted the truth behind the fiction, I've reverted to the previously discarded attempt at the illustrated fiction behind the truth....an even more daunting task.....realizing that both were plausible impossibilities.....So, I am also abandoning my rather obsessively punctilious requirement of seamless rhetoric and logical point of view, grammatical correctness and relative linearity......and, most importantly, the 'problem' that i have with....well......even in this paragraph.....left naked and 'uncorrected'.......not seeking either happy endings, gentle remonstrances, intellectual appeasements or the satisfactions of assumptive understanding......as difficult as it is to leave the in-distinctiveness of the wrong parts of speech, deliberate misspellings and neologisms.....all of which have already surfaced in these few words... THE GRAND CATARACT......the ocean of words, unhampered by the architecture of confinement... and read, only in the writing.....(and, the last six words are a complete dissimulation).......(typing....'the relativity of perspective'....)

Vernon Desmond Gross' Mokume-Gane Goblets

I met Vernon, who, incidentally, made the monumental Budweiser horses sculpture that looms above their factory, fashioned a pair of delicately wrought, hammered silver drinking vessels, with mokume-gane .....A friend of mine had a big crush on Vernon and thought the way to his heart would be to buy his art......but, as she could not afford any of his works, she called me to ask if I would purchase something! So, now i have these.....but neither of us got laid!

STUMBLING IN THE DARK.....

 I dreamt, last night, that I was in an incense-smoke filled room....filled with 'burners' with bronze dragons atop them....From childhood 'fairy tails' about fire-breathing dragons, I suppose, these images inundated my dreamscape....Awakening, I left my bed, half-sleeping, and decided to floss my teeth to remove a chunk of black walnut that was wedged in the open space, between a pair of back molars, awaiting a dental implant, and ventured by the light of the moon through a window, falling over a rolled-up oriental rug, stumbling into the harpsichord, from which fell a heavy Chinese censer with a dragon atop its lid.....some kind of synchronicity, happenstance and coincidence conjured abstract considerations of Cosmic forces at play with my imagination....then, turning a lamp 'on'....the room was just a room, with blue, powdered incense spilling onto the sound board.....Sneezing from having inhaled some of the blue crystalline powder, I glanced at the carved stone fire-breathing dragon dagger, mounted above a bathroom door, thinking....."i wonder what others, that ...as children....who were read Cinderella and The Prince and The Pauper as they drifted into slumber, their arms wrapped around a big, pink stuffed bear.....dream about"

RESTORING 'AUNT LILLIAN', MY GRANDMOTHER'S OLDER SISTER, FROM A FADED, TATTERED OLD PHOTOGRAPH LEFT IN MY GRANDMOTHER'S ANTIQUE, STRAPPED TRAVEL TRUNK....

an hour of work, cleaning up this old, very Victorian, funereal postcard photo of Great Aunt Lillian Cook......As she aged, she became much more beautiful and more sophisticated than her 4 sisters.......

EVERYONE SEEMS TO NEED TO GET "IN".......

It was uplifting to discover, today....that I would still be admitted to my College........However, I noticed that it NOW costs about $71,000/YR to play and live in the Academic arena......A friend and contemporary of mine, who is 'out of work', has two 'children' there now.....always begging for 'some spending money', clothing, vacations to Europe and 'summer sailing' trips....; and, had to 'borrow' $160,000....to support his two 'kids'...who are now 'begging' for new vehicles.....,ashamed to be seen in their 'old cars'....(or 'last year's' mobile phones).....Get a Life, 'kids'!.....and 'kick those freeloading kids out of the comfy nest of irresponsibility........ I can barely 'imagine' shelling out $71K to take creative writing, painting and drawing, ancient philosophy and Latin Poetry of Ovid courses....then, as I did, get a job selling clothes at a department store.....,,or 'waiting tables', bartending or.....worse scenario....working on a garbage truck, dumping trash into a compactor....

Blake and Francis - Swimming Home to some insipid "Polish" pop song

from the Films On DVD "stack"....BROTHERS OF THE HEAD, DEAD RINGERS and TWIN FALLS IDAHO......a film festival of movies about co-joined twins......just finished TWIN FALLS IDAHO.......written, directed and with music written by twins, Michael and Mark Polish, and co-starring Michele Hicks (wife of Jonny Lee Miller).....in whom I've developed an emotional bond. I was born with an identical twin that died in infancy, and this may be the source of my interest in twins, as I have had many friends who were also twins.....Two of my great-uncles were identical twins as were two of my paternal aunts and five pairs of close neighbors, as a child......All of us want to be "connected" to someone and a great fear is the inevitability of separation and loss:

I HAVE THE TOY BUNNY, STILL.....BUT....NOT....THE OBJECT OF MY FIRST 'REAL' AFFECTIONS.......

 

my first roommate, during my senior year of College.......whom I became fixated on.    the 'feelings' were, at that time, mutual........but, temporary...like most early infatuations...  We exchanged long letters, poetry and dream revelations for a year after being separated by a couple of thousand miles.......My letters were returned, bound lovingly with margin notes....in the romantic tradition of Keats, Byron and Shelley.....and a request that 'this must end!'.......alas.....   I do have the stuffed bunny...its ears in a knot....six decades hence..........

Reading the bound blackbook that I sent 'Charles' in 1968....the hundred pages, written on the IBM Selectric, the pages began to fall from the volume...pages that had been scotch-taped over the more revealing words, written before....now 'beneath'.....a representation of conscious repression.....with fading ink on decomposing paper......I remembered neither of the 'storylines'. However, isn't this the definition of 'repression'? .......forgetting, then forgetting you've forgotten? The brittle yellow tape, having released the 'underneath' from the ablative conjuring, masking the shame of confessional exploratory....

AS TIME GOES ON.........I JUST VIEWED THIS PHOTOGRAPH OF CHARLES, TAKEN YESTERDAY, AUG. 17, 2025........IN A HOSPITAL BED....TEMPERATURE @ 104F.....AT RISK OF DEATH FROM A URINARY TRACT INFECTION........I WOULD NOT HAVE RECOGNIZED 'THIS PERSON'!    

OFTEN, IT TAKES A LESS-TRAVELED PATH TO GAIN A REALISTIC PERSPECTIVE........

YET, ONE CAN ALWAYS FOLLOW THE WORN TRACKS OF THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE,  IF THE IMPENETRABLE JUNGLE OF LIFE SEEMS FAR TOO INACCESSIBLE OR CHALLENGING......ALTHOUGH....THIS WILL NOT LIKELY LEAD ONE TO THEIR OWN 'PERSONAL' DESTINY, BUT TO ONE OR ANOTHER DESTINATION, SHARED BY PREVIOUS PATHFINDERS AND EXPLORERS....