Saturday, July 30, 2022

Along a Garden Path

 "I built horse barns the past two years"- is what I tell people. But really I was a helper driver carpenter on a horse barn building crew. I used to emphasize that they were Amish, and I had all these takes and experiences to share about the Amish. Not as much anymore. Year-and-change with the barn builders, and about four months with an Amish hardscaping crew. Hardscape is digging out footers and gravel drainage bases for paver patios, and applying stone veneer to CMU blocks, and building with CMU and stone stacking walls and fireplaces and that sort of thing. Mixing mortar, lots of digging, some demolition and finish work on outdoor kitchens and stuff like that. Those four months I count as six months, there's hardly time in my life to review and count the exact amount of time I was with them, so I'll call that a half year, and the carpentry I'll count as two.

Going to grad school at UDEL soon here. Delaware and I have no relationship; except I have been three times to graduate critiques in the UDEL arts building. Seems like a cool little school with a good intuitive vibe. 

I don't have further thoughts on the school that are valid here yet. They did say no outside employment, so I quit my job and now I'm just taking side work. I built some nice stairs for a good budget, and I dug a French drain for a high budget. Now I'm working on a garden path in a neighboring town and the budget is high. I subcontracted my best friend Riley to come up from Baltimore to help out; who's been spending his time bartending and making art and constantly networking- he's a scene kid. So it's a lot of work, and I'm trying to get a portfolio out of it kind of- (I mean, really the homeowner has a nice garden and the vision that appears to me happens to be a very beautiful project- even though it might be considered overkill).


Anyway, so Riley hasn't been doing manual labor and I'm trying to help him out with some money. He gets out of his truck from his drive up from Baltimore and announces that he just got his test back for Lyme's disease and lets the silence hang. I say, "Oh, jeeze, what is it?" and he says, "Positive". I say "Man, I'm sorry to hear that." Then I don't remember just how we got back around to the topic of digging out this path, but I described the project to him and we started cutting a flat plane out of the burm. He was alright at clearing the dirt; we were both fresh to the job and eager. The first day he put in six hours which we counted as eight because of his waiting for me to get to the jobsite (I was waiting on the contractor too, by running errands gathering supplies for the project, but whatever, I am expecting a bigger payout anyway, so I comped Riley for waiting around), Three hours the next day; he spent most of the day on the phone mitigating beef in his circles, and five hours the final day. His ethic really slacked off after the first day. It happens. He went home after three days and I gave him $400. 

I've worked myself to fatigue on this job too. We ran into a bunch of rocks in the hillside and either have to dig them out or break them apart with a sledgehammer. It's a railroad tie retaining wall along a hill to make for a garden pathway where the customer can service her garden while not climbing akimbo hillside. I'm building steps and a recessed walkway (below the level of the railroad ties, to accommodate for decorative stone. It's getting close but recently I've been returning home to collapse on the couch for a necessary nap. It happens on these big projects. How much can a single person tackle- that's the idea of designing a project. You vs. the project. A will-to-power kind of thing. Or the participation in the Power Process. It's a natural thing, as far back as I can remember, before I knew the terms, a challenge. blah blah. 



So this is what I have to deal with and wrap up soon here. Should go fine. I will staple those verticals into the hill with rebar, no deadmen to speak of but the wall has those LVL braces front and back and there's a good drainage system behind it, so the idea is that it won't need to do much retaining- plus half of that hillside is buried boulders. Anyways, the company that I'm subcontracted under is happy and thinks I'm going plenty overboard and is happy I'm working for him. As evidenced by my blogging, my mind is approaching a better state. I put in about seven hours of work a day in this fatigued state- once I get going it's not so bad, and I'm actually working the whole time. That's a huge improvement from the hardscaping job where I had little say in my tasks, often felt useless and I was.. I don't know, it was demoralizing and I lost a lot of respect for them. 

My guilt has to do with how I treated Riley. I got to step into the lead role, which rhymes with what I'll be doing in UDEL- teaching the undergraduates, and I got to see what juggling cats was like a bit. Compounded by the fact (idea) that he's my friend, I have to pay him well and accommodate his personal life. Well, my idea was to let him participate in the power process a bit; because that's what I needed so badly from my last job; agency, but when you're green you're green; and Riley was a green worker. It went alright at first, but at some point, when he asked for something to do I gave him a big trench to dig out, and he instead grabbed a push broom to brush out a big boulder to see how large it was before he got to digging. He set to cleaning off the rock with a push broom. It's very frustrating to interrupt someone's logic while also paying them to do work they're obfuscating. He was tired. I kind of invited him to leave. This will have to be something I get better at. 

I'm going to help the company owner who subcontracted me for this job today soon with moving his home from an apartment to a house outside of town. He's got a wife and a baby and a dog and is a good guy who I'm learning lots from and I'm very paranoid about the durability of landscaping projects, so I do a lot of research and my expanding knowledge base has proven valuable to him; so we are good friends now, at least symbiotic friends. 


That's it for now, My fiance is annoying me saying stuff like do you want to get a dalmatian. More dogs. I do not. Elsewise things there are good. She was watching me type so I jokingly wrote a dig. 


Saturday, June 18, 2022

One Year since my last post

 I visited this site yesterday and noticed it had been a year. Well, I haven't stopped thinking about what I'm goin to write next. Gotta post later. It's almost midnight!

Friday, June 18, 2021

February through June.

I thought I'd make money in stocks and extra money by working construction. Well, I lost about three grand in stocks, one in particular called ENG. I sold after six long months. I vow to cut losses sooner next time, lesson learned. Heather quit a couple jobs and fell short on money. I hadn't gotten any covid money from the government, and expenses were up all around with the dog and cars. I had to pay a lot on taxes too. I had to cover a lot, but I did. 


March, April, May, June; The barn builders needed me more and more, and I needed money, so I worked in the shop in addition to on the road. I learned a lot about the process of building barns. We ripped through four modulars, from setting the sills to shingling the roofs and hanging doors. I thought of these days as my nest egg, but with losses from the stocks it was really just treading water. Some days I'd lose more than I'd made, and my body was being destroyed by the construction work. It was a very defeating feeling. 


After work I'd take the Hugo the Dog out for a walk at County Park. If I was lucky, I'd get an hour or two to paint in the evening upon returning home, then bed time and repeat. 

Barn work became less optional because of the nature of a two-month long project, to which I had to drive the crew, and therefore work the day. Some art deadlines flew right by because I was so busy. For a short while the dates with Heather went away, as I was usually working weekends too, and trying to make art happen, ironically, but they started to trickle back in when we could. We'd find a good Tuesday or Thursday or whenever to walk to a bar restaurant and grab a meal out. 

Heather's precarious employment was worrisome, but alas, now she has positioned herself well in two stellar employment positions, and it seems clear she has a north star. 

The barn work gave me a lung infection because I didn't protect myself while doing demolition work on a rehab project we've been on for a few months. I breathed in old barn dust, insulation, mold and rat and bird shit. Most of the damage was done in one day, and you know, sometimes you roll up to a jobsite not knowing what the nature of the day's work is going to be; so that's how that happened. I tried to breathe strategically, but it got me anyway. After the demo, the work got progressively cleaner, and the project has turned out very nicely. I am getting used to the work, and I think I will keep the job for a year or two, until I can buy a house. 

My sketchbook submission is being worked on. Some things take so much time that it feels as though you can waste a little and that would be okay in the long run. But enough of a little makes a lot, and that's what I'm dong with this blog entry- procrastinating. But also, these entries do help orient me and allow me to clear my head. If I have enough of them I begin to get into topics that I care about crafting a thought out of. The topical stuff needs to spill out into the sketchbook today, and the thought-crafting will go on inside of the minds of the viewer. 

I'm not sure whether or not my artwork is wicked or evil or anything. It is very often in consideration while I make it, because my thoughts are dark as I learn more about the world. Of course, the love becomes deeper and precious too, but the (perceived) realities are harsh often, so the work is dark. Dickens said after writing Moby Dick; "I've written a wicked book, and I feel spotless as a lamb!"  

Political leaders are clearly devoid of any moral anchoring; and that yields them upwards. Criminals go upwards so long as the state (or other competition) doesn't catch up with them to put a lid on the competition securing their monopoly. Statement making is a way of ratting oneself out, or pledging allegiance to the status quo, and so many 'statements' are built right into the status quo, like legalize weed, and gay rights and black rights, trans rights and the oft used 'what's next?'; they're rolled and doled out so long as the structures that be are further reinforced, never challenged; but perhaps I'm taking some the work of radicals for granted; just so much radical work is hacky and dumb- like why do you need the approval of everyone to live your life? Or why do you advocate for others' rights beyond just personally being nice to them and representing them well in your speech? Then also the other cannot be communicated about, though it is so often tried; marginalized groups are so often used as pawns. The kicker is that there are so many jobs on the market right now. Everyone is hiring. Get out there people! Not to be insensitive to.... what... those who choose not to work? Or 'cannot'? When I worked dispatch for a tow truck company, I'd call brokers and they'd clearly be at home taking care of kids; it can be done. In a way I think then that if you don't work or whatever, if you get left behind, that's a part of the whole process of change. I really wish the marginalized would get going (and many and most have), because that's the game. We can't grow weaker, the microorganisms are coming for us, if nothing else. Leave people alone too, that's huge. Shop as local as possible and as little as possible too. Take sustainability seriously. So now I'm like a working class hipster, equality seeking skinhead libertarian nationalist, who tries to shop organic and buy secondhand, and give back, like Jesus, but I also don't fucking know. Great, lol. So what is one to do regarding making art? What is to be communicated, to whom, and how? 

Therefore withholding opinions has become a part of the credo; to fly under the radar, and to what extent that has to do with a lack of conviction is where the art resides maybe. Because I don't know whether it's a lack of conviction or an allegiance to a lack of conviction. I don't know how to move forward. The matrix of it like fascia holding the thing together, begins to become palpable, tangible/physical. All the while I paint serieses of non-statements which I can only hope communicate a vision of what the thing is; wicked, beautiful but wicked, and all on the table; to be won or lost. 




Lot's of free money out there- that's one last thing I have enjoyed saying recently; like it's a solution to my problems. It is so blanketing, the implication being that I have been severely scammed. And other's successes are unearned. 

I think the thing to do is keep this job, work it for a few years, get into a house, work work work, and paint; paint the whole time, and the network will work. Doesn't need to be New Yorker network or anything, just a network, and in my case with people I love and respect so much.

That should do it. Sketchbook due in July, Murals to come in July through October, Plein Air painting show in the hopper, and bringing me much monkey on my back energy, but in a good way. 


okay, godspeed. 

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Site optimization


 I'm working for a barn building company out here in Lancaster, the best company of the bunch. They're Amish. The Amish call themselves plain folk. I love their way of life, and they work very hard. I was concerned the first time I worked with them that I would not be able to sustain more than a few days at a time of the work, so I expressed some flakiness when I returned from building a pole barn. 

I shoveled snow with a man who does parking garage restoration. After the snow, I did some concrete chipping. I used a chipping gun and we were indoors working under a garage in a boiler room, my coworker and I. We worked around scaffolding and wore respirators, and goggles, and ear protection. It was even more difficult than the barn work, and I kept the schedule spotty by acting flaky with that boss too. 

Both companies like me and want to keep me on, despite my lack of experience. The barn builders put me in the office once a week to optimize their website and advertise across social platforms. I am glad to do this because it is a skill I could utilize for my own promotions, of the art I supposedly make. 

The paintings come so slow nowadays, because I'm painting from my head maybe, or maybe because I'm working all the time it feels like. I'm expanding my life and it feels like it every day. I split my time up and there's usually none left. When the light of the tunnel seems near, something pops up- often an unanticipated expense, and I become motivated to work for the company hourly rate. 

I lost money in the stock market, but it should go back up, and I should adjust my exposure. 

I meant for this post to be about some site optimization, to drop in some words that would generate flow into my website, but now I realize it would generate into the blog only, not lead to my website. I should put the site in the header of the blog. 

2019 taxes hit me hard because I worked five months full days on a 1099, which is supposed to be illegal but in Philadelphia if you're not running a scam, there's no way to make money. Lew Blum towing in Philly ran into trouble because they just started impounding cars that weren't illegally parked, to scam money out of people. Now, the city has reacted; tow companies must wait for a car to be ticketed before they can tow. The result is that tow companies call the cops, and the cops don't bother to come out. If cops do come out, of course their ticket means they get some revenue off the car themselves. Terrible city. Glad to be gone. 

I secured two mural walls in Lancaster, neither paid, but both pretty close to Heather and I's apartment. 

The snow which sat for two months mostly melted off today, and I have my study done for one of the walls, which came with super clear instructions from the business owner. It'll be an underwater scene; something I've prepared for for a while, but in loose terms. Time to make a tight-ish drawing I think. 

The other wall the owner just wants me to do something better than what's on there now, which is a freight train looking piece of graffiti. So I'll do something beautiful and rhythmic, which is good because I have a wall like that in Philly, and it'll be good to reinforce that look for my portfolio.   

Unpaid walls often lead to paid ones, and I like Lancaster too. It'll be good to have a little representation in this town, and if we stay in it, maybe I can begin to conquer it like my friend Shaun Thurston did Jacksonville, Florida. When I remarked; "boy Shaun's work is really what Jacksonville looks like isn't it?" some critical friends remarked "well, he kind of forced it on them", which, that's fair, but over time his work will hold, and theirs will be at the mercy of trends, so my allegiances go to Shaun, and the crew that speaks clearly with their art. 







Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Painting outdoors again!



 Our dog Hugo is settling in nicely. We have taken him to a puppy manners class once, and his next class is tomorrow night. 

Heather surprised me this Saturday with the perfect date proposal; that we go to a park where I paint outdoors while she runs with the dog. I felt like Nabokov, who was known to ride in the back seat of a station wagon while his wife drove. They were interested in America's varieties of butterflies and they would travel to see them. Nabokov in the back would work on his books. Hugo and Heather frolicking around, I got back into the swing of painting outdoors; something that is so enrapturing yet moot feeling while you're not in it- like meditation. I had fun and made a painting of a field of clumpy grasses on a sunny but cold winter day. 




The next day I went out too; this time just Hugo and I and it was a much more overcast day, and I sat an made another painting- this time of a similar field but with a foreground birdhouse as the subject, with an echoing birdhouse in the distance too. Indeed I was reminding myself of Andrew Wyeth a little with this composition, but I didn't let it bother me too much. 



The night of the second painting, I went out to the graveyard, since Hugo was displaying that he had plenty more energy, and I took my acrylic gouache paints along- a faster and cleaner medium- and made another painting- one of tombstones and trees and columns. I took that painting home but didn't like it very much. Maybe the pleinair thing had seen its use for me then. I got sick that night from the turpentine smell in the house, which still persists; and I put the paintings in a closet to try to have a better night tonight. 


Hugo is a good painting dog companion. Unwittingly I have been informally training him by taking him out to paint plein air. The first time he was entertained by Heather, the second time he split his time between entertaining himself looking for birds and annoying me a little by stepping in paint, and eating a little bit of it, then licking himself to get it off his tongue (I tried to keep him out of it, okay?), staining his white fur permanent rose; (what was I thinking painting an overcast day with that color anyway?). My palette that day was permanent rose, titanium white, yellow ochre, pthalo blue, and black- a very 'fast' palette. 

The third painting session in the graveyard went well with the acrylic paints, even though I didn't like the painting. 


Today I worked for the Amish, helping the barn builders with updating their website. After work, I came home and knew I had to get a painting done lest I lose the streak.  I also feel hot to work on my website after I optimize and hook up the Amish one all day. So I worked on my site a little, then Hugo made it clear he needed to run, so I took the failed acrylic painting back to the graveyard this time with oil paints, and did another failed attempt. Tonight was much cloudier and the sky was orange due to city lights. the painting flipped from a cold scheme to a warm, and my blast over only half covered the surface resulting in a half cold half warm monstrosity. The thing I am writing on about though is that Hugo was a pretty good dog except he started DIGGING in the graveyard at night when I was painting. He was close, so I could stop him, and we were at least on a trail instead of atop a gravesite, but Jesus Pete!


The good thing is when he wasn't digging, he would sit neatly next to me and wait, then, bored, would spring back into a full run out and away in a big exploratory circle, before coming back to my side to sit by me again. "Why are we sitting quiet?" he seemed to wonder, then I think he totally got it- "we're hunting!"

Saturday, January 2, 2021

We Got A dog and it seems like we’re living Seven times faster.

 Been a while. 


Heather and I moved out to Lancaster, PA, which is out in the country kind of. It’s an old town, about as old as Philadelphia, and that it did not take off like philly did makes it a bastion kind of. IDK, I’m a little conflicted about how we’re at once out in the country, yet our front door, street level apartment is in kind of a ghetto. It’s a little hoody because of the broken windows and trash everywhere. There’s chicken bones around and not much greenery. 


Heather and I bought a dog, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 


I did some brick pointing work in Philly and finished a mural I’d been working on for Jon, and also some drywall work, and regrettably I also did some logistics work doing phone organizing for dispatching tow trucks. That was a handful of long days and nights; no sleep basically, and I have yet to get paid for it.


She quit her job to come out here. I weened off of my freelance clients with a few thousand in savings. We grocery shopped and nestled in. Her job stopped all at once when one morning she learned that her roommate had worked with someone that had tested positive for COVID-19, so she packed a quick bag and left her classroom of seven year olds, and came out to live at the apartment I’d arranged for us both. I proposed to her on a boardwalk in a swampy section of a park in Cape Cod probably two weeks prior. The rings were made by one of our mutual friends out in Texas who was a silversmith. Unemployed, we developed a regimen of cleaning and fixing up the new place. 


A couple months in to this routine and we ended up getting a dog, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 


I went on Craigslist and found some job leads. I almost had one doing construction but my schedule with the moving was still a little erratic. We bought Heather a car, which was a little Honda Fit bursting with personality. I insured it in my name, and still feel a little underleveraged as a result. Heather went the more professional route and went on indeed.com, where she found a job talking care of elderly Mennonites with Alzheimer’s and dementia in an assisted living home. I’m very very very proud of her for seeking out this work. She is in the middle of some preliminary medical tests (for TB, immunizations, etc.) to clear for the job she will begin on the 7th of this month. 


I found a job on craigslist titled ‘Driver/Carpenter needed’, which turned out to be an Amish barn building company. Groffdale Barns it was called. I interviewed in person with Moses and Jake, a father and son, and filled out a resume form by hand in their office. I’d had a dream of this interview about a few days before it happened, and my vision was not far off, and tied in with the office style of my uncle’s, who owned and managed a lumber yard. I got a call a few days later, (the Amish have been really proactive I’ve found, because there is a lot of work to be done, and they can use the help they can get), and agreed to meet them at 4am to drive a crew down to Virginia. We finished the construction of a pole barn that had been started the prior weekend. I drove the large truck towing a forty foot trailer loaded with barn siding. I had no qualifications, but the barn company instilled a ton of trust in me anyways. I want to go back to doing it. It was very intense and I assert that I was difficult to live with upon my return from the two day trip; whose itinerary was a strict sun up to sun down work arrangement- very fun. we finished the barn and what I think I learned was that there’s no need for pleases and thank you’s on the job site, just shout the measurements you need, your partner will cut them and hand them to you, and just nail it in and on to the next and so on. Lunches and dinners with the Amish were quiet. Perhaps it was me, guiding the quietness, but I thought this silence was an interesting part of the work, and I’ve always subscribed to the say less philosophy. So I came home a little off I suppose. 


I asked for more time off than on with the Amish, and they called me just to drive them around after that, which was good. I stayed on Craigslist a little and found a snow shoveling job for $27 and hour, and I jumped at it. My hours were 12am to 4pm next day. I weaseled my way in with the boss, Fred, and hopped job sites with him. His wife does the billing and he likes to hunt. I noticed a bloodhound dog on his phone screen, and we bonded over the ownership of dogs. 


Heather and I somewhere in the enlightened stupor of unemployment got really involved in looking for a dog companion. We filled out (mostly Heather did) a bunch of applications to shelters fo specific rescue dogs, but the shelters all had long waits, or they didn’t get back to us at all, and or they wanted to call our landlords and get references to back us up that we were good people, incomes, socials, everything. Are there dogs that need homes or what? Is this some boutique process? Anyway, contrast this to when we actually were ready to pull the trigger, and we began looking up puppy sellers. Heather found a batch of German Shorthair Pointers and zombielike one morning (that night I had a dream of not being ready, so when I woke up I thought to say no, but couldn’t bring up the words, so in the morning I just took up an attitude like ‘we shall see’), we went and bought a dog. There were two left and we got the one who was a thinker. Little philosopher pup. He was a almost four months old, so we got a $400 discount, making his total about $900 out of $1300. He’s a good guy. He came with the name Gus, and immediately (I was terrified) I tried to alert Heather with the amount of exercise these GSPs need. We took him straight to a park!


Gus became Hugo within a couple days. We changed his name to Hugo, which is the name of my late grandfather, my mom’s mom’s second husband. 


My grandpa Hugo was a Dutch man, master craftsman, master model train artist. 


The new dog is our wonder child. He’s changed our lives so much, in that we have more purpose and we go to all these different parks and trails all the time now. He’s our excuse to explore and I think my studio work is in the beginning stages of responding to the data I’m being exposed to through our outings. 


That might be about it. We’re working on him, and working on our selves, and our relationship. We went to Florida and back this Christmas. Heather got to meet my family including Donna and Ricky, Pam, Cami, Joshua, mom, dad, and Grammy. Grammy expressed that it might be her last Christmas, and I knew I wasn’t going to find another partner like Heather, and that this would really be it, so we went down. My car is now in poor shape, and we spent some money on hotels in order to do some nice trails in Georgia and Virginia on the way back up. 


I got a few phone calls down in Florida. One from the Amish wanting me to drive for their lawn care business three days a week- they said I didn’t even have to work, just drive. I think I want to do this becasue the Amish work on such beautiful properties, and my dilemma is that I don’t pleinair paint when I’m out on those types of scenes. Another was from Fred about payment. I helped Fred a couple more times on a Parking garage which he’s in the business of restoring. My complex that I have no business being on some of these work sites is fading. Entry level workers who aren’t wastiods are hard to come by. Fred wants me part time, and so do the Amish landscapers. The barn builders said they would take me anytime because they were thrilled with my work with them too. I’m just trying to find that balance where I can work without damaging my body so I can paint and live a long painting life. Secretly I think there’s always time, and painting time is always time stolen. So I’m trying to figure out which job to get in with, and if I can balance any; plus the new dog means we’ll either have to do daycare or figure something out for separation anxiety, or I don’t know, because Heather will soon start a pretty full time thing. All in all I’m happy, and I’m glad I took the steps I did in my life, to be comfortable with making the decisions that fulfill me.


My thinking on my painting is that all of my half-baked stuff needs to come to a more full realization than the made-for-market stuff I’ve pumped out in the past year or so. The day job makes it so that I can live while I work on these to their fullest. The fact is I didn’t bridge the gap yet, the gap I imagined crossable with a good portfolio, the door to a gallery representation where I just paint and be sold. I’m chronically at step one, albeit with a small collector base which I don’t wish to mobilize too often. 


I’m working on some pain staking acrylic compositions on panel from pencil drawings that are finding their way towards completion. I hate blending, so my goal is to work them until there is no choice but to either blend, or to which their hard edges subdivide in their half tones yielding a soft edge, real or perceived. Oil glazing in a final stage would be ideal, as would a very flat and graphic painting. Before the goop squad of oil painters, there was a thin technique that was so professional- just the image. 



I’ve got a bunch of collages in the works, though I largely ignore them because they were so much work just to get them where they are- and they’re unmarketable and there’s hundreds of them. 


My digital paintings have some hope, and the actually get done. Knowing how to finish paintings is a blessing, but knowing you can postpone a finish in exchange for the hope of transcendence is alluring too. Anyway, I feel that I still need to get over the unique artist stuff so I can make responsible paintings that say something, like those of Thomas Hart Benton, or all those unnamed outdoors art illustrators that do the paintings of fish underwater, or pointing dogs, or bucks. 


So that’s the project at hand, and we’re working towards it. 


Ps, I want to write a book about my art education. I would like to draw from Maggie Nelson’s argonauts format, along with some Eric Hoffer Working and Thinking, some Ham on Rye I suppose, and some Fun Home/ graphic novel stuff. Lots to chew on. My earliest biggest influence is still Jim Woodring. 

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Heather

 Heather I choose to be my life partner for as long as I can foresee. Nothing much to say on that. 


I’ve been hiding my tendency toward conservatism, treating what exposures I allowed myself to these ideas as merely treats along the side of the narrow path of article after book after lecture of whatever is being sold on the left. My thoughts summarized are that the dialogues on the left move faster than the rate of processing and dissemination, such that to enter their rank is like entering a pyramid scheme of a bogus product, and the only way to climb up is though hooking underlings into disseminating your curated regurgitations. Clout is gained without primary texts or exchange of ideas, rather the left project the darknesses within onto others in pseudo backpack rap battles, where to cleverly twist a riddle is enough to move on. If they lose, they move on, no recourse. That’s where I stand on that, but I still read mostly leftist stuff, to continue to investigate; ‘maybe it just hasn’t clicked yet, I think over time’, but most claims  apart from stuff like the history of workers movements as documented by Howard Zinn don’t hit home, and remain unsubstantiated: and even then, what’s happened in my lifetime in regards to labor movements, (or corporate endorsed revolutions- an if it goes slippery it can be blamed on nazis in the midsts, or whatever, and the solution always seems to be more government control), contextualizes the Zinn, the spin. What’s happening to the American politic, if you permit yourself to see falsities like the electoral processes, and the mock-attempted grilling of for example the new Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on issues irrelevant to her prospective job, including asking her whether she has sexually assaulted anyone, or been assaulted herself; very unprofessional, and yet, it flies, you might alleviate yourself from further entanglement, and therefrom entanglement altogether (I hope). 


Okay enough vitriol; it might have been a mistake enrolling in a political illustration class with Steve Brodner a few years ago. I thought this would be a place of nuance, but how wrong I was. It was 2017 and all that was being turned in were trump-pig caricatures, and our zoom meetings became anti-trump sessions. I tried to keep current and considered ‘perhaps i should feign outrage as my classmates’. But never could. I drifted further from the left, and now I’m one of those 30 year old chumps who watches politics like sports. Bummer. 


Studio life is going well, somewhat. I worked a lot over the last few months, thinking I was building. A nest egg. Yet, some life expenses pressed into my accounts; girlfriend I will mention because I currently commute an hour and a half to see her. My rent is $600 a month. I bought a used car a few months back when My grandmother’s old Oldsmobile shit the bed. I joked I wanted a Subaru to get laid with, knowing full well I also intentioned to hopefully settle as well. See, I moved to the country and got into the Youtuber Ryan Dawson, who’s among other things anti-left and anti-war and anti-neo-conservative. So through him I was turned onto Ted K, the unabomber, and thankfully instead of being recommended any documentary or spun story on him, I printed out a copy of his manifesto, which succinctly outlines the strategies, motivations, and hippocracy of the left, further sobering me of this poison. From there I felt also remedied of what had disrupted my relationship with my self and somewhat riddled my relationships. 

It’s very grounding. 

This is not to say that this was the only thing keeping me from a Healthy relationship. Truly, the dating scene is replete with ill-willed stock. My hope with Heather is to nourish her true beauty and absolve her from the tribulations of a likewise poisoned dating scene. She’s too good for that and I want her to thrive thrive thrive. She shows the right instincts- to help others, and to live away from the city. Her stance early on about children was to not have them, but when I showed my cards that I’d turned that page and would have them in time (I’d one week prior emailed an old classmate of mine to tell her I was still in for the promise of siring her kids, to which she replied amicably, though now she was happier as a lesbian; even better, I thought; I’d just re-read some of The Argonauts), she likewise showed her hand that yes she also wanted them. She wants mine. I want hers. I found a true friend in Heather; and amalgam of former lovers, friends, family, she is my world truly, and the experience of falling is one I savor and cherish.  


So we are moving to Lancaster. So far away from the city, and far enough away from her family as to facilitate the fall, to celebrate the fall. I threw money at an apartment, and I’ll move there first, then she’ll follow in a month or two. I’ve met her family and she’ll meet mine in short time. I will propose to her soon. 


So that’s where I’m at. 


Oh yeah, studio life! I’m painting much closer to the heart now. I painted cover paintings of Thomas Chambers compositions and two of those from Foster Cadell, and then made a dozen and a half small acrylic-gouache paintings of photo-based landscapes on panel. I sold three of these at an art yard sale, and am having a few others professionally framed for $30 apiece, from where they will go to an upscale farmer’s style marketplace near West Chester for the holiday season. This placement affords me the peace of mind to embark on more personal work, and now my day-job stuff is relaxing a bit as we approach our deadline of their (the Mezzanotte family’s) daughter’s wedding date. 


I want to complete the paintings I’ve started now for a show in American Mortals Hair salon in Philadelphia, by December. The world I’m building is one of funky landscapes haunted by graffiti, and otherwise unrequited shapes. I guess another way to put it is this; a return to nature having tried to fit my square-peg-self into a round hole template. The dissonance upon interfacing with that which only takes; speaking of technology and the culture it has spawned. Perhaps then this work is that of healing.

I live in a guy’s house now. He’s the lover of a woman who is cheating on her spouse. It’s a strange house where the parts disparately grasp at wholeness without attainment. Set on a trapezoidal lot, it is comprised of additive decks, sunrooms, patios, and the like. I stay in my room and have not unpacked my boxes since my three months of living here. I cook very little as to not over use the kitchen. 

Heather too lives in an intermediary place. She lives in the basement of her employers, albeit a nice-i-fied basement- one that’s built to resemble a livable space for passive income for the homeowners. Like a serf, she takes care of their kids for money, which she dutifully pays back to the employers to the tune of $1000 per month. She teaches a classroom of five kids- a’la pod learning, post COVID-19. 


So the Lancaster apartment for both of us represents a celebration of our love and a step away from our employments. We might keep our jobs, and thus commute, but hopefully also we will, in time, optimize even our work closer to our living spot. Better food, better living conditions, and an exploration of our love and symbiosis. Rent will be $1200 divided between the two of us. Electric and gas will go up, and Internet, while food will likely go down. Incomes I hope will trend sideways then up. Can’t wait.