holiday driving....

It's a regular winter wonderland out there this morning. I think the top hand is going 2 hour delay for work today. Which reminds me of my drive home from colorado on sunday... It was cold cold cold (about 10 degrees), and it had snowed about 6 inches of powder the morning I left. The streets were fine though thanks to the competent road crews. I'm headed out and doing fine. However, the windshield got pretty gross from the sand and general road gunk. I hit the wiper fluid and nothing. The wipers are going just fine, but no cleaning fluid is coming out. So I pulled over and cleaned up with snow. Then after just a brief bit of course I had to do that again. Stop # 3 or 4 I went into an auto parts place and got some more fluid. Then when I checked it, the reservoir is full. OH HELL, the thing is just broken. Off I go again and sure enough I'm pulling over every little bit with my windshield completely occluded. I stopped at a rest stop and a trucker helped me, or I should say tried to help me. We determined that everything was hooked up right and like that, just not working. The final diagnosis was, this sucks. So I thought, "what would McGivor do?" I got a sock out and soaked it with the washer fluid and put it on my windshield wiper. I was pretty proud of this solution, which worked for about 15 minutes, then froze, or dried out, or whatever, stopped working.
So next stop 7-11. I bought a bottle of 409. I practiced in the parking lot, driving and holding my left hand out the window squirting the windshield. Much harder than it sounds especially going 60 mph. That sort of worked enough to clear a 3 inch square of vision. As it turns out 409 is kind of greasy and didn't seem to be working that great. Another stop and I dumped the 409 and filled the bottle with the windshield cleaner. I got pretty good at all this and it included leaving the wipers going on intermittent. Every so often my hand holding the spray bottle would get hit with the wiper and got all scraped up. Remember it's cold as hell out and I'm getting washer fluid all over everywhere. So now I'm bleeding all over the place so I put my scraped up finger in my mouth, eeeuuu. Oh yeah, nothing like the taste of antifreeze. That can kill a dog right? There are dogs that weigh more than I do. I couldn't decide whether I should go to a dr or a veterinarian if I started to show signs of eminent death. I stopped again. Had to wash my hand and guzzle a ton of water to dilute the antifreeze in my system. Now I'm certain that this is plenty of evidence to support the long held theory held by many in my family, that I'm an incompetent nincompoop. I went back to the car and for some reason tried the washers again and eureka, they worked. The sun came out and the mist coming off my tires reflected little rainbows. From my vantage point, there were all kinds of colors coming off the back of the chevy. I knew I was going to make it home.


This is a raven out in my front yard probably saying "just because you made it home and didn't have to go to a veterinarian, doesn't mean you aren't an incompetent nincompoop...."

a loose screw

Yesterday morning I was checking out Kieth LoBue's holiday sale page and saw that he was making post earrings out of phillips head screws. These are post earrings with either surgical steel or sterling silver. I don't do that well with posts in the first place and there was no way to specify which you wanted and I'm wildly allergic to the surgical steel. So, I'm thinking, I wonder if I could come up with a french wire version. I found some old screws in the stash of hardware and started to hack away at one. 2 saw blades and no progress later.... OK, gotta hit it with heat. The creme brule torch does the trick.Then how to hang it with wire so that the thing doesn't fall apart . I made the screw into a rivet of sorts And on and on, you get the idea. Next thing you know, hours have passed, I'm still in my jammies but I do have an earring. The piece has some technical and aesthetic issues, but I did make a wire version never the less. The point is, and really this is the point, doing stuff like this keeps a person in the moment now doesn't it? This is perhaps what keeps most of us making "art" really.

just another day at the office

I often find myself in rural parts during the course of my work day. .. One day I went to see a patient in the middle of nowhere as usual. She is typically in her bedroom hanging out and the deal is, knock and go in. To get to her room I have to cross through a dark living room. I went in and had a good session with the patient. At the end I crossed again through the dark living room and almost stepped on something. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dark and then I saw it... what the hell? sure enough, right there, bigger than Dallas Texas, in the middle of the livingroom floor, was a dead bunny. I looked closer and could see it had been shot in the head and there was a little rivulet of bunny blood coming from it's little head wound. I've seen enough CSI episodes to know that it hadn't been dead long. I didn't linger but went to the kitchen and marked down my next appointment on their calendar. On my way back through the bunny crime scene also known as "the living room" the patient's daughter was there and began to ask me about the patient's progress etc and like that. So now just imagine, there we are having a rather normal conversation while standing next to the dead bunny. Now I wasn't about to mention the bunny but it was all I could do to keep myself focused on the conversation given the fact that one false move and someone was going to step on the dead bunny, or at least in the little pool of blood. ah jeez. I realize that the photo above is a cow. But not only could I not mention the bunny, I couldn't be snappin a picture of either, now could I ???

tin foil

There's a bit in the Maira Kalman book, THE PRINCIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY, about her demented aunt who tried to pay for a sandwich (I think...) with packets of sweet and low. Interestingly enough this is a common form of currency amongst the nursing home "memory unit" crowd. Which led me to start thinking about how tin foil is a common item used by psychotic people to defend themselves against the entities their delusions lead them to fear. You know, like aliens, microwave radiation, sprocketheads...(Oh forget the sprockethead reference. Everyone knows the only defense against them is a variable speed power drill, preferably cordless with a fully charged battery. )
They put tin foil on their windows, on their heads, in their pockets, anywhere the foe might seep in...
That led me to think, "what did stone age paranoids use to defend themselves? What came before tin foil?"

ambivalence

so here it is, a year and a half after the big break up... I made it through the survival phase: can I pay the bills??, what do single persons eat for breakfast?, do the rules of gravity still apply to me? . Now into the NOW WHAT? phase. I don't remember feeling like this for a long time, anxious and angst ridden, what to do with my life kind of a thing. I'm trudging along day to day rather bored and unsettled. so of course the opportunity to get myself embroiled in a heartache kind of situation comes up. or at least in MY head it comes up....20 years ago yippie skippy off i'd go, now I'm a little bit more reticent, but still worked up enough to lose sleep over thinking about the possiblility.
I made this piece to channel the energy. It involved power tools, which is always a good release, now isn't it? One side says "no way, stay out, be safe", the other is "well maybe a good jolt is just what the dr. ordered!"

excess and debauchery

the gal on the left pretty much sums up how I looked all day yesterday after being out at the blues jam on tues night, a school night.... I didn't get home until 10PM!!! and I had a second glass of wine, which turned out to be a BIG MISTAKE. and actually the gal on the left looks quite a bit better than I did yesterday now that I think about it.
the guy on the right with the guitar is Joe Kelleman, maker of fine amplifyers, aka Jo Mama. (www.jomamamusic.com)

the church of equine science

It's sunday morning and here I am coming home from my ride. There is a brisk touch to the air, and both the horse and the dog were spooky. The coyotes must have been out there somewhere although I didn't see them... When starting out I was headachey, and distracted. I think I was worrying over money, should I get new tires on the car I hate or find myself a good psychotherapist?? personal safety or getting 6 hours closer to self actualization, always a dilemma...In the midst of this pondering, Keno, the horse, stopped abruptly and puts his head in the air, the beginning of a whirl back towards dodge city...
bringing me back to NOW. So that's why I call it church. The rest of the time I'm right there riding the horse, stopping sparky from eating rotting garbage, looking for rusty junk to add to the latest art project, pulling cactus out of sparky's foot, being there. badabing badaboom I'm in the moment, the headache is gone...who needs psychotherapy, I think I'll go ahead and get the damn tires....