Bad Human

I knew it was going to be OK to climb Chief Mountain to watch the sunset on the winter solstice. Coming down at night would be a cinch under a cloudless moonlit sky. The packed snowshoe tracks would be easy to follow even without headlamps. What never entered my mind was the trouble my dog was going to have with ice collecting in his paws. People always laugh when they see a dog in boots, but in certain situations they are indispensable, like climbing snowy mountains. Unfortunately, we left the Fido Footware at home, and since our guy did alright on the way up, we figured there was no cause for concern.

On our descent the temperature dropped just enough that ice balls were forming in the thick fur between my dog's toes, which made it painful for him to walk. We'd stop every few dozen yards or so to help him de-ice, but with a couple of miles to go this method was becoming untenable. After a while it occurred to me that I should try to carry him. I gave Kae my backpack, and she helped lift our 60 pound pooch onto my shoulders. I carried him "fireman" style, which left him free to knee me in the head once or twice, but he rapidly figured out what was going on and settled in for the tippy ride. At first I was pleased with how much ground were able to cover quickly. Gravity was on our side. Soon, however, we came to a dense section of woods with low hanging branches. After misjudging their height and banging my buddy's snout a couple of times, he lost confidence in me and began to squirm. We collapsed in a soft patch of snow as I protected my face from his flailing claws.

We resumed our rhythm of paw cleanings at 20 yard intervals for the remainder of our ordeal. Once or twice the moonlight through the trees caught my attention, but only later was I able to recall how beautiful that had been. Somehow we made it back to the trailhead, and I can say I've never been so happy to see our car. The moral of this story is self-evident, so no lectures, thank you please. Suffice to say the dog boots are in the car now, ready for our next adventure.

At home in the yard my dog leapt against me and almost knocked me down. He loves punking me like that when I least expect it. Leaping is a trait most people like to train out of their dogs, but because it has something to do with expressing delight, I'm lenient with it. And last night it's how I knew I'd been forgiven.

The Dream Argument

José Argüelles' Rainbow Bridge

I have no idea where my wife wants her ashes scattered.

I'd wake her up to ask, but even in my insomnia-addled brain I recognize this isn't a good idea. So I lay there and mull it over quietly. Soon it occurs to me I don't know what I'd do if my dog bit some kid and the Aurora police came to take him away. It doesn't matter that I don't live in Aurora. Somehow those dog-snuffing cops would show up on my doorstep anyway. I'm giving this some serious thought when I realize I have no plan whatsoever for when the planet Nibiru swings around from behind the sun and slams into planet earth, ending life as we know it, only a few days from now.

If you suffer from both insomnia and any sort of anxiety disorder, you will know that the place they intersect is not a pretty one. Tiny seeds of fear, left unattended by the demands of the waking world bloom at night deep in your amygdala. They take on texture and substance in vivid dreams, alerting all areas of your brain to the presence of a real problem. Soon you are awake enough to give these cascading worries your full attention, and no matter how still you lie, or what sort of mental exercises you practice, you will not be going back to sleep. Never mind that all of these troubles are laughable by the light of day. There are just enough threads of reasonability tethering your phantoms to reality that they will make you their servant for the remainder of this otherwise quiet night.


In full disclosure, it probably was a bad idea to watch a documentary on 2012 Doomsday Cults directly before going to bed last night. I had not known there are so many people hiding in caves and bunkers all over the earth right now getting ready for something big to happen on December 21. Some of these people have quit their jobs, withdrawn their money from banks, and bought cheese and beans and ammunition. But not all of them are the kind you see wearing camo at the Walmart when it isn't hunting season. New Age author José Argüelles, who brought us the Harmonic Convergence, is organizing a simultaneous worldwide meditation event that will use the combined power of all the like-minded meditators to literally deflect apocalyptic solar flares away from the earth and channel them into a rainbow bridge that arcs from pole to pole. And if that's not your style, there's even an Arizona developer building fully stocked underground condos in a converted MX missile silo at 900K a pop. If things are about to get really bad, those folks are set to ride it out in style.

Cultural variations aside, these Doomsday clubs have a lot in common. Their thought leaders are all relentless self-publishers, whose source material typically includes aerial photos of crop circles, secondhand interpretations of Mayan tablets, and wild reinterpretations of ancient Sumerian astrology. What they lack in scientific rigor, they make up for with passion and imagination. These groups also share a reliance on social media to organize, raise funds, sell survival stuff to each other, and generally keep the fear fires burning hot. But the shared trait that surprised me most is their utterly pragmatic approach to the end of the world. This isn't your grandfather's Armageddon, where Good and Evil have it out one last time in a cosmic Battle Royale. This is going to be an entirely secular cataclysm, where only the prepared survive. Sure, some of these folks will quote the Bible or some other sacred text, but they aren't concerned with righteousness, they simply want to outwit the prophesies.

It's easy to assume 2012 survivalism appeals primarily to the socially marginalized. A sense of estrangement from the natural order would add even more to their numbers. But that doesn't explain the mass appeal of this latest end-times scenario. The search term "Doomsday 2012" returns over 72 million pages on Google. I can't help but wonder if the desire for disaster isn't a projection of a culture that yearns for global catharsis, even if it came at the expense of millions of dead people. Visit any doomsday website, and once you get past all the predictions of catastrophe what you find are twisted messages of hope. Many use the word "rebirth," fully acknowledging the word implies lots of blood and pain.

I find the obsession with 12/21 to be a culturally constructed "straw man" that facilitates us fantasizing about surviving an instantaneous cataclysm, while distracting us from the mundane and depressing effects of things like global warming, which is its own sort of slow-motion apocalypse, but much more hopeless in its way. That said, there is something to be admired in the folks who get hands-on when responding to these potential world-ending scenarios. Agreeing on which are the real threats is the hard part. Some of us stockpile food and weapons and head underground. Others drive hybrids and put solar panels on their roofs. Either way, it's doing something that makes the Bad Situations seem a bit more manageable.


There is an ancient philosophical conundrum concerning the illusory nature of reality called the Dream Argument. Plato and Aristotle both took it on. The crux of it is that since we do not know we are dreaming while we are in a dream, and yet our dreams are filled with the same sensations we experience when we are awake, how then can we trust those senses to tell us when we're awake? Or said even simpler, how do we know we are ever awake? French mathematician-philosopher Descartes said that while our senses are not particularly trustworthy, reality itself is separate from us and to some degree knowable. Later philosophers focused on the social construction of reality and the practical necessity for a consensus on what is real. So it seems that to this day the jury is still out on reality. What is certain is that our anxieties invade our dreams, and our dreams in turn create images that haunt our waking world. What separates dream from reality is less a door than a passage through fog.

If the Doomsayers turn out to be right, then it won't be canned provisions and weapons I'll regret not stocking up on. It will be sleeping pills. At the end of the day, I have enough trouble outwitting my own petty demons, and staying on a predictable sleep cycle.  I can't trouble myself with phantom planets. Besides, I'd rather rest in peace with the skeptics than spend the rest of my post-apocalyptic days roasting rabbits I snared myself on the bonfires of Ikea furniture while fending off marauding bands of feral suburban teens. You can have that world. If I can trust anything at all, it is that the NASA scientists are dead-on, and they all say not to sweat it. So I'm not sweating it. There may come a day when they let us know we can start to worry about this or that comet or solar flare, until then my money is on December 21st being an entirely ordinary winter solstice. The chilly, partly cloudy kind, with a killer sunset. So to speak.

Beach Blind

 She was nudged by a manatee. She was a child raking clams in shallow water, somewhere in Florida. It was 1980. The manatee bumped her just slightly, whether the result of curiosity, poor eyesight, or as some sort of message. She turned around to see the huge leathery sea cow gliding off into deeper water.

Until this moment the girl does not know manatees exist.



This memory has become important to her for a variety of reasons. Now, as an artist, she has decided to tackle the telling of it in the form of an experimental performance piece that will put performers inside sculptural constructions, out of which they cannot see, as they "kind of rove slowly around the floor" of the gallery. She says the piece will be about blind faith. The title of the exhibit will be "Half The Floating World."  It will be a group show that she will curate. She invites me to create a piece for it.



I read all this in an email, on my smartphone, while laying on a beach.



It is day nine of our annual family vacation on the eastern shore of Virginia. All week long siblings, children, girlfriends and boyfriends rotate through our rented beach house. Days are spent getting tossed around in the vigorous surf until exhausted, followed by a stumble up the sand for a nap under the umbrella, or to fall asleep with a good book in a beach chair designed to last exactly one week. All of this set against the music of crashing waves and sand-muffled sounds of children playing. In the evenings, we make fantastic meals for each other, drink uncomplicated wine and tell new variations of the same old stories. It's idyllic in an unambitious, middle-class way, and I love it completely. But it makes it hard to remember my life back home, and by day nine I have had enough. Not of the family, but of the opiating effects of the beach. 



I'm thinking about all of this as I struggle to lift my head from a nap on the sand. I am stretched out beneath a big striped umbrella, covered with sunscreen, but I feel the UV making me red anyway. From where I lie, I can see the sun through two colored bands of umbrella fabric. When I close my right eye the sun is a fuzzy pink disc. If I close my left, it is green. I blink back and forth a few times making the sun jump between colors until my mind reconnects with that little grain of anxiety that brings me all the way awake. Time to head back into the water.



Every year I come out here thinking I will use this unallocated free time to start some new project. Maybe rethink my website design or do some sketches for new paintings. Once or twice I've actually tried to work on freelance design jobs out here. But every year I come back empty handed. Rested, but dull in the head. Rudderless. Vacated.



My friend's email is a welcome intrusion as I begin to plot my re-entry into real life. I know the show she is planning is likely to be good. She's a visionary whose career is on a bit of a roll. It can't hurt to be a part of this, whatever it turns out to be. I re-read her message to make sure I've got the title right. "Half The Floating World." I have no idea what this means, or how it connects with blind faith, but I love something about it. I'm certain that when I talk to her she will fill in the blanks, but in the meantime I know the puzzlement and wonder those gaps create are exactly the places creativity thrives. But blind faith? I have no idea what this is. I'm pretty sure everyone thinks their faith is informed, regardless if it is faith in a god, or in a partner, or a country, or even that your car is going to be there where you left it. But blind faith sounds risky. Unhinged. Foolish. I'm trying to think of a good example. Even in that bible story where Jesus calls Peter to step out of his boat and come walk on the water with him. Was that blind faith? Probably not, since Jesus was already out on the water, suggesting some new faith-enabled feasibility was at work. Either way I'm guessing Peter's fingers were crossed as his toes hit the water.



Finally on my feet, I decide to take a walk to give this creative challenge some time on the front burner, but my brain is over-rested and fogged-in by salt air and mid-Atlantic heat, and the ideas just aren't there. What if I don't come up with anything? This is what the fearful part of my brain always asks. Its tiny voice is there to remind me I might fail. I don't resent it, or seek to suppress it, because it's looking out for my best interests. Besides, there is another stronger part of me that knows I will find a creative solution. The same way I don't have to look at my feet when I walk. It just happens, thankfully.



I'm headed down the beach without my glasses. Normally I'd be wearing them for any viewing beyond arms length, but the blowing sand is hard on the plastic lenses, so I leave them in my beach bag. Until now I've forgotten how truly bad my distance vision is. All shapes have their edges rounded off, like beach glass, and radiate faint halos. I decide it's okay to keep walking, carefully, since I can still make out where all the people and umbrellas are. I look back at my own and memorize its cluster of colors. I tell myself I like the challenge of negotiating this impressionistic scene, except the lack of detail is beginning to make me paranoid, and with good reason. I freeze as I discover I've wandered into a congregation of kite fliers. I should have remembered they were here. They are mostly children, from what I can tell, and the blurry colors just overhead are their kites. A stiff offshore breeze keeps the kites flying at a low angle, the highest ones only thirty feet up. I know, without seeing it, that the air just above this expanse of sand is bisected by invisible strings. Strings that would be hard to make out even with 20/20 vision. It's hard to tell how many of the people around me are flying kites. Ten, twelve? Better to count the kites. At first I find eight but then realize two are multi-part contraptions, so six it is. Good. Now, how to work out a passage away from them that doesn't involve crashing some kid's kite or slicing myself on the taught strings? The next few minutes are spent cautiously zig zagging between kite fliers, and willing—without effect—for the strings to come into view.



At last I make it down to the water's edge, uninjured and unembarrassed. The way back up the beach toward my family is reasonably apparent, so I take a minute to jump in the Atlantic and cool off. I have completely forgotten about trying to have a creative idea regarding blind faith, or anything else. At the moment, I am at least part of the floating world, but which half, I cannot say.



Shadows drift below me in the cloudy surf, but even without corrective eyewear I know they are shadows of my own creation and not to be feared. Further out, just past the surfers, dolphins ply the whitecaps in the afternoon sun. Beyond them, the occasional marlin is unlucky in it's choice of prey and lands thrashing on the deck of a boat. And miles further out, Right whales migrate south along the rim of the underwater Accomac Canyon. These waters are rich with pelagic mysteries, some bumping us, moving us along, some capable of tearing us limb from limb. But there are no manatees here. We are too far north.

Back at our beach enclave I locate my glasses case and peek inside at the unsanded lenses. Among the many things I am thankful for, these glasses are at this moment right on top of the list. But I do not put them on. I snap the case closed and stow it back in my bag. I'm okay without them for now. I stretch back out onto my towel and close my eyes under the striped umbrella.

White Wires

A father tosses a ball with his son in the park at the end of my street. A scene so ordinary it should go unnoticed, except for one detail. The father wears white earphones and seems to be listening to some sort of i-device. At first I guess he may have taken a phone call, and needs his hands free to continue the game of catch, but as I watch I noticed certain gyrations in between throwing and catching that suggest the dad is grooving alone to himself. There is no conversation between father and son, just the back and forth of the white ball against the green of a late summer afternoon. The boy, perhaps six, wears a comically oversized mitt which only occasionally helps him locate the ball.

When I walk the multi-use paths around my newly designed "urban infill" neighborhood, the people I meet almost invariably wear white headphones. It doesn't matter whether they are running or pushing a stroller, they all seem mid-workout, so I know there isn't going to be any chit chat. An unintended convenience for the wearer of the white wires is that they can be spotted from a distance, thereby signifying unavailability. It's a fair-warning of the listener's near-total disengagement from the social sphere. Though they may be in a public place, their behavior suggests preoccupation with something utterly private. You're lucky to get a "hi" out of anyone with headphones on, and you're supposed to know that ahead of time.

Headphones used to be black, with maybe some "chrome" accents. It was this way for decades. When Apple introduced the iPod the wires were suddenly a bold white. Apple had bucked convention right down to the tiniest detail. Now it's hard to find a set of earphones that aren't white, not that you would want them. Even the sketchiest of off-brands imitate the white Apple ear buds.

On my way down Mount Shavano in Southern Colorado earlier this summer, I was surprised at the stream of white-wire-wearing solo hikers that were on their way up the mountain. Though it's not a technical climb, any hike up above 14'000 feet in elevation would suggest you have your wits about you and pay close attention to every aspect of your environment. Particularly when you've gotten a late start, as these folks obviously had, and storm clouds have crowded the sky.

In full disclosure, I'm no stranger to the use of headphones. Though I'm irked by some of the sociological affects of headphone wearing, I know how critical a high energy mix can be to powering through a tough workout. I'll also admit I've dropped over a hundred dollars on a set of top-end ear buds just so I can get the extended audio frequencies a high definition source can deliver. Furthermore, I've worn the white headphones in public when I 'm not listening to anything at all, just to be left alone. And, outrageously, I have used them on top of a mountain. Which I can explain.

Even the easiest fourteeners can be extraordinarily demanding. When I first started hiking them, I noticed that lots of climbers perform some sort of ritual, or reward themselves with something special on the summit. After climbing a non-standard route on Gray's Peak in Colorado a few years ago, one of my climbing buddies took a kite out of his pack and flew it from the peak. Another produced a rotisserie chicken from her pack, which she proceeded to share with other hikers. I have seen flasks passed and cigars smoked. A friend of mine even reported seeing two young men with wooden Corn Hole game boxes strapped on their backs struggling up one peak. So it would be unremarkable to admit I've listened to my iPod on top of 14,196' Mount Yale, in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness. I mention it simply because the music I listened to led me into something of an ecstatic state, which I'd never quite experienced before.

It's no coincidence that every religion I can think of equates mountains with holiness, or states of spiritual bliss. You might say it's all just the effects of endorphins and the thin air, but until you've gotten yourself up to a high summit under your own power, and experienced the intoxicating numinous weirdness of just being up there, you'll only be able to guess at its mechanics.

The music I chose to accompany my stay at the top of Mount Yale was Carl Orff's O Fortuna, a particularly over-the-top piece of mid twentieth-century classical music. Purists who resent pop culture's appropriation of this piece for everything from movie soundtracks to video games, dismiss it as high camp. It's sort of the Bohemian Rhapsody of classical music. But no matter, listening to a piece of over-the-top music on top of a mountain requires no justification. From the opening choral blast the effect was overwhelming. That critical little voice in the back of my head which rarely shuts off, tried to remind me that this experience was a contrivance. But the voice quickly fell silent. The world tumbled away in every direction. Far below, the shadows of cumulous clouds drifted across the forests. I did a slow 360-degree turn as the names of familiar peaks in the distance drifted away. Only three minutes later the piece was over and I was nearly in tears. Returning to my bodily senses, I looked over at my friend Donny, who was smoking a huge cigar. Donny doesn't smoke, so I had to guess his nicotine buzz had him at least as blissed out as I was. I unplugged my white iPod headphones and stashed them in my pack for the trip back down.

Pretending to be busy with my smart phone, I watch the father and son toss, drop, and chase their ball for several more minutes. The boy hardly says a word, which causes me to suppose he is used to his dad only being partly present. Imagine a six year old boy playing catch and not talking. But his dad is there. They are doing a thing together. Which is something.

I walk the block back to my house and try to inventory all the sounds I can. Air conditioners, a truck backing up. Traffic. Two jet planes. More air conditioners. Concentration reveals another layer of acoustics. Crickets in a hedge. Children playing in the distance. The crisp scuttle of an empty Cheetos bag blowing down the sidewalk. My own footsteps. And beyond the individual sounds is the way they describe a space. A brick corridor sounds different than an open field, even if the sounds in them are the same. On my way home I do not pass any other pedestrians. The sidewalk is empty in both directions. There are no conversations, short or long. But I'm ready for one should it happen.

Normal with a capital N

It's hard to get my dog's mouth open. If he's gotten ahold of a chicken bone tossed from some construction site it's nearly impossible to pry it from his hydraulic jaws. Now, half asleep on the floor, and under the narcotic influence of belly rubs, it's a little easier to get him to open up. A quick look around his palette reveals no visual evidence of tumors, and again I'm relieved. I do this check every month since his battle with oral cancer last year.

The new top post on my list of worries is occupied by my dad. He was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer AND skin cancer, and will soon be enduring overlapping therapies. My family has seen its share of deaths from cancer. I've lost three grandparents, an uncle and a cousin to various cancers, including breast, lung and liver varieties. This seems like a lot, but I'll bet it's pretty average. There are literally thousands of blogs by and for people living with cancers. It's the boogieman in the back of a million mental closets. In my world, the boogieman is right out in the living room.

They say it's important to be able to laugh about your troubles, so here's a funny cancer story. OK, maybe not funny, but amusing in a pathetic and absurd sort of way. My own skin cancers were entirely self-induced. Back in the nineties, before my vow of poverty as an artist, I used to take beach vacations at least twice a year in either the Caribbean, Florida, coastal Virginia, or once in a while, Mexico. For weeks prior to each visit, I would spend hours on a tanning bed "building up" a tan so that I could run around in the searing subtropical sun without a shirt. I did this for years. Fast forward another decade, and this time it wasn't a tanning bed I was on, but an operating table. I've had two aggressive melanomas that have left my back pretty scarred up. After my most recent, my surgeon actually said "The bad news is, your modeling career is over. The good news is, we think we got it all."

We had already planned for my parent's annual visit to Colorado before we learned of dad's cancers. With his doctor's approval, we kept our plans, and agreed to make the vacation normal with a capital N. No sad conjecturing and moping around. It wasn't going to be about cancer. There would be weeks and weeks ahead for that. So we set about renting a mountain cabin as a base for toned-down hikes and nights of card playing, and absolutely NO politics. That last one was possible only because we kept the TV off.

For ten days we explored Colorado and managed to not talk about cancer much at all, though I did find myself wanting to show my dad utterly beautiful things that I hoped would somehow flood into his psyche and provide a healing buffer. It's the best thing I could think to give him. So one night we drove up to Cottonwood Pass on top of the continental divide to watch the sunset. And it delivered.

I can easily recall a time when inter-generational tension kept family visits brief and polite. As a young man I would obsess about the imperfections of my family. The same was true for my wife Kae and her folks. On a car trip home after one beach vacation with her family, we had that conversation where you amaze yourself by identifying all the layers of dysfunction that somehow only you could see, but that mom and dad could not. We were pleased at our own insight and our resolve to live differently. After a hundred miles of working ourselves up, we decided we needed a good primal scream. So just as we came to the Sideling Hill Pass over the Allegheny Mountains, we rolled down our windows and stuck our heads out in the 70 mph wind and screamed ourselves silly. Ahead of us the road sloped downhill all the way back to our home in Chicago, where we couldn't wait to be. This primal scream became a tradition. We did it every year at that same pass. We'd do it even when we had an enjoyable trip, just because we liked traditions. Our kids found it confusing when they were little. As they got older they let us know we were being overly dramatic and embarrassing. Eventually we agreed and stopped doing it.

A half hour before it was time to drive my folks to the airport, my dad and I sat quietly together in the living room, both busy with our mobile devices. He was on his Nook, and I was texting a friend about an upcoming photo shoot. My mom walked in and said, "Put down those things and visit, we've only got a few minutes left!" My dad responded, "We've been here ten days. We're all visited-out." Which was true, so we all laughed, and then I drove them to the airport a little early.

After my folks left, Kae and I puttered around the house, cleaning up a little, adjusting to our home being just ours again; which was welcome, but also made us a tiny bit melancholy. A ray of late afternoon sun hit the kitchen counter and illuminated hundreds of fingerprints. Evidence of life, invisible from other angles. Twenty or thirty years from now (if we're lucky), it will be our kids worrying about us, making plans, stressing out, feeling sandwiched. And as they see us beginning to fade, it will feel unfair, and it will seem absurd, as it should. I looked across the room at Kae and asked if she wanted me to make a margarita. The sunlight on the counter was now on her. Tiny blond hairs on her arms gave her a halo.  "Why does any of this have to end?" I said.
And she knew exactly what I meant.

I hate when my dog kills a rabbit

Responsible, not guilty.

It's only happened twice in five years, but still.

The dead rabbit drooping from Derby's jaws looked exactly like the extra realistic toy bunny she plays with at home. For half a second I thought maybe that toy was a "gateway" bunny we should have disposed of, but I knew better. That dog is hardwired to hunt. So I did my best not to be mad at her. She never really gets a chance to catch anything other than flies, because I'm always calling her off. She's pretty good with the voice commands, if I'm there to make them.

I've heard lots of stories about dogs who proudly gift their humans with freshly killed field animals. Generous acts of tribute which confirm that dogs and humans share common values, but not a currency. But this wasn't like that. Derby dropped the still warm rabbit and wandered away indifferently, as if to say, "This broke, see what you can do with it."

I'm okay with the Circle of Life, but I hate to get it on my hands. There wasn't a way to make this killing meaningful. We weren't going to thank the Great Spirit and make a meal of wild hare on the trail, so I looked for a place to put the rabbit where some animal might make good use of it. The fields here are rich with coyote and fox who'd be glad to stumble upon fresh rabbit, if it would even last until dusk. Probably some hawk or raven would polish it off within the hour. So I found a well-trafficked place where all manner of paw prints converged down by the creek, and I laid the rabbit high on the bank nearby, wound side up.

Many of this season's rabbits won't make it until winter. This particular one may have been eaten within the month. The random intersection of my dog's trajectory and this bunny's poor timing is just an unnecessary example of something that was likely to happen anyway. What bothers me is the moral clumsiness of it, and that's my issue, not Derby's. So when we got home she received her usual treat anyway, and I vowed to be more attentive in the future, which is pretty much what I'm always vowing.

Hakuna Matata.

We're all going to die, so please buy my art.

Today I went to the Madden Museum in Greenwood Village, to judge an art show by high school students. The Madden is what they sometimes refer to as a "vanity" museum; in this case, an enormous glass and steel structure built to house the legacy of a rich guy. The building is in Denver's sprawling suburban Tech Center, where gleaming corporate high rises thrust up from the prairie next to an eight lane highway. The name of the building is the Pallazzo Verdi, and the road that leads to it is called Fiddlers Green. Mind you, this is in suburban Denver. All of this would be easy to dismiss as irrelevant cultural grandstanding by yet another wealthy cowboy developer, were it not true that many important museums are vanity projects (think Marshall Field, JP Getty, Guggenheim), and that the Madden Museum houses some truly noteworthy pieces.

Twelve schools participated in the Continental League Art Exhibit, which is designed to showcase and reward excellence in the arts. Settling into the show, I found the usual scratchboard drawings of cats, and melodramatic self-portraits, but also some truly unexpected departures into combined media, and honest stabs at self discovery. A couple of the pieces felt vital, as if they not only mattered to their creators, but that they had the power to matter to passing strangers. It occurred to me that this is the best any artist could hope for.

My favorite moment came when I rounded a corner and saw an especially nice Robert Rauschenberg piece from the Madden's permanent collection that had been pushed into an unlit storage area to make room for the high school art show. I'm not sure if this was some sort of afterthought, or if I had arrived before they were finished moving things around, but if it were my museum, I'd make sure my blue chip art was either on a wall, or safely out of sight. Nonetheless, something about seeing the Rauschenberg there was both sad and wonderful, like the sight of dethroned royalty. The fact that it still projected a powerful presence from its dark corner made me like it all the more. The most surprising thing though, was seeing that the museum was willing to completely redefine itself to showcase the art of young people, many of whom are just beginning to suspect that art might be something of consequence to them.

Whether my artwork, or that of any of my artist friends, or the kids in this show will end up in someone's legacy, or in a thrift store, is anyone's guess. A friend of mine was recently tipped off that a painting by a well-known local artist was available at a certain thrift store for only a few bucks. The painting was quite nice, not to mention large, but whosever hands it had fallen into had failed to recognize anything of value in it. My friend rushed out and purchased the piece, which had the effect of not only restoring the work to a place of dignity, but my friend got a killer deal on it.

I own a bunch of art I'd like to think is notable. I've come to possess most of it by trading my own work with artists I admire. I've also got a couple of pieces I love, whose origins are obscure to me. One is a tiny painting of a face in profile being spoon-fed the word "never." I bought it from a college student who had taken only one painting class. That's all I remember. I liked the piece so much it didn't matter to me that I was pretty sure the girl who made it might never make another painting. It certainly wasn't an "investment."  I bought the painting for the simplest of reasons: it spoke to me. It could be that no one likes this painting as well as I do. Good. Then it has found its home. The best works of art contain their own justification, some little insight, or revelation, or just plain weirdness that will keep them out of dumpsters. This is perhaps more belief than fact, but I'll stick by it.

When I was in high school I made a painting of an old jalopy rusting under a tree and gave it to my Grandpa Baldy for his birthday. This was during my surly teen years, so any form of spontaneous generosity was a huge relief to my whole family. The painting was overtly sentimental and not at all original, but competently done, at least. I forgot about it entirely. At my grandpa's funeral a few years ago, the family presented the painting back to me. They told me it was Baldy's favorite painting (his only painting as far as I know), and then they took pictures of me holding it, which felt especially weird.

It took a few years, but eventually I found the exact right way to dispose of that painting. This is when I lived in North Carolina, where if you want to get rid of anything other than ordinary household waste, you have to drive it to the dump yourself. I used to go there a couple of times a month with various things that couldn't go out to the curb. The dump had an old gate keeper that wore the same brown Carharts every day. His job was to unlock the gate in the morning, keep an eye on whether things were being put in the proper dumpster, then lock the gate up at night. In his little guard shack I noticed he'd rescued a lot of objects: a vacuum cleaner, an old bendy pole lamp, a calendar picture with the months ripped off. On the day that I took the painting, I made sure it lay on the top of the "Misc Non-Metal" dumpster, face up and clearly visible. On my next visit to the dump I was happy to see it hanging in the guard shack, right where the calendar used to be. I knew the gatekeeper and could have just given him the painting directly, but I suspected that in his world, reclaiming the painting himself would have given it the right value.

Remember that maudlin 70's song Dust in the Wind? It's one hundred percent true, like it or not. Sooner or later, you, me, and everyone we've ever crossed paths with is going to vanish from this earth. This won't require an apocalypse, just the normal limits of mortality. In the big picture, this is all going to happen rather quickly. All of the things we've owned and made precious, all of the photos and half finished novels we've boxed away, all of it is going to be sorted through by people who won't have quite as much empathy as we'd like. Even our loved ones are going to throw most of our favorite things away.

The things you create, and the art you own (if any) will survive on their own merits. Some pieces may acquire rich histories and travel the world, others will slowly flake and peel in landfills. Either way, what happens is pretty much out of your control. Maybe you will be lucky and will get to leave a legacy. Maybe you will be especially lucky and have children who give a rat's ass about the same things you do. But for the rest of us, if art is going to matter, it will be right now that it does so. It will be because the things we create, and the objects we surround ourselves with help us discover who we are, while it still matters. So do what you can to buy the art that seems like it should belong to you. Especially if it's something that reaches into your psyche and gives it a good tweak. These are the pieces that will make your life just a little richer if you get them into your home. And some of them are going to keep working hard, delivering whatever experience they were designed to deliver, and will do fine on their own, long after you're gone.

What The World Needs Now...

Is another folk singer, like I need a hole in my head."

So goes the song. And that's pretty much how I feel about entering the blogosphere.

Recently my friends have been encouraging me to blog. I'm guessing this is a good idea since my Facebook posts have been getting rather long. And since most of my friends are reading at work, on their employer's dime, it's only fair to them to let them know what they are getting into. I'm flattered that my meanderings might be of interest long enough to compromise someone at their job. That's something of an accomplishment for me.

When I think about why I write and what I want this blog to be about, I think it can only hope to be about nothing in particular, but that it should be crafted in a way that it becomes undeniably 'something.' I know how contrived that sounds, but it's my mission statement, for better or worse, plus it's the only way I really know how to write. And if it makes you late for a meeting, then I'm probably doing my job. So here then, is a blog about art-making, Dog walking, wine drinking, divine and secular intervention, and whatnot. Especially whatnot.

Also, I've reposted some of the Facebook entries from the past year that I've really liked. Thanks to everyone who has caused me to believe this is worth the effort.

Enjoy.

_m

Date With a Power Saw

In 1985 I painted my first big painting. It was four feet tall and eight feet wide, and weighed close to 60 pounds. I know this because I once put it on a bathroom scale. I made a bunch of paintings like this, all unwieldy and cumbersome, because a college professor had convinced me that painting on wood panels was the best solution for large scale work. Stretched canvas, it seemed, was prone to warping. What he didn't tell me (or I didn't hear) was that I should make damn sure the painting was going to be spectacular before I went to the trouble of making it huge.

Sadly, over time it became clear to me that this painting wasn't very good. But it also wasn't very bad. And so it became increasingly troublesome as I moved from lofts to apartments to houses in different cities and states. I never hung the painting. You've never seen it. It isn't on my website. It lived mostly in a great big shipping box. I'd only look at it once every three or four years when I needed to move. Each time I peeked in its box, I half hoped to be surprised by my creation, as if I would finally discover something amazing that had previously eluded me. But each time it remained a solidly mediocre, four by eight foot, sixty pound thing - now with a light dusting of mildew. So today, while spring cleaning the garage, I decided to deal with it. I un-wedged the painting from behind a stack of ladders and scrap lumber and piles of other not-so-good paintings. I peeled back the U-Haul quilt and exposed my painting to the full light of day for the first time in years. It still disappointed me. The only surprise was that every half-good thing about it had resurfaced in other paintings I've done since then. Finally the thing had no real purpose left. It was time for the power saw.

I know plenty of artists who manage to recycle the work they don't like. They paint over it, or incorporate it into something else, or raid it for parts. Still others find comfort in the idea that all works of creation are part of an ongoing personal journey that has intrinsic value for the creator, regardless of whether the works are 'good' or not. In my case, I may recycle the ideas in a work of art, but find I'm too troubled by the physicality of a mediocre creation to let the work survive another incarnation. For those of you who find the materiality of art problematic (or the proliferation of man made 'things' in general), you'll know what I mean when I say the poor choices that result in a crummy work of art have a multiplying effect on the very materials used to bring the work into existence. These objects resist transformation. This is why I'm happy to own a variety of power saws.

As I halved, then quartered, eighthed and finally sixteenthed the painting with my saw, I found myself cutting the pieces into increasingly irregular shapes, as if to outwit some imaginary trash picker who might be curious about piecing my big failure back together. In my cosmology, this person would somehow have a fine arts degree, and would be bitter about the circumstances that led him to puzzle with other people's trash. From sheer spite, he would go to great lengths to reassemble my object of shame for his own amusement. So for this reason, I disposed of the fragments in separate dumpsters.

And now for the benefit of those of you who may be embarking on a similar portfolio cleansing, I offer the following tips:

Only careful deliberation will make clear which of your 'iffy' works should travel any further with you on your journey. Once you're sure which ones are crying out for the landfill, you'll need a good saw. I recommend the reciprocating type, like a Sawzall. These allow for a variety of curved and angled cuts, and with the right blade you can make short work of even the toughest materials. Plus they are fun to work with.

Before you go 'Shiva' on your inferior creation, take a moment to make peace with it. If its really bad, you may like to forgive it. I'd recommend you have a beer while doing this, but only one, since you'll be working with power tools. If possible, you'll want to set about this work on a sunny day. If it's cloudy you might get sad about your life, which is pointless and undermines the task at hand. Also, don't be listening to the Cure.

Next, to avoid cold feet, be sure to approach the work from the back side as you tear into it.

Finally, once your piece has been rendered asunder, consider disposing of it in a dumpster that will allow some anonymity. You can find these at your nearby mall. Just look for a store that's in bankruptcy, like a Borders. Chances are good there will still be a dumpster round the back.

When you are finally home, try a little light TV watching. You must steadfastly avoid writing poetry, or blogging about your day. These activities could result in something else you will later need to destroy.

For those who find my approach to purging obsessive or melodramatic, remember that the creation of these objects required many hours spent physically manipulating materials. You literally wrestle your creations into being. It's only fitting that the act of decommissioning them as art objects should take a similar hands-on approach. Simply tossing a work into the trash doesn't require the full participation by the artist in one of the most important steps in the creative process. At least this is how I justified taking an entire afternoon to reduce my big painting to what resembled a pile of roofing shingles from a Dr. Seuss house. Besides, It's only by actually taking your work apart that you can talk about 'deconstruction' and have the slightest clue of what you really mean.

One Morning

One of my first jobs ever after college was working as a museum guard at the Art Institute of Chicago. I used to love to get there early before the museum opened and just study the paintings in whatever collection I was assigned to protect that day. Van Gogh's "Bedroom in Arles," (1889) hangs in the Potter Palmer collection there. One morning, while looking very closely at this work, I noticed that a little flake of cobalt green paint had fallen onto the gilt frame beneath the painting. Bedroom in Arles was in need of conservation, but then lots of artworks are, all the time, so museums prioritize which ones get fixed, and when. The triage order is compounded by the fact that certain works - like ANY of Van Gogh's - do the heavy lifting in terms of museum ticket sales. They don't get to spend a lot of time squirreled away in conservation labs getting spruced up. The decision to remove a popular painting from public view is as much a business consideration as it is one of preservation.

On the morning that I found that flake of paint I was utterly alone. I looked at it for a while and tried to find the place on the painting where it had come free. There were several other flakes just waiting to drift off, given the exact right gust of air or too-close wave of a hand. Of course I knew to not touch the painting. The discipline of not touching art was, after all, my job to enforce. Still I couldn't help but think I could very easily moisten the tip of my finger, lean in, and own a little piece of Van Gogh - just like that. There was something utterly narcotic about the possibility. It was then I noticed the flake was composed of two different colors, a green, and a yellow. Now it contained an echo of Vincent's creative process. A green decision and a yellow decision had been made by a master. Was I meant to have it? Had Van Gogh "gifted" a piece of his art to me from beyond the grave? I spent several minutes considering it, but primary-school morality prevailed, and I left it alone.

In subsequent days I mostly forgot about my secret flake of Van Gogh. But occasionally I'd find myself back in that gallery, and I'd go visit it. Just to check on it. To make sure it was still there. It always was.

Eventually I moved on to other jobs, and years later, after I was well-embedded in my advertising career, I found myself back at the Art Institute to attend some private Ad industry event for which the museum had been rented. The galleries were kept open for us to wander, but most folks didn't venture too far from the free catered food and drink, or the people they were desperate to schmooze. As the evening ground along I felt a nagging urge to disengage from the Ad world and disappear into the galleries. It had been a long time since I'd looked at art.

By the time I made it into the Palmer collection I had remembered the Van Gogh, and my flake of paint. Of course it wouldn't be there, but when in fact it wasn't, I felt just a little betrayed. The Van Gogh had been restored. It was brilliant! It had moved on. For a second I felt something had been withdrawn from me, some phantom possibility. Of what? Minor theft? Some imaginary relationship with a dead artist? Then good.

The truth is, my days at the museum were filled with excruciating boredom and aching feet. Mostly I just stood around and offered directions. It was a crap job with occasional moments of transcendence, but almost nothing in between. Looking back though, it was that half hour before the museum opened, when I was alone with whatever artwork needed watching over, that the world of art was most likely to open up amazing revelations. I can tell you there's nothing like having a major collection completely to yourself, if only for a few minutes each day. I feel lucky about that. I'm only now able to fully realize how important those mornings were, even if I never did end up with a souvenir.

Sometimes An Eagle Is Just An Eagle

02/27/2012

While out walking my dogs this morning I managed to get this nice photo of a bald eagle before my hounds barked it off its perch. Clearly more annoyed than frightened, it flew away because the dogs had blown its cover. Most big birds of prey are used to being hassled by other wildlife. Even song birds will swarm and dive-bomb a hawk until it leaves their nesting territory. It stands to reason. To other birds, the sight of a raptor isn't a thing of inspiration, it's a cause for near suicidal terror.

It irked me that my dogs couldn't keep from barking. I wanted them to sit and watch and simply appreciate the sight of such a great creature. I understood instantly this was just my desire to impose human values onto canine behavior, and that this is rarely successful. I have, however, had a couple of occasions of sharing a moment of awe with my dogs. Once while hiking, a huge bull elk crossed the trail directly in front of us. I had seen it first, so I quickly got down on one knee next to my dog, made him sit, and whispered hypnotically to him "Just watch." This was accompanied by something of a doggy massage. It worked. We watched that bull for several minutes as he browsed, and my dog never stirred. Another time involved a white baby bison. In full disclosure, this wasn't a sighting in the wild, it was at a zoo. I'm happy to admit this because I'm thrilled there's a zoo where well-behaved dogs are welcome. It's at the Royal Gorge, in Cañon City, Colorado. It's the only place I know of like it.

We all know we're not supposed to anthropomorphize, but certainly there are lots of thoughts and feelings that translate directly across barriers between species. That's why we bother to keep pets. The Border Collie is capable of learning over 1000 unique human words. You could argue that the Border Collie has only learned these words to earn approval, affection, food rewards, and so on. But I'd argue that's why any of us has learned most of the words we know.

The real trouble with empathic identification with animals is that people don't work very hard to learn the animal's vocabulary. Our perspective is hugely distorted by our own self awareness and good intentions, which is why every so often you hear about some kind-hearted person living in the woods cozying up to the bears, only to be eaten by one.

The writers of the Bible use the image of the 'peaceable kingdom' to describe heaven. "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them." (Isaiah 11:16). While lots of Christians are happy to take everything in the Bible as literal truth, I'm going to stick my neck out here and guess this is a poetic metaphor for a transformed human reality. It's not about the wolf or the lamb. The minute wolves stop eating sheep it's all over for them as a species. The image of the peaceable kingdom is comforting because we know it's about us finally ceasing to prey upon each other.

When I looked at the eagle I knew we weren't going to be friends, and that though I admired him, he certainly had no admiration for me. It's a tough idea to accept that we are not as connected to nature as we'd like to think. There's this notion that persists from childhood - exploited, but not invented by Disney - that we can make friends with all the animals, and that they are pretty much just like us. Think back to when you were a little kid, and maybe you found a baby rabbit, or duckling, or some other cute thing. Think about how intensely you wanted to possess it. You were going to feed it, care for it, love it. It was going to depend on you, and in return, it would reward you with its unique friendship. Then maybe some parent or other adult told you the baby whatever-it-was really needed to live outdoors, among its kind, wild and independent. Can you remember how crappy that felt?

The urge to connect with nature on a personal level, to receive validation from the 'universe' is powerful business. It may be an entirely romantic view of reality, but the promise of special connections to friends in the forest means we are really not so alone after all. It means the universe has our back. I have a friend who rejects outright, the possible existence of Jesus, or any other manifestation of a 'personal' god. How could a god bother itself with the details of individual human lives? Instead she believes in energy, the pulse and flow of life itself. Fair enough. But this friend routinely (and sincerely) thanks the universe any time she gets an awesome parking space, or if something goes well for her at work.

We're human, we want it both ways.

When I got home and looked at the eagle photos on my computer, I was rewarded with that unmistakably stern glare that birds of prey all share. I don't know whether the eagle was in fact being stern. Probably he looks that way all the time, no matter how he's feeling. Nature has uniquely equipped eagles with a fierce look, clearly designed to scare the bejeezus out of one and all. And it works. Something about this made me really happy. To see a thing for what it is, and accept it, is its own reward. I'm glad the eagle stopped by, but not because I think it had a message, or omen, or had a single thing to do with me, but because I'm certain it didn't, which makes me feel even luckier. Nature may have a lot to teach us about ourselves, but for those of us exhausted or over-saturated with self-discovery, it offers an occasional stern look to remind us it's not always about us. Sometimes an eagle is just an eagle.

There's this thing that happens

It was a small moment. It couldn't have been smaller.
We walked on opposite sides of a street at night. Between us were banks of snow piled up high after the last storm. A rope in her hand angled down beyond my view, suggesting a dog. I knew my dog was also hidden by snow, so I held my leash high, hoping it would explain my spastic movements, stopping, starting again, backing up, lurching forward. We stood briefly facing each other across the street, trading a nod and a half smile while our unseen dogs busied themselves. Each of us was directly beneath a street lamp, in the exact center of the block. I was thinking about symmetry, and how this might look like a modern dance choreographed by dogs. Which it was. And then on cue, we were each yanked back into the shadows, our leashed partners having resumed the ancient, wordless canine business of marking territory, as meaningfully as they could with cumbersome humans in tow.
And that's all it was.

It's a life's work just being fully conscious, staying tuned in to the world around us, but when we get it right, beauty inevitably slips into the mundane. It happens over and over, and is a kind of gift, but it has a terribly hard time making itself known to a cluttered mind. The clarity needed is not unlike what many people experience during moments of trauma. Years ago I was struck by a speeding car and flew through the air before hitting the ground and losing consciousness. Despite the pain that followed, the heightened awareness in that moment was instantaneous and terribly rich with detail. In the days to come, I struggled with the mind-erasing effects of concussion and amnesia, but to this day I can still see the light sparkling through the trees, hear the kids playing in the park nearby, and feel myself floating backwards, then the lung-flattening crunch of windshield against my back.

How many of us ever really know what's happening at any given moment? The knowing is revealed to us in the wake of a thing happening. The experiences that make the most meaning for me are usually visual events, beyond language or quick comprehension. The kind of thing where context and expectation are stood on their heads and you simply live it. It's not that language fails. It hasn't even shown up to the party. Words come later, when you describe a thing to yourself. When you say how it was. You might decide it was your favorite thing, but you have to wait for words to arrive before that can happen. And in the space before language floods the brain with bias, or creative agenda, a moment can expand and possess you, and it's a good kind of possession to submit to wholly, because in a minute you might discover you're simply living. And then it's over. The trick is to cultivate that sort of lucidity without being struck by a car.

In With The New

01/01/2012

It's eight oclock in the morning on New Years day. I'm standing in my brother's backyard waiting for my dogs to pee. The city is entirely silent, it seems, except for the church bells ringing two blocks away. The church has a bell tower, but I'm guessing there are just speakers hanging where the bells used to be, and that I'm hearing a recording of bells rung a long time ago. Probably decades.

As holidays go, New Years demands as much pretense as any of the others. Maybe even more. The effort to summarize a year as if it had a cohesive essence has always been a ridiculous contrivance to me. How can I give a shape to a span of time that only randomly frames the events of my life? The whole situation is a bit like one of those timed tests back in grade school, where you're writing an essay and it's turning out pretty well, but the clock runs out and the proctor shouts "Pencils down!" and you are expected to just drop your thought, right then and there, and to move on to the next part of the test. If you took the time to name the thing that you are feeling, it might be insult.

The dogs finish peeing and chase a squirrel to the far corner of the yard where it escapes over a fence and up a bare tree. The Dogs don't know it is New Years day. Neither does the squirrel. All around me are little brick bungalows with thin wisps of vapor drifting from their rooftops. Wires crowd the sky at all angles. From here to the horizon thousands of hangovers are just beginning to make themselves known.

The problem with deconstructing holidays, or with trying to sweep all traces of superstition clean from your life, or trying to live ideology-free, or with adhering to any strictly rational habit of mind, is that it will lead you straight down a path of total alienation. The onion has no core, and you know that before you begin to peel it. And if you proceed anyway, all you end up with is fragments of onion. So if you're looking for the truth at the center of things, you're going to come up empty, but at least you'll still have an onion to cook with, so to speak.

A few hours later I am surprised to find the church down the block does in fact have bells in its tower. At the moment they are motionless, silhouetted in their little window against the sky. I decide this day is as good as any other to revisit the myth of new beginnings, and to join the many who have once again dared to re-imagine themselves slimmer, healthier, more generous, and more thankful - if only for the next couple of weeks. Whether any of my resolutions actually stick shall remain to be seen. For the moment I can at least say that I'm happy to be welcome in the home of my brother, that I'm blessed by the love of my family and friends, and that I managed to slip into 2012 without a trace of a hangover. That in itself feels like a serious head start.

Happy New Year