It had been storming for 48 hours when Chloe suggested to Drew,

“Sing a sweet song so the sun will come out.”

I do believe they have seen too many old musicals.

And who didn't feel that impulse to run heater skelter when the 'button-eye' sewing episode was introduced in (Neil Gaiman's) Coraline? 

I was thinking, that’s why a parent knows how to push their youngsters buttons ... because they sewed them on!

In the studio there is a batch of antique jet glass buttons in a small grass basket. I have not really meant to assemble a collection, for each button was acquired for a specific duty. Then, the excitement of seeing the perfect button faded and was replaced with dread memories of small defenseless glass broken carelessly before its time.

Learnt:
Never throw a sweater down a ladder with jet buttons.
Never put a garment with jet buttons with dryer.
Never swing a bag of jet button around and around.
For a little button never (tried to) hurt anyone.

Wasn’t it Sam Levenson who something about making sure to press the up button, 

if you die in an elevator?

Now I will mash the publish button (too soon);
it's next to the placebo-panic button.

Budai’s button. Popular folklore maintains that rubbing his belly brings good luck. 

But you already knew that.

Random thoughts. Ephemeral words.
The word ‘thwarted’ is only used in novels.

“Vampires ARE real! I saw a vampire interviewed on the National Geographic channel, and they don’t lie, do they mom?”

Water tanks & the wayside shrines.

End of a limerick never written
...for she can balance quite well with out it.

Got to admire Aubrey Beardlsey, a man who in this ninth hour destroys some of his (short) life’s work on the grounds that it is obscene and make it through inspection gate of heaven with it in his satchel.
And, J. Adams, for, who in a huff would jump up on the board table and throw his furry wig at his peers.

Lying down is like standing on your side.

We have hit upon the Baroque of cartoons.
I believe Flapjack is a good example.

Memories in every shop, on every corner, every greasy spoon offered a fleeting tease of an image, color, or conversation, until the collective experiences blurred and flew by as a giddy roller coaster in suspended animation...

Today's rainy day to-do list;
Build a fishing rod for Chloe-
Make NY pretzels with kids help-
Disperse dye a red cape-
Repair a chenille fabric as cover-
Make dog shade cover for the deck with scrap flag nylon-
Go to graveyard in the rain-
Remember to take pic of mossy crumbly green-

What’s the big idea, again?

I was in Quan Yin’s dream. She came to me and said,
“Time has passed, you should know these things.”

55 I dreamed someone was calling me to hurry up. He was high on a hill and moving fast, with head turned back, painfully watching my progress. I needed to cover my feet and was lost in a mountain of shoes. None would fit. No two would match ...

It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe. - Muhammad Ali

The cabbie zooms by a costume shop named Just Decide. A restaurant called Food. A leather place run by Hell’s Angels that touted a teetering lineup of hogs on the front sidewalk. Tiny, the tallest Angel, wore boots covered with retablos, buckles and buttons. Scraps scavenged from the shoes he repaired. This layer, in turn, was covered with the dust of his exploits...

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. 

-Charles Spurgeon

We harbor sorrow inside of the body. We have to expect a leak. Maybe I will learn to wear sorrow as shoes. Under the bottom of my feet, like an ancient Egyptian, drawing a likeness on the inner soles of my sandals, symbolically crushing the enemy with every step. I’ve tried and tried again and again to work through it. Over it, around it, in front and behind it. Now I’m going to work beside it and see if I can manage it...

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul. 

 -Victor Hugo

Space is vast the road is limited. Have you seen the shoe tree? With its boughs bowing and swaying with the weigh of sneakers, pumps, sandals flapping, stilettos, a golf shoe, a fuzzy chartreuse slipper, an ice skate, manolos, it become the texture of shoe ... You hit on wondering where the mates were to all those brogans. Is there is the sister tree? It is somewhere on the north-bound side, heading up Route 44 in the Mohave desert. Along near, but after Amboy, and Needles. Such an incredible landmark is wasted, seen as a mirage, you don't stop for photos. Thinking only when the tattered image is a pinpoint in the rearview mirror that perhaps the wayside shoe shrine really did exist.

How strange, when your father's wearing women's clothes and platform shoes, that a pair of loafers looks incredible.

 -Moon Unit Zappa

We were ooowing & ahhhing over an acquaintance’s book of poetry that had been begrudgingly lent and was now being carefully handled. He set it down on the papered work table near our 8th floor open window. In one very foolish elbow move, by me, it was gone. There was a cursing of bad luck in twain. In our mournful anguish we looked out the window expecting to see the book free falling eight stories with the binding bowed and the pages stretching wide, liberating themselves, fluttering as to say I’m ‘this’ free. Down, down to the pavement and crushed underfoot by a New Yorker who was sipping espresso thinking about a guest list as he hurried to buy a newspaper to check into fair weather for this weekends’ family holiday on his home out in Montauk... We focused nearer and saw that the volume had landed in the window plastic flower pot in the apartment just below us, 7D. Being less petrified by whomever lived there, than what would happen to us if we reported the lost book, (Yes, stolen!) we ran down and stood there, before the door, listening intently to the quiet and what lie beyond. Thinking, who would have a plastic flower pot in Union Square?

You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in. -Arlo Guthrie

Those who restrain their desires, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. -William Blake

I went on, all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay. -Dylan Thomas

It doesn’t take as much magic as moxy. Creating is not for social sissies. You gotta have guts to create. -Lonnie Hanzon

I call everyone 'Darling' because I can't remember their names.
-Zsa Zsa Gabor

No good deed goes un-punished.

Theater of the mind.
She concluded her magic by ringing up a few quotes from Victor Hugo. Grinning to herself, she rehearsed an abbreviated reenactment of Fontine’s death. Still smiling at the mirrored audience, she shut out the light and exited stage front door. Indeed, she had possessed a bit of this character as a younger woman. The uncertainty of each day. The working really very hard through every single detailed accomplishment that some people take for granted. Toasting bread while getting the pin light to hit her cheek bone correctly. Brushing the bird’s teeth. Zipping up a wind-breaker. Now, she simply skipped to the ending of each life she portrayed. Trying on different finales to get an idea of what felt most natural...

She walked down and around to the corner on Main Street. As she handed a derelict loose change, his cell phone rang from deep within his tattered pocket...

A performance at a Bowery outdoor cafe theater of life in late fall. Coffee steaming into the chilly morning air. A tense tête-à-tête discussion about life on the edge and horrible deaths. The audience is hanging on every word.
Two mongrels tumble across the screen in front of the protagonist and prophet. The miniature terrier is ripping the hair out of the larger wolf, as he has a death grip on the smaller one’s neck. Engrossed in the importance of their own words, our two heroes never glance up at the riot of commotion.
The device obliterates the seriousness of the message. The importance of the words are knocked aside as if being effaced from a huge tablet in the sky.

...Inhabiting strange places reminds me of the winter Clint, Trax and myself were living in the costume shop of the church flipped Acoma Theater. We slept under the huge cutting table. I knew when the third act of Macbeth was about to begin because the swords fell on me, every time.

...A really great opera review might include, “...And as for the cast, none of them offended me greatly.”

...Opening a box, revealing an archival monkey mask of the thinnest open cell foam wrinkled and folded years ago by a perfectionist. The Image of the delicate mask turning to dust as it was being lifted out of it’s nest of wrappings, has never left my mind's eye.

“It dosen’t matter a rats ass if there’s not butts in the seats”

see June 27...

Another stream of conscious post...

It says right here, don’t aggravate the door.
Nosfurato / just forgot to

Vigilante visual antics individual acts more into the Grand Gesture than the blind hem these days.

She was a veteran at carrying more than her share. She had the knack to gather up an odd pile of things sitting throughout the car, picking each up as though she had auditioned for the role. Using all the usual holding places of the under the arm, over the shoulder and in the crook of the elbow, she also implemented, behind the ear, clenching of the teeth, under the chin, hooking finger, available pockets, stuffing into the sock, balancing on the head, and a lesser known keep named the Women’s Purse. None of this meant a rat’s ass, of course, unless she still had a free hand for keys to unlock the door. She was forever on the lookout for a game show that would celebrate this talent with a cash money award.

It’s the telling of the story. Not knowing the ending of a story has never been important to me. It dosen’t ruin a tale by someone slipping-up and divulged the ending. There are so few endings, and so very many ways to tell it.

Detail from Chance Neglected, work-in-progress graphic novel.

Truth is Nothing More Than a Feeling
that Something is True.
True or False?

(circa 1983) 

I am listing 7 things people don't know about me. Of course there is the minor problem of not knowing me at all. So, I’m going for acquaintance status so as not to have to start with complete basics. I’ll keep it light. 

1. I have dear, dear friends. And there's others I'll always love that have never given me a second thought.

2. In real life I tend to qualify everything I say (something about my dreaded conversation remorse and Mercury\Saturn alignment) which makes it a bit tedious to listening to my own mind, because I am forever returning to a conversation coming up with what I should have said. 

3. I am an olive oil and chocolate snob. And this brings up the questions of compared to who? 

Only stating.

4. A well timed spider-check around bedtime is always necessary. 

5. I swim in creative chaos. The peek of the creative wave dose not frighten me. I’m best suited to work on multiple project at any given time. Having something going, in all the basic project areas, is as it should be. A change of work, in the flux, gives rest and energy to the work sitting on the next table. I do not fluster and I wont buy into drama. Unless, or course  it’s appropriately placed on the theatrical stage. 

6. I cry easily. Soda commercials, dead poet recordings, recitals, roadkill, orphans. You name it. 

7. I love a well designed ampersand. 

Sometimes you only know where your mind has been by writing down what it says between your ears.

What does art do?  Chloe’s Bottle & Tornado Pouch Holder. (-Remade form Tornado-in-a-Bottle) 

  “We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal” 

-Bergman 

 “Truth exists. Only lies are invented.” 

-Georges Braque

Chloe gets into my Things-I-can't-make box and builds. 

My dear friends can attest that I scare easily.
And I tend to personify everything, anything.
It was an unusually gusty day even for the desert. Up on the hill road a titanic trampoline compete with safety net has jumped its retainer wall and is bouncing across the road. The weight of it’s own landing has bent the legs and formed knee joints that look like Pop-eye’s elbows. The aberration has crushed on its weight and looking like a monstrous bogey spider scurrying as the wind skitters it across the blacktop.

Ghost in the machine.
Give up the hallowed ghost.
The animating spirit of us all.

He hoped he would be able to mind his own business in the hereafter, she had made that very VERY CLEAR.
“If you die before me, do not come back if you feel the need to tell me something, DO NOT haunt me. I will not understand. I will quickly and simply say, GO TO REGRESSION.”

Ghosts before breakfast.
These mornings I wake up before the break of day. I’ll sit in this predawn darkness, resisting the impulse to do anything. It’s now that I remember people, their words, the sound of their words and the color of the sound. Each harkens back to a ghost of a memory, trips back, skips back farther and farther until there is no place else to go, except round to the now. And I like to wonder why, through this mental synaesthesia, I thought of them today, this minute.

"I want to go to heaven without dying to hear Judy Garland sing."
Chloe Mae

Never sleep under a used pall without sageing it first.

...At some point down the street there lived a threesome of grown bros. that were Civil War reenactment enthusiasts... As though it wasn’t good enough the first time around. They were the classic, happy, Santa/biker ZZ type, with a home full of dusty American antiques and a ready musket leaned near every window. The booby trapped barb wired back acre was decorated with litter and half organized with destitute VW parts, (we where expecting?) Within that motley pile and wonder weeds, there stood a heavy black cannon they fired off every Fourth of July.
I imagine other locals knowing the date and time and moment of the annual explosion. On the expectation of it hurrying willy-nilly to hold down the urns and nic-nacs keeping the piano in place as in the scene from Mary Poppins when Admiral Boom blasts the canon on-the-dot.

Lisa, Terry, Lonnie, and Mark will shutter along with me remembering the gun shots over Oakland that would ring in the New Year. As though everyone let loose who owned a secret weapon and then, once over and concealed again, eyed each other suspiciously then on. Starting one minute till, with the final sound-off at five minutes after midnight. I’m sure the Vulcan in Oakland has become rather gentrified to a degree. When we lived there the inhabitants were working artists and artistic spirit types converting it into the groovy space we are allegedly known to occupy. Yet, as time passed it was inevitably commandeered by the (then) popular yuppies with bigger bank rolls and small children, who looked on their actions as the courtesy of patrons instead of a hostel takeover. Whoa, where have I gone...

Anyway, yes, New Years Eve at the Vulcan...of course most of this was during my white-out phase so I could be way off in recall. Also what goes around, again, so it could be totally trashed and on it's way back up in repeat by now....hey, Mark you think your painting is still the in the Vulcan Thai Café?

 Words are indeed my second language, but, becoming an ever more closer second. I do believe it is easier to misinterpret written word far more than spoken, since the tone is left up to the reader....makes for some lively, and sometimes misdirected comments. One thing is certain, though, everyone gets their say so on paper, or in this case, on the unlined screen. Even if it ends up being an unread paragraph for a nonexistent audience. There's a touch of the zen in writing. 

I am hard to impress.

I knew an artisté whose art took the physical form of post card invitations to art opening extravaganzas around the world. Each of these A6 pieces of chrome coat had the back story of a hundred hours of processed art and the promise to inspire even the hardest of aesthetics. And, of course, there weren't any shows to open. We need to release all of the marginally insane.

Funky: The quality given to a person, place or thing having the ability to be unusually interesting, unexplainably pleasing and entirely unique all at the same time.
Also: A groaty smell.
Oh yea, and that restless place between blue and over-it.

You can’t make time, but you can create more space.