Fig.1-Worm Drive

7.6 Solving Rational Inequality

2011-11-13T12:23:00.000-05:00

circa 1996 maybe

In the Dream

2011-11-13T10:36:00.003-05:00

they sent me and Gloria out in one of the boss-cars, small four-dour Saturns with the City emblem on the driver’s side. It was one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind jobs, finding work for personnel by losing them. I was struck by the idea that we never went up into the 30’s and higher streets because of course, in my dream, it wasn’t Richmond anymore, it was Manhattan. I decided to drive Gloria by NYU and show her where my son was born. East 32nd street was wide as always but populated with stately Foursquares and Dutch Colonials, new and vinyl covered as a phony Pennsylvania suburb. The streets were empty except for police cruisers, the sidewalks were lined with large trees, behind them were the skyscrapers. I pointed out a Sycamore to her where me and my ex-wife’s station-wagon broke down, playing with my son under it, him two years old and climbing massive gnarled roots that buckled the sidewalk. We went further north and got into a large grey cliff area like around Columbia, it felt stodgy and old, the buildings got larger and larger, whole city blocks of darkened glass and stone. I told Gloria you were supposed to feel small there. She did that thing where her eyes half-closed but her head was up looking like an Egyptian Mau. She never said anything in the dream but seemed to enjoy being driven around. I got lost and drove us into an area that was blocked by army guys; it looked like a ship-yard. They pointed rifles and shouted, we were diverted along the side of the great docks. There was a ship pulling into port, if you could call it a ship, it had enormous polished iron arms churning huge wheels along its length that churned the water heavily. The contraption released violent clouds of steam, I could see no crew. Hundreds of children had been released and were running along the dock to greet it, screaming with laughter. Lining the opposite side was a large building that could have only been a bank, multiple bay windows faced in ornate copper that had long oxidized green, a wall of battered turquoise over ten stories tall. As we drove by I told Gloria it looked like the most desperate scene I had ever witnessed

2011-11-13T10:34:00.000-05:00

I quit my City of Richmond job Friday. I start another job Tuesday.

Stone Mountain

2011-10-23T14:24:00.000-04:00

Revolt/

2011-10-11T20:32:00.001-04:00

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-01T11:35:00.006-04:00

Every two Fridays I get paid and usually take Ruth out for Mexican. I can't do much with my money, but I can at least do that. We go all over town, last night we went back to the new-ish "Mexico" over on Southside. Just before we left out I had an exchange on Facebook with a friend of mine, she was looking for someone to ride shotgun with her husband to New York. He happens to be "directionally dyslexic" and she was worried that he'd wind up in South Dakota. While I've never met the man, they've got it like me- grown up punk rockers with a kid, they both work, she writes books, she's got The Job. They Struggle.

Word is they started gassing people in New York yesterday. I've been following the "Occupation" loosely, mostly from articles my more politically minded friends have shared on Facebook. I try to avoid those type posts. However Ruth and me sat on the couch two nights ago and watched the Youtube video of the girls getting maced point blank behind an orange barricade on Wall street. As we drove the truck across the Nickel Bridge I told her I was thinking that going up there might be the most important use of my time that weekend. A quarter mile to the west a slow train was crossing the river over the arched rail-bridge, the sun going down behind it. I won't give you a laundry list of everything I'm up against. If you're one of the ten regular readers here, you've probably got a pretty good idea. I appreciate the understanding. So I guess we can agree the message expressed in New York this weekend likely applies to me, my situation, the current and future well being of my children. In Southside, Ruth and me discussed all of this over cheese dip. My original plan for the weekend was to focus mainly on more job-hunting.

The idea of open conflict with the NYPD does not excite me. Of all the cops I've had run-ins with in my career, Manhattan cops have always seemed the most laid back, the most intelligent, the most human. Neither does the idea of getting maced, or locked up, of even knocked around by cops scare me much either. My intentions for going would not be because of anything I have to prove to anyone, not even myself. I am a free agent. My time is my time. It seemed to me for a little while that going would be like my friend Larry Levis said at the end of his poem "In 1969"

As the summer went on, some were drafted, some enlisted
In a generation that would not stop falling, a generation
Of leave sticking to body bags, & when they turned them
Over, they floated back to us on television, even then,
In the Summer of Love, in 1967,
When riot police waited beyond the doors of perception,
And the best thing one could do was get arrested.

Or counted or gassed or rounded up by the hundred with hands zip-tied behind backs and sat on the street. I would go because it seemed like an important time to be there, to see what it was like to be inside an Eric Drooker drawing. I would go so that I could hear what was being said, break away for it for a minute, go two blocks and see the waters rushing over the 9/11 monument. To come back home and write and tell you what I saw.

We sat and ate and Ruth told me all the good reasons to stay. The money. The fact that I've got to be at the Fan Free Clinic on Monday to see if they can line up a CT scan for me. If I got locked up, I might not be able to make it. If I missed work because I got locked up, the temp agency might fire me and then everything would be a world of shit. We left out from Mexico with our take-home box. The sun was setting and finally had a good Fall look to it. Red and orange going straight up with purple and blue down around the edges. We drove home and Ruth nibbled on chips and cheese dip as we crossed over the Huguenot bridge. The air was crisp, the sky seemed to be on fire and everything was as it should be.

By the time we got home and I checked Facebook, there was another interested party, another Clay, with revolutionary bicycle emblems as his profile. Nobody had ever met anyone else, yet everyone seemed to be on the same page. Even though in my gut it seemed like exactly the next right thing to do, I told them sorry, but I couldn't go.

I stayed because I decided it seemed a little too much like other times when I've run out the door like that; bad, reckless, dangerous times. No, I didn't go because I made a commitment a while back not to live like that anymore. To avoid, whenever I could, acting as an agent of chaos, no matter how good or pure the intentions driving me.

2011-09-21T21:25:00.000-04:00

Sept 8

2011-09-21T21:07:00.002-04:00

I wrote the following as a Facebook status:

The first stop today was a giant hulking wreck of a sycamore that hadn't even been cut yet. It was every bit of forty foot long and six foot around and it was all wet and green, green as a garden snake and vibrantly mottled like the way a sycamore does. Flinging various dismembered parts of it frightened me a little, like we were handling the carcass of a brontosaurus. I do believe I told it I was sorry that it had died.

To which my friend John Holland responded that he was expecting a "memoir of my time on the back of that truck" and that he was "dead effing serious." So I told him okay, I would do it.

So yeah, there you go. I'm going to try and write a book now and maybe even get it published. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for staying with me.

Clay

Been waking up with Dylan songs in my head all week

2011-09-16T09:39:00.001-04:00

while summer lays dying in the street

NoLA Love pt. 2

2011-09-11T00:27:00.007-04:00

"Benefactors"

"Fig.17-Stonewall Jackson"

"SelfPortrait" & "Fig.18-Stone Mountain"

Other pictures of these drawings can be found here and here. I have not yet taken pictures of the one with my parents on the elephant, I essentially "mostly" finished it up and then stuffed it in the tube so that it could make it on time for the show. Also Thank you Mrs. 21K for the Link!

NoLA Front

2011-09-07T21:57:00.002-04:00

Last week I mailed down five drawings rolled up in a giant cardboard tube I found in an alley. Tuesday Ruth mailed down twenty small chapbooks made up of writing excerpted from here.

http://www.nolafront.org/

"Georgia"

2011-09-04T10:38:00.004-04:00

CHICKAMAUGA Ernest Lloyd Gant Jr., 70, passed away Thursday, Aug. 25, 2011. He was a member of Fairview Baptist Church and the Ahaba Sunday School Class. Lloyd attended the University of Chattanooga and was the owner of Clydes Auto Glass.He was preceded in death by his parents, E. Lloyd Sr. and Marjorie Gant.Survivors include his wife, Patsy Edgemon Gant; daughter, Kandy Gant (Robb) Gilstrap, of Rock Spring, Ga.; two grandchildren, Haynie Jane Gilstrap and Harrison Gant Gilstrap; sister, Mary Frances (Jerry) Blancett, of Fernandina Beach, Fla.; several nieces and nephews.Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at the East Chapel of Chattanooga Funeral Home, 404 S. Moore Road with the Rev. Jim Bennett officiating.Burial will be in Edgemon Cemetery in Ten Mile, Tenn.Memorial contributions may be made to Fairview Baptist Church, 108 Jenkins Road, Rossville, GA 30741.Please share your thoughts and memories at www.ChattanoogaEastChapel.com.The family will receive friends from 4-8 p.m. today at the funeral home.

My Uncle Lloyd Died this Morning.

2011-08-25T13:06:00.001-04:00

there are more pictures of his place here

Clyde's Auto Glass

2011-08-25T13:00:00.004-04:00

View Larger Map

this was his shop

The Promise of May

2011-08-24T19:36:00.008-04:00

The big truck lumbered and creaked as it slowed down to nothing under one of the maples that lined the road circling the lake. After an hour the truck had idled almost long enough to warm us, the raw edge of spring was yet to soften. We had come to the park, my driver and I flushed out the day before by a random trade supervisor who lucked into getting his breakfast at the Burger King that hidden us since March. In mid-May the sun had still yet to rise by six o’clock so we decided there was no point in doing this shit in the pitch black. It was after one stop off Patterson, I spilled out of the truck, and looking up, couldn’t find the three hundred pound claw of the boom. Instead a shape arced soundlessly and huge just over my head. I made out Orion’s arched shoulders twinkling through a web of black and mostly naked tree limbs.

So instead we slept. Each week finding a new spot, driving in silence through the empty city; not from a dislike of one another, but after eight months together, seemed like the right approach for the morning. Nothing was said about the park, we just wound up there. My driver pulled the air brake, leaned his head against the window and promptly started snoring softly. He had developed the talent to doze off nearly anywhere. Two kids and three jobs will do that to a man. I bunched the hood of my jacket up and nestled against it, squinting out the cold window into the cold of the lake, dark as Homer’s wine-dark. Three geese on the water, I dozed. I dreamt about the muscles that made up my girl’s neck and how they were like a song. I thought that if that were so, then surely each morning my truck must be a prayer to the city. Maples thrust ragged fingers into the horizon which had started to bleed pink. Pink and blaze orange crept into the lakes reflection. One long dogwood rose yonder like a ghost.

The radio, turned down to a murmur, had a speaker located just behind my head. I couldn’t remember when it was but at some point that winter Steve Harvey had dedicated the first five minutes of his radio show with some thoughts about spiritual matters. As I went in and out of consciousness he sounded as though he were singing, his leathery baritone as alien as a foreign language. There in the blue morning, he whispered to me.

“Now I’ve been talking with a lot of people these days and I know it’s hard right now. It’s likely going to get harder and you may think that God has forsaken you. That he’s abandoned you and you’re all alone. Well I’m here to tell you that’s a flat-out lie, cause he’s got you and he’s always, always had you, even when you weren’t listening out for him. I want you to know that I’ve got you too and I’m here to tell you right now that He didn’t bring you all this way to let you down now. I know it feels like you keep hammering and nothing is breaking loose and nothing is coming together and every year you just feel more tired all the time. Well I’m here today to tell you that it gonna come together, you just got to keep on going, and never quit. Just keep going and don’t you ever, ever give up.”

Nothing About Elephants

2011-08-19T14:16:00.000-04:00

I learned today that when the ruined suspension of the trash truck you're riding in bounces you to the point that you are propelled out of your jump-seat, it is imperative that you holler "BUCK MULE!!"

Statement of Purpose

2011-08-13T16:12:00.000-04:00

At some point I decided I wanted to be a conduit. As an artist I figure it’s my job to report on the world around me, the beautiful as well as the grotesque. However, being the person I am, realized I could never attain the perfect impartiality of a mirror. My daily vision is clouded with worries, fears, minor resentments, and various physical urges. So I figured the best I could shoot for was a conduit, and attempt to let the world move through me, while allowing what I saw to frighten, to inspire me or to stoke whatever memories they may.

For example, working for the City of Richmond, I find myself daily watching refuse truck unloading at a transfer station over in Southside. Their freight is dumped on a “tipping-floor” of a huge, open structure, and then loaded by heavy equipment into open-top tractor trailers which is then “transferred” somewhere else. It is a loud, dangerous operation. Everything is huge and moves too fast. The texture of several tons of trash is enough to overload your senses, not even taking into account the smell. Plastic bags and styrofoam get blown out and hung up in the tall oaks and pines that boarder the place. At some point I started noticing the birds. Each tractor trailer seemed to have a line of sparrows riding along the top edge of its box, darting down occasionally to scavenge food. Red-tailed hawks hunkered down sixty feet up a massive radio tower across the way. The place is essentially in a healthy wood with some good sized loblolly pines and pin oaks. The trash used to depress me, as did my station and paycheck associated with it. I am a middle-aged pilgrim wandering the new economy with children to care for. After a few months of watching birds dart through chain-link choked with Trumpet Vine, I was struck by the idea, a concept maybe, of “Urban Naturalism.” I realized I previously always looked away whenever I saw a municipality truck, that I’d never really considered the shape a trash truck makes.

Or rather, I’d forgotten about it. Large trucks are like elephants. You become an adult and have kids and a mortgage and dysfunctional relationships and then one day you wander into a large open space at the Bronx zoo and there is an elephant walking on it’s huge elephant feet, waving it’s trunk around and you realize somehow you’d forgotten all about elephants. You remember the child-like feeling of not being able to fully comprehend something that foreign, that much bigger than yourself, much less appropriately describe how it moves through space. I mean, look at it! All you want to talk about is elephants, you want to write a story about elephants. Ideally it should be about the elephant, but shouldn’t you acknowledge that your anxiety about how close the children are is partially based on the hangover you haven’t been able to walk off? Also, how can you leave out the comment your mother-in-law made to you back in the dark halls of the reptile house? In the real world, shouldn’t all this inform your elephant?

Death from Above 1979

2011-08-06T21:04:00.003-04:00

Nantes L'Elephant

2011-08-05T17:59:00.003-04:00

Started a New Drawing Today

2011-07-31T09:20:00.002-04:00

My parents are "commissioning" this one. So I'm going to try and incorporate this image into it. In the style of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Except as a mountain shaped like an Elephant or something.

Motorcycling in East Tennessee IV (I think)

2011-07-16T12:50:00.005-04:00

My first night out I stayed in Wears Valley again, at my Aunt Judys' place. I hadn’t been down in almost three years. Judy and Bill couldn’t come up as they were in Chattanooga with Bill’s sister Beverly who was at Erlanger getting some un-named medical procedure. I’d stay the night alone then, like almost always. The irises and blaze red dragon lilies had grown to enormous proportions, there was still a huge bottle of Vodka in the freezer, there were still ants in the kitchen. It was as lonely as it always was, looking out over the valley, but it didn’t scare me to stay there anymore. Just before dark I went down into the valley to fuel up and get a milkshake. I tightened the chain in the parking lot of the grocery and gas place, sitting on the pavement, torquing on the axle nuts, hands on one wrench and boot on another. Harley tourists roared all around. A big crew-cab Ford towing a giant black trailer pulled up next to me with my tools spilled everywhere and a group of heavy set dudes sounding like Atlanta middle management rolled out and eyeballed me. I eyeballed them back. Another small pack hollered over by the pumps when gas overflowed and poured down the sides of the tank of a big expensive machine. I figured half of everybody there was down to ride the world famous “Dragon” outside Robbinsville. Check the website. I rode the four-lane in the opposite direction to the dilapidated Burgermaster, got a malted from a girl behind the tiny window and drank it sitting in the tall grass beside the blinking arrow sign parked on the edge of the gravel horseshoe driveway.

I kept waking up in the night, checking my phone. Determined four a.m. was too early to head out. By dawn I was showered and packing up, the bike in the yard and the contents of the saddle bags scattered all over the front porch. My hands were shaking with nervous excitement, it had rained in the night and smoke hung on the mountain looming across from my aunt’s front yard. I wiped my seat down with yesterday’s t-shirt. I stretched and prayed and prayed again and headed out. I set the idle low as I could, just a bare grumble, so as not to disturb the woods and hills. Under my helmet I prayed for safe passage, for the roads to dry, for the sun to crest enough to penetrate the blue morning of the hollows. I made myself take it slow despite my nervousness. Rolling down into Metcalf Bottoms I slowed to a stop to let a small family of wild turkey cross, tiny velociraptors hopping the moss-lined ditch into the cover of tall ferns. By the time I picked up 441 to Cherokee, it was still early enough for me to be the only one on the road. Fleets of winnebagos and RV’s must have still been getting breakfast at the Pancake houses lining Gatlinburg. I started climbing.

Half a summer’s worth of huge slow moving vehicles left a treacherous snail trail of oil and grease down the center of my lane. Old growth pines and oaks canopied green overhead, green rushing alongside. There was some construction on the old brown road, payloaders like sleeping dinosaurs crowded the narrow shoulders trailing gravel washout toward the insides of the corners. Halfway up, the earth fell away on one side leaving nothing but road and sky, rock, cedars, hemlock and pines. At some point amid the mist and conifers I passed from Tennessee into North Carolina and started down toward Cherokee. I clutched the bike into third gear and let it growl there as we picked up speed. Cold wind rushed over my small windshield and buffeted my helmet. Everything in the periphery turned to a green blur. I realized I had been afraid of this moment the whole trip. Three years previous I was out of control with grief, half convinced I’d come to Tennessee to wipe myself out on a mountain. I lined up the first few curves and ran them a little shaky, nervous about the rushing edges of the tree lined road. Correcting the geometry of a corner that you’ve entered too fast is tricky at best. After about five minutes I realized I was holding my breath. I decided to concentrate on my breathing- stop worrying about tire pressure and nailing each apex. Line up a corner, brake slightly, breathe in, roll on the throttle and exhale as I pushed through the exit. Breathing through each curve, under a dark tunnel of hanging limbs. In this way I wound my way down the mountain. I hadn’t yet scraped a foot peg. I wondered about the engineers of that road. Did they imagine an abstract concept of the math that went into each radius? Or was it just laid down along the knobby spine of the mountain? Did they mean for a man like me to be able to run along it on a motorcycle averaging sixty five miles an hour? It was the fastest I’d ever run a mountain road like that. At some point it occurred to me that I’d reached the limit of what my machine could do. At some point I realized I had no idea what drove me to go that fast or that alone. As the road flattened onto the valley floor and ran suddenly through an open field, blue sky soaring above, I realized I had started crying.

Acid King

2011-07-16T12:49:00.001-04:00

Didn't take too many Pictures

2011-07-12T21:23:00.005-04:00

Robin Heart

2011-07-12T20:11:00.005-04:00

By seven o'clock we were done with almost half our tickets, and I had somehow managed to start liking my driver again. We were rolling down a long alley in the west end, manicured enough to have that country lane feeling. Crepe myrtles bunched and hung pink flowers over our passing, trees barely canopied over the truck. The sun had not yet broken through the haze of the morning so the temperature managed to hover in the mid nineties, mercifully. I was holding on tight to what was at best an attitude of sullen but quiet helpfulness. It felt like utter bullshit. Long hot weeks have passed since I've liked any of the drivers. It was too early to be rolling this hateful machine just yards outside peoples bedrooms. Adolescent rabbits and chipmunks scattered before us.

I located the house by a faded address spray painted across the back of a supercan, spilled out onto the gravel while my driver mounted the ladder to the operator's chair. Two small piles of branches, purple pokeweed stalks, flattened and limp outside a short wire fence lining a smart white clapboarded outbuilding. I grabbed the pitchfork from the underbelly of the truck, walked back to consolidate the piles and noticed a robin in distress on the ground next to the building. An ordinary thing.

It was rolling, one wing out, and beak open. It seemed as though it couldn't get itself righted. I was just about to reach over the wire fence when it tumbled over on it's back and looked up at me over it's white heaving breast. He met my gaze, then stretched out straight as a cat in a sunbeam, head up, wings down and legs straight, and moved no more.

I thought maybe the roaring truck or lowering boom had scared it. We got the piles up and I went back, made sure it wasn't breathing. I've rescued no less than four adolescent robins this summer. I supposed I was the last thing the bird saw before it died. Feeling like a kid, I nudged it with one of the tongs. My driver came down and got back in the cab, switching off the high idle, filling out the paperwork for the stop. As I shoved the pitchfork back under the frame of the truck I think I managed to say something out loud- Commend this spirit whose passing I witnessed. I suddenly wanted to leave from that place. I resisted the urge to ask all the questions- What had killed it, Why did it have to die, Why did I need to be there. I've been asking Why too much lately. Why can be the most hateful word under heaven.

Saturday

2011-06-23T21:51:00.004-04:00

I'm riding my motorcycle to my Aunt Judy's place in the Smokey Mountains. Sunday I will get up and ride over the mountains to Cherokee and pick up the southern most part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I'll ride all day Sunday, stay in Boone, North Carolina and then come home Monday. It's about a thousand miles in three days. Here's a map of the first day which has always been the most grueling. I'll post pictures and hopefully write about it.

Couple More Better Pictures

2011-06-04T15:21:00.005-04:00

Birthday Present from Kay

2011-05-29T12:28:00.005-04:00

“real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. it comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. you are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. you are willing to share your heart with others.”

- chogyam trungpa

Ruth took the picture in the new header, going about forty five miles an hour through West Virginia. See that shade of blue up in the left hand corner? That is about the closest estimation of blue I have yet seen of her eyes.

Also, I have gotten this up finally. Hopefully I'll get my shit together enough soon to write an artists' statement and send it all out to galleries, etc. start trying to show my stuff around RVa. Or something.

As Yet Untitled

2011-05-29T11:04:00.008-04:00

"In a big country dreams stay with you

like a lover's voice across the mountain side."

Something about Fatherhood maybe or Blue Rhinos.
Approximately 5ft. by 6ft4. More Sharpies.

Could really use a bigger room to photograph in as well as some of those umbrella flash things. Yes I stole "Dürer's Rhinoceros "

O Rly?

Back on the Lift

2011-05-29T11:02:00.002-04:00

It's kind of a work in progress. Gaddammitt.

So

2011-05-20T21:46:00.003-04:00

Randy Savage died today in a car wreck in Tampa. Also I just found out yesterday that the Rapture is apparently happening tomorrow. I'm not sure how I missed this. The day after that, the new Lady Gaga album is coming out. Then, on Monday, the Twenty Third, I am somehow turning forty years old.

I am Making Art Today

2011-05-15T09:49:00.001-04:00

Hear my mighty warriors' cry ArroooooO

Out by the Edge of the Woods

2011-05-10T19:15:00.002-04:00

RIP Redwings 1994-2011

2011-05-08T12:04:00.003-04:00

Requirements

2011-04-25T17:54:00.005-04:00

so a tenured version of my job came online last week and it had this at the bottom of it:

PHYSICAL AND DEXTERITY REQUIREMENTS: Physical and dexterity refers to the requirement for physical exertion and coordination of limb and body movement. Requires medium work that involves walking, standing, stooping, jumping, stretching, or lifting all of the time; exerting between 20 and 50 pounds of force on a regular and recurring basis; and exceptional skill, adeptness, and speed in the use of fingers, hands, or limbs in tasks involving very close tolerances or limits of accuracy.

it was all bold and everything, but this is the part I really like

ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS: Environmental hazards refer to the job conditions that may lead to injury or health hazards even though precautions have been taken. The job may risk exposure to extreme heat and/or cold, bright/dim light, dusts and pollen, wet or humid conditions, extreme noise levels, vibration, fumes and/or noxious odors, traffic, moving machinery, electric shock, animals/wildlife, and disease/pathogens. SENSORY REQUIREMENTS: Sensory ability refers to hearing, sight, touch, taste, and smell required by the job. The job requires normal visual acuity, depth perception, and field of vision, hearing, speaking and sense of smell. ADA COMPLIANCE The City of Richmond, Virginia is an Equal Opportunity Employer. ADA requires the City to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. Prospective and current employees are invited to discuss accommodations.

and just this morning they gave us a four page handout to review about dogs as potential threats. It's funny cause I got chased up the side of the truck last summer by an escaped pit-bull. I was reminded again that my job is somewhat hilariously dangerous.

Yesterday Evening

2011-04-24T13:16:00.004-04:00

I backed the truck into the front yard, right up to the front porch, in order to unload the last piece of Ruth's furniture into my little house. It's been sitting that way, catty-wampus in the yard with the tailgate down, since last night. I'm half thinking that I haven't moved it because I'm trying to make some sort of statement this beautiful spring day, with the wind in the new budded trees and the low flying clouds. Maybe I'm just feeling lazy.

If You Got Nothing to do Today

2011-04-24T12:58:00.002-04:00

Fig.11-Stonewall Jackson

2011-04-20T21:13:00.010-04:00

Click on image for larger version. CLICK IT NOW DANG YE.

Highland Park

2011-04-17T20:48:00.005-04:00

I had found that my seat belt made a sort of harness for my head so that it didn’t knock into the door so much, this way I could snooze in the morning waiting for sunrise as we bounced through Northside in the truck. It was raining and had been all week, the wipers smearing hydraulic fluid across the windshield, the inside of the truck was hot with the three of us- me, Wil the operator and Gloria the other groundsman. The weird virus that had kept me out most of the previous week had subsided but still braced me; I had been making myself come in, afraid for my job, Mickey Mouse as it was. Everything was too loud and smelled too strong, the trucks in the dark of the morning were all too big and moved much too quickly. The awareness of being the only white person around had returned to me.

I came out of a doze as we lurched and entered one end of a long alley. Wil pulled the airbrake and looked through the paperwork of the day. We were to clean the whole alley, everybody groaned and got their gloves on. I spilled out of the door into the light drizzle, not bothering to pull my hood up, walked down the length of truck. I had found a place back by the right tire where I could shove my pitchfork up under the frame one handed, however it was located by the big three inch exhaust that was pounding heat down into the gravel track, scattering rocks. Bending over, I noticed I could pick out the muscadine sweet smell of oil burning in the diesel fume. I snatched the forks out and standing up, got the familiar dizzy feeling again. My head felt magnetized, more susceptible to the earth’s pull or perhaps drawn against the tall metal walls of the bed of the truck. Gloria came out and lit up a cigarette in the rain and declared all this some fucking bullshit. I agreed. She pulled her hood up and fussed at me for not covering my head. I’d let her sit it out in the truck for the first couple stops but I needed help with this. The alley was probably a quarter mile long and strewn with shit. Wil had climbed the ladder to the operator seat, dropped the stabilizers and brought the boom about, grabbing debris on either side of the truck. Gloria and me consolidated piles, lining them up for the truck roaring behind us and started working out way down. It seemed like each asphalt-shingle sided four-square lining the alley was boarded up and had a yard chin-high with grass and weeds. After a couple of weeks working in the West End, I had forgotten about the wonderful sketchiness of Highland Park. It has a lush, rich texture like nowhere else in the city. After minute, my sick dullness started to fade and I got into a rhythm, jabbing piles of trash, stacking limbs and brush. Gloria helped me drag a vinyl baby pool out of a pile of boxes and weeds. I said I kept waiting for a Rottweiler to come charging out of the tall grass, she assured me she’d run his ass through before he got on me. I said I recognized the house we were behind; didn’t we pick up something out front not long ago? She said yeah. It was an eviction, mostly furniture and clothes, clean new toddler pants, shirts and shoes as well as food and trash placed out front right on the curb. A neighbor had come from across the street and asked could she take some of the children’s clothes, she knew where the family was staying, we tried to help sort some of the useable stuff out from the trash. Most of it was already in the back of the truck.

We stood up from our work and she looked down the way, said she had a girlfriend owned a house about halfway down, mostly painted in sea-green, purple and blue, with windows covered with fresh plywood. I reckoned her girlfriend had gotten foreclosed on. It looked as though only one house in four on either side of that alley was occupied. Like it has always has been, I suppose, the crash had landed hard on Northside.

We agreed Glo would stay by the piles and wait for Wil to bring the truck up while I went on ahead. I swung the pitchfork across my shoulders and realized I had worked myself into feeling better. I walked and surveyed the rest of that lane; a piece of plywood rotting against a lilting carriage house that could be ignored, broken glass glittering everywhere green and brown. One house with an enormous hundred year old oak reaching overhead in the mist, spanning three yards or more, English ivy choking the entirety of its stem almost to the branches. I felt the rain running down through my hair and heard the truck grumbling behind me, thought about a Vet I’d worked with in Tennessee. He was infantry, got shipped over during the Tet Offensive, and found himself appointed to the curious task of escorting tanks through the jungle. He said they were picked off routinely because the tanks were slow and loud as hell. He told me at length one time what it felt like to be in that situation, and as I trudged the long length of bombed out ghetto, sick, broke, boots leaking and pretty much alone, I decided I did not feel like that.

2011-04-17T20:47:00.000-04:00

Northwest Georgia

2011-04-17T15:10:00.004-04:00

Whoever designed the house I grew up in must not have taken into consideration that by having a twenty foot ceiling in the living room would make the house difficult to heat, so for the most part of every weekend, my dad and I would scour lots in North West Georgia downing trees, hauling them home or else splitting firewood by the truckload in the back lots of church friends so that we could keep the great cast iron stove running all winter. The few twenty acres or so we had at our place were divided almost grid-like by hoary tree-lines laced with barbed wire. We thinned some of these back and stacked cordwood along the lines, we had cordwood piled under the back porch. We had wood stacked under the open sided shed roof where the tractor lived, which is where one day, loading with my brother I threw a quartered log clean through the back window of the old black Chevy we used to haul it all with and I’ve never been sure if I did it by accident or not. I remember the smell of fresh cut oak, I remember the bark of the saw, the smell of chainsaw exhaust. I remember loading wood into the truck and keeping track of the figure of my father from a distance so that I could get out of the way should he bring a tree down. I remember working hard and nobody talking, driving hours along curving nameless two-lane county roads through rubbed down Georgia hills and nobody saying anything.

The mountains of Georgia are the oldest in Appalachia, worn down almost to nothing. Something that ancient has an inherent weirdness to it, I believe. Down the road were woods several acres thick behind my friend Jeff’s house which nobody seemed to own. We’d get into them a day at a time, tell each other lies and smoke his dad’s cigarettes. They had stands of lower pines there and open areas with rock and sand for some reason, and in one clearing him and his sister and two brother’s had made a stone ring lined with stone chairs in the middle of which they would burn things. We found cars in his woods and farm equipment in mine. He showed me a fox-hole under a cedar one time and we dared each other to scramble down into the walls hung with roots yet neither of us would go. The hole was still too thick with the smell of wild animal.

Next to my house was a stand of tall loblolly pines, planted originally in rows but then grown to dark vine-twisted wildness. I had to cut an entrance with my buck knife just to get in them. I would spend afternoons laying quiet in big piles of pine needles, sometimes reading, sometimes daydreaming. Once, from nowhere a great wind rushed along the roof, shoving it all back and forth till I realized it was a low flying cloud of blackbirds. A pestilence flying so thick they almost obliterated what little sky showed through. I used to think it was normal for a twelve year old boy to spend all day getting lost in the woods, now I’m not so sure. I used to try and force my wrists to grow retractable claws, like Wolverine. Sometimes I would pretend I was Grizzly Adams and my only friends were deer, rabbits, birds and snakes and they could talk to me.

At the end of one summer my dad thought we should clear out one tree-line divider between fields, the one that ran away from the back of the house into the state park. Hacking at one end we found what seemed to be a cave entrance, a passage through the wild brush with childrens tin toys scattered along the floor and pieces of fabric nailed to the underbelly of low branches. It ran about fifty feet, had two or three entrances and in five years or more, none of us had discovered it. We named it the “Rabbit Hole." I think that was the summer I first read Watership Down.

Adjacent to that was where we kept our usual stack of seasoned material ready after a year or two to be brought into the house. It was here once that my dad, my brother and I finally got down to the lowest layers or soft and rotted timber and rolling over a log, I uncovered something, an animal of some sort that turned its small head and hissed in rage at me and then disappeared. It wasn’t a snake and it wasn’t a cat, but maybe some sort of large insect only about a foot or two away from my face. When I saw it, my entire perception seemed to go blurry, I only remember eyes and a mouth. I paused and turned to my brother and my dad, but nobody seemed to have noticed anything as they kept working. I’m not even sure now if it really happened or if I dreamt it.

Many years later, either in a dream or in a blackout, I returned and climbed down into that fox hole behind Jeff’s house. It was tight and dark but after a distance opened up into a large tall cavern. The walls were made of clay and lined with hundreds of small animals embedded into the red mud, rabbits or something like them, horrified wide-eyed and screaming. In the dream I scrambled back out as fast as I could, tripped and fell breathlessly, laying among scattered piles of shale and gnarled, whispering cedars with the sky above cloudless and mercilessly blue.

Last Stanza

2011-04-13T19:51:00.002-04:00

We all know sometimes life hates and troubles
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space
But you can bet your lifetimes that and twice it's double
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed
So make sure when you say you're in it, but not of it
You're not helpin' to make this earth
A place sometimes called hell
Change your words into truths
And then change that truth into love
And maybe our children's grandchildren
And their great grandchildren will tell
I'll be loving you until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky

Stevie Wonder- AS
Songs in the Key of Life 1976

or maybe you ought to re-familiarize yourself with it.

Copper II

2011-04-13T19:16:00.005-04:00

Today our we made our last stop around ten thirty, roughly a yard of old brush and two rooms worth of moldering carpet. My new guy is very new and thus he goes slow, which isn't a problem for me. I enjoy spacing out, watching the PTO spin wild and deadly under the crane-tower assembly, taking pictures of gentle mosses growing on a brick wall, trying to decide whether a crow splashes across the sky or is it more of a tumble? These are the perks of the job, earlier I had gutted a king sized mattress with my knife allowing a hand-hold so that I could drag it the length of a long alley to the truck, I get paid to throw shit into the sky.

After my driver picked up the pile and mashed down into the back I spotted something nestled in the last few slime-black reeds. A bracelet. Back in the truck I picked it out of my hoodie pocket, it was copper, flat bands of copper, stacked six tall with a copper rope band spacing every two. I squirted hand cleanser and polished it with the soft high-vis yellow fabric of my vest. I rubbed on it the rest of the morning till it had that clean low luster glow of worn leather and then put it on the dash to watch it catch the sun through the greasy windshield. Tiny augers of shiny coppery rope, going down Broad street. I figured either Ruth would take it or May could wear it as a Egyptian dancing anklet.

My front porch is slowly filling up with glass and porcelain objects I find. A lantern base wound in vines, different antique bottles, a Colorado Springs commemorative plate with gorgeous line drawings all over it- Will Rogers Memorial Shrine of the Sun. I enjoy finding this elaborate, delicate stuff surviving the filth.

Mostly for the Guitar Solos

2011-03-30T21:34:00.003-04:00

FTW

2011-03-30T20:09:00.002-04:00

I am right now skipping meetings, drawing rhinoceroses and listening to Led Zeppelin with absolutely no shame.

"Hollow Bone" Theory

2011-03-29T18:57:00.002-04:00

Every night before lights out, we stood in a circle grasping each other, arms over shoulders and said the following prayer:

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace;
that where there is hatred, I may bring love;
that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;
that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
that where there is error, I may bring truth;
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
that where there is despair, I may bring hope;
that where there are shadows, I may bring light;
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;
to understand, than to be understood;
to love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.
Amen.

1,738

2011-03-29T15:25:00.007-04:00

With my current job with the City of Richmond, I make three hundred and fifty dollars a week. After I pay rent and utilities on my six hundred square foot house I have roughly sixty dollars to work with any given month. Half of this goes to the laundromat.

As of last week I have been turned down for ten different positions with CSX and eight different positions with the City. There are rumors about trash-collector positions coming up but nothing's materialized. Couldn't get a call-back from friggin Starbucks. I have approximately fifteen years experience as a carpenter and woodworker. I am under the belief that my trade is dying. I stopped blaming the Mexicans for this just last week.

Also last week I quit what has been my year and a half commitment to opening up the Al-anon meeting I helped found. I'm not sure if it will keep going or not. I decided I needed to get out of it's way so that it could either grow up on it's own or else die a tragic lonely death. Of course now I'm in a panic to find other meetings.

I've been reading this book at work as I bounce around in the boom truck. It, as well as it's predecessor, have been an absolute miracle to me.

As of today I have been clean for one thousand seven hundred and thirty eight days.

I've been watching youtube footage of the tsunami in Japan all week and listening to Tool's album Lateralus in the truck or while washing dishes. I decided earlier today that neither of these things have been very helpful. The main reason I haven't been able to write is I feel that everything I have to say right now is bitchy. However I know for a fact that I've never been healthier or stronger in my life. I also suspect I might just be insanely happy on some level.

So that I don't wake up Ruth, I shower in the dark each morning where I often find myself deep into "fox-hole" prayer. However today I woke up to the thought that I have absolutely no time right now to entertain fear, bitterness or resentment. I got too much going on, too much at stake and I need to be able to travel fast and light.

DPU 2

2011-03-27T18:06:00.001-04:00

"Urban Forestry"

"Loner"

"Broke Down Agin"

"Landfill"

"Oakwood Cemetery"

"Collards, I Think"

"Rocky"

"Self-Portrait"

Been Having a Hard Time Writing Lately

2011-03-25T21:38:00.003-04:00

However Ruth wrote something for me.

She is my champion.

O Rly

2011-03-07T05:39:00.002-05:00

Eowyn

2011-03-07T05:11:00.003-05:00

Got an Idea just now

2011-03-07T02:55:00.006-05:00

My friend Alex in New Orleans offered me a show in his gallery again. I called him this weekend to work out some details as I've only made a couple of things since last summer. We decided on August at the earliest. I had hoped to get back to doing more writing, but something he said a while back struck a note with me. May and Henry are getting older, and probably not going to want to fuck around with me and my drawings when they're surly pre-teens. So the clock is ticking on this particular body of work. I figured I'd start writing something long here, broken up into sections, that later could be presented in between whatever drawings I'm able to come up with between now and then.

Self-Portrait

2011-03-04T16:02:00.001-05:00

2011-03-04T15:46:00.003-05:00

It’s as easy to become a father as it is difficult to be one.
—German proverb

Last Lines

2011-02-13T22:33:00.001-05:00

But still I hadn't dreamt nothing about me and Ed until the end. And this was cloudier cause it was years, years away. But I saw an old couple being visited by their children, and all their grandchildren too. The old couple weren't screwed up. And neither were their kids or their grandkids. And I don't know. You tell me. This whole dream, was it wishful thinking? Was I just fleeing reality like I know I'm liable to do? But me and Ed, we can be good too. And it seemed real. It seemed like us and it seemed like, well, our home. If not Arizona, then a land not too far away. Where all parents are strong and wise and capable and all children are happy and beloved. I don't know. Maybe it was Utah.

-- Raising Arizona

For Example

2011-02-12T17:12:00.000-05:00

I am Better than I Was

2011-02-12T08:19:00.005-05:00

Fire in the Belly

In the song of this season, the trees that ring the fountain
Are ablaze and the one in the fountain is no longer there.
If I am to be burst apart, to never get better, if this
Is what is required of me, then so be it. I have been reduced
To less than the sum of my parts, I remain defiant in that
I am what remains, defiant. I am pieces stitched together
With a current run through. I find myself forming the position
Of a man doubled over, eviscerated, clutching whatever
is left inside.
I am one of the lucky ones, I have been blessed with eyes unlocked
And I'm not listening to anyone anymore. This is a gift,
You'll get your chance one day if you're lucky.

I have been told to wrap each night around me to grieve
And sing my song to God. I am spurred by it, I travel by day
With fists against the ground. There are waves of grief,
Bigger and bigger that rise in the dark and I cannot describe
What I've seen in them, I find myself making an animal growl,
And if banishment is what is required of me then so be it.

It was Dvorák that reminded me, playing out into the yard,
That I had been hearing the sound of violins all along,
That the maples lining the street had finally exploded
Into crimson and orange, and forming this golden corridor,
My three year old daughter running under it and her perfect sky,
Up to me on the steps, I am reminded that holding her
Is the only thing that feels safe anymore.

posted November 17, 2008

Fear is the Weapon

2011-01-21T15:22:00.003-05:00

ZOMG TOMBS

"Let Us Cross Over the River"

2011-01-19T14:43:00.003-05:00

"and rest under the shade of the trees."

I think I am going to draw a trash truck on top of it and name it "Stonewall Jackson." I have no idea why I work the way I do.

Detail Shots

2011-01-19T14:37:00.007-05:00

from an unfinished, nameless little bastard of a drawing

"The Whale and the Hammerhead"

2011-01-19T14:36:00.002-05:00

The Description

2011-01-16T21:11:00.003-05:00

Of the vase that's in my current header reads

"Ajax and Achilles Rolling Dice with Athena Watching."

I took the kids back to the VMFA this morning.

Ex-Cowboy

2011-01-09T16:27:00.005-05:00

Residue

2011-01-09T13:09:00.000-05:00

True Grit is a Very Fine Movie

2011-01-07T21:15:00.002-05:00

Owls

2011-01-01T12:07:00.005-05:00

Click for larger image. These are much smaller than the previous bird drawings.

Mermaids

2011-01-01T12:05:00.002-05:00

Prayer

2010-12-29T21:50:00.004-05:00

I am more than just the residue of my own story. I am not merely defined by survived traumas, injuries unrepentant and delusions half fabricated to give the events of my life validation. I am somewhat able these days look honestly at my own history, acknowledge it for what it is and not be afraid. I hope one day not to be locked in what feels like a battle struggling hard just to survive, and get some time and some room, that I might be able to sit down and write about some of it.

Pine Forever Pine

2010-12-29T13:13:00.003-05:00

Today me and my driver, Kent did nothing but pick up Christmas trees. I felt like we were single handedly cleaning up Christmas. At the end of the day we unloaded a solid ton of them at an empty lot over behind the diamond. I'm not sure but I think they're to be ground into mulch. After we dumped I took the opportunity to stage dive off the top of the truck into the giant piney pile. It smelled very nice. Kent, from the chair on top of the boom laughed at me and called me a Big Kid.

Requisition 032593

2010-12-29T13:11:00.001-05:00

December 28, 2010

Dear Clay,

Thank you for your interest in employment opportunities with our company. We regret to inform you that requisition number 032593-Track Worker has been canceled.

Have a safe day,
XXX Human Resources Department

you know it's bad when the railroad is losing jobs

12/25/10

2010-12-26T12:30:00.004-05:00

Down by the River

2010-12-20T21:17:00.001-05:00

Last Year

2010-12-20T19:02:00.003-05:00

I was too broke to buy any presents and too strung out from just having quit smoking to make any art either. Ruth bought me a twenty dollar pink Christmas tree from Walmart, her parents donated a Lego Chess set. I somehow got it together to purchase a forty dollar Playmobil set for May and that was Christmas and it was enough and everybody seemed really happy with it. This year the kids are flush, the rent, heat and water is paid and I'm drawing owls for my parents. If I got time I might do some Kingfishers. The kids are helping. I'll take pictures for you guys when we're done.

One of the major things I've learned in the last year is that when everything gets spongy, the wind is howling and the wheels have fallen off, practicing simple gratitude, even for the smallest, most bullshit Norman Rockwell things, will carry you through and then some. Write a few down in a list form and see how you feel afterward.

Two nights ago, my daughter the five year old said to me, "We're poor." I jumped up and said No, do you see these walls? What is this place, is it our house and are we in it? Is the damn heat working? I showed her the inside of the fridge, Is there food in there? She said Yes to all these things and smiled a little. I said, we keep all that taken care of and we're fine. Everything else is gravy.

Been Too Long

2010-12-19T17:41:00.001-05:00

Ruth got a New Camera

2010-12-19T17:26:00.002-05:00

for a graduation present last week. We took it out this weekend for the snow and despite my intense love/hate relationship with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts we wound up there again. Mostly because it's only a couple of blocks away and free and at least partially heated. Anyway they have these stunning new Greek pieces set up. I'll go back in a couple of weeks and gather up the proper titles.

Hummingbird War

2010-12-05T20:23:00.003-05:00

Winter decided to stop dicking around last week and finally lowered its full weight upon us. Well before sun-up, I headed out from the warm cacophony of the break room full of black men shouting and laughing into the cold dark of the yard. Collectors and drivers move out from under the lone street light by the single story cinderblock structure, gettin' it toward the beeping, blinking red and yellow carnival that is the city's trash trucks moving out each morning. Me and the other groundsmen of Bulk and Brush stalk past them, under the i-beam frame of some abandoned structure, out to the tall line of boom trucks parked behind the towering cone of the salt barn. I usually stretch out, pulling my back loose off a concrete divider that the others mostly lean on, but last week we all stood in there, hands in pockets, heads under hoods like seagulls bracing in the wind, waiting for the drivers to do their pre-check and for the trucks to warm up.

After a month of wondering, I finally looked up the star I always see just above the sunrise, the one bright enough to make me nervous whenever I notice it. I showed it to Ruth one night and she thought it was an asteroid come to obliterate all life on our planet. It’s the morning star Venus, of course; bright enough to cast shadows, brightest in the morning before dawn. All of which I already knew, just never experienced first hand, with the sweet oil-smell of diesel in the air and trucks roaring all around. At that time of day, before dawn has had a chance to break open, it is the cruelest looking thing in the sky. In that coldest hour, when I don’t feel like to talking to anybody anyway, with the yellow of the hazards blinking and the amber of the rotating caution lights arcing across the yard, before I’ve had any breakfast, before I have the chance to get my attitude right, it’s Venus that makes my brain goes everywhere it shouldn’t. The heat pump back at the house and whether or not I’ll make the bill this month. The bodies of Union soldiers at Cold Harbor shot so full of lead they fell apart mid-run. The terrible precision of hummingbirds making war, upside down, in the air. In the dark there, in the morning, I feel I am tumbling just like they do.

Thank You

2010-11-26T13:53:00.002-05:00

Seashore State Park, Va. Beach, Thanksgiving Day

Oh yeah

2010-11-16T17:59:00.007-05:00

I forgot to mention:

thanks, Ruth!

Mighty Joe Anderson

2010-11-15T15:58:00.005-05:00

is a good friend of mine.

Thumper is Back Online

2010-11-15T15:54:00.004-05:00

after more than a year. While still not exactly street-legal, she's at least safe to ride.

"Hello There"

2010-11-14T18:17:00.001-05:00

more Here

Lucky

2010-11-08T13:46:00.001-05:00

Conduit

2010-11-04T20:20:00.004-04:00

I have become convinced that my legs were, in no small part, grown but to propel me through this world so that my eyes might record all this stuff. I am grateful for the opportunity.

Up Behind the Thirty Four Hundred Block

2010-11-04T20:01:00.006-04:00

of Kensington this morning, my driver Kent picked up a twenty's era looking settee and shook it for me with the knuckle boom after he had crushed it. A trick one of the "old heads" taught us. Standing out of the way of the radius of the crane, I heard change rattle out onto the gravel of the alley. It was about seven this morning, it was cold and raining. He swiveled the arm around and dropped the couch into the back and I crouched down and got up about three dollars mostly in quarters. A fine catch. From his seat atop the cab of the truck Kent yelled down at me and pointed. I shrugged, yelled "What?" and kicked at a flattened bottle cap that was embedded in the rocks . He came down the ladder, strode his lanky frame over and pointed out the pennies scattered about that I had missed. "Look dude! There's a penny, There's a penny!" bent over and picked them up. "Dude I done got up all the white meat, leave that bullshit," I laughed. "Oh Hell No!" he responded and we laughed and cussed, arguing over pennies in the cold driving rain.

Sir Peter O'Toole FTW

2010-11-03T14:47:00.002-04:00

Everyday I Wake Up on This Side of the Dirt

2010-11-03T14:33:00.002-04:00

is a Good Fucking Day.

Just Went for a Walk Downtown

2010-11-03T14:10:00.009-04:00

To visit Social Services as my food stamps card got declined yesterday at Kroger buying Maymay's birthday Sloppy Joe fixins. See the cool thing about food stamps is they eliminate the need to decide between paying to keep the electricity on or buying food. I didn't change out of my dirty Carhart coveralls and I wore my City of Richmond shirt. I haven't been able to get my case worker on the line since Monday of last week when she told me what I needed to fax her about my new job. My original case worker is long gone, it seems, my second case worker is on extended medical leave. My new case worker never heard of me before Monday.

I tried to communicate all this to a lady who was vetting people in line. She told me that no case workers would be available today and could I come back tomorrow. I said I couldn't as I got my kids then. She then gave me two supervisors' numbers and very nicely turned me away. I went outside, suddenly very light headed again. I had been getting lightheaded all week. There is a nice courtyard there on Marshall and eighth I think, with a canopy framed by tall willow oaks. I sat on a bench and called the numbers. The wind blew and slender willow leaves clattered all around my boots. I hated everyone walking by who looked like they might have a nicer job than me.

Walking the long blocks back to the truck, someone called me back. I didn't get her name because of noise of the traffic. The sky looked gray and cold and low. She took my information and put me on hold. I wondered if I should stop walking and get my paperwork out of my backpack but then noticed I was walking through that homeless no man's land between the dead mall there on Marshall street and the Coliseum. Everything was open, exposed and concrete and faded metal that was tall and brown. There were dudes sitting around a metal table looking drunk. At some point I noticed my call had ended. I got that old feeling again like I was marching through the Apocalypse. I kept walking because I wasn't sure what else to do.

One Year Ago

2010-11-01T20:50:00.004-04:00

I sat on my porch, watched the sun go down and smoked the last cigarette I've had to date. It was kind of on a whim. I had two left over that I had thought about spreading out to my daughter's birthday on the Third, but decided that left too much to chance. So I broke them up, went in and told Ruth what I had done. We sat on the couch and watched Lawrence of Arabia while I detoxed that first night. She sat with me like that for months. I started smoking when I was fourteen, that's twenty four years. I'd been smoking two packs a day since the nineties. I believe strongly that my being able to quit and stay quit had very little to do with self-will, or determination.

Happy Halloween

2010-10-31T12:34:00.005-04:00

That's right Totoro pumpkins, next year a Cat-bus!

Ruth as Bird

2010-10-18T22:32:00.003-04:00

Meadows of Dan

2010-10-18T22:27:00.006-04:00

Self-Portrait

Cormac McCarthy

Faster

Guard-Rail

Water

2010-10-18T22:23:00.005-04:00

Dean Stockton's Tattooed Abdomen

2010-10-08T05:42:00.006-04:00

Head in a Box

2010-09-29T18:43:00.006-04:00

Over a year ago I helped start an Al-anon meeting downtown here in the Fan because me and a friend got tired of going out to the suburbs three times a week. We're listed here however they got the time wrong. However I'm skipping tonight because I've got some independent work to do. I stopped by Plan 9 on the way home and picked up the third album by Fu Manchu, mid-nineties Southern California skateboard stoner metal. This being not even the backup or the third or fourth choice of what I was looking for, because for all their indy-cred snobbery Plan9 has has fuck-all for Doom Metal these days. I need something slow, meditative and heavy for what I'm working on, having to do with deep old hurts. I started a piece of this endeavor last winter. It's also another reason why I haven't been making much art lately. I have so much to tell you about and it feels like I got no fucking time.

Ruth told me to write this though: Late in the day today we were trucking over the James by way of the Robert E. Lee Bridge headed for the Hopkins road transfer station to dump our freight. Gloria, who was sitting in the middle kept nodding out onto my shoulder. It had been raining all day. I scanned out over the river looking for my friends the Ospreys when I noticed a couple islands I'd never paid much attention to before. Just boulders lodged in the flow really, but they had at least one big ass Sycamore each. I noticed a huge nest in the upper reaches, much bigger it seemed than an Osprey's. Further up the branches I saw a hulking black shape and after a second more of staring intently I saw it had a white head. A fucking bald fucking eagle. We were bumping along, going maybe fifty and I can't believe I picked it out. I've never seen an eagle in Virginia. I'm almost down there looking for him now and for some reason I kinda don't want you to tell anybody about him.

Blue

2010-09-19T08:54:00.000-04:00

Not Doing any Laundry

2010-09-19T08:43:00.003-04:00

Not doing any writing today either. Got a new battery from Honda House Friday and a pair of blinkers from the Yamaha place next door and suddenly after almost two years of cobbling parts together, I'm ready to put my motorcycle back together. I drove back down Broad street feeling a little shocked. It's been sitting, tires holding up a tank and a naked frame under a cedar tree, since last fall. The back end's needed to be torn down and rebuilt since day one. The whole thing's very Tennessee. It's all I plan on doing today.

I am Blessed with an Interesting Life

2010-09-09T21:28:00.008-04:00

This morning, the head of my pitchfork started working itself loose while managing a large pile of brush in the West End, the first job of the day. The truck was idling high, roaring from the PTO diverting energy to the crane swinging above me. Looking up to keep track of the knuckle boom, I saw seven geese passing overhead, the sunrise reflected pink on their underbellies.

River Hawks

2010-08-30T21:20:00.006-04:00

Every morning I am reminded
Trucks are waiting for me in the dark,
I belong to the woman in my bed,
And a little boy and girl across town. That’s it.
There is fast water that cuts down the center
Of our city, water that can carry us away

If we let it. In the dark it occurs to me
That bending over to lace my boots,
My heart will be closer to heaven.
That crossing the river each sunrise
I will look for river hawks lighting out to hunt.

A response to a poem by Charles Simic I carried around in my wallet for five years.

Fig.10-Hummingbird Moth

2010-08-30T21:07:00.001-04:00

Thanks to PhantomKitty

Mercy

2010-08-28T11:23:00.006-04:00

Bulk and Brush

2010-08-28T10:35:00.003-04:00

a division of DPW