Tuesday.....................yeah, that's it, just Tuesday.

I'm going to the hemotologist tomorrow. I can just imagine that he'll tell me that there's nothing really wrong with me, and that I've been worrying about nothing for the past three weeks. Either that or that my liver packed it in a year or so ago, and I have only months to live.

I'd find both of them extraordinarily funny.

I think I might join a gym. Just typing those words makes me feel ill, however I'm gettin' kinda tired of being a pudgy artist. There is a gym....or as they call it "fitness center".....(my pride slowly disappearing as I type those words)....between my home and my studio. Convenience is key, I'm a lazy shit.

I joined a gym a few years ago with relatively lacklustre results. I didn't go that often (see lazy shit comment above). I could barely stomach the locker room.......I mean, c'mon I'm not homophobic in the least, but please. I can barely stand the sight of my own cock let alone a half-dozen different ones all at once. Seriously, why would I want to have a conversation with a naked man. And the smell, Christ! Why do all men's locker rooms smell like someone giving a corpse a perm?!?! For God's sake it's 2006, can't something be done?!

And another thing............why all the mirrors? We can't all be that narcissistic. I know, I know.......you need to see that you're working out in the correct form blah blah blah. Look at me. Do I look like I would know what the correct form is? I wouldn't know the correct form if it snuck up and bit me in the ass! Listen, I'm working out here because I don't like the way I look, why are you forcing me to stare at myself............when I'm sweating, no less!?!?!

I don't know why I'm ranting about this shit now. Maybe it's because of the documentary that I watched on Sunday night on TLC. It was about this couple of guys that ballooned up to and over the 600 lb. mark. Surprise, one guy died. Honestly, has anyone watched these medical oddity shows. They could market it as Look at these freaks. See your life isn't so bad you whiny shit. Sundays on TLC. Anyone who complains about their life, after watching these shows should be shot..............................not killed, just wounded. Oh yeah, that includes me.

The painting is going well. Starting a new one today, one of the 4' x 5' paintings.

Almost at two weeks

......without booze that is. I know it's no great accomplishment, but DAMN.....two weeks. I was thinking, and I'm pretty sure that this is the longest I've gone without a drink since I was.......uh.............maybe thirteen. Twenty goddam years!!! Hmmmmm maybe it's a good thing that I take a break. Seriously, what's the longest you've gone without a single drink?

As I said before, I'm still going out bars and art openings and such. I'm amazed at how utterly annoying everyone is when I'm stone cold sober. With the exception of several of my friends I hate everyone................or at least I view them with the coldest form of indifference. Most of these people aren't even snot-licking drunk. If I ever needed confirmation of this.....which I didn't.............I am definitely not a people person. I often joke that I'm a lot more charming when others are drinking, I guess others are more charming if I'm drinking. Shit!...................................did I just have a moment of clarity?

It is strange though, most people do like me. I can't figure that out. A lot of the time I can be a pompous, arrogant, sarcastic prick. I freely admit to being an elitist jerk, but I guess I'm always friendly. I meet people with a smile, and I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt (at least for fifteen seconds to a minute) . I'm also painfully shy. I don't think I have ever spoken to someone to whom I've not yet been introduced. I'm always open to a conversation, but starting one always makes me feel a little ill. I can't start a conversation, but when it comes to continuing one I'm a fucking juggernaut. It's funny that shyness and arrogance can often be confused, and in my case they're both true.

Happy weekend!

"....so you better go back to your bars, your temples..........your massage parlors..."

--- the first person that can tell me what song that line is from, and who sang it gets a free painting!

Valentine's Day makes me think of my dead Mom

Isn't that a warm and fuzzy thought. It's true though.

A lot of people have been writing about their horrific parental relationships recently........so if this isn't the shit that ya want to read right now, no biggie.................I'm sure I'll be writing something funny soon......probably something about about my newly formed liver polyps or a crippling blood disorder that I contracted from Haitian hooker back in my fraternity days......ya know, comedy...not this maudlin bullshit.

It's coming up on her deathday (well, what do you call it?)........the 20th. It will be the 17th anniversary of her demise. I was thinking that I have now lived longer without a mom than with one. It's funny, you can take away the mama and you're still left with a mama's boy. Once again, I guess some back story is in order.................

Flashback to the 80s......big hair......stupid clothes.....and everything new seemed to be designed around neon and an isosceles triangle......................

My Mom gets diagnosed with lung cancer somewhere around my birthday (Oct. 6th). She ends up going into the hospital around Thanksgiving and is released after a while. She goes on the usual course of chemo and radiation with the usual side-effects....lotsa fun. We get a huge oxygen tank installed in our house. All in all she seems to be doing pretty well. One morning, while I'm at school I'm told that my Father has just had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. Either en route or soon after arriving in the emergency room he has his last rites read to him. Somehow he pulls through ( I swear the man will probably outlive me). While visiting him in the hospital one evening my Mother has, what I can only imagine as, a complete nervous breakdown. She is taken to another hospital and observed. My Mother is released from the hospital and a few days later so is my Father. My Mother is then admitted back into the hospital for some sort of complications of something the details are sketchy to me (mind you I was 15-16 and I was getting profoundly high on a regular basis). She was in the hospital for a few days without me visiting her. At this point I was pretty numb. Finally I decided to visit her one evening, with my father enormously pregnant sister and my brother-in-law. She ended up dying that night.

After the wakes and the funeral and all that garbage, my father plans a Florida trip for us, over Easter break. While on vacation, staying with my Aunt and Uncle, my Aunt goes into the hospital and dies.

SPRING BREAK!!!!!!

Yeah, I was a fucked up kid.............or an especially efficient killer. Is seventeen years too long to still be whining about it?
So, that's what I think of when Valentines day comes around.


Anyway, hugs n' kisses everybody!!!!!!!!

Deep thoughts......or incoherent ramblings

Well, since nothing of any importance happened this weekend, other than the fact that I haven't touched a drink in a full week, I figured I'd prattle on endlessly about my current work. This was actually a suggestion by a fellow blogger (thanks!). I figure that it'll be a good thing, especially if I am to be going back to school. I'll be having to explain and defend my work on a daily basis.

Anyway........................

I'll start with the big work. When I say big I'm talking about paintings that are only around 4' x 5' and others that are between 1 1/2' to 3' x 8'. Nothing monumental, but decent sized works.

--- A little background. My last series of paintings were about relationships, or more specifically the relationships that our minds create between two or more objects, when we see them together. For example, in one work I painted a pair of white cotton panties normal-sized on a panel that was roughly 3 x 4 feet. The background was a soft textured pink. I paired that painting up with a painting of the Denny's grand slam breakfast. The breakfast was painted slightly larger than life-sized on a background of a light greyish blue. In another work I reproduced a 50 year-old photograph of my Father smiling, when he was in his 20's (my favorite picture of him). I paired that with a painting of my (deceased) Mother's false teeth, the teeth she had in her mouth when I was a kid, thus painting her smile. Hopefully you get the idea. When I was working on the last painting in that series, a painting called breastpumps and crazy straws ( I don't think that needs a description) I started thinking about the work that I am now doing.

One day after my show, with the new work that I just described, opened I was kinda depressed and was moping around the studio like a big dopey sap. I ended up by the sink in the kitchen. I leaned up against it and rested my chin on my hands and just stared at the sink.....completely zoned out is more honest. After about fifteen minutes (that's right fifteen minutes!) of just staring and having my mind wander I realized that I was staring at what could become my new work. After that I became interested in the things that I stare at when I'm thinking about something else.........more interested, in fact, than the shit that I'm thinking about. So that's what I'm painting. They're almost non-images, kinda the thoughts between thoughts, or images that you only see on the periphery of your vision.

The first painting that I started was of rain on my front door window (it's 3' x 8'). The background is completely blurred and the focus is on the raindrops that perfectly focus my front lawn, the street, and the house across the street, only upside-down. C'mon everyone's done it, stared out a window during a rain storm. You look out into the distance and then focus tightly on the raindrops on the window. You go back and forth, alternating between foreground and background focus. The raindrops become perfect convex lenses. The next two paintings are going to be the sink that I first mentioned and a seascape (really a lakescape). The inspiration behind the sea/lakescape was a ride with my father to my sister's house on a particularly grey and windy Thanksgiving. The ride took us by Lake Erie and I stared out the window at the horizon, watching as the wind churned the water. The sky and the water took on the same feeling, and for a few fleeting seconds the clouds and the waves became interchangeable. The painting will be 16" x 8'. The horizon will be dead center. 8 feet of just horizon! I forgot to mention that all of the "big" paintings are going to be grey......well grey scale......different kinds of grey (warm and cool) but just grey. I always thought that it was funny that my paintings were always so colorful even though I'm red-green colorblind. This will make that a non-issue and it will also help to homogenize the imagery.

Okay, now on to the small paintings. These are all going to be 2' x 2'. I was thinking about rituals and ritual vessels/containers, religious and secular, past and present. I noticed that much of what once was a ritual is now considered common place.....eating, drinking, washing etc. I also noticed that we still have rituals though we don't realize it or think of them as such...........Stopping at the same place every morning for coffee or the process of going out to dinner and taking leftovers home. The work is going to be about the vessels with which we carry out these modern rituals. The first painting is of a small styrofoam to-go container, the next is going to be of a green two liter soda bottle, another is going to be of those classic yellow and red mustard and ketchup bottles with the white caps. I have plans for between 10 and 20 of them. Am I full of shit or what?!?

So that's it. That's the shit that I'm working on. Believe it or not that was the condensed version. I know what you're thinking..................Sweet fuck I hope he starts drinking again soon!!!!!

Art openings without booze........do such things exist?

I'm gonna find out. Due to my latest health concerns I'm imposing a two week drying out period on my liver. This wasn't even a recommendation from my doctor. I'm just doing it to give the poor little guy a well deserved vacation. I figure it will only do me some good as drinking causes the body to absorb more iron....and I already do that at a freakishly breakneck pace. It will also save me, from my calculations, a metric shitload of money. This is a good thing, because with my recent creative explosion I've been hemorrhaging money on art supplies...........close to $1000 in the past month or so.

So tonight there is an opening, and I'm gonna see what these things are like without any social lubricant. This will be fun. Of course I'm going to go out after........I gotta stay social. Holy shit am I going to be hydrated!!!

I can't begin to describe how much I like the work that I'm doing and that I'm going to do in the next few months. Ideas are coming faster than I know what to do with them. Mind you my fast pace may be, to another person, glacial.

....and there was great rejoicing

The cafeteria that I did the mural for had it's grand opening this morning. I really don't like having attention drawn to me that much. I had to stand in front of a small group of people and be introduced............................I'm really much more of an in-the-background kind of guy. It's a look at my work, don't look at me sorta thing. All in all not that bad though. The really good thing was there were representatives of two other campuses and they were impressed enough with my work to ask about doing things for their schools.

There's an tiny picture of the mural at http://south.ecc.edu/pr/ecctoday under the Feb. 8th archive. Almost too small to be worth it, but I'll be damned if I gots the time to figure out how to post a picture. I told you already that I'm a fucking tard when it comes to computer shit.

My liver's the size of a toilet seat

Well, I got the results back from the doctor today................................Looks like I got the blood thing, and on top of that, an enlarged liver. I now have to go to a hematologist for more tests and a course of treatment. It was kind of funny. My doctor was giving me the list of problems that this shit can lead to (down the road).................Diabetes....Hepatitis....and such, I didn't much care until he mentioned vision loss.

I swear, it's the only thing that I fear. Being a colorblind painter is stupid enough, but blind blind, that's just going way too fucking far! Granted it's all very treatable/preventable, but the sheer mention of its possibility freaks me out a little.

Canadian boobs and not seeing them

Just got back from lunch and I'm stuffed. a friend called me this morning and asked if I wanted to meet him and another friend, and we ended up going across the border to Fort Erie for Chinese. Sauteed baby corn is the fucking shit!! Unfortunately I couldn't get them to go to one of the fine "ballet" establishments. No boobies for A.J.

Another Friday, another art opening. This one's at 7-ish. I'm actually lookin' forward to it a bit. It's a friend's show and I'm always curious to see what people are working on or have just finished. Either way it will be nice to connect again with some of the other poor slobs who make stuff for a living. Fuck, it's such a silly job. I love it so much.

I'm kinda shocked at how well my own shit is going. my first big painting is almost done, granted i did get a little head start on it a while ago, but not for nuthin'...... It's a little funny I'm finding myself slow down a bit near the end of this thing. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not fully prepared to start the next big painting, or what. Once again I have to get over myself and get to work and not think so fucking much. the new smaller work is going just as well. This is one of, if not the first time I've ever worked on two different series of paintings simultaneously. If things go well I might be able to manage working on five different canvases at the same time. I fear saying it, but I'm happy with the way things are going.

Well, I should get back to work. It is Friday and I can only stay sober for so long.

GO STEELERS!!!!