For my brother, one of the old stock who plays guitar and sings
What will happen when all of the real men are gone? The ones who can build, install, plumb, lay, and fix all manner of things with their own two hands – a dying breed of the old stock, they say. What will happen when all of the real men are gone? Will no buildings be built, no cars fixed, no oil changed, no lights installed? Everything broken and in disarray? What will happen when all of the real men are gone? When finally all of the hammers grow rusty, the wood rotting from their handles for lack of use. When nails fall from our shelves, and we just sweep them out into the ground for we know not what they’re for or from where they’ve come.…
My name is not Andrew Jackson. I was not the 7th president of the United States. My likeness does not appear on the twenty-dollar bill. However, in my quest to gain acceptance, I instituted my own “Removal Policy.” In the process, I carved out my personal “Trail of Tears.” Naturally, I walked it alone …
*
In the summer of 1963, my parents discovered I was very near-sighted, nearly blind, actually. The moment the kindly lady put the first pair of glasses on my face at a tiny optician’s shop in Port Said was nothing short of a miracle. Thanks to two pieces of glass, ensconced in a thick ugly plastic frame, the world was changed. The fuzzy outline of objects was magically replaced with sharp, clearly defined edges.…
I took two pills and danced my way through Sunday swaying in the chapel. Life started here, she met dad in the basement by St. Marks stained glass votive. Bible study, 1956, two college kids in the basement of a church unable to tell cigarette smoke from incense. Fire in their psalms, tongues, and palms. Julie and I shared a moment there, half whispering prayers to a god you both deserted for the new lights in Missoula. We both left Montana, Julie and I, though we will always find it to be home. Sickly sweet small town kind of love. Everybody pours out of doors to head to the big things, weddings, funerals, baptisms. What they won’t tell you is how they peek out of windows for the little things, pregnancies, breakups, Lydia and Marie’s lavender garden.…
Time is short, so here is the heart of it: everything I own in my house is alive. My reading lamp ate T-rex, my kitty. I came home from work today to the lamp hunched over the remains, the cat’s belly ruptured. The bulb lay on the ground beside, and when I closed the door, the lamp twisted its shade to regard me. Teeth filled the bulb socket and hung with gore. It hissed electric.
The guilt I feel for poor T-rex is tremendous. While I’d been increasingly aware for some time that things were not right with my possessions, I’d been sure poor T could hold his own. It is, after all, hard to imagine him being outrun by an object.
In his defense, I don’t think it was the lamp that brought him down.…
Author’s Note: I spent much of my formative art-making years dabbling and being inquisitive about many art-making techniques including sculpture, architecture, furniture design, painting, and collage. I found that even though collage has become the art medium I am most comfortable utilizing on a daily basis, it is the ability to freely move from one interest to another that pushes me. In 2010, I took a mixed media art class at the local community college. This is where I began working more extensively in the medium of collage, utilizing both existing images and forming my own imagery with paper.
Sometimes these pieces will host only a few clippings from magazines to tell the story in my mind, other times it will take many clippings weaved together for the piece to take shape.…
I didn’t reply to Jacob’s last text message to me, but I did show up to his funeral. I’d spent the entire morning deciding what to wear. A lot of the clothes that I once wore don’t quite fit me the way they used to in high school.
Is wearing black to a funeral mandatory? If funerals are truly meant to be a celebration of life, why can’t people wear something bright? I thought about wearing my orange polo, but I was worried I’d stand out too much. Maybe the key is to wear something somewhere in-between. So I went with gray.
A funeral is just a little bit different from a high school reunion. At high school reunions, you get to see who potentially has their life together and who doesn’t.…
I almost agreed to kill someone today. Almost. It sounds bad but it’s kind of my job. The person paying me, my employer you could say, was the guy who wanted to die. I wasn’t going to kill-him kill him, I hardly ever do. I just help people who are committed to doing it themselves. I make sure it reaches completion. The idea is to avoid a messy, half-finished outcome. I have sort of a good reputation in the business.
This is not what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t major in self-actuated demise planning. I didn’t even take the elective. My post-collegiate aspirations were to take my sports marketing major with the international business minor and perform essentially any task offered by the global sports marketing industry.…
