Sunday, December 21, 2003

kind of like...spying We called my mom's dad Pop-Pop.  Pop-Pop was a navy pilot in WWII.  After the war was over he joined the FBI.  He was in the FBI for almost thirty years bugging Martin Luther King and tailing Frank Sinatra and other such things. Pop-Pop got sick and died not too long after the 9-11 disaster.  I remember soon after the towers came down I went down to help Pop-Pop do some yard work.  He had me cut down these two citrus trees.  The two citrus trees seemed like the twin towers of Pop-Pop's back yard.  When he turned the tv on and they started showing the disaster footage again, Pop-pop said, "there's nothing I can do about it now.  I'm too old." Over the next few months Pop-Pops health rapidly declined.  In his final weeks he was bedridden and wracked with pain.  Then finally, Pop-Pop died. I sometimes tried to imagine what Pop-Pop thought of me and my life.  It seems like whenever I saw him I always had some new crummy job and had been dumped by yet another girlfriend.  I was never on track for any kind of serious career.  I imagine I must have looked like a complete fuck-up. I actually thought about joining the FBI one time when I was twenty three or twenty four.  I called the Tampa bureau of the FBI while I was drunk and told them I'd like to join up.  A very skeptical sounding lady told me the preliminary paperwork and procedures I'd have to go through.  I thanked her and tried to sound like a very serious FBI candidate, but I never followed through with it. In my late twenties I dropped out of law school and decided I wanted to be some sort of avant garde artist. The thing that pushed me over the edge with this decision was an article I read about JSG Boggs in the Weekly Planet.  He's the artist that made a name for himself by drawing US currency by hand and then exchanging the drawings for goods and services.  Being an artist sounded like a lot more fun than being a lawyer.  Especially if you were an avant garde artist. I thought being an avant garde artist wast the ultimate thing because it seemed like you could just make up some sort of weird thing and poeple would praise you and call you a genius and give you millions of dollars. One of things I started doing as my avant garde art form was taking lots of pictures of people with disposable cameras.  I would take my disposable camera to an art opening and then start snapping all sorts of pictures of people whether they liked it or not. The first art show I ever participated in was called the CO show.  It was a group show in which artists were supposed to submit 100 works on 100 squares of paper.  In retrospect it seems completely absurd to ask any kind of serious artist to come up with 100 works for a show in a matter of weeks.  But it was perfect for me then, since I generally like to make lots and lots of things without any special regard for quality or content.  The CO show was being put on by none other than Tiffany Szilage and JSG Boggs.  Tiffany Szilage would eventually become my fiance.  Then she would also go on to scream at me, bash me in the face and throw me out on the street. Being in a show with JSG Boggs was kind of mind boggling for me, since I had just read about him in an article that made me want to drop out of law school.  Boggs' unusual artwork had brought him a great amount of trouble and fame.  He had had his own special on PBS, and had been featured in all sort of nationally published articles.  As far as I was concerned he was as famous as Michael Jackson.  Boggs had also had his studio raided by the secret service.  At the time I met him he was trying to take the secret service to the Supreme Court to get back the stuff from his studio. Anyway, I just started filling up these 100 squares of paper with whatever I could think of for the CO show.  Since, I had so many photographs from the disposable cameras, I glued them down any old way.  And since there was space left over by the photos I just started writing whatever came to mind about the people in the photos.  I wrote about whatever happened the night I took them, or things I'd heard about the people, etc.  I started to find that I liked recording what I knew about all these people in the photographs.  It started to create some sort of pattern.  It made me feel like I had some sort of control over them.  The night of the CO show opening was pretty thrilling for me.  It was my first art show and my first time meeting a "famous" artist, like JSG Boggs.  I felt pretty special seeing my work up on the wall and having it studied by very serious and intellingent looking people. At one point, JSG Boggs took me aside to talk to me. "I really like your artwork, Mark," he said.  "It's kind of like....spying." 11:42:01 PM    comment []

my little blog star My little girl went to some sort of  Christmas cookie party with her grandparents today (while I was blogging and suffering my 10,000th hangover).  While my girl was at this cookie party a lady that she'd never met before came up to her and said, "you've never me before but I feel like I know you.  I see you all the time on your daddy's web site." I thought it was pretty amazing since I had absolutely no idea who this lady was. When I went to pick up Mariel, I tried one of my mom's oatmeal cookies.  It was absolutely terrible. 10:59:02 PM    comment []

making my way in the world Back when I went to USF in Tampa, I had a girlfriend named Melissa Senecal.  I really liked her because she was nice and she had big boobs.  But then one day she went off to visit her parents in Colorado and she just disappeared.  She didn't call and she didn't write and she didn't come back.  She was just gone. In the meantime, I failed out of all my classes again. You see, I didn't wanted to be bothered with mundane things like studying and doing papers.  I wanted to do fun, creative things, like build giant pyramids out of plywood and canvas, and draw cartoons and write all my thoughts in my journal.  But before you know it, my little fantasy world caved in on me.  My parents stopped paying my rent and the semester ended and I was college drop-out failure. When my mom picked me up in the family station wagon, the first thing she said when I opened the door was, "well, Mark, it looks like you've hit another new low." The next thing you know, I was living at home again.  I tried to channel all the shame and embarassment of living at home by writing in my journal constantly.  But it didn't work.  My mom would find me wherever I was around the house and say, "you need to clean up your room."  Finally, one night, I blew up at her.  I pounded the dining room table and screamed, "DON'T EVER TELL ME TO CLEAN UP MY ROOM!!"  It was the most dramatic moment in my house that I can remember. A few days later I got a job at a Subway, making sandwiches for four dollars an hour.  For some reason, the only minimum wage job I could find was on the other side of town.  And I didn't even have a car to get there.  All I had was this yellow bicycle.  But I was determined to make my way in the world. So I rode my yellow bicycle all the way across town through heavy traffic and bumpy roads and sometimes thunderstorms until I got to my job at subway where I made four dollars an hour making sandwiches. My first day on the job it was pretty nervewracking.  The people were standing there staring at me while I was making their sandwich.  I felt like I was operating on one of their children or something while they watched. The customer would say he wanted horseradish or some different kind of cheese and I wouldn't be able to find it and I could feel the customer getting impatient and angry  with me.  It was very high pressure. I remember this one lady stared at me with this funny look and her arms crossed while I made her sandwich.  I thought I did a pretty good job, but I guess she didn't think so.  After I was done she said, "Is this your first day here?" "Yes, it is," I said. "Good luck!" she said in complete sarcasm. Anway, the Subway job got a little easier after I started knowing where all the meats and cheeses were, and I learned how to wrap up a sandwich without squishing it.  After a couple of weeks I even got a raise.  My wage went from $4.00 an hour to $4.10 and hour. The chunky, lesbian manager with a mullet looked at me and said, "I know it's not much, but every little bit helps, huh?" I nodded in agreement although I didn't think an extra ten cents was going to help at all.  Later, I found out that as a manager, she only made $7 dollars an hour.  So there wasn't really a lot to look forward to in the sandwich business. After a few weeks of riding across town on my bicycle and working at subway, I finally saved up enough money for an apartment.  I found this strange little apartment on fifth avenue north for $200 a month.   It was kind of a neat place for $200 a month.  It was fairly spacious and even had a bear claw tub in the bathroom.  There weren't too many bugs and there was a rusty fire escape in the back which was kind of like having a porch. There were some bohemian artist types that lived in the same building.  There was this long haired guy named Bill that lived downtstairs.  He made these psychedelic paintings with spraypaint on plywood.  They actually looked really cool.  But I don't think he every showed them anywhere or sold them.  He just painted them while he was high and then stuck them in the corner.  When I found out that Bill was 31 years old I was shocked.  31 seemed way too old to be dicking around in a cheap apartment with long hair, smoking pot and making weird paintings.  (Now I've gotten used to such things). There was this other long haired dude named Jeremy.  He was a really kick ass key board player.  He had just graduated from the special arts high school and this was his first time living on his own.  He played in a greatful dead cover band called Ugly Rumors.   I remember one time I was riding around with Jeremy and Bill and some other people in Jeremy's little honda civic hatch back.  We got really high and started driving out to the end of the Pier downtown.  We were listening to that Blue Oyster Cult song, "Don't Fear the Reaper".  The Pier is almost a quarter mile long, and we were driving really slow to the end and back while listening to "don't fear the reaper".  Then some sort of cosmic hiccup happened.  Jeremy got in the wrong lane when we got back to the base of the pier.  Somehow we got turned around and the next thing you know we were headed back to the water end of the pier again, driving at like five miles and hour.  At the sametime, somebody hit the radio and a different station popped up.  Don't fear the reaper was somehow playing again, but it was  all muffled and crackly.   Because we were really high it seemed like we had entered a different dimension or something and we couldn't stop laughing. Then we saw this person standing on the side walk who had a very small face when compared to the size of his head.  Jeremy pointed at him and said, "oh yee of little face." Anyway, these were the type of people and things that went on at my new little $200 apartment.  Then one night, riding my bicycle home from work I picked up a six pack of Hamm's at the convenient store.  When I got back to my place I sat and drank them one after another.  I thought about my job and my apartment and how I had made my way in the world. I thought about Melissa, wherever she was.  Maybe now that I had established myself, she would come back to me.  If I could just show her that I was a provider now, with a job, she might come live with me and I could lie naked with her in bed again next to her big warm boobs. 9:12:30 PM    comment []

out of sight Our society does a pretty good job of keeping dead bodies out of sight.  I am thirty-three years old and I have never seen a dead human body. It took me almost 18 years to see a real, live, naked woman. 7:20:16 PM    comment []

the execution of what might be the most important project ever conceived by mankind I was finally able to execute my stuffed animal project this morning.  Fortunately, I had the help of my lovely assistant Linda, who is pictured a few frames below. After a few errant, girlie throws, Linda was able to toss my animals up to me. A few people stopped to see what I was doing but mostly I was able to go about my important work without interruption. A guy from the liquor store below looked up and said, "how'd you get up there?" "I climbed," I replied. 4:21:45 PM    comment []

psycho-kinetic influence With the Duh! animals strageically placed about the tree, I will now be able to exert a powerful psycho-kinetic influence over all who pass below. There are many noble goals which may be achieved through this mystical power.  The most noble goal, and the one which I am working  hardest for, is to get laid. 4:19:23 PM    comment []

not without a price Linda's assistance didn't come without a price, however.  She took me for a four dollar mocha something at Starbucks, twenty minutes of airtime on my cell phone, a cheesburger and two beers at El Cap, a dozen cigarettes, and the transportation of her bass amp from her practice studio to her apartment. When I got back to my place I went to have a smoke.  I checked my pockets but they were nowhere to be found.  Damn!  She took my cigarettes! I had to go bang on her window to get them back. 4:18:33 PM    comment []

Linda's band, Pinktricity will be playing New Year's eve at the Undertow on St. Pete Beach.  She and Kendra are working on their own rendition of Eye of the Tiger! 4:17:29 PM    comment []

Amanda Peepers While researching artists that work with street signs on the internet, I came across the work of this woman from Reno, Nevada.  Her specialty is bringing sight to otherwise blind and faceless sign people.  With a couple of wigglie eyes from the craft store and a few squirts of glue, she brings familiar icons such as these to life. I particularly like this piece, because Amandas innovative use of wigglie eyes has transformed the mound of dirt on the lower right to some sort of mysterious creature. When I showed the artwork to Bob Bandit he said, "it looks like shamu suckin' some guy's dick." That's the beauty of art.  Everyone has their own unique intrepretation. 4:15:38 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Mark Michaels. Last update: 1/1/2004; 3:39:28 AM.