Archive for Self Portrait

Of graphics and junkyards

May 13, 2015 at 11:20 am · Filed under Mighty Ten, New Jersey, Self Portrait

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In many ways on the internet the blog has seemed separate from the Family Web site but maybe this will (reluctantly) connect the two. So this is the The Family Web Site. I say reluctantly because in many ways I don’t want them to connect. I don’t want to feel obligated to always have to write about this family. Not that there’s lack of material but besides the sad deaths, happy weddings and births, life is pretty much a trivial journey through monotonous (not mountainous) highways. Boring with a capital B. I’m not calling everyone boring, I’m just saying everyday life is just that. Everyday. There is social media to blow your steam or toot your horn and we’re all pretty good at using it. I can’t even list how many of my writings, poetry, photography and digital artwork I would rather “publish” here but am frightened to do so. You see, I am a rather strange dude with weird taste. I have always had a huge appreciation of art, animation and creative writing. As a result of that keen appreciation I have tried (rather unsuccessfully) to actually BE a respected “artist” When I am surrounded by really intelligent writers, artists, teachers, graphic designers, voice over artists, and even ridiculously skilled puppet builders, I can’t even come close. It goes back to what I am. A really strange dude with weird taste and amateur skills. In art there are those that create it….and those that just appreciate it. I have surrendered to the latter.

I am a rather strange dude with weird taste.

I am a rather strange dude with weird taste.

But the news here is that the web site is back. Not that anyone noticed but it was down for quite awhile. I had come across many obstacles in the last year or so. Most devastating was a hard drive crash of my Mac book pro laptop. This was essentially the heart and guts of the web site and it held all the data and functions for Mightyten. Although, I was sensing something wrong with the computer and instinctively did an emergency back up on an external drive one week before the crash…I still lost key passwords and expensive software that I used. At the same time the ISP provider for themightyten dot com (Yahoo) decided to upgrade editing and uploading capabilities that left me out in the cold. Yahoo is a company that just ASSUMES everyone has the money to just go out and buy or update expensive software. They have also increased the annual fee that I pay to keep this name up and running on their server.
Forty-four years ago (a tiny history) the “Family Ties” was called “The Hartman News” and it was printed by hand on school loose leaf paper. There wasn’t a server, Adobe Dreamweaver, Photoshop, hard drives, corrupt fonts, blogs, and the closest thing to a hard drive crash for me was crumbling up a piece of paper and starting over. After that my sisters and brothers took over and released some absolutely beautiful paper editions of the now called “Family Ties” Some of these will be digitized and available for download I hope soon. Then nine years ago while working the night shift at a large format graphics company on 3oth street in New York City I became fascinated with the internet, web design, Adobe Flash and slowly self taught myself to put up a new “family news” site.
It was a lot of experiments, failures and fun and the main thing was that I was learning. The website I created was a bulky amateur mess that became outdated rather fast. I didnt have the time or resources to keep it updated.
Actually my main goal at that time was to discover any bit of information on our family heritage. I become totally intrigued by our great grandfather and his 12 children that lived on this earth around the same time the Titanic sunk 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada. I was also fascinated by the stories aunt Carol, uncle Brother and our mother had told us about the Gill and Westfield NJ. While I was creating this huge list of questions in my mind for them, but then they slowly and softly passed away and left all my questions unanswered.
blogForm_masterpiece I have had many inspirations, influences and teachers in my time. I’ve had some lucky breaks. I remember the first time I saw somebody doing Photoshop on a PC in the late 90’s. It was version 4.0 and I was floored by the use of layers which had been released a few years earlier. Even I knew at that time how absolutely ground breaking that was in digital art. I also knew right then and there that that was something I wanted to do. I wanted to learn. I asked a few people at my job at Lucent Technologies in Holmdel NJ to “please just sit down with me a few minuets and show me some things” and nobody ever helped me. I will never forget one guy looking at me right after I asked him for help and saying.. “why don’t you go to school like I did and learn it”.
So I went to Barnes and Noble all the time read and purchased books. I practiced at work. I practiced at home. Then I got into Adobe Illustrator and was completely baffled by that. I self-taught myself all that I could with books and YouTube didn’t come out until April 2005 and it was even a few years after that when it became the mother of all tutorials on the web.
And yeah I did, at age 40 went back to college and the small Brookdale Community college I went to had just built a brand new computer lab with 30 brand new Macs. I was in heaven and I was blessed with good teachers who insisted on me learning how to cut a perfect path. At the same time I buried myself in art magazines and tried to duplicate other peoples work as practice.
After the dot come bust from 2000 to 2002 and the collapse of Roman Empire Lucent Technologies (Many argue that the dotcom boom and bust was a case of too much too fast.) I ended up on the streets searching for anything to provide for my young family. I ended up in a auto graveyard in Carteret NJ. Far far away from anything creative, or digital or what I had inside of me pushing out.
I was driving a huge fork truck in an car auction crash “graveyard” Moving around automobiles that were in accidents. Some of the accidents were not so bad. Most of the accidents were totals with fatalities. There were detonated blood covered air bags. Shredded windshields and doors. Jaws of life claw marks on the hoods and roof. There is money in car parts. Sometimes a totaled car is worth more in parts then the car itself. We cleaned these cars out and lined them up for an auction every week. Big shots from all over the tri-state area would come with their tow trucks and car carriers and buy these wrecks for parts. It was a highly depressing job. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get along with anybody there.
I was never a “car guy” and they found that out quickly. I reported the unsafe working conditions to Occupational Safety and Health Administration and wasn’t afraid to put my name on the report (even though it could have went anonymous) because I wanted to get fired. They demoted me to the grungy job of cleaning out wrecks and took me off my fork truck. In many of these wrecks that I cleaned in the hot sun it was the last stop for many people. There were even stories of the accidents from the tow truck drivers that dropped these cars off. “Oh this was an old couple that got hit head on by a tractor trailer. They never had a chance.” or “This was a car load of teens with no seatbelts that rolled over three times.” I was too sensitive for this shit as I collected their loose change in the ashtrays and tried on some cool coats that would find in the back seats.
I was ready to surrender myself to a life of physical labor, warehouses, factories, bleach lines, blue collar punching in and out until one day, a newspaper ad. This was still web infancy days. There was no Monster.com or Craigslist although emails were the thing at that time. There were still newspapers publishing wanted ads.
Every night the Summer that I worked here I would lock the huge barbed wire fences and watch the sky turn gold and purple then black. I had that newspaper ad and the next day I called it a man named John answered the phone. He was in a complete panic. “George…I need someone to come in here….get behind that Mac and get all this prepress work out the door. I need a quick mind. I need someone that knows graphics…knows prepress….understands printing..I need help.”
So a few days later I was hired. At this point in my digital career, I wasn’t very good. I was slow. I had a lot to learn. I was basically a poster and powerpoint designer with pussy footed deadlines.
This job threw me out of the pot and into the fire. I learned the incredible details and hectic world of large format prepress for huge companies like Barnes and Noble, Cigna Insurance, Morgan Stanly, The Holocaust Museum. I learned fast and I learned hard. John insisted on using software “shortcuts” and being quick and precise. He was a great tough teacher. At first I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had major panic attacks when they gave me job envelopes. I almost quit several times. It was very rough times for me and a few years before I was comfortable with ANY challenge.
I often wondered why I was hired. I know they had a quite a few people lined up for the job. Turns out, because of my “lack of” experience the CEO got me cheap and he liked the fact that I was…
German.

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stories from Poland

November 8, 2014 at 12:18 pm · Filed under Art, Krystina, poetry, Self Portrait, the beginning

this faraway land
just a mysterious dream when I’m awake
wet cobblestones in Kraków
old village heritage so fresh and green
a pile of freshly dug potatoes
your mothers swaying flowers
your fathers radiant Winter fires

Come up and kiss me sometime
i wont push you
away
Or grab me randomly and put your arms around my waist
or an electronic ‘kiss’ from nowhere
in the middle of the day
(haven’t i taught you yet?)
remind me that we are one sometimes
even if for just once
on your own

i dont ask for much
i got pulled over for being too much
i got a ticket on this one-way street

but then its just not the same
when you Have to ask for it
our hearts can speak even when blidfolded
or at least mine can
Life isn’t supposed to be this brutal
this fast
this competitive
everything isn’t money

im fading down this dusty dirt road
slowly
like a crying cow
being led to slaughter

neondusk11814saturday1218pm

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things i will never regret:

October 24, 2013 at 1:52 pm · Filed under Addiction, Gratitude, Self Portrait

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Almost dying from osteomyelitis at 2 years old.
Starting to drink at an early age.
Joining a colorful musical cult.
Failing some most math subjects at school.
Hating my mother.
Almost being abandoned in California by my mother.
Doing LSD.
Having nine siblings.
Experimenting with life-crushing poverty.
Almost dying while trying to swim across Farrington Lake.
Going to an all-boys private Catholic HS.
Changing from beer to straight whiskey.
Learning stream-of-consciousness writing method.
Getting arrested and going to jail.
Getting dragged by my hair up a flight of stairs by an ex convict named John Dellaroba.
Working split shifts, night shifts and every minute of overtime ever offered to me.
Marrying an incoherent woman from another universe
Being an alter boy

Things I regret:
…to be continued.

.

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low tide

August 1, 2013 at 6:45 am · Filed under Art, Gratitude, poetry, seasons, Self Portrait, Tall Tales, the beginning

A wooden house in eastern Europe. Elm trees. Low hills. My walking stick. “Let me sketch you.” Set yourself free. Charcoal shadows and hollow air. The earth sings goodbye to another day. Brisk and fresh. Steam and mist. There is no script. A car radio bleats the blues….my minds not right….my sideburns are lopsided…my testicles are hanging lower than usual. The moon is a boomerang and at low tide you can smell dead sponge and rotten crab meat. From the bridge we looked down and saw huge fish swimming, a broken dock and the cafe lights where we had lunch. A salad with walnuts and fresh fruit. A glass of bubbled water from another country. Down at the waters edge, the crowds filled the streets and bikers had an excuse to ride in the orange hue dusk. We will grow old. Read books on a porch. Wait for visits from children. And their children. Fade into the colors of the trees. Watch the shadows move across the wood and when the noiseless winds come, I will still hold you and kiss you.
The End.

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Cousin Dennis

November 7, 2012 at 6:11 am · Filed under Addiction, cousins, Gratitude, Jones, Self Portrait, the beginning

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Heart of Darkness II

September 11, 2012 at 7:58 pm · Filed under Dreams, friends, Gratitude, Mom Dad, Self Portrait, Tall Tales, the beginning

f-life mother f-er’s


Fevor
In twenty-four hours I had been sick and sicker then I have ever been in a long time. The aches, pains and sweating were the easy part compared to the feverish nightmares. It all began with a powerful sneeze in a train station in Seacacus NJ and very slowly advanced into a lost day and a half of tangled sheets and chills. You can almost recognize the power of the brain when you witness what it does when you body is burning up in fever. Your mind is a movie house of horrors. The movie replaying over and over again. As you sit in your seat gripping the armrests with horror, you know it will all end but you think that if it doesn’t you can fully understand why people would commit suicide.
As the cool wind blows and yesterdays news tumbles to your feet, you can wipe your brow for the last time. But the snots are still like a river. It is a human metamorphous to emerge from the sheets one morning. You have survived and hope to never go there again.

—My eldest son’s holy trinity: Red Bull, Hot Wings and Heavy Metal.

—To the philanthropist: Your tongue is mightier then the sword. You’re killing me.

— Oh Mrs. Mc H —Wherever you go … there you are.

Anthony
Anthony wasn’t a close friend of mine, as a matter of fact I hardly knew him. The spaces were so far apart in between our meetings that he actually forgot he had already told me his life story and would repeat himself every time we met. Anthony was certainly different then most alcoholics, perhaps there was a more severe bipolar thing going on inside his mind. When somebody takes their own life you can’t help but wonder what was going on inside their head leading up to that moment that they find themselves alone and make such a decision as Anthony did. One night shortly after his huge funeral, I was sitting in a hot tub with some other people that knew him when I was asked, “What’s your take on Anthony?” And I was speechless. I couldn’t put it together yet. It was too early. I was really shocked. Death has always fascinated me, scared me, and captured my thoughts. I finally came to the conclusion that Anthony’s brain had succumbed to damage from his drinking. The last time I saw him he seemed really out of it almost like he was mentally ill. I also think that the period when he told everyone he was sober, he wasn’t. I believe he had a a thing that chronic drinkers get called wet brain syndrome When this happens it is irreversible and that’s pretty much the end of the show. I also don’t think it helped Anthony’s cause that he was rejected and verbally battered for many years by his girlfriends family. That’ll take a toll on even the soberest man in the world. People are people. Some are sicker then others. There is no room for ignorance of this proportion in the world. You don’t hate and reject human beings. You pray for them and try to help them. Too late ignorant people, too late.

The right way to end a story.
After the sunsets and the longest hottest Summer EVER is finally over, the actors and actresses will realize that everyone had already left a long time ago. The writers will smack the sides of their head and realize that their writers block had never ended. This was the Summer of nothing. A dried up ocean of desert sand with no waves and a sun hotter then a preheated oven in hell. A vegetable garden that, to me, produced weird stuff. A drought of happiness that led into a deep depression. I’m still waiting for the day when I will wake up refreshed.

The Blues
Today has been cancelled. I can’t listen to people anymore. My coworkers speak Spanish, struggle in English, dance to latino music while they work. Read my lips when I speak to them from the managerial pedestal. They understand me, but I am slow to learn. At home it’s a different language and I am lost in Polish. English is just not part of my normal day but I love it, it’s an adventure in listening and learning. I’m so confused.
Working on this blog is a unique kind of torture. The only safe place is within.

The Blues have been strangling me lately.

im waking up opposite from you upside down
so far apart and the faint smell of sex in the 6am morning sun
(so it must be summer but what day
? ahhhh, wednesday so i will go to work but even my snoring again
must have flipped you around and I face your feet
CLIMBING over you and knocking over plastic fan again
creaking toward now simmering heat this way too long
summer of moths, the olympics and unending heat
THIS is about when the now negative chemistry
deep blue almost black neon lights at night flickering
with my emotions these empty rooms and old carpets in my head

IT USED TO BE every day was magical but then something happens
the endless grind of living maybe. the never-ending sucking leach (more about this leach in a later episode)
on a part of your unreachable back. a bubbling of bad chemicals in the brain

TRULY A TOTAL LOSS of gratitude, faith, and money Taking restless
naps in the hot car Tossing and turning like empty trees in winter
shaking off the fuck-it-all-blues.

“Happy Horseshit” somewhere in this mixed media day I heard this forgotten expression and it has since become my new battle cry.
The bad thing about Barnes & Noble the bookstore/cafe is that it’s not a library and you can’t “shhhhh” people on the phone or tell them to “shut the hell up, I don’t care about your happy horseshit!”
To all my unlovable political IDIOTS burying my social media world in all your CRAP: Solutions, not signatures and if you think spoon-fed Rommney is gonna do better you have mashed potatoes for brains. Nobody is EVER gonna be a good president of the United States again. It was allot simpler in the 1800’s and up to the turn of the century. There were less people living here and most of them that did, GREW THEIR OWN FOOD and slaughtered their own meat. Life was FRESH and SIMPLE with no fucking preservatives. Why do you think the health care issue is what it it is today (Besides GREED) we have all these diseases, heart disease, cancer etc etc and including autism because man insists on screwing around with nature! Stop putting shit in our food and the cows food you dumb bastards, You are what you eat. Health Care is what it is because even with a successful surgery PEOPLE ARE STILL SUEING! Authorities are still catching people and groups of people stealing from the health care system. MONEY has become god in this stupid country. Everyone has to have a big fancy car because they watch too much blaring TV with commercials that tell you what you have to have. And most dumb asses BELIEVE that happiness comes to us through television and movies. Most dumb asses will steal, kill and go into tremendous debt to obtain that TV- driven message.
When we lived in log cabins that we built with our neighbors and grew food with our VERY OWN mud-caked hands and sat around a fire with our family, it was because THERE WAS NO TV. There were also no mortgages, no crazy insane diseases, and we didn’t need pills for everything. When life was REAL, you fell asleep naturally because you were so damn tired from plowing the field or your wife.
I found out recently that it’s illegal to keep chickens in your yard where I live. What a bunch of HAPPY HORSESHIT !!

Nobody Understands Why I Sit Next To These Churning Rivers Of Ideas
The past has it’s place, I agree. I shouldn’t dwell in it but it’s so freaking cool I just can’t stand it! Beam me up Scotty, there is nothing better then a well made movie about time travel. The latest one for me just happens to be Woodey “the genuis” Allens fantastic film, “Midnite In Paris” ONCE I was in an antique store somewhere in the hills of Pennsylvania with some hip chick wearing a swirly hippy dress and I found a big old wooden box. Not that the box was so damn cool but it was filled with old postcards…not that the postcards were so damn old and cool BUT they were USED. There were handwritten messages, address, stamps and lipstick kisses from the past. I was so enthralled with this, that I spent an hour in front of them. My swirly-girlie-hippy chick had to finally drag me out of that place so that we could dig into so Tai Food at some freaky Indian place on the side of the Hudson river.
Now, over lunch, and the smell of searing tuna, I explained to my colorful friend that I needed to go back and maybe even purchase some of those “neat-O” postcards from the past. As her eyes rolled (a typical expression of ALL my female friends) I heard her say “That’s a bunch of happy horseshit that I’m not going to do. We have a steam boat to ride.”
Hippy Goils are so sweet and yummy on the outside but on the inside they are just plain old females. Sort of like M&M’s they melt in your mouth but you can get sick if you eat too many of them.

Things I Never Regret As A Father:
1. Getting divorced.
2. Getting divorced.
3. Getting divorced.

WHY?
…as the only patron in Barnes and Noble does the coffee chemist behind the counter have to ask me for my name and write it on the cup?
My problem as a writer and photographer is that I’m always thinking that amazing revelations are to be found in the blandest most boring facts of daily life.
And THAT my friends is a bunch of happy horseshit. Today and hopefully not tomorrow.

We really need to get away. Nature is the deepest relief. Ocean or Forest. I don’t care which. Just show me the way. I’ll drive. I’ll pay the tolls. I’ll fill the tank.

How I Met Your…
One day boy, I tell ya, one day I’ll wake up from this unconscious stroll thru life and I’ll realize that I was a slave to money, yeah, evil moolah. You were waiting for me on the other side of the automatic doors looking fresh and pout. Your ass crack showed when you leaned over to kiss me. Yeah, you think I closed my eyes? I forgot to buy flowers but they would have died in my un-air-conditioned car from the early senventies. A Ford Pinto, a time bomb that could explode on impact. A fiery painful death for sure. The Pinto only had two front doors so you couldn’t get out if you were in the back seat and you were rear-ended. And that was why you would never understand why I never came to meet you. Why I never drove with you. I have always had nightmares of claustrophobia. I think I was suffocated or drowned in my previous life.
But there we were; In the middle of the produce aisle. Soggy broccoli being shoveled into the garbage. Parsnips freshly cut. The smell of onions and your french perfume. Organic cabbage. Small and soft. Cucumbers, like cocks lined up, I was disappointed you didn’t stop to lift them up, and feel them, squeeze them, like you are supposed to do while shopping in the produce aisle. These nuclear vegetables, they just don’t grow things the way they used to. So as they say, we lived happily ever not after, chasing vegetarian dreams and after several years, I caught you sneaking into the meat department.
That was the sunrise of our next ten thousand meals together. Holding hands and taking cracker samples until we couldn’t eat anymore. Wouldn’t you know there was a TV to watch while we checked out. You read People. The coupons saved us a fortune and I wanted to spend the extra cash on a new car with air conditioning. But you said I was too frivolous.

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Diary of a Sex Addict (a play)

May 22, 2012 at 7:55 pm · Filed under Addiction, Art, Self Portrait

The Final Scene

A classic red velvet curtain opens to an empty wooden stage. Butch walks out from behind the back curtain, struggling a bit with finding an opening and then almost tripping. He walks to center stage and stops in the center. A stage hand, with an unlit cigar hanging from his mouth, walks out with a silver retro microphone. He places it in front of Butch and adjust it to the height of his mouth. He connects a wire that he was carrying to the microphone stand and a sudden large squelch startles Butch. As the stagehand slowly walks away, Coco emerges from front of the stage right wearing a stunning blue evening gown and carrying a hand held microphone. She stops at center stage, slightly to the left and in front of Butch by twenty or so feet. She gazes blankly out into the crowd. The already dimly lit stage lights begin to fade and at the same time separate spot lights begin to turn up on Coco and Butch.
As the scene goes on, several stagehands carry out life-like male undressed mannequins and place them on the stage. They are placed randomly around Butch at all angles. By the end of the scene there will be over one hundred undressed mannequins on the stage nearly and then totally covering Butch from view.
Coco: (lifts up the microphone that she has been holding on her side) How do I begin? What have I done? (looks down at her feet)
Butch: I remember the first words you ever wrote to me. “You’ve got to be kidding.” Yup that’s what you wrote to me in our first email exchange. But now, no, I wasn’t kidding. I was married, two young kids. I was working in a huge dot com company during the big dot com explosion. Times were good. No, times were GREAT. The sun shinned everyday. Stocks seemed to split every month. Bonus were multiple and huge. We took two hour lunches paid for by the company. Everyday was a celebration. I had a brand new home in an all-white neighborhood surrounded by an all-white town. We lived by the ocean deep in the scrub pines of south Jersey.
Coco: I have no regrets in my life so far. I am who I am and who I will always be. It, what ever “it” is is rooted to my soul. Carried on through generations. It clutches to my heart with iron claws.
Butch: We met at a design conference somewhere in Florida. The internet was in it’s infancy. It was so raw and clumsy. We fell in love with each other before we even saw each other. But I knew you through hundreds of emails. Like a blind man feeling someone’s face.
(Now some of the mannequins being carried out are different brown and beige and some are females.)
Coco: I tried to be normal. Go to school. Have a husband…well I did have a husband….several. I tried. I prayed. I begged. I took pills.
Butch: I remember that picnic we had..somewhere up high overlooking a river. There was that slow moving barge that took all day to go by. The picnic basket filled with cheese and fruit. Going down to the banks to throw rocks.
Coco: I feel like a magician, how I make it through the day, appearing in places I shouldn’t be, while people wait for me on the other side of the curtain. Queen of the double life. I am a professional liar. You caught me a few times but you were so stupidly in love.

While Butch slowly becomes surrounded by naked mannequins he is delirious to what is going on around him. He is unaware that this is Coco’s “breakup” speech. Thru the small crowd gathering around him, he keeps his eyes focused on Coco.
Butch: (laughing) That night in New York driving back and forth through Times Square. You were like an excited little girl. Or that time driving around in Tampa, the sun an orange ball and the sky…. (Butch looking up and around pointing at the now glowing red lights of the theater)….the most beautiful sunsets EVER. Sryacuse. Fort Henry. Oswego. Wellesley Island. Point Pleasant. Cape May. New Hope.
Coco: (shaking her head and looking down) You are stuck in the past Butch…
Butch: …in the beach house just me and you…and the romantic rain
Coco: I liked you the most Butch…I did…I really did…the only way I know how to say goodbye is for you to become one of them….just another notch….a number….
At that moment one of the heads of a mannequin that a stage hand is carrying out falls off and rolls around on the stage.
Coco: I remember him….he was such a klutz..
Butch: (now almost completely covered by mannequins) That time in Boldt Castle, we were so in love, like little kids running around…in the car playing the Traveling Wiburys on the cassette player…
(singing now “Handle With Care” by The Traveling Wilburys) “He love’s yer sexy body, he loves yer sexy mind. He loves when you hold him, grab him from behind….Ohhhhhhh baby your such a tasty treat…
Coco: I stayed with you the longest..
Butch: (very low murmur) Remember when I beat you in that miniature golf game? The bet was any sexual favor you want….and all I wanted was for you to go through a day in a short skirt with no panties…
Coco: I was drawn to you in some strange way. Pulling excuses from my hat. You never knew. Nobody did. Fake smiles. Invisible doors. Mirrors. It was so easy. Too easy. One night stands. Outside. Inside. Married. Single. Cars. Hotels. Dating sites. Parties. Close friends. Just one quick smile. Oh hell, I could configure out a room full of men in thirty seconds and have sex with all of them within two days.
Butch: (his last muffled words) I love you Coco. Always and beyond….
Coco: I have to go now.
(Coco walks off the stage and halfway there she is met by a man dressed in a tuxedo. He takes her hand and they go off together. At this time all the lights die down and the customary applause from the crowd begins. When the house lights go on, the stagehands have begun moving the mannequins back off stage. They begin in the center and work towards the area where Butch was talking and has now been silent since the end of the play. As the crowd files out of the theater they may be able to see that when they reach the microphone that Butch was standing under there is indeed a life-like “Butch” mannequin. He is a little different then the others, almost identical to Butches looks. Shocking and ghastly looking as a stagehand picks him up and carries him off. Butch has indeed become “one of them.” A number.)

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Home Movies

April 3, 2012 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Art, cousins, HERITAGE, Jones, Mighty Ten, Mom Dad, New Jersey, Self Portrait, the beginning


On the plane back from Las Vegas Nevada my prized possession was a dvd that Jaybird had burned for me. Several attempts at viewing proved futile and finally a visit to a "dvd specialist" gave me the bad news. The dvd never really burned. What I had was three seconds of Comedy Centrals Happy Days. Well, these weren't the happy days I was looking for.
When I called Mr. Jaybird with the bad news he almost instantaneously resent the dvd along with some other surprises. The movie then had to be converted in order to edit it. I found some free software on the web.
Originally this movie was just thrown together. It is a scrambled mess of dates and places and is in no way in any kind of chronological order. Some of the earliest stuff on here is around 1961 and the pool scene is probably a two years before dad died.
I want to thank Robert Jaybird Jones our long lost cousin for getting so many memories to me. It has been so good to be able to talk to him randomly on the phone.
For me, it is really quite eerie seeing dad "moving" That many of us probably never even remember seeing him move. To see someone you love acting goofy and even clowning around with his father is quite amazing after 41 years. The few seconds of mom being a loving mother is just priceless. You can almost forget at this point in your life that she did indeed give birth ten times in her life. She was a mom practically her whole life. A good mom too.

Most of these movies were taken by Jay Jones. Our uncle. He too, died terribly too young before any of us could really grow up to appreciate what a great guy he was. I remember him fondly. I am very fortunate. He had a heart of gold in his own military way!

A further analysis of this tape including a "who is who" list will come quickly after this posting.

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“My life is holding the universe together.”

March 20, 2012 at 8:49 pm · Filed under Art, poetry, Self Portrait, the beginning


Dearest Icky-Poo-Yum-Yum,
My thoughts while searching for a vector ice cream cone on “images” in Google: is art an anti-depressant? If my laptop dies, I can always learn how to paint on canvas.
Do you, as a man, know the principles of basic plumbing?
Do we all know that your hands are your first teachers? There are way too many techno-brats in America today.
Keep the spark ! Eat the faith ! Slice some bread !
Rehabilitated gas stations. e-mailing-surfing-sharing-downloading-uploading-swapping information-videogaming-meetingpeople?- a brain chemistry love fest.
Are we not yet afraid of The monitor and the keyboard? The lion and the bear. The peach and the cobbler. The paint and the brush.
People need to know how to make things work!
Can you take apart a magnetic motor and put it back together again?
Did you ever build a plastic model? (of a car – of a war machine)
Can you use a sewing machine?
SUB-PAR
(not enough salt in the potatoes)
If the phone does not ring, it’s me.
I love the winter in the spring.
Please touch.
Ja !
Love me do.
Hand painted canvas ties. My idea for Etsy!
The business card will NEVER be replaced! Handshake school.
I will meet you, Mr Icky Poo Yum Yum some day. In person. Face to face. Not with Skype or a text or a mouse.
I will hold your hand under the roof of a house, look into your plastic brown eyes and shake your professional hand. Then we can have plastic cheese.

Kindest regards
Georgeous George. 2012.03.21

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Mixed Greens

March 19, 2012 at 9:13 pm · Filed under Art, Dreams, Self Portrait, the beginning


In this dream I am painting a huge steel bridge by myself. There is a date etched in one of the concrete supports that says; “1960” It is very hard work with scaffolds and ladders in all kinds of weather. Sometimes I feel as if the heavy winds are gonna knock me into the raging river underneath.
It takes thirty-seven months and almost sixteen days to complete the job. By the time I am finished, the paint is beginning to peel on the other side and I have to start all over again.

In my unending quest for (to) manhood, I have tried everything.: Carrying a hammer around with me at all times. Talking deeper. Walking heavier. Checking out woman’s butts whenever possible. Measuring my penis. Driving irregular and fast. Hanging up landlines loudly. Cursing. Watching controllrd violence on TV. The final signature to being a man is to be human. It may take a long time or you may have the capacity to get it almost right away: Just BE YOURSELF. Don’t ever give a crap what anybody else says. Take your time. Have fun. And ride a roller coaster whenever you can.

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