BALD

Bald.
The word has weight. It makes strong men shudder. It causes normally sensible people to change their behavior as their emotions and vanity get the best of them. It instills fear: fear of rejection, humiliation, prejudice, embarrassment.

I once had a lot of very thick, nearly black hair. My sister, suffering with fine hair that wouldn’t hold it’s shape, told me many decades ago that she wished that she had my hair. I had the kind of hair that would hold any shape it twisted into if I went to bed with a wet head.

I never thought I would go bald. My brother went into that Other Realm long before I did and for some reason I felt safe. The “thing” had not infected me.

Then I turned forty. Above my forehead the hairline began to look uneven and slightly thin in spots. I was too busy trying to survive to give it much thought.
But gradually, almost imperceptibly, that thinness spread towards the crown of my big head. I began to notice that when I spoke to people sometimes they would keep glancing at that area of empty scalp.

Finally, in 2001, I published a “how-to” book on mural painting, and when I saw the rear of my head in the step-by-step photographs, it really hit home how bald I was getting.

The upside to all of this narcissism is that it has never bothered me too much. Worrying about such things seems to me like worrying that I only have two arms, when four would be so much handier.

I refuse - however - to shave the remaining hair on my head to a nub (the current rage) in order to hide or diffuse the fact that I am.................................Bald.

The Times

In 1978 I moved from my farmhouse apartment to a two-family house on the west side of Cincinnati. This was in Cincinnati proper and yet still very much in the middle of the middle (The term “Midwest” is a misnomer, of course. Perhaps MidUSA is better.).

I had moved from a small town to attend a prestigious university, where I was exposed to a much larger universe of ideas and experiences. I had lived and travelled in Europe. Now I was settled in the so-called Queen City. It did not take too long to see what was what here. This was a conservative place, ruled by a rather straight-laced business class whose tastes were well-aligned with one of the reigning corporations in town: Procter and Gamble.

Still, in any town or city one can find things to attach to, people of similar tastes, others who lean more towards a life of exploration, creation, and contemplation, than a straight life-line towards accumulation and retirement.

In that same year my oldest friend Danny got me a subscription to The New York Times for my birthday. Twenty-two years later I still get the Sunday edition. It’s expensive now and the Sunday paper is a gift to myself, something that I am unable to relinquish. I read the paper daily online.

The Sunday paper was once a humongous thing to which readers would refer to in jokes about the futility of trying to read it all. It has shrunk considerably amidst the devastating assault on the viability of newspapers and the news business in general. The Times is not angelic or perfect or without its errors and faults, but for me it has remained a lifeline to the larger world. There are other often better sources for unbiased political reporting. But I read Frank Rich and Bob Herbert to reassure myself that sanity still has a place in the national discourse.

TOWEL HEAD

A month or so before the last Presidential election, I was working for an older single mom of a 35-year-old autistic son. She was a joy to talk to, full of life, an avid gardner.
The last day at her house I asked about one of her antiques and she spoke about getting it from an old friend who lived in London until recently. “He had to get out of there,” she explained to me, “you know, because of all the Towel Heads.” That shut me up.
She went on to explain in more, unnecessary depth.....and then finished up by exclaiming to me: “God help us if Obama wins!”
Aside from the presumption of where I might stand politically, all of this racism was a mind-slam from out of left field. This sweet, fun and funny woman was infected with the nasty, nasty disease of Stupid Simplistic Thinking.

I returned - somewhat hesitatingly - this past Spring to do some minor decorative work for her and, again, she brought up that term “Towel Head” in conversation.
I quickly responded with “....that’s not nice! You can’t use that term and lump so many different kinds of people all together!”
“Well, the Muslims are the source of all the problems in the world today,” she replied.
“No, that’s not true,” was the the only answer I felt like giving.
The next day we were having an amusing conversation and at one point she joked about how she’s not allowed to say such-and-such, and I simply looked at her sweet face...and smiled.

REFLECTION

Thesaurus: SENDING BACK, IMAGE, INDICATION, SLUR, THOUGHT, OPINION.

There is a scene in an old Ingmar Bergmann film from 1968 - Hour of the Wolf - where Max von Sydow’s character, Johann, a painter, makes his pregnant wife Alma (Liv Ulman) sit quietly while allowing a single minute to pass. It is the hour just before dawn. Johan stares at his watch as the seconds tick away amidst the quiet at a pace that becomes disturbing.

This scene has stayed strong in my memory all of these years.

Time..........huh? What? When? We were, are, will be?

WALK & CAR pt.3

The humidity takes a break from beating us all to Hell and it is a beautiful evening. I take my first walk in almost three months because I have had to rest my right knee, apparently a victim of a Baker’s cyst. I feel unfettered and free to
move this old body through the waning light.

Evening is my favorite time, just as Fall is my favorite season. The light rays bend through redness, the shadows lengthen and harshness of daylight softens and takes on a patina of mystery.

I can’t imagine going through this one and only life without exercising and stretching and strengthening my mind as well as my body. I remember seeing the very elderly Jimmy Stewart on the Johnny Carson show speaking about aging and describing how he felt the same inside as he had always felt but that, when he looked in the mirror, he saw an old man staring back at him.

We spend so much time entertaining our minds and it is so easy to forget that the mind is a universe unto itself. We use so little of it. So many of us find a niche and spend an entire life on rewind and replay.

I walk and see a young guy with a cool hat. He’s got that youthful thinness that I used to have. Parents are throwing baseballs to their kids, pushing strollers, making sure little bike riders don’t ride into the traffic. The weather pushes this activity into high gear and I am right with it.

I circle around and start walking down a somewhat steep hill that leads to my home. Parked at the curb is that vintage Mercedes I always spot on my walks.
I always wonder who the owner is. Someone I could easily talk to, I think. Maybe someone who is a beer snob like me (IPA’s and Pale Ales) or who also loves blended red wine. I would be uneasy leaving that car at the curb. I’d want to keep it in my bedroom.

Roaring up the street is one of those Hummers. It is a huge, bloated, obnoxious hulk.
I like to think that I can converse with just about anyone. I know that I could talk with the owner of that monstrosity. But I could never befriend them.

CAR pt.2

My first car was a 1960-something Pontiac Catalina that I got from my father right before senior year in high school. It's color was somewhere between purple and the color of Pepto Bismol, only slightly darker. It had black leather seats, AM-FM radio, a 400 cubic-inch V8 engine, and - best of all - a black convertible top.

Since my school day ended at 1pm senior year, I was set to roll. This car was huge and fast and comfortable, especially for my psychologically unstable girlfriend who would freak out when large trucks went by.

I wasn’t allowed to have a car when I went away to college, trapped as I was in a crowded dormitory. I sold my beautiful boat to a guy named Gene who worked for my father. Gene was tall and rail-thin, usually wore a cap, smoked unfiltered cigarettes and smelled of alcohol. I remember one summer working for my dad and riding in a truck with Gene. He liked to stop at a place that sold sausage sandwiches. When we sat down to eat, I would watch in amazement as Gene opened a Coke bottle with his teeth.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I sold the convertible Pontiac to Gene for next to nothing because I had no way to store the thing and maintain it. Less than six months later, Gene crashed the purple beast and totaled it.

Four years later when I was home for the summer, I was hanging around with my cousin in front of his apartment that happened to be only a few minutes walk away from my house. Suddenly, a young girl came running up to us, obviously frightened to death. "Please hide me!!" she breathlessly pleaded to us. "He's going to kill me!".
We tried to convince her to go inside and hide upstairs but she ran off instead.
A while later my cousin and I were walking up the street to my house when a yellow Mustang came screeching to a halt and a
long-haired young guy asked us if we'd seen a yound blond girl running around the area. I recognized the guy with the crazed look on his face. It was Billy - Gene's son.
I lied and said I had not seen anyone and he sped off.
Later I would find out that Billy found his wife later that night and shot her dead. Somehow, he only served a year in prison.
Middletown justice.

Car

I am on the way to a 9pm meeting with a client and the designer. The client is worried about the background color on a mural I am starting.......concerned about how the color changes at night. Hence the unusual time for the meeting.
It was 95 degrees in Cincinnati today and hellishly humid and the
air conditioning in my car is broken. Open windows on the highway are
in the extreme minority. This along with cars that obey the speed limit and
humans who do not tailgate.
What is it about people who tailgate you when the other two or three lanes are wide open? How does passive-aggressiveness find suitability in a four-thousand pound metal box traveling at seventy miles an hour? The stupidity and obnoxiousness of this kind of auto mania is something that I can’t really fathom.
The dreadful Venus-like weather only heightens my weariness of driving.
I always wonder how many millions of miles and countless hours I have spent doing this ridiculous activity. Driving a car can be great fun. But seeing the masses of vehicles crammed mile after mile on overburdened roads, spewing atmosphere-killing toxins into the air, day after day after year after decade and now into another century....well, it ain't so fun.
It’s absurd.

Home

I live in an apartment now. I used to own a house, but no longer.
Still, I lugged my furniture here and proceeded to place it in some kind
of visually pleasing arrangement - modest though it may be.
What is it about us humans that we like to have our living spaces
resemble little museums or our own little theatrical stages or echoes of
rooms we have seen somewhere? Many of us go into huge debt in order to create living spaces that resemble something that we believe is expected of us in
order to show our maturity or our success or our sophistication.

It’s fascinating. Couches, chairs, bookshelves. Objects of art hung on the
walls. Most of us do this. Some of us are more non-conventional and we throw wall hangings and fabrics and found objects all over the place, possibly to break with normalcy and expectation. Some of us pare things down to the barest minimum to allow mind/breathing space and a sense of openness and possibility.

I have worked in some of the largest and most lavish homes in Cincinnati, in my
profession as an artist. I have also been in enormous homes that feel like stage-sets for peacocks or posers. Many people mistake size for status. However, when entering someone’s library, it’s easy to tell well-read books from trophy books bought en masse to fill shelves in order to look good.

Eventually, wherever we happen to be living usually becomes “home”.
After a really long, difficult day, I don’t want to be at someone else’s house, regardless of how fine or fancy or cozy it is...I want to be back in my own home.
Even if it’s just an apartment that I happen to be renting from somebody at the moment. Even if the arrangement of things seems fragile and somewhat tentative and not exactly High Style. Even if the tiny kitchen is cluttered with the remains
of a scattered lifestyle.

Drawing Free

A drawing in a sketchbook. From April 29, 1993.
I was drawing more then and it shows.
Drawing is a short circuit to the unconscious.

I remember decades ago I had a kind of epiphany. I realized that the
doodles I was doing on the edges of my school notebooks - done
in the midst of college-classroom boredom, perhaps - were much more engaging
and interesting that the drawings I was doing on good paper in
a studio setting.

Too much thinking can be a dangerous thing....in some circumstances.

August Brains (a blog improvisation...)

hotter than hell and
humidity is evil.
warm, warmer,
how far will my
brain swell until it
seeps out of my nose?

i finish the trilogy,
part of the national dream
swept into shore by a
team of oceanographers,
scraping tar from
tongues, a livid blonde
screams for death
of government unless,
of course,
her family needs it.

August arrives on my back,
scorching my car
as it wheezes to the
finish line, a winner from
the Japanese response
to a dimmer view
hot dog Yankee
takeover for the top
one percent.

We keep it running, the engine
of wartime, keep it moving
forward and up-to-date,
regardless of logic
or need
or the blood of the
innocent,
heated and debated
between forgotten ideas and
ice cream sandwiches,
three times over,
sand and oil and our
swelling brains.