Stories, etc.

Je me souviens. This is what the Québec license plate says . I remember.  Growing up in central Maine, my family took our first road trip to the city of Québec when I was 14. During early summer, we drove through the verdant cuts of western Maine, on highway 73, and it was a five hour journey. When I got to the city of Quebec, I was flummoxed. I couldn't believe the history, grandeur of buildings such as the Chateau Frontenac, the detailing of the cobblestone streets, the boardwalk, the language immersion, the cafes, the purity of clean Canadian air. It made me happy to see the beauty there, and we actually had the pleasure of staying at the Chateau Frontenac, because the American to Canadian dollar (also called a loony) exchange rate was lopsided towards the U.S., so we could afford to stay there even on a limited budget. Our excitement came to a dull end when we turned on TV and noticed everything was in French. That's when my mom said, "get your tails outside," an...

I first started really enjoying the process of drawing heads when I was in high school. Our art teacher, Mrs. Menninghaus, made us simply draw the head and some of the neck of a fellow classmate for an in-class exercise. I think I used a pencil in medium softness. I drew a girl named Keely. Keely Downes. I realized as I was drawing her that her upper lip had a protrusion that dipped down onto the middle part of her bottom lip. Getting that subtlety with the pencil made the mouth look so much more convincing. After Keely, some of my friends wanted me to draw them, and some of them came out looking pretty good. The Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones once said the fastest way to lose a friend is to draw a picture of them. Luckily none of my friends have ever stopped talking to me because of a poor drawing I did of them. It's hard to draw some people from real life though, especially if they are your friends; I always feel the impulse to talk with them while they are sitting in front of...

Painting the Grand Canyon A cavernous hole that constitutes itself on this planet is known as the Grand Canyon. Each year many a caravan, including Mike Brady and his Brunch (minus the r, and plus an Alice) venture to this southwestern retreat to explore the crags and caves of the big GC.  In honor of the subject itself, I'll intersperse relevant sentences from the chapter "Grand Canyon", excerpted from  Our National Parks, a book written by Nelson Beecher Keyes in 1958, with some action shots from the watercolor painting I did there.  Main Supplies. I like tubes just as much as cakes. Couple bottles of water. Temperature was a pleasant 85 so didn't need too too much water to carry in there.   "In 1540 a large party of Spaniards, greedy for easy wealth, pressed up out of Mexico intent upon locating and seizing the seven mythical cities of Cibola, supposedly built of pure gold. While this was to prove a most disappointing and ...

Steve didn't want to show up to work on time. In his office in the research wings at London's British Museum, he had been helping the renowned archeologist, Dr. Atticus Block, prepare to exhume the mummy tomb of Osiris. This coveted, seminal piece of Egyptian history had made its way to the laboratory of Dr. Block through a pile of grant letters Steve and Block had written, indefatigably, over the past seven years. Seven years Steve and Block had been planning and hoping for this acquisition, and seven years they had experienced, through the throes of professional museum protocol and dense pleas, that challenge of getting what one wants most: and in their case, it was the mummy tomb of Osiris, the great Egyptian demi-god who, while married to Nut, gave birth to Isis. Osiris was the mystical figure to whom King Tutankhamen had prayed before going to bed every night. Osiris was also believed to be the one who instituted both common sense and magic into the dynasty of ...

In August 2006, my brother and I drove from Maine to California. Once we got to California, we ran into this sign, so I took a reference photo and did a painting of it a few years later. When we were stopped to take the sign and explore the breakdown lane, I found an arrowhead beside a bush of dry desert grasses. The arrowhead was covered in a green limestone which had ridges evenly cut in 45-degree angles along the "grip ridge" of the arrowhead. Maybe it wasn't an arrowhead, but rather a blade for cutting things. I put it in my pocket and we traveled down that road you see to the left of the sign up there; we drove towards "Death Valley". I was wearing heavy denim, and it was hot as hell outside.

This is an alphabet of a language I made up. 

And Leap Out of the Water

Short Fiction: I came across an elderly man at the local sandwich store. He had swollen ankles and thin gray hair. His skin was white like paper, with the occasional splotch on his face. I made eye contact with him and smiled somewhat kindly, motioning for him to come sit at my table. He didn’t smile but nodded and came over. I asked him if he lived around here, and he said he lived off of MacArthur Boulevard, near the cross section of High Street. I knew this area well. I took casual carpool every day at that corner, and had been to a dinner recently at a house just down the street. Anyways, I asked the elderly man what his name was. He said “Harold” and I introduced myself. He asked me what I did, and I told him I worked as a carpenter at a lumberyard in the hills. He could tell I hated it. I explained to him it wasn't working with metal that bothered me, but the boss and how he treated his workers. Regardless, Harold listened. He told me he enjoyed taking photographs and had t...

Point Reyes, California One autumnal, late October weekend of this very year, I went to Point Reyes, California. One of the objectives was to reach within the depths of my energy reserves and execute a painting or two.  In the northern bits of Marin County I ventured, 'to the lighthouse', and was met with fog galore. The last sunny spot before I reached the vicinity of Point Reyes was a town called Inverness. It consisted of a few cafes and restaurants, and an accommodating grocery/general store. All the residents and people I interacted with were kindly. One particular cafe I went to was called Blackbird . The gentleman who ran the cash register and kitchen crafted a BLT that comes within inches of being the best BLT I ever consumed. You can see the fog encroaching its way over a hill.  The road that I took to get there was highway one, visibly apparent on this map. A shape of land that appears so cut and dry, though when I journeyed onto the road, it was anythin...

BODIE, CALIFORNIA- Gold-Mining Ghost Town.          "This is Bodie, or rather the remains of Bodie. Only about five percent of the buildings it contained during its 1880s heydey still remain. Today, it stands just as time, fire and the elements have left it - a genuine California gold mining ghost town. Designated a state historic park in 1962, it is now maintained in a state of "arrested decay." "Bodie was named after Waterman S. Body (also known as William S. Body), who discovered gold here in 1859. The change in spelling of the town's name has often been attributed to an illiterate sign painter, but it was a deliberate change by the citizenry to ensure proper pronunciation. "The town of Bodie rose to prominence with the decline of mining along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Prospectors crossing the eastern slopes in 1859 to "see the elephant"-- that is, to search for gold- made a rich discovery at Virginia City. Th...