“WHEN YOU LOOK IN THE MIRROR
DO YOU SMASH IT QUICK
DO YOU TAKE THE GLASS
AND SLASH YOUR WRISTS”

From ‘Identity’ by X-Ray Spex

Hollywood physics would have made the scene impossible without a bong anchoring our little circle… Dim lighting, Hank Williams revolving slowly in the corner and meandering discussion of art certainly seems the likely result of some serious puffing and gagging but really there was a nearly empty box of Pacifico in the kitchen and many more empty cans of Pabst in my own personal history predating that… Somehow someone had pulled a notebook from a shelf and we were examining a quick sketch of an image from a dream and I was surprised that someone would attempt to preserve a memory by drawing– maybe this is another reason why discussions of art typically find me out on the porch or back stairwell smoking a cigarette…

Meanwhile the kids, both past and present conscripts at McArt, were a little mystified about my concentration on the events of my (rare) remembered dreams over the setting… Looking at the sketch I couldn’t possibly imagine trying to relate in any detail what was pictured but I guess the crux of their curiosity is that it never really would have occured to me to take a moment to mention what things actually looked like while I swam around the horrors of my sub-conscious…

 I’m pretty sure this is how we ended up with my head needing scratching… Are you gonna wear your suit (recently bought to appear as a flackey in someone’s recent wedding) for Twin Peaks? If you could dress to immitate your ideal what would that be?  At first I took this as a gentle jab about my slovenly nature but a quick study of the other two in the room found little room for such criticism… I didn’t understand, rambling about how I’m not very flamboyant, but apparantly my course was still set for a reef… If you could dress up without any societal constraints and ‘become’ someone or something what would that be? Like in bearskins? There was a begrudging yeah while wheels spun inside heads… Mine jumped the rails:

I used to run around town wearing this grey (soft)collared shirt that a friend had given me to impress prospective employers up and down the downtown offices… It may not seem particularly fancy but a grey button-down and Ben Davis was a big step in a direction from my evaporating t-shirts and jeans with holes in the seat… Obviously I never got any of the jobs but every time I was waiting outside smoking a cigarette watching the suits and bums stagger about I always felt like I’d infiltrated something– like a secret agent but with cheap plastic sunglasses that didn’t shoot lasers at foreign dignitaries… I obviously didn’t belong anywhere around here, certainly had no business standing on the steps of some 30-story office block, but this costume let me slip in and out of places effortlessly… Usually I get followed around the store when I buy toilet paper…

 Since I’d been drinking all day I related this to the other occupants of the room but the earlier begrudging yeah was revoked and I was stamped ‘ignorant’ and the matter moved on to some other one in the morning heart-felt, mind-expanding topic… But somewhere in the head the conversation had found a corner and taken a nap and when it woke up the next morning it began raising hell, demanding attention and wanting to know if I still thought it was beautiful or not…

It reminded me of a friend who worked at a TV station which was decidedly unhip and clueless… She had purchased and on occassion wore a studded belt which I thought was some serious Hot-Topic contrived bullshit but she found liberating… When she wore a belt people at her work had no idea what to make of it… Was she a slut?  Is she into bondage?  Maybe it’s punk-rock?  None of these were true but because people supplied their own answers she could exploit their interpretations and live as something other than herself for a little while…

If I had time… But I don’t…