A huge Photoshop collage of some of my favorite books. Just click on the image to get a screen filling version.

The Kentucky Theater

I was at the Kentucky Theater today and I took a few photos. I have been going to this theater for the better part of a quarter of a century and even though I've lived in NYC and Los Angeles I am convinced that there is no theater on earth as beautiful as this place. When I was in high school in the early eighties I would skip school and come to this theater to see matinee shows. It was a full on art house theater in those days and in an age before the proliferation of VHS tape it was the only way I would have ever gotten to see such films as the Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Great Escape and a host of other great old movies.





When I was there today I finally introduced myself to the theater manager Fred Mills. Mr. Mills has worked at the Kentucky since 1963. I took the opportunity to tell him how much the Kentucky meant to me and how grateful I was to him and the Kentucky for giving me some of the most memorable entertainment of my life. I also told him that I and several of my friends had been regulars there back in the eighties and a number of us pursued careers in the film industry. I told him that in Los Angeles today there are a number of young professionals that spent a fair amount of their youth in the Kentucky Theater and to this day they speak of the place with a reverence that is reserved for things that are sacred. Mr. Mills shook my hand and thanked me for telling me that and said that it meant a great deal to him to hear such a thing... He seemed moved almost to the verge of tears.


If you have never seen a movie there I highly recommend it, and if you would like to know more about the Kentucky Theater and it's history you should click here to see their new website.

http://www.kentuckytheater.com/

The Morris Bookstore

Thought I would post a few pictures of one of Lexington's best new places. The Morris Bookstore opened in 2008 and is located on Southland Drive just across the road from the Good Foods Co-op. It is a truly wonderful shop that is filled with about twenty thousand new books and staffed by people who really know their stuff. I don't know about you but I find it very refreshing to visit a shop that is locally owned and operated where the staff is not only knowledgeable but genuinely interested in what they are selling.


In the back there's a fantastic children's section with a couple of bean bag chairs encouraging kids and parents to make themselves at home and check out colorful new titles.


The comics section is really well stocked with lots of deluxe format graphic novels and plenty of Manga.


The store also features a large mural adorning the wall behind the counter. It's the work of local artist James Shambhu and this mixed media installation alone is worth visiting the store to see...


The local interest section is especially inviting and there is even a good collection of Larkspur Press material.... All handset pages and filled with breathtaking illustrations.



All around the store are notes on the shelves that promote certain books the staff has found particularly interesting. The personalities and passions of the staff begin to emerge as the customer reads a small paragraph here and there describing why they recommend one author or another.

The store also holds events, this September Cindy Sheehan will be at the Morris Book Shop as will Kentucky writer Silas House. For more information on this be sure to click on the link below. It will take you to the Morris Book Shop Home page and there you will find links to everything from Larkspur Press to James Shambhu's art website. All in all, the Morris Book Shop is a wonderful place to visit. I usually pop into the Good Foods Co-op across the street and get a cup of coffee and then hit the stacks at Morris. Hope to see you there...

http://www.morrisbookshop.com/index.html

Summerscape

Time to go large. Summerscape is made up of three stretched canvases. The center canvass is three feet by four feet and the side panels are two feet by four feet, making the overall piece a whopping seven feet wide and four feet tall. The media is acrylic paint mixed with sand. As always, if you click on the image you can get a bigger view.

The following is a picture of the tryptic in the backyard.

Below is a detail of each panel, moving from left to right.



The last couple of pics are detail shots taken within a few inches of the paintings surface.

Avalon Harbor

Avalon Harbor. The painting is three feet by four feet and painted with a mixture of acrylic paint and sand. In the detail shots of the painting you can see that the canvas was laid flat on the floor and different colors were poured onto the surface, then it was mixed with fingers and sticks. I also used spray bottles to mist the surface and keep the paint at the correct consistency. Click on any image to enlarge.

Telephone Pole Collages

Wandering around downtown and couldn't help but noticing an inadvertent community art project happening. Local bands and businesses tack and staple fliers to telephone poles. Over time the layers get several inches thick and the rusting staples overlap and intersect in some very interesting ways.

Just click on the images below to embiggin!

New section of the Town Branch Trail!

A new section of the Town Branch Trail has begun! Over the last two weeks I've been out taking pictures documenting the progress so far... These first few pics show some of the earth moving equipment creating the beginnings of the trail, there is also a shot of the trails current end point at Alexandria Drive...







This morning when I walked over I found that a compacted layer of gravel had been put down... A sure sign that a finished, paved section of trail is just days away.





Here is a wide angle shot that shows the gravel trail and two beautiful old sycamore trees at the back of Mare Haven Subdivision.



The new section of trail has a fantastic pond that's a relic of the railroad era. It's a man made body of water that trains could fill tanks from back in the age of steam. The trail arcs around and above offering the hiker a wonderful view of the pond as well as the farm land just to the other side of the tracks.





The banks of the pond are alive with bullfrogs and turtles. Fish can also be seen splashing about in the middle...





On the south side of the pond is an old spillway that keeps the pond true to its appropriate level. Well fenced for safety reasons, its man made falls and old mechanical pipes make for an interesting wide angle shot.





Here's a shot of an old tree and the ruins of a small section of fence, the other picture is a peek through the foliage at the old railroad tracks that run parallel with the Town Branch Trail...





I'll wrap up this post with a massive wide angle shot of the trail, the pond, and some of the homes of Mare Haven Subdivision. It's the kind of thing that looks good scrolling across a widescreen computer monitor. Don't have one of those? Not to worry, just get up off the couch and hike down Town Branch Trail... This view and others like it are available to you at any time.

Antebellum Trailer Park

In William Least Heat Moon's classic travel book Blue Highways, the author writes at the beginning of Chapter 13 that the highway took him through Danville Ky. where he saw a pillared antebellum mansion with a trailer court on it's front lawn. If there was ever a stronger visual metaphor for the glory of the Old South gone to seed I can't think of what it would be... I read this book in the late nineties while living in Los Angeles and was stunned that the author was writing about a place where I had lived. My Godparents Helen and Jim Strevels rented a small one bedroom apartment in that old house on the hill that by the early seventies had been chopped up into four apartments, two upstairs and two down.

Growing up there I had no idea how strange such a place would seem to someone from another part of the country. It never really sunk in that I was playing and living in a place that once housed a single family that not only owned vast tracts of land, but also, owned human beings. My Godmother once took me down into the basement to see the hand hewn limestone rocks that made up the foundation. I'll never forget how creepy it was down there. She wasn't helping much by telling me stories about haints, for those of you not from the south, haint is a word synonymous with ghost. My Godmother claimed that the ghosts of slaves who had died on that plantation haunted that property, yes, she even claimed to have seen and heard them.

It's so ironic to me now that such a place ultimately evolved into a trailer park. Most of the folks living there were either the working poor or they were on some kind of relief. Sometime around the early nineties the house became so run down that it was condemned and even the trailer park that surrounded it is now all but empty of it's little rectangular homes. I went back there yesterday and took some photos of the place and walked around the great ruin that it's become.





All the windows and doors were sealed and the window above had a vine that had grown between the storm window and the interior glass. Anyone interested in seeing this old place before its demolished can find it on 408 South 4th Street in Danville Ky.

Shots In The Dark

Last Saturday night at about midnight I went downtown to test out the new camera for night shooting. Below are a few pics of Lexington's Triangle Park at night.

Golden Collage

A new Photoshop Collage using images taken with the new Olympus E-500 camera.

Ten Novels

1. The Road. Cormac McCarthy. One of the most paradoxical things I've read. As sacred as it is profane, as horrifying as it is beautiful, a story of profound love wrapped in an apocalyptic vision.


2. All the Kings Men. Robert Penn Warren. Reckoned by many to be one of the greatest men of letters this country has ever produced, if you pick up this book you will quickly see why. Warren's prose is tight but at the same time it manages to capture the Byzantine world of American politics and gracefully articulate a uniquely southern perspective. There are worlds within worlds here and somehow the author manages to tie it all together so that the reader is left feeling that he's stepped outside himself and lived in another time, another place. The experience will certainly haunt you and it may even cause you to reevaluate some of your deepest convictions.


3. Winter's Tale. Mark Helprin. Like biting into the literary equivalent of Chocolate Cake. Winter's Tale is a beautiful love letter to the city of New York, a portrait not of the city as it is, but rather, how we imagine it to be in our most romantic dreams. The author manages to do this without ever slipping down the slope of sentimentality.


4. A Confederacy of Dunces. John Kennedy Toole. One of the most laugh out loud funny things you will ever read. The book follows the exploits of Ignatius Reilly as he attempts to foist his anachronistic vision upon an indifferent modern world. Imagine a mix of Thomas Aquinas, Don Quixote and Oliver Hardy... A lovable, gifted, train wreck of a man who's convinced that he's St. George out to slay the dragons of pop culture with nothing more than his rapier wit, gelatinous ass and the "Consolations of Philosophy". It's one of the great tragedies of contemporary literature that this book was published and won the Pulitzer prize several years after the author took his life.


5. Burr. Gore Vidal. Few people can breathe life into history like the writer/historian Gore Vidal. I suspect one of the many reasons his work will always endure is Vidal's willingness to go after sacred cows. Vidal gives the unvarnished truth about our founding fathers and doesn't shy away from describing the human motivations driving those seeking power. In the wake of such candor we are left with enthralling portraits of the people who cobbled together the world of today. Many will site Lincoln as Vidal's best historical novel and it is without question a fantastic read, but the story of Aaron Burr appealed to me in a way that Lincoln did not. Perhaps it's because I tend to see Burr as an honest and charming rogue while Lincoln is perceived by me as something far worse.


6. The Razor's Edge. W. Somerset Maugham. Often a book will come along at just the right point in your life. It will offer help with some of the most troubling questions about how one should choose to live. I read this at the age of eighteen and it really put it's hooks in me. The protagonist is a veteran of the First World War and after surviving that nightmare he sets out to discover the meaning of life. The book is a young idealists dream and I often wonder if this isn't the Granddaddy of the 1960's counter culture movement. The characters seem to wrestle with all the things the youth of the sixties were so concerned about, the rejection of materialism, the fears shared by people living in world hell bent on war, but most of all, the stumbling around in the dark that takes place in the absence of God. It sometimes seems that people never change only the fashion and geography do. Young American ex-patriots living in Paris in the 1920's are just dressed differently than the flower children of Berkley forty years later. In my late teens as I was trying to figure out what I wanted (and what I wanted to be) I found this book helpful in a way that few others were, for here the writer chose not to give me answers, instead he armed me with all the right questions.


7. The Stand. Stephen King. I've read a good many Stephen King novels and this one is surely his Magnum Opus, it's also the one I would vote most likely to endure. It seems to me that many stories by King can be boiled down to this simple outline. There is evil in the world and there are places in the world that are inherently evil. Evil forces are drawn to these places like moths to a flame. Good must face down this evil and vanquish it and the place where evil once flourished must be purified by fire. Think about the town in Salem's Lot with the old house on the hill attracting the vampire and the great fire that burns it all away, same sort of drill in Tommyknockers, Christine, etc. With the Stand, King weaves his grandest version of this motif and peoples it with some of the most memorable and likable characters in contemporary fiction. Because of this, the books length isn't in any way daunting, in fact, by the time you complete it you find it hard to let go...


8. Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry. A sprawling, brawling look at an amazing time in U.S. history seen through the eyes of two aging Texas Rangers who come up with a scheme to steal a herd of Mexican cattle, drive them north to Montana, and secure their fortunes by selling them at the approaching rail head. This is the ultimate road trip story that comes to us from a time when roads were called trails and the people you met on them often proved to be your undoing. Even if the western genre doesn't appeal to you this book will still capture your imagination. The relationship between the two protagonists Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae may well be one of the most moving portraits of friendship ever committed to paper.


9. House of Stairs. William Sleator. This book is generally marketed at young readers but I think it has much to offer anyone who picks it up. Five teenagers are placed inside what seems to be an M. C. Escher drawing on crack, flights of stars trail off in every direction with none of them leading anywhere but back to the starting point. As the story progresses we are witness to the degenerative effects of operant conditioning and machine control on social groups. The book is a cautionary tale and with chilling objectivity it describes the costs of both rebellion and submission in the face of injustice. It is a book I look forward to sharing with my son when he comes of age.


10. The Queen's Gambit. Walter Tevis. One of the most gifted and overlooked writers of the twentieth century. Walter Tevis writes with great clarity on some of the most complicated subjects imaginable. Risk, addiction, gambling, sportsmanship, genius, loss and alienation are all rolled together into this powerful story outlining the life of a chess prodigy. For those who may peruse the cover of this book and wonder how anything written about the game of chess could be interesting, I would say to give it a chance... The focus of the book has more to do with a gifted young woman coming of age and finding her place in the world. Chess simply fills out the background and it's complexity serves as a metaphor for life. Tevis does a remarkable job here getting inside the head of an adolescent girl. From her humble beginnings as an orphan in central Kentucky to Grand Master Champoinship matches on the other side of the world we see for ourselves just what is risked in the pursuit of perfection.

Bomarzo

There are mysterious places in the world. I know it's sort of out of fashion to acknowledge that but I really believe it's true, places where empirical reality gives way to something older and more intrinsic. I have a sense that the whole world was such a place in the beginning, back when the arc of God's stars meant more than the ticking of our little clocks. These once vast and dangerous places have surrendered territory over the course of the last few centuries, now they are so small you have to seek them out.

In the summer of 1988 I was hunting such places with a zeal that can only come from being young and in love with creation. I was traveling in Europe and had read about a place called Bomarzo, or the Monster Park. Nearly five hundred years ago a Soldier, Poet, Dreamer and Duke named Vicino Orsini had built a place of wonders that broke all the rules of the art of his time. The park was filled with statuary described as anachronistic. Most of it looking as if it were something done by Etruscan or Roman artisans... Not the sort of thing one expected to see in a high Renaissance garden.

The few photos that the magazine article had were enough to wet my appetite and I wrangled my best friend Grant into the adventure. We broke from the tour we were on and headed south from the city of Florence by train. Neither of us spoke a lick of Italian and where we were going there weren't likely to be a lot of English speakers. "You really think this is wise?" Grant asked as we boarded the train to Attigliano. "Hell no." I said as we took our seats, "I'm just sure it won't be boring."

By the time we got to the station in Attigliano it was already afternoon. We found signs in the little town that indicated Bomarzo was about eight kilometers up into the mountains. Being broke and having no real way to communicate we simply started hiking. It turned out to be a long hard slog. The central Italian heat was the sort of thing one finds in Kentucky, lots of humidity, but the fact that I had experienced that sort of climate back home didn't make the packs we were carrying any lighter.I recall that Grant had made the mistake of carrying a gym bag instead of a backpack and it seemed that no matter how he arranged it on his shoulders it was never really comfortable. On a couple of occasions he wondered if he should stash it somewhere on the road and retrieve it later. I cautioned him against it as I felt it would surely be pinched. He took my advice and soldiered on, later, in the city of Athens he would put his scheme to the test and suffer the consequences, but that's another story.

I'd read that the place we were headed had been reclaimed by nature about a hundred years after it's completion. The trees had wound their roots around stone structures that had been carved straight out of the bedrock and into the sides of hills. It wasn't until the later part of the twentieth century that the park began it's resurgence. Thanks to the interest of the Spanish Surrealist painter Salvidor Dali who drew inspiration from the things he saw there. this was the sort of thing I was thinking about and kept pushing me forward up the steep terrain through the heat and humidity.

We didn't get into the little town of Bomarzo until early evening. The place was still a medieval style village and had very few public places. We found the only reseraunt just as it was closing for the evening and discovered that the towns only inn and coffee shop had long since closed for the night. What to do? Faced with the daunting prospect of an eight kilometer hike back down to Attigliono, I suggested we just hike a bit out of town and rough it on the side of the road till morning. Grant wasn't too wild about the idea but he also wasn't very excited about the hike down to Attigliano either.

So off through the little medieval streets we went, onward to the outskirts of town where we found a small stone slab beside the road. We threw down our packs and proceeded to call it a day. As we drifted off to sleep I starred up at the sky and marveled at how clear the air was and how bright the stars seemed. A few hours later we both awoke at about two o'clock in the morning with chattering teeth and goose flesh from head to toe. Neither of us had been prepared for the impressive drop in temperature that happens on a summer night in central Italy. We were also dressed in light summer clothing. Staying where we were was unthinkable.

Loading up packs we struck out for Attigliono in the wee hours. Dead tired, and chilled to the bone we made our way back down the mountain, as we hiked the blood began to flow and our spirits raised. Even with the fatigue this trek was far more enjoyable than the hike up. There was a three quarter moon and the little farms and houses were bathed in soft blue light. My memories of that evening are vague at best, I can't recall what Grant and I were talking about but I do remember a great deal of laughter. The whole thing had taken on a surreal quality as if we had stumbled into a production of A Midsummer's Night's Dream.

At around four in the morning we hiked into the train station at Attigliono where we racked out on what I'm convinced were the most uncomfortable benches on Earth. No doubt designed that way to discourage just the sort loitering we were engaged in. We awoke to the sound of an arriving train and the cold stares of locals unhappy about two disreputable looking American boys lounging around their station house.

Outside on the sidewalk we took stock of our situation and decided what to do next. Grant was really over the whole thing by this time and was ready to catch the next train back to Florence but I bitched, pissed, moaned and generally cajoled him into making one final attempt at seeing the park.
Off we went back up the same long road we had traveled twice already. The heat on the second day proved be even worse than the day before but we pushed on. we stopped at the road sign to take a couple of pics that documented our fatigue then shouldered heavy packs and marched on. It's funny what one remembers. I vividly recall seeing a cat that had been hit by a car on the side of the road. The poor creature had had it's lower body crushed and lay panting on the hot asphalt waiting for it's death. I was deeply upset by the sight and wanted to put the thing out of it's misery, but looking around we saw farmers at work in the field near by who seemed to be watching what we were doing. I remember both of us wondering if killing the animal would be seen as the right thing to do by the peasants who stared at us. Would they think our actions humane or cruel? Would they be offended? I really didn't know the answer to those questions as I was a stranger in a strange land. In the end we walked on, and to this day I've regretted it, I feel as if I should have ended that cat's suffering no matter the local opinion or consequence.

We arrived in Bomarzo just before noon and this time found the place filled with people who were friendly and curious about the two young Americans walking the streets. No one spoke English but we were able to communicate that we were hungry through sign language. We were shown to the coffee shop where some of the locals stood us food and drink when we showed them the American art magazine that featured the article on the Park and they began to understand that we were art students come all the way from the other side of the world to see the Monster Park of Duke Orsini.

They escorted us into the street and made it clear that I should do a drawing of their town before we left for the park. I sat down in the middle of the main thoroughfare and proceeded to draw. I was shocked to see a crowd gathering to watch the American artist do a small sketch. Grant took a few shots with his camera and said to me, "These people seem to really love their town so don't screw up that drawing Lister." I chuckled and said, "Thanks pal, no pressure there."The drawing turned out pretty good so I signed it and gave it to one of the guys in the crowd. I've often wondered what became of it, and even fantasized about returning to Bomarzo one day with Grant's photo and using it to track that drawing down. The locals led us to the outskirts of the town and put us on the road to the park. It proved to a short distance down the road that we already become far too familiar with. We got the gate, bought the tickets and entered the Park.It remains one of the few times that reality surpassed my imagination. The park was a stone menagerie of mythical beasts. Everything from dragons to elephants seemed to be clawing their way up from the bedrock of the mountain and all the structures were covered with rioting vegetation. As we wandered through the place I felt that I was loosing all sense of time. The stone carvings and wooded areas were devoid of any indication of the modern world. No signs with explanations or aluminum guard rails to keep visitors away from designated areas. Just a large wooded area filled with carved Chimera. It was hard not to let the imagination run wild and see the place as some of of gateway to a much older and mysterious era. There was no question for Grant or I that all the things we had gone through over the previous two days were worth it.I find that when I try to write or describe the things that I saw there words simply fail me... I hope that some of the pictures I post here will inspire people to visit Bomarzo. I think it is something that needs be experienced first hand.





I should like to point out that the wonderful photos of Bomarzo that are featured on this page were taken by Robin Blair Riley who even twenty years ago was an artist without peer. Anyone interested in seeing more of her work should see her website...

http://www.robinrileyphotography.com

Harvest Time

New Photoshop collage created with images taken on my new Olympus E-510 camera.

Working for Change...

This weekend two of my friends from NYC got on a bus and headed out to western PA to canvass for Barak Obama. Here's a big thank you to Jorge Gonzalez and Jennifer Maldonado for getting out there and fighting the good fight.



Here's hoping Tuesday is a hard day for the Republican Party!

More pics from the trail...

Just a few more pics taken during early morning walks over the last few days. Really loving the new camera.

Fall Photos

Got up early this morning and took a hike down the walking trail. Managed to get a few good shots of an amber tinted fall morning in Kentucky.

Pissing gravel.

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. A couple of months ago I had to be hospitalized for a Kidney stone. When they did an x-ray it revealed that I had another much larger stone that would have to be dealt with. I went in last Friday and they used sound waves to break up the larger stone so I could then pass it. In short, for the last week I've been laying around pissing gravel, and wishing I was dead. Here are some pics that show some of the fun. The self portrait shows me a few hours ago after having passed a few more stones, getting me a much needed reprieve from the pain. The arms show the needle tracks from a weekend trip to the ER where narcotics had to be administered by IV as I couldn't keep anything down. The last is as Macro shot of the little crystalline beasts that have been making me wish I was dead.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going back to bed...

The New Camera

I finally saved enough money to buy a digital SLR. I picked up an Olympus Evolt E510 10MP Digital SLR Camera with CCD Shift Image Stabilization and 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 and 40-150mm f/4.0-5.6 Zuiko Lenses! I've been wanting one of these for about five years now and so far I'm just thrilled with the way this thing takes pics. I'm posting a few images that I took over the last few days below. The first is one of Thomas Wyatt riding in his stroller on the walking trail that runs behind our subdivision.


The next one is a shot of the little guy getting ready for some tub time...



A close up of a bee on one of the flowers in the backyard garden...



The last two shots are of a rock wall I'm in the process of building in the backyard. Every time Sarah and I get a chance to walk the new trail I take my garden wagon and load it up with stones. So far I've pulled, pushed and shoved ten wagon loads of rock a total distance of about ten miles. I figure it beats joining a gym...

The Old Tree

This weekend my Dad and I took Thomas Wyatt Lister to Old Fort Harrod State Park in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. On the grounds there is an Osage Orange Tree that dates to the latter part of the 18th century. At an early point in the trees growth it's trunk was split and it branched out across the ground in several different directions. The branches are now larger than most tree trunks that you will see and covered in knots and unusual formations. It's been a favorite for climbing for as long as anyone can remember and the bark has been rubbed smooth by the grip of countless children.


When I was little and reading the books of J. R. R. Tolkien I used to think that this old tree was surely one of the mythical Ents that Tolkien wrote about. It was great fun to watch my little boy climb all over branches that I once played on over a quarter of a century ago. I shot some video...Here is the You Tube link...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEibckdnImg

Life of Pi

Every once in awhile I'm lucky enough to read a book that has the power to take you apart and put you back together again. Life of Pi is just such a book. It is without a doubt one of the most fascinating and paradoxical novels I've ever read. Is it an adventure story? Yes and no. Is it an allegory? Yes and no. Is it truthful or factual?

Both and neither.

It really defies description or being pigeonholed in any way. About the only way to describe this book to someone would be to start on page one and commence reading. If you do read it I think you'll find it both sacred and profane; sublime and horrifying. I was fortunate enough to have the illustrated edition with pictures by the artist Tomislav Torjanic. Beautiful rich images that complement the text and help the reader conceptualize some extraordinary circumstances. I'm posting a few below...



I feel indebted to Yann Martel for writing such a wonderful story, but I think everyone should be grateful to him for becoming the kind of man capable of writing such a book. Art of this caliber doesn't come easy.

Golden Hour

I was sitting in the living room late Sunday afternoon watching Thomas Wyatt and Sarah play and I couldn't help but notice that magic quality light gets just before sundown. I grabbed the camera and tripod and fired off a few shots of the Golden Boy at Golden Hour getting a kiss from Mommy.

Joseph Beth Bookstore

Yesterday Thomas Wyatt and I went to Joseph Beth Bookstore. It is without a doubt one of the coolest bookstores on planet Earth. The little man ran amok through the children's section and afterwards we went outside to the pond and fed the ducks and fish. I've posted a few pics below and if you click here...

http://www.youtube.com/user/chazlister14

there is a You Tube Video titled Bookstore on my You Tube page. Enjoy!

The New Mac!

A couple of weeks ago I threw down a bit of cash and picked up a new I-Mac. It's not everyday that you can spend the kind of money that I spent on this machine and not have buyers remorse. The new beast is everything I hoped it would be. I'm loving the 24 inch monitor and all the I-life sorftware. The upgrades to I-Movie alone make this machine worth it. I know it's something of a cliche' but why in the world would anyone buy a PC?

Just to the left of the new machine you can see my old E-mac still humming along. It's now six years old and still going strong. I bought my first Mac back in 1996 and traded it to a friend of mine for a laptop in 2001 when I moved aboard the sailboat. I asked him just the other day what happened to that machine. He said he sold it to a guy down the street from him that still uses it as a word processor and internet connection. Thirteen year old computer!

Happy Trails

Just across the street from our house is one of the many walking trails that the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government is creating all around the city. For the last few months the section that runs south to downtown has only been a roughed in gravel pathway that goes about a mile and a half around the outer part of our subdivision on its way to Alexandria Drive. Yesterday at about 5:00pm that section was paved and Thomas Wyatt and I took our first walk on it this morning.

As I hope these pictures will show the trail is fantastic. It meanders in and around enormous oak and sycamore trees and follows an old tree lined fence row that has probably been there since the late 1700's. Everywhere you look there are wildflowers in bloom and all sorts of wildlife. I've seen several rabbits, the occasional raccoon, and from time to time, there's even a red tail hawk perched and ready for a meal of Hossenfeffer.

Over the course of the next few years the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government has plans to link this trail to downtown Lexington via a route that will follow old Forbes road. Along the way the trail will link to McConnel's Spring Park. I can't wait to be able to ride a bike from my house to the farmer's market downtown, not to mention have a safe place for kids to run, play and ride bikes.

I suppose the best thing about the trail is the sense of seclusion and distance from urban noises. The section that I walked today was far enough removed from houses and cars that you could actually hear birdsong and insects. As you can see in the shot below the little man was certainly enjoying it...
Anyone interested in learning more about this project should click here...

http://www.townbranch.org/index.php

There are maps and photos documenting the progress so far as well as information about completion times.

Deer Hunting With Jesus

About a week ago I read one of the best books to come my way in quite some time. The title is "Deer Hunting With Jesus" and the author is Joe Bageant. Joe grew up in a small town in Virginia and is one of those rare few who manage to get out and spend some time in America's larger cities.

Somewhere around 2000 he moved back home and was shocked to discover that the people he grew up with were the same folks who put George W. Bush in power. It was bewildering to him, as it is for most folks that live in urban areas, and in his book he takes a hard look at why.

I think this volume should be required reading for every progressive in this country. At the very least, people in urban areas should read the chapter about the issue of gun control. I fear if they do not, and they continue to lack an understanding of the importance of gun ownership in rural areas, then they can surrender all hope of ever exercising political power.

I was so impressed by Mr. Bageant's book that I actually wrote him a letter and was thrilled when he not only took the time to reply but posted the letter on his website. You can read both my letter and Joe Bageant's response here.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/06/new-york-hollyw.html

I would encourage anyone who enjoys good writing to also take a look at the numerous essays that are posted on the site as well. I think you'll find many of them are as funny as they are thought provoking.

Remembering James Perham

I first met James Perham when I moved to New York City in the fall of 1993. At the time he was renting space from Kevin and Carol Vanhook in their apartment in Jersey. James had the loft that overlooked everything on the ground floor. I remember him standing up there, leaning over the railing, listening to the conversation below. It may be that way for him now, up above, looking down, following the ebb and flow of our lives. Not a bad thought. Such notions are comforting in a time of loss, and make no mistake, loosing James is a real loss.

There were many things to love about James. His generosity, his intellect and his willingness to go to bat for people he loved. I suppose the thing I liked most about him was his commitment to the truth. He wasn't a guy who sugar coated things. He took the world as it came and often bumped heads with people who think a thin veneer of horse shit will somehow improve things that suck. If James didn't like something he let you know it. And more importantly he told you why. I found that to be a good thing and it's why I never saw him as cynical or a mean spirited critic. When he told you why he thought something fell short of the mark he would say it in measured tones that revealed he'd considered the matter deeply. In short, he wanted to help make things better.

I often thought that this more than anything else stood in the way of his career. He was in no way a political animal. And brother, in an industry loaded with creative types (people with Himalayan egos) you can't take that stance without ruffling feathers. Sad, because James was loaded with talent. Whenever he would tell me an idea for a story I was riveted. He may well have been one of the great underutilized resources of Valiant Comics.

James had a fantastic sense of the absurd. I remember the way he would stand in the middle of Kevin and Carol's apartment in Jersey with their two little boys running circles around him. James would pose with hands on hips doing the patented Perham cackle saying, "Look at me! I have satellites!"

It was fun to mess with James. Once you figured out his buttons you could have a blast pushing them. One Saturday afternoon in the winter of 1994 I popped in at the Valiant offices to get some stuff from my desk. I thought the place was empty until I heard typing coming from one of the cubicles in marketing. Seeing it was James, I decided to crawl to the cubicle next to his and make sounds like the creaking of doors and whistling winds.

Each time I did this the typing would stop and James would say, "Is there someone there?" I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. When the typing would start back up I'd wait a few seconds then give him another round of noises, the kind of shit guaranteed to unnerve a person alone in a dark office.

In time he got up from his seat and begin to tip toe out of the cubicle. I crawled on hands and knees to the next hiding place and continued the audio assault. James roared, "I know there's somebody there, and whoever it is this isn't funny!" I disagreed. To me it was funny as hell and thats why I continued to crawl from cubicle to cubicle making low moaning noises.

It was clear from the pitch of his voice that this had gone on long enough so I decided to wrap things up by leaping out in front of him from around the corner screaming like a wild Indian. James shrieked in horror and I nearly pissed myself when I saw that he had a white knuckled grip on a pair of scissors raised high above his head ready to strike! He'd stopped just short of putting an end to my shenanigans once and for all.

James swore revenge and took his sweet time about getting it. Nearly a year and a half later I'd relocated to San Diego and I decided to take a trip back to NYC for a visit. James was kind enough to let me crash at his place. As he was leaving for work on the last day of my visit I asked if he had any new movies worth watching. He said to flip through and see what I could find. I came across a copy of the movie Babe and began to give him shit about it.

"What the hell are you doing with this? Isn't this a kids movie? Good God James what kind of gay ass collection is this? Where the hell are the action flicks?"

He proceeded to inform me that Babe is a beautiful film with an inspiring story that's fun for the whole family. I just laughed him out the door. Around three in the afternoon I was bored out of my wits and thought, "What the hell, let's put this pig movie in and see what the fuss is about." Two hours later I found myself at the moving climax of the film...The moment where the farmer looks down at the little pig and says, "That'll do pig."

Let me tell you, if you haven't seen this picture you need to check it out. It's a bigger tear jerker than when Old Yellar got shot. Anyway, I'm sitting there crying like a little girl just as James comes through the door from work. "Aha," he screamed. "I told you it was a good movie." With tear streaked cheeks I agreed but promised him if he ever told a soul he'd found me in such a state I'd kill him.

The next day I flew back to California and had a nightmare time of it. In an effort to save money I took a red eye with layovers in what seemed like every shitty airport in the midwest. Arriving at my San Diego apartment I collapsed on the floor exhausted and ready to doze off to sleep. The phone jarred me awake and picking up I was treated to sound of the entire staff of Valiant comics on the conference phone yelling..."Awww, did um cry at the little pig movie?"

In the background I clearly heard the Perham cackle.

Over the course of the next few years James and I drifted apart. I would like to tell you that it was because we lived on different sides of a continent and no longer worked for the same people. That's only half true. The truth is this: James arrived at a place where he no longer wished to compromise what was good for the sake of appeasement. It would take me years to become like that. I lacked his courage.

I feel very lucky to have gotten back in touch with James a few short months before he died. We had a good talk and I was able to see what I couldn't see years before. It was plain to me that the decisions James had made about his life, career and associations were not only good...They were psychologically healthy. He was working for Hasting's Books in Arizona and really enjoying it. Still writing, still telling stories, still a fan and an admirer of quality things. He had friends. Friends who were willing to listen to his point of view and respect his ideas. He was happy.

In the end...Is there anything more important?

Where Ravens Run...

Today Sarah and I went to Raven Run Nature preserve. If you've never been there I highly recommend it. Located in the southeast corner of Fayette County its property rubs right up against the Ky. River. From the top of a cliff there is an amazing view of the palisades that marks the end of Fayette and the beginning of Madison county. There are also a number of waterfalls to see as well as the ruins of an old Mill that dates back to the first part of the 19th century.



I put Thomas Wyatt in the Baby Bjorn...it's a nice little rig that allows you to carry him hanging off the front of your chest. You can even turn him face out so he can get a peek at the world going by and if you stop he can reach out and touch the trees and leaves. He really loves it.


After hiking down to the waterfall by way of the wooden bridge we took a break for lunch...


The little guy tried out his brand new teeth on an apple...


Yum, yum...


On the way back it was clear that the whole thing was a bit too much for him. Especially since we were running late and cutting into his nappy time.


Bouncing around like a limp doll he snoozed all the way home...


Good times.

The Kids Got Alotta Balls...

Mommy brought Thomas Wyatt a whole bunch of plastic balls from work and we turned his playpen into the kind of pit you sometimes see at a theme park. The little man had a blast...

The Big Four Ohhh!!!

I turned 40 years old today. Lordy, Lordy Charles Lister is forty! I just can't believe it. I can't believe how lucky I am. I have just about the best family in the whole wide world. Sarah and I went up to Cincinnati and did the Art Museum and the new IKEA store. We also stopped in at Jungle Jim's and stocked up on all kinds of fun stuff to eat.

And I got the best present ever. At the end of May I'm going to the Abbey of Gethsemani Trappist Monastery for a three day spiritual retreat. Three days of hiking in the woods, seeing the place where Thomas Merton lived and worked and most of all...silence. After a year of taking care of a screaming baby, well, it sounds like a great way to recharge the batteries.
Mom was good enough to take care of the little man for us while we went on our trip. It's incredible, even though we were only gone for one night Sarah and I both missed him so much we thought we would go crazy. Mom took this great pic and I'm posting it because it's just too good not to share... He's holding a a Joker from a deck of playing cards in his hand. Look at that face and tell me it isn't a sign.

Wes and Thomas Wyatt

One of our closest friends from college stopped in for a visit today. The last time Wes saw the little man was just a few weeks after he was born. It was great. Thomas Wyatt showed Wes all the new things he can do...Clapping his hands, babbling, standing up and of course, pulling on chin whiskers. As you can see from these pics they really hit it off...

Vernal Equinox

Mulching the trees and hedges. Cleaning and repairing pots. Breaking up soil. It's spring, things are starting to grow. Already there are buds on the trees. Hyacinths and buttercups are pushing up through the dirt. Everywhere there is a pungent smell, a scent that speaks of the fecundity of nature. I love it.Gotta be patient. Take it slow. There will most likely be a few more weeks of winter. Still, hard to resist the temptation to plant seeds and put out shrubs. Have to be satisfied with turning the compost, raking the leaves. Clearing a path for new life.

The Second Coming?

Watching the news last night... They said America is definately not in an economic recession. That cheered me up. I was confused by the run away inflation and skyrocketing gas prices. Seeing the 3rd largest financial firm in the country go belly up also had me confused. I tell you, without the good people in establishment media making six figures a year to tell us how things really are I don't know what the hell we'd do.

A few days ago we marked the 5 year aniversery of our VICTORY in Iraq! Sound bite from the Commander in Thief (Oops! Sorry, that's chief right?) talking about how great things are going over there. There was another from the vice president describing the post surge security situation as phenominal.

Many are the blessings.

Yeasterday afternoon as I was driving in to work, I spotted a car covered with peace symbols and bumper stickers. One said, "Impeach the President." Yet another said, "Bush Lied!" But the best of all was a small one in the right corner of the windshield that said, "Never Thought I'd Miss Nixon."

Damned ingrate!

What are people like that thinking? Don't they listen to the news? Aren't they propagandized...er, I mean informed? Well, in the end I'm not worried. A new election cycle is on the horizon and there's every indication the Democrats with snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as they always do, thus insuring the status quo! Go! Go! Status Quo!

Hosannahs are shouted! Bibles are thumped!

The hours come round at last! And Look there...Is that a rough beast I see slouching?

Whew! sorry I got a little worked up there...Until next time

Keep the faith.

Put that Shit in Writing...

The fall of 1986, that's when I first met James Geoffrey Coatney. It was during an art class at Eastern Kentucky University. I remember scribbling away at my board looking up and seeing Coats starring down at me. At that time he was average height, ursine build, with a slightly swarthy complexion. His hair was cut short; black as coal.

The clothes? Well, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of jeans. I would later discover that this was something of a uniform for him. Sometimes he'd mix it up a bit...There'd be days he'd sport a pair of cargo pants with his Hawaiian shirt, making him look as if he'd raided Hawkeye's footlocker over at the 4077th.
If there was one thing that really set him apart it would have been the 1950's style Rayban Sunglasses. In those first few years, I never saw him without them. I recall asking, "Why the hell do you wear those things all the time? Even at night?" Coats never missed a beat, placing a big paw on my shoulder he shook a finger in front of my face to emphasize his point, "Because Charles, when you're cool, the sun shines on you 24 hours a day."

Surreal is the word that best describes what it's like hanging out with Coatney. I remember a day in Florida when we'd gone to Cocoa Beach; we were on the pier watching the girls go by when I spotted an especially gorgeous beach bunny down by the breakers. I turned to Coats to give him the heads up and discovered that not only had he seen her, but he was looking at her through a small telescope he'd pulled from his coat. No shit. Honestly, who other than Harpo Marx can produce a telescope at a moments notice?

Try to imagine what it is to work with someone like this. Once, when he and I were employed at a Kinko's copy center, a lady stopped in to send a fax. This would have been in the early nineties and fax machines were still a bit of a novelty back then. Timidly, she held out the documents to be sent. It was obvious from what she was saying that she had no idea how a fax machine worked. She seemed to think the pages would be atomized by the machine, the particles pushed through the phone lines and then reassembled at the other end, like the transporter on Star Trek.

Coats faxed her pages then gave the woman back her originals. With a look of suspicion that said, "I'm on to you," she held them up to the light to confirm that they were indeed the pages she had just handed over. Then she said, "Well, I don't get it...were is the fax right now?" Coatney sighed and said, "It's at a layover in Atlanta, it's gonna have a few drinks, then be on it's way to Chicago." This line was delivered deadpan without a hint of sarcasm. I couldn't bring myself to feel sorry for her as I was too busy trying to keep from pissing my pants.

People who have this kind of chutzpah seldom lack eccentricities. Coats has scores. He won't wear a time piece and consequently he's always late. He has a legendary aversion to snakes that borders on mania and he's absolutely convinced he's lactose intolerant even though friends and family serve him dairy at every opportunity. But the best is his imagined gastrointestinal ailments. Like sunspots they can flare up at any moment causing all manner of havoc. It's this last bit that leads us to his greatest idiosyncrasy... James Geoffrey Coatney will shit nowhere but upon his own bowl.

Let me clarify. Coatney is one of those folks who is incapable of moving brown at any location other than his very own throne in his very own home. Out on the town? Gotta go? Tough. He has to hold it. Why? Well, that's a whole nest of neurosis that would strain the limits of this forum. Let's just say it's a big stew of germaphobia, fastidiousness and maybe even a dash self consciousness. For Coats maintains that he can raise a cloud capable of peeling paint. Whatever his reasons, the man is adamant about the sanctity of his own tidy toilette.

This curious habit once led to a disastrous afternoon for Coatney. While living in LA a number of us had made the acquaintance of a man (who for the purposes of this telling) we will refer to as Steve MacMiserable. Steve isn't one of those people who has charming idiosyncrasies. Steve's insane.

He was so nuts that most people in our circle of friends had written him off. The guy couldn't keep a job, was habitually penniless and all in all a colossal asshole. We avoided him like plague. But one of Geoff's great qualities is his sympathy and patience for lunatics. In time, he'd become the last person who'd hang out with Steve.

Feeling magnanimous, Coats rang up Steve on a Saturday and asked if he wanted to meet at the mall and knock around. Although Jeff was still willing to spend time with Steve, he, like the rest of us, had recently moved and wasn't really sure he wanted MacMiserable knowing where he lived. If there is anything that I could say that would indicate just how fucked up Steve was I suppose that would be it.

At any rate, they met at the mall, did the shops, then went for a ride looking for a place to eat. As they were driving...Disaster struck. Coats felt the tell tale signs that a major movement was on it's way. What to do? We've already established that Coatney can't shit anywhere but home base. That option however was off the table as going there would reveal his new address.

Swallowing hard, Coats made a command decision. He turned to Steve and explained his distress. He also told Steve that they were too far away from his place and... (Gulp!) Was there any way they could go by Steve's so he could "drop the kids off at the pool?" Steve said, "No problem." So they headed out for the tiny Burbank apartment that served as MacMiserable's roost.

The joint was like something out of the movie "Seven". Everywhere you looked there were Pizza boxes, candy wrappers and all the other flotsam and jetsam that accumulates when a person spends his days sitting in a dark room muttering. Coatney was horrified by the mess but with nature calling...What could he do?

Stumbling over the folding couch and overflowing garbage cans, Coats made his way to Steve's shitter. When he tried to open the door there was resistance from the other side, it felt as if something heavy were laying on the floor of the bathroom. Steve apologized and began to push hard on the door so it would open.

What in the world could be in there? A corpse? Body parts? Coatney felt that none of those things would have been out of place in that Hell Hole. Steve reached around the door and began pulling out dirty laundry. After a moment he had removed enough that a person could squeeze through the door and gain access.

Upon entering, Coatney found the bathroom filled with several weeks worth of dirty laundry. Knee high in places, the clothes reeked of mildew and God knows what else. It was enough to make a germophobe shriek in horror. Most of this was deduced by touch and smell as the room was pitch black inside. Apparently, in an effort to save money, Steve had not replaced any light bulbs in the apartment for quite some time.

So picture Coats, in the darkness, up to his knees in Steve's soiled underwear and dirty socks with bowels a rumblin'...desperate for relief. Many questions raced through his mind: Why is this happening to me? Did I really need to spend time with this crazy son of a bitch? What cruel Karma brought me here? And most important of all...Is that seat any cleaner than the rest of this sty?

His roaring colon now firmly in charge, Coatney soldiered on. There was no way to check the cleanliness of the seat and there was certainly no way to get to the safety of his home court... So Coats dropped trough and pressed pink ham to chilled porcelain.

Not just chilled, it turned out, but also wet.

Outside the door, Steve clearly heard wailing and gnashing of teeth, the kind of thing one imagines when reading Dante. It was the sound of a man who had, "Abandoned All Hope."

"Is everything OK in there?" Steve asked, through the door.

"Fine Steve, Oh God, things...things are fine...whimper, chortle, sob."

Resigned to his fate Coats evacuated his bowels, flushed, and made ready to clean up. Looking around he was shocked to discover that there was apparently no toilet paper to be had. Horror nearly overtook him but somehow he managed to get hold of himself and call for help.

Steve responded immediately, as if he were standing just outside the door the whole time.

"What's wrong Coats?"

"There's no paper in here, that's what's wrong."

"Oh...yeah, I forgot about that. Hold on, let me check the kitchen, I think I may have a paper towel or some napkins."

For the next few moments Coatney sat alone in the mildew reeking darkness while Steve crashed around in the kitchen. Then...a soft knock on the door...

"Uh, Coatney...Not much luck really, all I could find was these old Burger King napkins. Here ya go..."

Coats reached his hand through a crack in the door and Steve handed him two, tissue thin, ketchup stained napkins. Disbelief now turned to anger and he railed at Steve, "I can not use these! These will not do! Find me something substantive Goddamnit!"

Steve too was at the end of his rope, fearful of loosing the last friend he had in the world he said, "Ok, don't worry man... I'll run to the store and get you some toilet paper. Be right back."

Coats sat alone in the darkness again this time with his face in his hands. After several seconds passed it occurred to him that he hadn't heard the door slam or the sound of Steve walking away from the bathroom...Just an eerie silence.

"Steve? Are you still here?"

A floorboard creaked, then a whisper from the other side, "Yeah, I am...It's just... I'm sorry Coatney. I'm just really broke right now and I don't have any money for toilet paper. Could you loan me a few bucks?"

"Are you Fucking kidding me?"

"No I'm not. Just loan me a couple of bucks and I'll be right back."

Coats reached down and fished his wallet from his pants. Sadly, it was empty.

"I got no cash on me Steve!"

"Oh, it's Ok, just give me your ATM card and your PIN number and I'll be right back."

Coats mulled that over. Thoughts quickly meandered to an image of Hell freezing over.

"It ain't gonna happen Steve. Now stop fuckin' around and find me something to wipe my ass with."

When Coatney related this tale to me I was having difficulty breathing as I was laughing so hard. Few things tickle me like a little schadenfreude. That's my idiosyncrasy. Anyway, I was brought up short when I realized that this had been a real trauma for my friend.

Eyes swimming Coatney asked, "You think this is funny Lister?"

"No, of course not Coats...Please continue."

"The whole thing had gone on too long. I was at the end of my rope Charles...So when Steve handed me a soiled and crusty bath towel through the door and said I should use it...Well...I...I."

"You didn't."

"Oh God Charles...how could it have come to that. Swear you will never speak of this to anyone."

"Fear not Coatney, I won't say a word."

Hair Pullin' Time!

On Saturday Sarah and I took the little man to Joseph Beth Bookstore to check out the great stuffed animals. As you will see in the following pics, Thomas Wyatt got very excited...




OK! OK! Kid...I'll get ya whatever ya want, just leggo my effin' hair!

Forces of Nature

I can't remember the first time I met Johnny. That's strange because I'm usually good about that sort of thing. Johnny Walkup was my mother's second husband and the father of my twin half sisters. His people were from Mississippi and for those of you who are strangers to the south, there is a world of difference between there and Kentucky.

Johnny raised cattle and farmed but I think his true vocation was fun. He was one of the most spirited and mischievous people I ever met. When he wasn't hunting, trapping, partying or drinking he was usually holding court to a room full of old timers at the stockyards, just telling jokes and outrageous stories. Johnny was the best kind of storyteller, he was never one to let a fact get in the way of a good laugh.

It's odd looking at old photographs of him because they don't look a thing like how I remember him. It's as if two dimensions aren't enough to capture Johnny Walkup. When I knew him I was only about ten years old and from my perspective he seemed larger than life. He was very tall, to be sure, and lean. He reminded me of pictures of Civil War calvary officers: red hair, hatchet faced with a hawk like nose, the bridge of which was covered in freckles... And then there was the beard, an auburn beard, framing a Cheshire Cat grin. I think that face would've seemed predatory without the grin; maybe Johnny knew this about himself because he was never stingy about flashing a smile.

I doubt I ever saw him without a beer in his hand, even when driving. As shocking as that sounds I suppose it's more surprising to hear that I never saw him drunk. I can remember us being pulled over by the county Sheriff. Not for the purpose of ticketing, just because the Sheriff wanted to chat and see what was new with Johnny. It was a different time.

I loved riding in the truck with him. His pickup was filthy. The foot well of the passenger side was usually so filled with empty beer cans that a few would tumble out when you climbed in. In winter, the the truck had mud inside and out, come summer it would dry to dirt. A gun rack in the rear window held a 30.06 rifle with scope and many times I saw blood on the upholstery from something freshly killed and dressed. If all this strikes you as horrifying it's because you're a grown up. If you're a ten year old boy...It's just about the best Goddamn thing you can imagine.

Riding in the truck one autumn afternoon Johnny said, "Hey, stand up and look over my shoulder." Standing up in the passenger seat I saw a deer leaping along beside us in a corn field. It was a doe, the picture of grace and agility; she had no trouble keeping pace with the truck. I had never seen one before, at least, not in the wild. It was one of those moments that upon reflection seemed to happen in slow motion. She would leap up above the corn, then disappear momentarily and spring up again a few yards further, like some land locked porpoise jumping through amber waves.

I didn't know I was yelling WOW at the top of my voice. I was so taken with what I was seeing. The doe bolted in front of the truck and easily avoided being hit. She cleared the fence on the other side of Craintown Road and crashed into the obscurity of dense foliage. I was still saying wow over and over as I turned and saw Johnny laughing, vicariously enjoying the reaction of a little boy thrilled to pieces. "How 'bout that?" he said. and threw his head back for another laugh.

He had a great sense of the absurd. On time, after harvesting some unusually small peas from his garden, he spent the the better part of a couple of days hulling them into a large bowl. I remember him just sitting on the front porch for hours picking those little peas from the pods. Finally one afternoon he got up and took the bowl to the kitchen. With great ceremony he placed the bowl in the center of the kitchen table and said to Mom, "Judy, I'm off to town. But before I go, I want you to understand, if anyone breaks into this house, they can have any Goddamn thing they want...anything...but this here bowl of peas!"

Every fall I would go Dove hunting with Johnny. A dove hunt is a fairly laid back affair. The hunters take up positions around a partially harvested corn field and wait for quarry. When the birds fly over shotguns roar and if hands are steady, several birds will fall. I was too young to hunt but I enjoyed being out on fall days making myself useful retrieving birds.

Growing up southern means you get to know about firearms at an early age. By my tenth year my own father had already introduced me to the .22 caliber rifle. Understand, this was done under strict supervision and taken very seriously. I believe this is a good thing to do for boys as education tends to demystify the thing in question. I knew for a fact that firearms were deadly and I wouldn't have dreamed of touching one without an adults supervision. This was because I'd held them in my own hands, fired them, and seen the potential for catastrophe. For me, direct experience shattered the romantic notions of violence seen in comic books and movies.

So it was with real trepidation that on one of those fall days, at the end of a successful hunt, I asked Johnny if I could fire the shotgun. Johnny considered and said, " Let me think about it." Upon arriving back at the trucks Johnny told the rest of the hunters what I wanted to do. There were a couple of chuckles here and there and a few eye rolls. One old fellow said, "Well, yer never too young to get knocked on your ass."

Johnny laughed too and squatted down beside me, both hands on the barrel with the butt of the weapon on the ground. He leaned into me and said softly, "They aren't kidding Rob, These shotguns really kick, you could hurt your shoulder, or get a broken nose if you don't hold it right." I swallowed hard, "I really think I'm big enough Johnny, that is, if you show me how to do it."

Turning to one of the guys at the pickups he said, "Ray, throw me an empty Coors can." Johnny caught the can and held it in front of us. "Ok," he said, "I'm gonna show you how to hold a shotgun. Then I'm gonna throw this can up in the air over the field yonder and you're gonna blow it out of the sky...Ok?" I nodded and Johnny began showing me how to hold the shotgun so I wouldn't get knocked down.

"Plant your feet like this... See? Then the stock goes here, that's real important. You're gonna lean in just a bit, so when it kicks you got your shoulder into it... See? Absorbs the shock... Now, I'm just gonna rack it (an unnerving sound) and then you hold it, placing your hands here and here...Now, feel the weight as I let go."

It was nothing like the .22 rifle. Shotguns are heavy and I thought, "Oh Shit, this may not have been a good idea." I'm sure Johnny knew I was scared because he looked down and gave me a wink. Then, very serious..."Get ready." I nodded that I was, and Johnny threw the can out in front of me. I closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger. If you've never fired a scattergun before, I don't think anything I write can convey the experience...

I just remember thinking I'd embraced God's own thunder.

The ringing in my ears was slowly replaced by the amazed voices of all the hunters. The can was struck dead center by the shot. The force of the shot launched the can high in the air and it literally took a count of several seconds for it to fall back to earth. As Johnny secured the 12 gauge several of the hunters ran out to retrieve the can. Upon their return we saw that the bird shot had not even had time to disperse from the barrel. In the center of the can was an almost perfectly round hole. The kind of "one in a million shot" that could never be duplicated. I would have been happy with just staying on my feet and here, with my first shot, I had pulled a Buffalo Bill. I kept that can for years.

Sadly, my mother and Johnny divorced a few years later. I remember what proved to be our last truck ride together. He told me that even though things hadn't worked out with he and my mother he hoped I understood that I would always have a friend in him. I knew he meant it, but I was just a boy, and I couldn't do much more than look out the window and sulk. I sometimes think adolescents get a bad wrap for being inarticulate, it's not that they lack words, they just know words fail when life is unfair.

Over the years I saw very little of Johnny. He remarried and life marched on. I went off to College, then New York and the West Coast. I would get updates from my sisters of course, and I would always tell them to say I said hi. Then, in the late nineties, word came that Johnny had cancer. I could not believe it.

He had always struck me as something of a force of nature, like the sun or the moon. Such things don't get cancer and they damn sure don't die. They just are. While home on vacation from L.A. I called his house trying to reach my sisters, hoping we could meet in Danville for a visit. To my surprise Johnny answered.

"Well, hey Rob, how are ya? No, the girls aren't here just yet...Oh I'll tell 'em ya called, I know they'd love to see you...

Heard about that did ya? Yeah, it's a tough bit of news...Why, hell yes I aim to fight it, you know me."

It was about this point in the conversation that I thought, Maybe I should drive out there and see Johnny. Like a shadow it crossed my mind that the cancer could kill him and I would never see him again. As soon as I thought it, I almost laughed. It seemed absurd. Johnny Walkup will be just fine. He spent years riding in the rodeo. If the bulls didn't get him cancer sure as hell won't.

I was wrong.

Johnny Walkup succumbed to his illness in the summer of 2000, leaving behind a host of friends and family who loved him very much.

Through a Glass Darkly...

Dad exhaled from a long drag on his cigarette and said, " I'm not sure what year son, but I was working for Singer at the time. Your Mother and I knew that a call could come, that's just part of the deal when your in the National Guard. They didn't screw around. The phone rang and they told me to pack my kit and stand by. Our unit was going to Vietnam. I was stunned and so was your mother. It was a call we'd hoped we'd never get..."

Rain pelted the windshield of the old Datsun splintering the light from on coming traffic. It was very dark and cold as my father and I drove from Lexington to Danville; the windshield wipers kept a steady beat over the hum of the engine.

"So I got everything together and had all my gear sitting in the living room ready to go. We waited that whole weekend for a confirmation call and orders about my departure; fortunately it never came. The Army had decided to take a unit from Bardstown, Kentucky that we were attached to...but not us."

I looked over at Dad and said, "Wow, that was welcome news."

"For me...You bet. But not for the poor guys from Bardstown. A number of them got killed over there."

"Really?"

"Yep, Bardstown has a monument to them and everything."

It got very quiet inside the little Datsun as I mulled that over. Finally I said, "Dad if you had gotten killed over there I would never have known my father."

The silhouette of Dad's head nodded, and I watched as he took another drag off his Winston, the tip glowing, painting his face blood red. "Oh it's worse than that son. This was before you were born. Had I been killed, you would not exist."

I would not exist. Turning away I looked out the passenger window, watching the water bead and run down the glass. Somewhere out there the green hills of Kentucky were rolling by, but I couldn't see them for the darkness. I could only see my face reflected in the glass, illuminated by blue light from the dashboard. A ghostly vision of myself.

Yves Vegan Hotdogs

As many of you know, for the last few weeks I have been eating a strict vegan diet, just trying to drop the middle age spread and doing what I can to maintain good health. This Sunday I awoke feeling carnivorous and I figured that today was the day to see if a vegan hot dog could be the answer. So I went to "Whole Paycheck" and purchased a pack of Yves Vegan Hot Dogs and some Organic Wheat Bread Buns. Hell, I went all out, and even picked up the organic ketchup and mustard as well; after spending a good deal of money on these items, I raced home to give it the old college try.

Understand, I cooked the dogs a couple of different ways to make sure I was giving this thing the effort it deserves. I boiled and microwaved, but I confess, I did not grill. There was no need. Exposing shit to fire does not make it more palatable. I can honestly say this was the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth...So let this post serve as a warning keeping others from making my mistake.

In the end, I believe the people at Oscar Mayer do a better job of simulating meat than the people of Yves are doing simulating, simulated meat.

A View From the Top

In the summer of 1988 I traveled to Europe. I went with an outfit called the Kentucky Institute for European Studies. The tour put us in Italy for a month and after that you could opt to fly home or stay on for another month on your own. I chose the latter and activated a Eurail Youth Pass that allowed me to ping pong around central Europe. It proved to be one of the best experiences of my life.

I was all over Italy and I went north to Holland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium. Saw an incredible amount of art and ate a hell of a lot of good food. Because of the intensity of that trip I sometimes feel as if I was gone for more than just two months. More like I spent a lifetime there. Travel is intense. Real travel that is: not a trip to a theme park or Las Vegas. Travel... The word has the same root as the word travail and implies something that is both experienced intensely as well as endured. It implies a level of awareness.

One of the places I visited that summer was Mutters, Austria. It's a small village a few miles down the road from Innsbruck. I was traveling with a fellow by the name of Kyle and we'd arrived in the Innsbruck train station late in the evening, late enough that most things were closed, and it was looking like we were going to wind up roughing it on the benches until early morning. Fortunately for us, Kyle had an old copy of "Europe on Five Bucks a Day" and in it he found a number for a boarding house in Mutters. When he called, a woman by the name of Kattie Wolfe answered and she was so excited that someone wanted to stay at her place she offered to drive down and pick us up at the station. We went to the front entrance and within minutes one of the first BMW's ever made screeched to a halt in front of us.

A stout Tyrolean woman was stuffed behind the wheel and she motioned for us to hop in. Had I known what sort of driver this lady was I might have had second thoughts. She took off like a shot into the night. Up the sides of mountains and around hairpin turns at dizzying speeds. The whole time yammering about the merits of her beloved Austria. Did we know how great the Austro-Hungarian Empire had once been? Were we at least familiar with the achievements of Arnold Schwarzenegger? I maintained a white knuckled grip on the dashboard and agreed through tightly clenched teeth, anything to offset the negative effects of high G-forces.The roller coaster ride ended in the center of Mutters. Her place was one of those charming little houses that seemed to spring up naturally on the sides of Alps. I had seen replicas of them in American homes, miniaturized, with clocks on their faces. In a flash Katie showed us to our rooms and told us how to find the kitchen. Kyle and I collapsed into two of the softest feather beds ever made.

Morning came and we were both reluctant to rise. The blankets were soft as butter from years of use and the room was just cold enough to be pleasant if you were under cover. But the smell of breakfast was compelling. Kyle went across the hall to shower first and while waiting I threw open the shutters to get a view of the Alps. Breathing in the cool mountain air, I thought... I could get used to this.

Downstairs, we ate homemade bread and jam as Katie told us her story. She had been a midwife during World War Two but had retired a few years before. Now she ran the boarding house and made her homemade jam. She encouraged Kyle and I to get out and do some hiking, see some of the beauty of the Tyrolean Alps. We wasted no time. The trails and forests around Mutters and Innsbruck were breathtaking so we stayed on at Katie's for several days. In time I would accompany our hostess into the surrounding hills to help pick berries for the jam. While gathering, she would tell me stories about the war, sad stories about love, loss and hope.

I discovered that over the last few years her business hadn't been doing too well because living in Mutters put her a bit off the beaten path. In response to this Kyle and I would stop in at the train station every morning and strike up conversations with American backpackers. We would ask where they were staying and when they said a hotel we would just shake our heads and tell them how they were missing out. Intrigued they would ask about our arrangements and we would chat up Katie's place in Mutters. In no time, another group of Americans were experiencing high G's on narrow alpine roads...Gaining a new appreciation for Austrian culture and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This arrangement proved ideal for a number of days, especially since Katie was kind enough to give us free lodging, toast and jam every time we snared her a bunch of Americans. About a week into the stay, a couple of guys from Florida expressed an interest in climbing the large mountain that loomed just to the south of Katie's house. She heard us speaking and said we would enjoy it up there but we should only go to the first peak that was visible, the one to the right, and not the main peak as it was above the snow line and somewhat dangerous. The next morning the four of us made an early start and spent the next four or five hours attaining the summit that Katie had pointed out. It was beautiful up there. We were well above the tree line and I remember the dark rocks contrasted sharply with the blue sky. The view was fantastic and we could see the city of Innsbruck laid out in the valley below.

I felt young, strong and full of beans in a way that I've seldom known since, so when Kyle suggested we press on to the central summit (above the snow line) I thought...Why not? Why not? Well, Let's see, there are scores of reasons that now come to mind that escaped me when I was twenty. We could fall to our deaths... The weather could turn before we got back down... You know, death by exposure. Hell, the only thing I was wearing was a pair of faded Levi's, a short sleeve T-shirt and a pair of old worn out sneakers. No socks of course, who the fuck needs socks when climbing above the snow line in the Alps?

Thinking back on this I wonder how the hell I could have been so stupid. The whole effort was a monument to assholery. But it seems fortune favors fools, so off we went. Our luck held and the weather stayed perfect. But even on a hot day in summer the temperature was chilly at high altitude. I doubled my pace to stay warm. Real smart when navigating paths that are no more than twelve inches wide in places. On one side, slick, cold, stone. On the other...the abyss. I'm reasonably certain that there were some drops that measured in the hundreds of feet. A couple of spots were so narrow my back was pressed flat to the wall, arms spread out with palms turned toward slick rock. From heel to ball of foot there was purchase but my toes were in the air. Yes, we were stupid, stupid boys.

In time, the summit was attained: upon arrival I was shocked to come upon an enormous cross. I suppose it was some fifteen feet tall and made of wood. Later I was told that pious men of the surrounding villages carry the large timbers up there, place them and maintain them as a testament to their faith. Surrounded by clouds and blue sky it was hard not to be moved by this powerful symbol.

At the foot of the cross there was a brass box secured to the wood and above it was a small plaque written in German listing several names. Inside the box we found a leather bound book and pencil. The book was filled with entries, people from all over the world who had been to the summit. The excitement they felt at having arrived there was evident in their writing. I placed my mark with theirs at the foot of the cross, and then turning, I drank in the view I'd just risked my life for.The valley that contained Innsbruck stretched away to the horizon, flanked on both sides by high mountains. The air was impossibly clear and I wondered how many miles distant my eyes were seeing. Up high in the white world of cold stones and ice the valley looked rich with vibrant greens. It shimmered in my eyes like an emerald and unconsciously my hand reached out for it. As I was looking, a small object raced from my peripheral vision into my line of sight and disappeared into the distance with tremendous speed. A bird...screaching past me on a gust of wind. I think in the time it took me to realize what I'd just seen that bird may well have crossed into Italy.

As wonderful as it was on that peak Kyle and I realized that we had to get the hell out of there quick. It was already late in the afternoon. The thought of traversing the paths that led to the summit in darkness were enough to motivate us. The way down proved to be just as harrowing as the trip up. By the time we arrived at Katie 's place in Mutters night had fallen and the rest of the boarders were sound asleep. Kyle and I retreated to our room and collapsed into our beds completely spent.

That night I did not dream...There was no need to.

I woke up late, hearing the voices of the other guests downstairs in the Kitchen. Kyle and Katie's voice carried and I wondered what they were arguing about. Walking into the kitchen, Katie struck me on the top of the head with a jam covered wooden spoon. She was furious that Kyle and I had not listened to her and had pushed on to the central summit. Turning to me she asked if I had noticed the little plaque on the cross with the list of names. When I said yes she said, "Those are the names of climbers who have died up there!"

"You stupid, stupid, American Boys."

Twilight

In the Autumn twilight
At the Twilight of Autumn,
Looking up at last,
At the last leaves to leave.
Wondering,
How long can they last,
These last leaves of Autumn?
And what should we believe?

C.R. Lister

A Night in New York

I suppose this would have been in October of 1994. I had gone out to eat with a couple of friends of mine. We had a great meal in Greenwich Village and afterwards we went for a walk to stretch our legs and see if there were any shops still open at that hour. The weather was cool and there was a drizzle of rain but it wasn't bad enough to call off a walk, especially if you were fortified with a couple of drinks. New York was quiet that evening, or at least that little section of the Village was, the usual city noises seemed subdued by the night.

After a few minutes of walking we came upon a small shop that shimmered like a gem in the darkness. I remember the light from inside was an amber sort of color as if it were being generated by gas lamps as opposed to electric bulbs. The effect was mesmerizing and inviting. Upon entering we found that much of what the shop offered was statuary, some of it plaster knock offs of works by Rodin and Michelangelo, other pieces were obscure, the likes of which I've not seen again to this day. It may have been a trick of the light but many of them seemed to be real marble and bronze. The bronze had the patina that only comes with age and much of the marble was pitted as if weathered. At any rate, everything in the shop was visually interesting and as I walked through I was less and less aware of my friends Kevin and Carol and more taken with the little world of needful things. I had the sense that I didn't want to leave that shop, that it would be nice just to stay there, forever. I felt... Comfortable? No. That's the wrong word, I was beguiled.

At no point did I ever make eye contact with the woman behind the counter or her partner, the tall man in a long black coat. They both looked like poster children for the Goth Movement. They were pale, thin and tall. Impossibly tall. And there was something else about them. They both had grace. No, it wasn't grace, it was more like poise. Yes, I'm sure they were both poised...for something.

I was never asked if I needed help or if there was anything in particular I was looking for. I had the strange feeling that they knew the things I wanted. And they knew I would have to look elsewhere. I remember Kevin talking a great deal with the man in the long coat. Kevin was interested in a number of things that the shop had to offer. The man was courteous, helpful and almost courtly. I stepped out onto the sidewalk while they talked more. The misty air chilled me but I still stayed outdoors. My friends emerged and Kev was still chatting with the tall man asking if he could stop by tomorrow morning on his way into work. The man said that would not be possible as his shop was never open during daylight hours. Cocking his head to the side Kevin asked why and the man replied, "Because we are Vampires sir."

I was looking down when he said this, starring at the man's boots. They were magnificent riding boots and seemed so well made that they were almost one with his leg. Being from the horse capitol of the world I had seen many such boots. But these were different, they reminded me of the way a horses leg blends into the polished surface of a hoof.

Kevin, Carol and I turned and walked on into the night leaving the little shop to diminish behind us in the darkness. For weeks afterward, in my free time, I would walk from midtown down to the World Trade Centers to catch the Path train home. I would choose a different way every time so that I could check out as many New York streets as I could. Kevin knew this about me and he would often ask if I ever saw that little shop again. I would just look away and mutter that I hadn't. "Isn't that strange," he would say.

It was. But not as strange as the conversation Kevin and I had upon leaving that odd place. We'd stopped only a few blocks away and turning to me Kev said, "I believed him."

"So did I, Kevin...So did I.

Papaw

Papaw is what I used to call my Grandfather. His name was Marion Lister and he was one of the more influential people in my formative years. My parents divorced when I was young and both worked full time, so the grandparents wound up being the primary caregivers in my case. I've often thought that this gave me a different perspective than my peers who were raised by the baby boomer generation. My grandparents were from the era of the Great Depression and World War Two as opposed to having come of age in the time of Sputnik.

They would often talk about what it was like in those days and the difference between the world that they described and the world of the mid to late seventies was like night and day. It was hard for me to come to terms with the fact that I was being raised by people who never imagined they would see a man walk on the moon, a world where not just television was unusual, but a world where radios were rare. They described the grinding poverty of rural Kentucky in the kind of detail that made an impression on one so young.
I think it was this sort of background that made my Grandfather one of the hardest working people alive. Sadly, he was saddled with a grandson interested in art and philosophy. (A nice way of describing sloth) I remember him saying things like, "Hard work is it's own reward." I would just scratch my head and wonder, "What the hell does that mean? Really? What does that mean?" I came to understand that it meant my Grandfather would rather be working than doing just about anything else. It also meant there would be certain expectations of work from me, and here lies the source of much angst, and frustration.

Papaw was going to teach me the value of hard work and the dollar if it killed him. Although he had retired from the RC Cola company some years before he was not happy to rest on his laurels. Nope, his idea of retirement was to start a small lawn care business. This would keep him busy and teach me how to sweat. Understand, at the time, I was ten years old. This was the era of Star Wars, Atari and Saturday morning cartoons. The people at Hasbro and Mattell were making sure there were all sorts of overpriced little plastic toys about and the TV assured me I couldn't live without them. As much as I hated pushing lawnmowers during summer break I was enjoying the cash flow. Without question, I was the richest kid on my block. In a typical summer I would make a few hundred bucks mowing yards with my grandfather... And I would spend like a sailor on shore leave as soon as I got it.I was feverish with the desire to make money. Getting enough meant I could buy all the Star Wars action figures and comic books in the world. This kept me hard at work pushing mowers through many a summer day that would have been better spent doing things other boys my age were doing. Fishing, riding bikes, playing football... Activities that eluded me as I was heading out to cut grass with Papaw. Of course, the grass is always greener on the side of the fence you aren't on. The kids in the neighborhood seethed with jealousy as I had toys they couldn't afford, but I wondered if it was such a good thing. The only time I ever saw those toys was when the rain poured and we couldn't mow. This taught me something at a young age that eludes many people their whole lives. If you don't have time to play with your toys, then what's the point of having them?

In time, the money failed to inspire, and the last thing I wanted to do was go and mow yards. I longed for sunny days that were my own. I would search the skies hoping for the kind of summer rainstorm that would keep us from cutting grass. A reprieve from the hard work that my Grandfather felt was its own reward.

On one such day I went across the street to play board games with my friend Anthony. The rain was coming down in a slow drizzle and there still seemed to be a chance that the weather would turn and allow Papaw and I the opportunity to mow. He wanted me to stay close and be ready. So as Anthony and I played Monopoly on the front porch, I watched Papaw tinker with his mowers on the tailgate of an old Dodge pickup. Tinker is really the wrong word. Papaw wasn't mechanically inclined. He mostly just beat on his mowers with whatever tool was handy while using words that were wildly inappropriate for children...often at the top of his voice.

As my friend and I played Monopoly (and committed choice phrases to memory) I began to realize that it was almost noon. Every day, no matter what he was doing, my Grandfather would drop everything and fix lunch for my Grandmother. She had yet to retire and was working in a textile factory called the Palm Beach Corporation. I could rail all day long about what a shit hole that place was but it's enough to say it was the sort of depression era anachronism that by then could only be found in the south. The steamy hell of that sweat shop would leave my Grandmother so spent she could barely walk. Forget about making it to her car and going somewhere for lunch. The whistle blew at exactly noon and blew again at 12:30pm. In that window, employees were expected to eat, relieve themselves, rest, or whatever they needed to do to prepare for more hours of hard labor in temperatures that pushed 115 degrees inside the factory.

My Grandfather was always sure to get to Palm Beach early enough to park near the front doors. That way my grandmother didn't have to walk too far to cool off, rest, and try and eat something. I remember the way Papaw would open the glove box of the old pickup truck and make a small table of the front seat so my grandmother could eat lunch there. I loved to watch him do this. He was always so focused and mindful of what he was doing. This was in contrast to the way he worked for money. That work was always manic and detached, a means to an end. Watching him make my grandmother's lunch and preparing a place setting for her was work that was loaded with meaning and significance.

This important business had slipped Papaws mind on that rainy summer day. I saw him check his watch and swear a few oaths as he ran into the house to throw together a few items for Grandmother's lunch. Pans clanged and cabinet doors slammed. Moments later Papaw emerged with a bag of stuff. He leaped into the front seat of the old pickup and revved the engine several times just show the old contraption he meant business. The tires squealed a bit as he slammed the stick into reverse, backed out of the driveway onto the hill and made ready to rocket off to Grandmother, lunch and glory.

I think this would be a good point in the story to talk about the importance of making sure your pickup's tailgate is closed before you tear off up a steep hill. It's especially important if you run a small business from the back of that truck and store the tools of your trade there. When Papaw put pedal to metal everything sailed out the back as if shot from a canon. Three lawnmowers, a spare tire, gas cans, oil cans and tool boxes briefly took flight, then surrendered to gravity. The ensuing crash was loud enough to be heard over the roar of the old pickups revving engine.

As the mowers had wheels and the spare tire and oil cans were round they didn't just hit ground and halt, they hit the ground running. The best was the tire, which had the added fun of bounce as it tore down the street and through the neighbors yards. Prized petunias, plastic flamingos and even a concrete lawn jockey were no match for Papaw's sling blade tsunami.

Anthony and I both leaped to our feet and watched slack jawed as the shit storm unfolded down Madison Ave. I remember turning to each other as both our faces went from surprise to glee. We realized that we were witnessing one of the funniest things we had ever seen...Hell, it might have been one of the funniest things anyone had ever seen. As you can imagine, Papaw felt differently about it. He slammed the brakes, got out and surveyed the damage. As the scope of the catastrophe registered the sound of two boys laughing reached his ears.

That really chapped his ass. He roared that I was in a world of trouble for coming across the street and pulling that tail gait down and that I had better damn sure have the whole thing cleaned up before he got back from lunch. I was agast. The injustice! How could he blame me for such a thing when there were witnesses to the fact that he was the one who forgot to raise the tail gate? Didn't matter. Adult right, child wrong.

This was the sort of thing that drove me crazy about my Grandfather. He knew better, but once committed to a position there was no changing his mind. Arguing with him was hopeless but that didn't stop me. For years we would have terrible rows over the "Great Tailgate Incident" as it came to be known. I couldn't let it go and neither could Papaw. Grandmother bore the brunt of this foolishness. She would get pissed and tell us both to shut up and say she never wanted to hear about it again. Grandmother was wise...She wasn't interested in justice. She just wanted quiet.

Elliptical...Take Two.

The Elliptical that was featured in the last post broke after only five days of use. After spending more money than I spent on my first car I was, needless to say, pissed. However, the people at Dick's sporting goods really came through for us. Not only did they take the old elliptical back but they exchanged it for a higher end model at no additional cost to us. We were thrilled. The new machine is a Sole and is a much smoother model with more features than the previous machine. It has an ominous look to it. Almost like the wheel section from an old locomotive. My wife has taken to calling it the Pain Train. Every day for two sets of ten minutes, we huff and we puff...cause we think we can, we think we can.

As for diet. Well, I'm doing the vegan thing. No meat, no dairy, no refined sugar, no white flour. This pretty much leaves you with fruits and veggies. Tough sledding? You bet. The first few days were a special kind of hell that saw me longing for all the old greasy dishes, but after a time I've gotten into the groove and I'm not missing the fast food so much. My twin sisters have been a big help recommending some great veggie substitutes that are long on taste and short on chemistry.

Their best tip so far? The green goodness. A smoothie made from swiss chard, spinach, avocado, agave syrup, pomegranate juice and ice. I was skeptical at first as the sight of a green shake is very disconcerting, but the taste is really quite good. After a few mornings of having it for breakfast, I now crave it the way I used to crave coffee. The difference is that I used get a charge out of caffeine, now I'm amped up on complex B vitamins and mono unsaturated fats. I love the good feeling I get from it, and the energy lasts well into the afternoon. After about four weeks of eating this way and working out, I've managed to loose seven pounds and I'm feeling great. Seven pounds is a cup out of the ocean but I'm in this thing for the long haul. In April I will turn forty and my son is only eight months old. By the time the little man goes off to college I'll be pushing sixty. I gotta stay healthy. Look at this pic and you'll see...Lot's to live for.

Elliptical

And so it has come to pass that Sarah and I have purchased an elliptical. We have both experienced trouble loosing weight so we bit the bullet and bought one of these beasts. Expensive? You bet. Reasonable? Only if you use it. With the baby and both working full time there is no way to get to a gym so this seemed like the best option. The convenience of having it in the home is hopefully going to help make things happen.

Its like this friends, and I'm just throwing this out there. If I can't drag my big woolly ass the three feet from the bed to the elliptical to do the work out...Well, just F@#king shoot me.

Ash Wednesday, Sovegna Vos

Above is a recent collage called Ash Wednesday. The image was inspired by T. S. Eliot's poem of the same name. The subtitle Sovegna Vos is from the poem as well and was lifted by Eliot from Dante. I'm told that a rough translation of the phrase is " You should remember." The piece is a truly mixed media image that utilises everything from the computer to paint. I thought an explanation of the process that leads to a collage like this might make for an interesting post.

I begin with a ground and for that I start with wood. Just simple pine that is cut to size and smoothed on the edges. As this will be a triptic I thought it would be interesting to make the centerpiece taller than the side panels and to achieve this I glued quarter inch strips along the edges of the center panel. After the wood is shaped and sanded I prime the work surfaces with an off white and then I paint the sides black.


The next step is to get out the morgue and select a few images. Many people are unfamiliar with the concept of an artist's morgue so I'll explain. Artists, especially those who do collage, often keep what is known as a morgue. This is nothing more than a collection of interesting photographs and papers that the artist has collected over the course of his career. I organize these images in small filing boxes and categorize them in different folders. Some of the categories in my morgue include Japanese papers, pictures of leaves, textures of all types, maps, photocopies of charts, old letters and photos found in junk stores, post cards...You get the idea.


I begin to cut the images apart and place them on the surface of the piece. Arranging and rearranging until something visually interesting begins to take shape. I sometimes tear the pictures, sand them with sand paper, or even work on them with an eraser. Whatever I can do to distress and alter the photo or paper. It's around this point that I will often employ a digital camera or scanner and pull some of what I have into the Photoshop program. In Photoshop I make changes to the bightness/contrast, hue, saturation and color balance. This affrds me the opportunity to work out some inconsistancies in color.


When I've toyed with things in the digital realm for awhile, it's time to get back to the material. I output a number of the elements with the HP color printer on a heavy stock of paper so that I can cut the prints into pieces, sand, erase and even paint on the images. Around this time I begin to commit some things to the boards. I do this with an acrylic gel medium. I paste layer upon layer until I begin to see things that please me. When the image is at the point where I'm ready to abandon it ( I never really finish, I just abandon) I seal it with the same gel medium and call it done.

Thomas Wyatt Lister

On June 6th 2007 Thomas Wyatt Lister was born. To say this was a big day is an understatement. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for the overwhelming feeling of love that accompanies being a new parent. My wife Sarah and I are constantly pinching ourselves. We can't believe how lucky we have been to have such a beautiful, healthy child come into our lives. Dealing with a newborn is at times both wonderful and horrifying.

I remember when Sarah and I brought him home from the hospital we were scared out of our wits. I mean, talk about crazy, they hand you this tiny helpless little person and say, "Good luck." Both of us were nervous wrecks for the first few months fearful that we would screw it up. Is he eating enough? Is he sleeping the way he should? Did he poop today? What do you mean he didn't poop yesterday? You think that's bad? I tell people all the time that I have no memory of the first three months. Between the many feedings throughout the night and diaper changes the lack of sleep is incredible. I was on auto pilot and since I wasn't the one doing the breast feeding I had it lucky. Sarah was a Zombie.

After that first few months things have gotten much better. Sarah and I work different shifts and so far this has allowed us to avoid daycare. I have the little guy during the mornings and afternoons and then I drive him to Sarah as she is leaving work in the evening. The only down side to this arrangement is how little we get to see each other during the week. A number of my married friends have told me that the less we see each other the better our marriage will be. I'm not so sure, I do know that I miss Sarah very much during the week and wish that I could be with her more. If fact, most of our fights are about how little we get to see each other. Not bad for two people who have known each other for nearly twenty years.

The Holidays were just an outright blast. Halloween came and Sarah got Thomas Wyatt the best costume ever. He was dressed up as a little owl and really looked the part. He has the largest, most inquisitive eyes and the costume really played that up. I can't wait for a Halloween when he's old enough for trick or treat. Hopefully that's when some of Mommy and Daddy's experience with theater and movies will pay off in the form of some cool costumes and makeup. One of the great things about having a kid is everything seems new again, you experience the magic of that first Halloween or Christmas through their eyes.

At Christmas he surprised us all by starting to crawl.He was gracious enough to do this as I was video taping and I managed to get it on tape. Seeing him open his presents was even fun at this early stage. Although he seemed to enjoy the ribbons, paper and boxes more than any of the toys he got. Soon after Christmas I went into the nursery and found him beside the crib in a standing position. He had used the slats to pull himself up and was crying because he couldn't figure out how to get back down. The pediatrician thinks that at this rate he will be walking before his first birthday. Geez, Mommy and Daddy got to get in shape.

Wonderwalls

Wherever I live I tend to construct elaborate shelf systems. They are often put together from crates that I have purchased at a store like Michael's or Garden Ridge. Other times they are made up of combinations of shelves that are bolted to the wall as well as stand alone structures. I don't have any idea how I got started doing this. I think the first time that I ever referred to them as Wonderwalls was when I was living in Los Angeles. Having done a great deal of moving, the crates were something that evolved out of necessity. I liked being able being to flip a crate of books over on its side and walking out the door at a moments notice. Stackable shelves and crates weren't just aesthetically pleasing they were a practical necessity for a young man on the move.

Bookshelves have never been just a place for me to put books, they are also a place to put everything from art supplies to art objects. I think in the end I have an eye for good clutter. I don't care for mess but I also don't like things to be obsessively neat. I like something in between. It's hard to describe but I think the best way to explain it is to say that I am drawn to interesting clutter. There is a great deal that you can tell about a person from their clutter. If I enter someone's living space and fail to find something of interest in their clutter I gotta say I'm a bit put off. I wanna see their books and I wanna see what sort of rocks they picked up off the ground when they went hiking. Did they ever save a shell from the beach or a pine cone from the forest? If they did, where is it? For the love of God, don't hide that shit in a closet. Let there be clutter...

I'm not big on spaces that have too much clutter. I'm looking for a visually pleasing balance. I want clutter that draws me in with it's complexity without being overwhelming. There are people out there who have allowed the clutter to overwhelm their living space. I fear for them. I suspect it may be unhealthy. Whenever my shelves and clutter reach a certain point I find it's time for a purge. I'm off to the used bookstore or the Goodwill with a box of books or junk. The exorcise becomes very Zen, a way of practicing non-attachment. Learning to care and not to care for things.

I've taken this to extremes from time to time. When I lived in L.A. I was just around the corner from one of the great used bookstores in the western world. The place was called the Iliad and over the course of three years I was able to accumulate a massive pile of used books. My Wonderwalls groaned under the weight of hundreds of books. Why so many? I was on the graveyard shift working as a security guard. Reading material becomes as important as food when you go days without seeing anyone. I began to feel as if the Wonderwalls were closing in on me in that little L.A. apartment. I sold all the books back to the Iliad and went north to Ventura California and bought a 24ft sailboat to live on. No Wonderwalls there. I had everything I owned narrowed down to less than ten cubic feet. It was a study in contrasts.

In a way I find the Wonderwalls to be something like three dimensional collages. The juxtaposition of different trinkets and books can be a form of sculpture or even a still life. In fact, many of the small pieces on my shelves have provided inspiration for some of my work. When working on a collage or any artistic endeavor it's great to have things of visual interest close at hand. And there may be nothing more important to an artist than books. I don't think I've ever met a serious artist who wasn't a rabid collector of books or at least a pack rat of some sort. Their studios are often as interesting as their work.

Some Thoughts on Tomatoes

I love tomatoes. I love to eat them and I love to grow them. One of the great deprivations a person experiences living in a large city is the lack of home grown tomatoes. Sure there are organic supermarkets like Fresh Market and Whole Paycheck that try to provide good tomatoes. But nothing, I mean no thing, can compare to the taste explosion you get from walking out into the backyard and carefully selecting a little red globe of goodness. Taking it to the kitchen and slicing it to just the right thickness, placing it on a piece of bread and slathering on a cool spoonful of Duke's mayo... Best to take a moment at this point and dust it with a dash of pepper from the mill. Why does this taste better? Well, it's like this, you can actually taste the heat of the sun when you do it that way. The tomato is still warm and contrasts nicely with the cool taste of mayo.

In 2005 my wife Sarah and I rented a three bedroom house in Lexington. The backyard was perfect for tomatoes. Not only was the backyard a good place to grow them, but there was also a screened in porch just off the kitchen that was a fantastic place to eat them. I couldn't wait to get started. I spent the tail end of that winter dreaming of fried green tomatoes and big meaty Betterboys dripping down the the side of a grilled burger.

There really is a lot to consider with the growing of tomatoes. You can't just go at it half assed. You gotta do your homework. Prepare the soil and prepare yourself. There are no end of things that can go wrong. Fungus, insects, drought and worst of all, squirrels. Dreadful little tomato thieving bastards. If that location had one Achilles' heel it was the squirrels. Surrounding the property were a number of large trees that over the years had become home to a great many agile rodents. I knew they would be trouble. What to do? Fight them with conventional weapons? Risky...could take years, outcome uncertain. Maybe grow more plants than I need...Allow the squirrels the surplus? The notion smacked of appeasement. I don't negotiate with squirrels.

The solution proved to be containment. I chose to secure a perimeter around my precious plants. The structures were built of wood and chicken wire and proved completely effective. Not one tomato fell victim. I prevailed. In my zeal I also became a subject of ridicule for family and friends who felt I had gone too far. They mocked what they did not understand. Of course, even though they made sport of my efforts, they all had no problem eating those tomatoes at harvest.

Knowing that few people will believe the kind of success I had with my 2006 crop I've posted photos on this blog to back my claims. Unlike Bigfoot, or reported sightings of U.F.O.'s the outrageous tomato harvest of 2006 is well documented. Using a method of gardening known as "French Intensive" I was able to grow plants that reached heights of over eleven feet and yielded a bumper crop measured in tens of bushels. That ain't bad for a patch of dirt measuring no more than eight feet by eight feet.

If I had to point out one thing that will make the difference in home grown tomatoes I would say it's soil. That sweet, black, loamy stuff is the biological high octane that jump starts your crop. Getting it to the place you want it doesn't just happen overnight. At the minimum you need a year. I believe you have to start working the soil a full year before the plants go in the ground. Compost is key. A good pile of compost is where I begin. I build a wood box container about a foot above the surface of the surrounding ground and I begin to fill it with scraps from the kitchen table as well as old leaves and clippings from the yard. Start this in the fall of the year so that by the late spring of the next year the stuff has had plenty of time to rot.

By building the box structure and keeping the area where the plants are growing higher than the surrounding area you allow for plenty of drainage. Tomato plants love plenty of water but they like it to pass over the root mass on the way to somewhere else. With the plants in the box garden a foot above the surrounding ground you can water them several times a day without the fear of over watering them. This is great on those really sunny dry days of mid summer. If the plants get plenty of sun as well as water... Well, get ready for lots of tomatoes.

There is a final trick to growing good tomatoes that few people are aware of but really makes for a good crop. When you put in the tomato sets go out approximately six inches from the base of the plant and dig down about five inches. In this hole place an egg. Don't break the egg, just gently cover it over with dirt. Over the course of the next several weeks the egg will rot and feed the plant with calcium and other much needed nutrients. The first time I tied this I suspected it was some sort of wives' tale and didn't really do much for the tomatoes. Out of curiosity, at the end of the season when I dug up the plants to discard them I found that considerable root mass had formed around the area where the egg had been.

As a control for this experiment I put out three plants that year very close to the ones that are photographed and written about. They grew under almost exactly the same conditions but only produced about half the fruit. The only difference, the egg. I'm now a believer. As an added bonus I would recommend throwing a bag or two of Miracle Grow soil on top of the compost. I've found their mix to be great and this also helps speed things along.

In the pictures you can see that the 2006 crop was an incredible success. Even the cages proved to keep the squirrels at bay as I had hoped. The one thing that I did not count on was the plants growing bigger than the cages. In the end. I had to cut the tops out to allow the plants room to climb higher. After I did this of course the squirrels managed to come in over the wire. They wreaked havoc. The thing that was most depressing was they way they would take just a single bite out of one the best pieces of fruit leaving it there to rot. They are the animal kingdom's answer to the Viet Cong. The horror...the horror.

White Line Fever

Ever since I can remember I've had a fascination with motorcycles. When I was no more than five we lived next door to a man named Clyde Austin. He was into bikes in a big way and would spend hours tuning them in his garage. I would wander in, sit down and watch, and as long as I was good he would let me hand him the different tools that he needed. When he would fire one up and let it rumble I was always thrilled. I knew one day I would have to have one.

That day came sooner than I could have imagined. My parents divorced when I was about six and that summer my father bought me a 50cc Honda mini bike that I rode until it fell apart. By age twelve I had gone through two mini bikes and had graduated to a 125cc Honda dirt bike. The 125 had begun its life as a street bike that someone had stripped the lights off of and converted to an off road machine. One of the things they neglected to do was put the right kind of muffler on it and as a result it sounded like a ban saw cutting corrugated tin. Jeeeesus! I loved that thing. In retrospect, I can't imagine what the hell my father was thinking putting that kind of power in the hands of an adolescent boy. I now believe that it was a reckless bit of parenting on his part. I felt a bit different about it at age thirteen. As you can probably imagine I found the arrangement sublime.

I swore many an oath to the old man that I would ride responsibly and not take any foolish chances. He made it clear to me that there were safety rules that had to be observed at all times or there would be grave consequences. And observe them I did, religiously, whenever my father was around. I even tried to be good when I got out of sight of the house, but the truth is there were many unanswered questions that needed to be addressed. Questions like... Could a bike that heavy really clear a fence that high? Or... How far past a hundred would that little red needle go?

How the hell did I survive? There were a number of close calls and outright catastrophes. There was the time I broke my collar bone crashing into a cast iron mailbox. I lost all kinds of skin tumbling ass over teakettle down the pavement.Once I forgot to put the gas cap back on, took off, and discovered some twenty minutes later that I was covered from neck to nuts with high octane. The stuff was sloshing out of the tank and dripping down onto the hot engine as I made my way cross country. Well, boys will be boys...

As I grew older the machines grew bigger. I got my fist street bike in college. A 500cc Honda Ascot. Not the best bike in the world but a bike nonetheless. About a year after school and about the time I relocated home from Florida I purchased a 600cc Honda Shadow VLX. Hands down, without a doubt, the finest machine I have ever laid hands on. It was stylish, light weight, reliable and quick. I loved it, and over the course of the next decade it would be my only source of transportation, taking me from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. When I finally sold it in the spring of 2005 it had just over 60,000 miles on it.

In the fall of 1995 the comic book company that I worked for in NYC was purchased by a video game company. They wanted us for the licenses we held on a number of popular characters. Swearing that they had no intention of interfering with our production of comics they waited no more than six months before they fired many of the artists who worked there. I was pissed because I really loved that job but they say every cloud has a silver lining and mine came in the form of unemployment checks. Those bucks funded a cross country road trip on the Honda. The open road beckoned and at its end lay the cool beaches of southern California, the movie industry, and the promise of gainful employment.

But the getting there, that's the thing. I was going to take my time. I was going to see America in a way many people dream of and few people get to do. And by God, I did. Back roads, greasy spoon diners, flea bag 10 buck a night motels and always the road. The endless, endless road. After Oklahoma I said to hell with the motels and would sleep out on the side of the road somewhere.

Even though I took that trip over a decade ago the sights, smells and sounds still linger. The experience still resonates and probably always will. I remember what it was to wake up in the dirt beside the bike and roll over on my side shivering. Inches away from my face was the chrome of the muffler and reflected there was the sun as it broke across the desert. The acrid smell of diesel from a passing semi and the turbulence of its wake at high speed. I will never forget what it was like to be holed up under a highway over pass in Death Valley as a sand storm raged, reducing visibility and leaving its strange bitter taste in my mouth. I loved the feeling of walking into a small quiet diner in the afternoon. The dull thump of my boots on a wooden floor and the creaking of leathers while sliding comfortably into a booth. I even liked the thinly veiled contempt of the blue haired waitress who took my order and couldn't help but notice that I had of late been a stranger to soap and water.

I'll never forget stopping the bike just to get off and look out at the grain fields of Kansas. It was October and the harvest was in full swing. Combines the size of starter homes devoured amber waves. Those waves dissipated into sagebrush and scrub grass as I got into western Oklahoma, and that gave way to the light and color of Santa Fe. In Arizona I rode to the lip of El Diablo Meteor Crater and saw a 50,000 year old scar on the face of the earth. Such a sight proved to be only a warm up for the overwhelming view at Grand Canyon. I was so happy and grateful to be young and free in a world of wonders, riding a steel horse into new territory.
Over the next few years the Honda Shadow proved to be the ideal transportation in Southern California. A place where rain is seldom seen and snarled traffic is ubiquitous. The little bike would carry me right down the center line, past mile after mile of frustrated commuters. It was like a concrete war zone and I thought the misnamed freeways were nothing more than vast POW camps. Day after day I would roll past the prisoners stuck in their plush Japanese and German cages. I wore a full face helmet that had a tinted visor. This gave me the opportunity to watch people in their cars while stopped at a red light. How unhappy they looked. Alienated.

I'll be the first to admit that riding is a young man's game. The risks to life and limb are extreme. There are times that I look back on the many close calls that I had and shiver. After nearly 30 years of riding motorcycles I may well be a fugitive from the law of averages. Even though I was never seriously injured I was by no means unscathed. I've had two broken fingers, one rib and a fractured collar bone. There are no end of scars and minor abrasions to show for my commitment to that form of transportation. Those who know me will be the fist to tell you that I am about as far from a macho persona as you can get. In fact, I would go so far as to say that when it comes to pain, I am a full blown pussy. But I would say this more than anything else is the reason I didn't come to greater grief. Oh sure, when I was a boy, I had no idea I could be injured. But one tussle with a iron mailbox at high speed permanently altered my worldview. After that I rode with a commitment to caution.

I have a good friend named Wes who loves bikes as much as I do and I remember in college he once shared with me a pearl of wisdom. "Charles," he said, "there are old riders and bold riders...But there aren't any old, bold, riders." I agree. Next year this little weenie turns forty.

Adventures in the Screen Trade

From somewhere around 1996 to 2001 I worked on a low budget horror movie called Frost: Portrait of a Vampire. The material was from a comic book created by a high school friend of mine named Kevin Vanhook. Most of the cast and crew had been friends for years, either having met in college or connected in southern California as a result of a shared interest in film making. I was cast in the role of Nat Mckenzie who is the vampire. Another college friend of mine was cast in the lead as Frost. I don't think any of us knew when we all agreed to work on that film just what we were in for.

It took the better part of five years to complete the movie as there was all kinds of trouble getting money for a project starring unknowns. We would get a bit of money and people would quit their day jobs, run off to shoot, and the money would run out... Then it was back to the salt mines of whatever a person was doing to keep the wolf away from the door. In my case it was working as a security guard. This is all pretty much par for the course for the movie industry, especially the acting side of it. If you are uncomfortable with that sort of uncertainty it's best to get the hell out and go do something else. I found I was not cut out for it.

There were a number of things I hated about it but probably nothing more than the worry about when the next check will come in. I also felt completely estranged from anything remotely creative. Movie making seemed to me to be an overwhelmingly logistical process. Not much different than the mobilization of armies. Such endeavors by their very nature tend to be Fascist. You can't seek advice from every guy involved on how to get something done when you're doing movies or else nothing ever gets done. It's for this reason that directors tend to wield so much power on set. I think it was the megalomaniac Coppola who once said, "I love directing, it's the last truly dictatorial post in an increasingly democratic world." If it's true that the director has great power and is the guy who brings his vision to the screen then I think it's also true that the actor is the last person in the world to have anything to offer. They show up, try to remember their lines, and do what they are ordered to do. Creative input...just about zero. I'm told that the difference between a star and an actor is that the star actually has the power to have creative input. I wouldn't know, I've never had the opportunity to work beside a star and see the dynamic.

In the end, the experience of making Frost proved to be fairly heartbreaking for me. I spent quite a number of years feeling I was in a sort of limbo. Working dead end jobs for low pay and waiting for the phone to ring in the hopes that we were shooting again. All that sort of thing is understandable, that's the deal with movie making. But after pinning your hopes on something its nice to see results. And here we come to the rub of motion picture making. You have no control over whether or not a project is good or bad. I even think that the director has little or no control over whether or not the film is bad. The extraordinary things that have to happen to make a film that is worth seeing are so numerous that it boggles the mind. Even the director is at the mercy of changing attitudes toward subject matter at the time of a projects release, or the whims of the producer who is writing the check.

Understanding these things are of little comfort when you work hard on something for years and see a finished product that your ashamed to show anyone. In the five years that it took to make that picture my weight ranged anywhere from 150 to 200lbs. There are scenes in the movie where the vampire is anything but svelte. It's embarrassing, and there is no one to blame but myself. I will say the same of my performance. I remember watching that movie for the first time edited together and thinking, "Shit man, that's some bad acting." I really was crushed.

There is an upside to this story and I'll leave this post on that note. I was dreading showing this film to my father more than anything in the world. I had talked a lot of smack over those five years about how this was gonna be a great movie once it got made. I'm gonna be great...a big hairy deal...blah, blah, blah.

It was almost a year after I had relocated back to Kentucky that the movie was released on video. I remember sitting with my Dad at his place and he turned to me and asked, "Hey, when is that movie you did gonna be out anyway?" I winced because I knew that it had been out for a week or so and the reviews were not good. I swallowed hard and said, "Well Pop, the truth is it came out last week. " He wanted to know why I hadn't said anything and I told him it was because it wasn't worth watching and I was somewhat embarrassed by it all. Dad began putting on his shoes and grabbed his car keys. I asked where he was going and he said, "Get in the car, I wanna go to Blockbuster and rent my son's movie."

When we got it home my Dad watched every frame of that picture including the credits. He watched it all leaning forward in his chair, looking at the screen like a tree full of young owls. He never spoke the whole time he was watching and I sat in the other living room chair squirming. As the last credit rolled he turned and asked, "Well, what do people say about this movie? Do the critics like it?" I laughed out loud and said, "You wanna see what people think of it just check out some of the reviews on Amazon." To my shock Dad proceeded to do just that. He went to his PC and read everything he could find on the movie.

After about half an hour he tuned, looked right at me, and said, " You know what all these people have in common? Not one of them has ever done anything in their whole lives but lay on the couch and WATCH movies. You and your friends on the other hand, got up off your asses and made something. I am very proud of you son, I don't give a damn what these people think. You and your friends really did something, and I know it couldn't of been easy or else a hell of a lot more people would be doing it."

I don't think I ever loved my father more than I did in that moment. I'm just damned lucky to be his son and now that I'm a Dad I hope I can be as good a father as he is to me...

L.A. Stories

I lived and worked in Los Angeles California for about four years. I had moved there from San Diego in the late 90's looking to get into movies. Doing story board work, acting, whatever I could get. In the end what I could get turned out to be very little and since the bills still have to get paid I took a job as a security guard. I was posted to a place in Encino called Encino Terrace Center and charged with keeping an eye on things from midnight to eight in the morning. It turned out to be a pretty cool job. I did have to wear a suit and that was a fucking bummer, but on the whole I was my own boss and rarely did I ever see so much as another living soul.

The job allowed me to draw, paint and work on my portfolio. I was still scrambling to get movie work so whenever that sort of offer came along I would quit and be off to adventures in the screen trade. At the time there was something like 2% unemployment in the San Fernando Valley and it was easy just to quit a job and come back a few weeks later. They would hire you on again as they were so desperate. It wasn't just the unemployment situation that was to blame for this anomaly...the drug scene was a contributing factor as well. To stand a post as a security officer you had to be able to pass a drug test and a lie detector test about your past drug use. I was clean as a whistle when I lived in Burbank. Not from any Reaganesqe commitment to just saying no, but rather, my lack of coin. Most people in LA don't let the lack of money stand in the way of their buzz and as a consequence finding sober people to stand a post is a real challenge for the private security companies.

The place I worked was enormous in scale. Four stories above street level filled with offices and four below for parking. The footprint of the building was an entire city block and to do the rounds could fill close to an hour. That explains why that seldom got done. There were a number of high profile clients who had offices there. Paine Webber had most of the fourth floor and, believe it or not, the production offices of John Travolta were on the third floor. I don't know if they're there still there but if you wanna stop in I'm sure they would love to see you, especially if you express an interest in Scientology. The one time I had to enter that suite (helping some window washers get access) I found the joint filled with books on Scientology and little signs over the books encouraging you to borrow one. The other noticeable aspect of those offices were the enormous life sized photos of Travolta on almost every wall.

Well, what the hell, that sort of thing worked for Mao.

During the day shift the guards were all "in house" security. Some were retired cops and some were younger guys looking to get into the Academy. At any rate, they were serious. The graveyard shift however was outsourced to flunkies like me who really didn't give a damn about security. We were just there so the building owner could make hands on Bible promises to the insurance company that there was "on site" security twenty four hours a day. As my job was to do nothing more than show up with a heartbeat (and believe me the pay reflected this) I never really could get it up for doing anything above and beyond the call. There was an incident that illustrates this point...

I was wrapping up the night shift one morning when there was a call on the emergency line from one of the tenants. I picked up the phone and found that it was the big health insurance company on the third floor. The woman was hysterical saying that they had just canceled the insurance of a client who's son was suffering from cancer. The guy had flipped out on the phone and said that he was three blocks away at the doctor's office. He had had enough of the insurance companies shit and was headed their way with a .357 magnum to quote, "Kill everyone of you crooked fuckers!"

The woman on the phone assured me that this was no joke as the the Doctor's office had called right after the guy left and said he had went to get something from his car and headed down the street toward Encino Terrace Center. I hung up the phone and turned to the day shift guys who were just coming on duty and brought them up to speed on what the lady upstairs had just said. I then smiled and said, "so while you guys deal with that, I'll be across the street at Starbuck's having a coffee and a bun. Good luck men."

As I was hauling my precious ass out the door the head of building security arrived at the desk and was advised of the situation by the guys I had just told. He nodded and then asked where the hell I had gone off to. The guys said that I was headed across the street for a coffee but I had promised to come back just as soon as the coast was clear. To the boss's credit he just chuckled and told one of the guards to radio me and see if I'd score him a mocha Latte. He was smart enough to know that a buck more than minimum wage doesn't buy a lot of courage.

In the end the pissed off guy with the gun was a no show (thank God) but the Latte arrived as ordered.

Who, What, When and Where...

Welcome to the online journal of Charles R. Lister. I suppose I should start by saying a few things about myself. Things like the who, what, when and where. I was born in Danville, Kentucky in the spring of 1968. I grew up in that small town but in the summer of my freshman year my father relocated to Lexington, Kentucky where I graduated from Henry Clay Sr. High. After that I landed at Eastern Kentucky University studing art and theater, a choice that secured for me a life of grinding poverty.

I am however, rich with experience.

How so? Well, let's see, I've backpacked across Europe, ridden a motorcycle across America (twice), worked as an illustrator for a comic book company in New York City, Acted in a couple of Hollywood movies and even sailed the Channel islands. But in the end I returned to my home in Kentucky where I married the most beautiful woman in the whole world, an adventure that six months ago produced a little boy by the name of Thomas Wyatt Lister. After all the knocking around the map, I can honestly say that I now have everything I never knew I always wanted.