No one could see me
Alone and all by myself
I was wrong, both times
Friday, May 9, 2014
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Unfriended and Blocked...
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This interweb thingy is a strange thing.
In my entire life, before 'social media', I doubt I have known the full names of more than twenty non-family members. I'm serious. I can look through my high school yearbook and recognize photos as people I interacted with regularly, but for the life of me I can not say that I knew their names.
I remember dating a girl for an entire summer and not knowing her last name. The only thing I had to go on was a scrap of paper with her first name and a phone number. After the fourth week of our 'relationship' I spent a weekend scouring the school yearbook for her photo only to find out that she was a transfer student from an all girls catholic school and didn't have a senior photo. Three months later, I ended up resorting to picking through her family's mail and getting her last name off of a gas bill. Problem solved!
Entire friendships were founded upon a warm 'HEY YOU' or a thoughtful 'HEY DUDE'. I've had countless conversations with 'close' friends and never known or used their actual names. They knew my name but, to this day, I never knew their name. Once in a while I would get lucky and someone would say something like "Frank, are you going to Burger King?" and I would then have something to hang my hat on. Other times I would encounter the nightmare of a nameless friend meeting another one of my nameless friends and inquiring "So, Topher, are you going to introduce me to your friend?". That was like dancing in a fucking minefield. Usually, if we were in a nightclub or some other loud environment, I would lean over and mumble some unintelligible thing in their ear. Other times I would just make some lame assed joke to change the subject.
The internet changed all of that.
...OK, it didn't change it real fast.
Way back in 1993, I was so excited to have a 14.4k modem and a brand new AOL account. The idea of meeting new and interesting people from around the world seemed so exciting. I still remember the first time I engaged in sex-chat. She was tan0045 and I was lumpy001 and it was a Wednesday night. We had met in a chat room and quickly moved to our own 'private' chat room. We had began chating about Twilight Zone episodes, moved eventually towards spicy sexual innuendo and then we both exploded into a pornographic rant that would make last month's Penthouse Forum blush. Needless to say, I needed a fresh pair of underpants when all was said and done.
It wasn't until several months later that I learned that lonely men were masquerading as women in AOL chat-rooms and enticing heterosexuals into quasi-homosexual sex-chats. I doubt that tan0045 was a guy because she knew sexual things that only women knew, but news of the whole homo thing ended my run of sex-chats pretty quickly.
Regardless of sexual orientation though, I realized that I still did not know tan0045's full name. Tan0045 was only a screen name and I had not moved any further from my habits of anonymous friendships. But, at least I had now moved on to faceless anonymous friendships with a happy ending.
Over time, AOL evolved and I matured. Looking back, AOL and all of it's awkward, anonymous and messy sexual encounters, best represented my early teens. The time between AOL and Myspace could best be represented as my mid to late twenties. You know what I mean, a lonely Saturday night spent with rented VHS porn and a jar of Vaseline.
Yep, life back then pretty much sucked.
While Myspace seemed pretty good at the time and could best represent my late twenties and early thirties, the dawning of Facebook was a complete game changer and truly represents my life as I am today and who I have always wanted to be. I now have over 500 Facebook friends and if I want to know any of their names, all I have to do is click their picture. It's all there for me and easy as pie. I can see their high school prom pictures, how hot their teen-aged daughters are, what movies they like, where they work, where they eat and who they are sleeping with. How easy is that?
I also love getting friend requests and seeing that it is a nameless someone from my past who I used to know.The excitement, of looking over their Facebook photo albums to see if I recognize them from my past and clicking around their profile to see what they have been up to since 1986, is epic.
Well, that fantastic journey can sometimes be a one way street that is not shared by both parties.
"Why do you post stuff like that? You're weird"
The above message was posted to my Facebook wall by someone I had a major crush on in high school. She was a cute girl who's name I never knew, until she became my Facebook friend. Her post was in response to my sharing of a wonderful photograph of a couple of Hooter's waitress's enjoying each others company. At first I was intrigued by her post and excited with the slim hope that she was masking her own wonderful fascination with Hooter's style pantyhose with a healthy dose of theatrical disgust at my post.
Boy I was wrong.
While we ended up 'chatting' back and forth via Facebook for a couple weeks and I found out that she was now a divorced mother raising three wonderful children, her disgust at my public fascination for the female form encased in pantyhose became to much for her handle and she felt the need to tell me.
Almost every one of my Hooter's posts would get a message from her. Until....
It was a week night and I was in my studio when I first noticed that I was at 499 friends. Someone had dropped me, but who was it? A quick stroll through my 'inbox' answered that question. I could see her messages to me, but the her name was now listed as 'Facebook user' and her picture was that generic gray silhouette against a baby blue background. When I clicked on her picture, Facebook told me that her account was not available. A quick Google for some answers and I found out that she had probably de-friended and blocked me. The crush was over.
Maybe it was for the best? The person who had that crush way back then was a very shy and private person. I am as different now from who I was way back then as AOL is different from Facebook. Now I'm public and out there shaking it free and in the breeze; like a guy with a closed head injury who now doesn't know the difference between 'inside the head' thoughts and 'outside the head' thoughts. Facebook allows me to be the man I have always wanted to be; unafraid to post my hopes and dreams for all to see. If little miss-divorced with three kids and hates pantyhose doesn't like what I post, well fuck her. I have 499 other, very close friends, who DO like to read my posts regarding Hooter's waitress' encased in sheer suntan hue pantyhose.
CLICK THIS AND BUY A COPY
This interweb thingy is a strange thing.
In my entire life, before 'social media', I doubt I have known the full names of more than twenty non-family members. I'm serious. I can look through my high school yearbook and recognize photos as people I interacted with regularly, but for the life of me I can not say that I knew their names.
I remember dating a girl for an entire summer and not knowing her last name. The only thing I had to go on was a scrap of paper with her first name and a phone number. After the fourth week of our 'relationship' I spent a weekend scouring the school yearbook for her photo only to find out that she was a transfer student from an all girls catholic school and didn't have a senior photo. Three months later, I ended up resorting to picking through her family's mail and getting her last name off of a gas bill. Problem solved!
Entire friendships were founded upon a warm 'HEY YOU' or a thoughtful 'HEY DUDE'. I've had countless conversations with 'close' friends and never known or used their actual names. They knew my name but, to this day, I never knew their name. Once in a while I would get lucky and someone would say something like "Frank, are you going to Burger King?" and I would then have something to hang my hat on. Other times I would encounter the nightmare of a nameless friend meeting another one of my nameless friends and inquiring "So, Topher, are you going to introduce me to your friend?". That was like dancing in a fucking minefield. Usually, if we were in a nightclub or some other loud environment, I would lean over and mumble some unintelligible thing in their ear. Other times I would just make some lame assed joke to change the subject.
The internet changed all of that.
...OK, it didn't change it real fast.
Way back in 1993, I was so excited to have a 14.4k modem and a brand new AOL account. The idea of meeting new and interesting people from around the world seemed so exciting. I still remember the first time I engaged in sex-chat. She was tan0045 and I was lumpy001 and it was a Wednesday night. We had met in a chat room and quickly moved to our own 'private' chat room. We had began chating about Twilight Zone episodes, moved eventually towards spicy sexual innuendo and then we both exploded into a pornographic rant that would make last month's Penthouse Forum blush. Needless to say, I needed a fresh pair of underpants when all was said and done.
It wasn't until several months later that I learned that lonely men were masquerading as women in AOL chat-rooms and enticing heterosexuals into quasi-homosexual sex-chats. I doubt that tan0045 was a guy because she knew sexual things that only women knew, but news of the whole homo thing ended my run of sex-chats pretty quickly.
Regardless of sexual orientation though, I realized that I still did not know tan0045's full name. Tan0045 was only a screen name and I had not moved any further from my habits of anonymous friendships. But, at least I had now moved on to faceless anonymous friendships with a happy ending.
Over time, AOL evolved and I matured. Looking back, AOL and all of it's awkward, anonymous and messy sexual encounters, best represented my early teens. The time between AOL and Myspace could best be represented as my mid to late twenties. You know what I mean, a lonely Saturday night spent with rented VHS porn and a jar of Vaseline.
Yep, life back then pretty much sucked.
While Myspace seemed pretty good at the time and could best represent my late twenties and early thirties, the dawning of Facebook was a complete game changer and truly represents my life as I am today and who I have always wanted to be. I now have over 500 Facebook friends and if I want to know any of their names, all I have to do is click their picture. It's all there for me and easy as pie. I can see their high school prom pictures, how hot their teen-aged daughters are, what movies they like, where they work, where they eat and who they are sleeping with. How easy is that?
I also love getting friend requests and seeing that it is a nameless someone from my past who I used to know.The excitement, of looking over their Facebook photo albums to see if I recognize them from my past and clicking around their profile to see what they have been up to since 1986, is epic.
Well, that fantastic journey can sometimes be a one way street that is not shared by both parties.
"Why do you post stuff like that? You're weird"
The above message was posted to my Facebook wall by someone I had a major crush on in high school. She was a cute girl who's name I never knew, until she became my Facebook friend. Her post was in response to my sharing of a wonderful photograph of a couple of Hooter's waitress's enjoying each others company. At first I was intrigued by her post and excited with the slim hope that she was masking her own wonderful fascination with Hooter's style pantyhose with a healthy dose of theatrical disgust at my post.
Boy I was wrong.
While we ended up 'chatting' back and forth via Facebook for a couple weeks and I found out that she was now a divorced mother raising three wonderful children, her disgust at my public fascination for the female form encased in pantyhose became to much for her handle and she felt the need to tell me.
Almost every one of my Hooter's posts would get a message from her. Until....
It was a week night and I was in my studio when I first noticed that I was at 499 friends. Someone had dropped me, but who was it? A quick stroll through my 'inbox' answered that question. I could see her messages to me, but the her name was now listed as 'Facebook user' and her picture was that generic gray silhouette against a baby blue background. When I clicked on her picture, Facebook told me that her account was not available. A quick Google for some answers and I found out that she had probably de-friended and blocked me. The crush was over.
Maybe it was for the best? The person who had that crush way back then was a very shy and private person. I am as different now from who I was way back then as AOL is different from Facebook. Now I'm public and out there shaking it free and in the breeze; like a guy with a closed head injury who now doesn't know the difference between 'inside the head' thoughts and 'outside the head' thoughts. Facebook allows me to be the man I have always wanted to be; unafraid to post my hopes and dreams for all to see. If little miss-divorced with three kids and hates pantyhose doesn't like what I post, well fuck her. I have 499 other, very close friends, who DO like to read my posts regarding Hooter's waitress' encased in sheer suntan hue pantyhose.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
It's Been a While...
Have you seen my books for sale?
Click here and buy several copies
Those damn things have been keeping me very busy.
So how has it been shakin'? This winter has been a bitch hasn't it?! Sucks to be a hobo.
Coming home from the studio the other day, I passed one of our town's lovable urine scented hobos standing near the freeway entrance ramp with a tattered cardboard sign that read "truly homless hard worker any help needed god bless". Of course I drove by without even looking in my cup holder to see how much spare change I had. Fuck 'em. Coldest day of the goddam year and this asshole is standing on a street corner begging for spare change? Really?! I freeze my ass off everyday in an unheated art studio making art that no one buys so I can give what ever cash I have to some dirty hobo on a street corner? That shit wont fly in my book.
When I got home, I my hobo encounter got the old gears turning. I couldn't help but to think about what life choices we both made to place us where we where in life. You know, those specific points in our lives, when we make a simple decision and it irrevocably alters, for better or worse ,our journey through this mortal world.
For example, if I created enough art that people actually wanted to buy, I could have heat in the winter. Or, if the panhandling hobo had never tasted the sweet intoxicating nectar that is gin, he may have very well been a United States senator that help write a law that gives every voting American exactly what they want for the rest of their lives. The dude would have been a fucking king if he had never placed that clear glass bottle of gin to his lips. Well, shit happens.
That night, in front of a warm fire and with a fresh bottle of booze, I began to draw out a short list of things I have done that changed my life the most.
It's time to share my candy....
1: Loudly calling my son's Cub Scout den mother a "FUCKING CUNT" during a den meeting. Boy, there really is no coming back from that. The look in my son's eyes the next week when I had to tell him that we were not welcome in the Cub Scouts and that daddy had to give back his little kerchief and hat pretty much laid the foundation for his hatred for me during his pre-teen years.
2: Surrendering to peer pressure and trying that rope swing at Murray's Lake. The sunken log got the best of me that day. It's been over 30 years, five surgeries and I still can't maintain a full erection for more than four and a half minutes.
3: Proposing to my first wife at PF Chang's. Her fortune cookie that night said 'You will find disappointment in new adventures'. Eight months later, I found a used condom on the floor of our living room. It was one of those Magnum condoms for guys with really big wangs.
4: Not learning how to tell time. I know, it's stupid but true. Way back in like third grade we all took a class on how to read a clock. I just remember joking around the whole time with a group of really cool fourth graders at my table. I didn't learn a goddam thing and to this day I can only tell time from a digital clock.
5: The three separate times I used the phrase 'YOUR MAMA' to end what I thought was a harmless confrontation with an urban Detroit local after a Red Wings hockey game. You would have thought I had learned my lesson the first time I got my head kicked in. It took two more times for me to come to the conclusion that 'YOUR MAMA' is an 'inside your head' word.
Well, those are the first five I could think of. Let me know what yours are.
Click here and buy several copies
Those damn things have been keeping me very busy.
So how has it been shakin'? This winter has been a bitch hasn't it?! Sucks to be a hobo.
Coming home from the studio the other day, I passed one of our town's lovable urine scented hobos standing near the freeway entrance ramp with a tattered cardboard sign that read "truly homless hard worker any help needed god bless". Of course I drove by without even looking in my cup holder to see how much spare change I had. Fuck 'em. Coldest day of the goddam year and this asshole is standing on a street corner begging for spare change? Really?! I freeze my ass off everyday in an unheated art studio making art that no one buys so I can give what ever cash I have to some dirty hobo on a street corner? That shit wont fly in my book.
When I got home, I my hobo encounter got the old gears turning. I couldn't help but to think about what life choices we both made to place us where we where in life. You know, those specific points in our lives, when we make a simple decision and it irrevocably alters, for better or worse ,our journey through this mortal world.
For example, if I created enough art that people actually wanted to buy, I could have heat in the winter. Or, if the panhandling hobo had never tasted the sweet intoxicating nectar that is gin, he may have very well been a United States senator that help write a law that gives every voting American exactly what they want for the rest of their lives. The dude would have been a fucking king if he had never placed that clear glass bottle of gin to his lips. Well, shit happens.
That night, in front of a warm fire and with a fresh bottle of booze, I began to draw out a short list of things I have done that changed my life the most.
It's time to share my candy....
1: Loudly calling my son's Cub Scout den mother a "FUCKING CUNT" during a den meeting. Boy, there really is no coming back from that. The look in my son's eyes the next week when I had to tell him that we were not welcome in the Cub Scouts and that daddy had to give back his little kerchief and hat pretty much laid the foundation for his hatred for me during his pre-teen years.
2: Surrendering to peer pressure and trying that rope swing at Murray's Lake. The sunken log got the best of me that day. It's been over 30 years, five surgeries and I still can't maintain a full erection for more than four and a half minutes.
3: Proposing to my first wife at PF Chang's. Her fortune cookie that night said 'You will find disappointment in new adventures'. Eight months later, I found a used condom on the floor of our living room. It was one of those Magnum condoms for guys with really big wangs.
4: Not learning how to tell time. I know, it's stupid but true. Way back in like third grade we all took a class on how to read a clock. I just remember joking around the whole time with a group of really cool fourth graders at my table. I didn't learn a goddam thing and to this day I can only tell time from a digital clock.
5: The three separate times I used the phrase 'YOUR MAMA' to end what I thought was a harmless confrontation with an urban Detroit local after a Red Wings hockey game. You would have thought I had learned my lesson the first time I got my head kicked in. It took two more times for me to come to the conclusion that 'YOUR MAMA' is an 'inside your head' word.
Well, those are the first five I could think of. Let me know what yours are.
Monday, December 30, 2013
The Walk of Shame
"Everyone loved your work. Sorry we didn't sell anything"
And with a halfhearted "oh, that's OK, it really was a very strong show though", my 8 foot crated works of art and I were out the door.
The walk of shame consists of the last trip out of a gallery after taking down and packing up your unsold work. Sometimes, from behind a desk and without even trying to pretend standing up, the gallery agent (usually an unpaid intern) will throw you a "Do you need help with the door?".
"No, I got it. But thanks!"
There are varying degrees of shame. The easiest to take is the summer group show consisting of older flailing artists at the urban coffee house where absolutely no one questions you when you unhook your work from the wall and walk out on the last day of the show. The coffee house experience usually is followed with a promise to yourself to never ever show your art in a place that lacks even the most basic security AND that sells vegan sandwiches. The promises last about a year.
A group show at an established regional non-profit gallery can be a little more bitter, especially when your art is part of an annual fund raising silent auction. When that shit happens you almost want to call the joint and tell them to burn it in the alley rather than endure the walk. I mean, when I get invited to be a part of one of those shows, I usually try and give them something of quality that will appeal on a broad level and that has an attractive price point. That is why it fucking hurts when no one bids on it and I get the email to pick it up.
The bitterest pill is the solo show walk of shame where nothing sold, not even the goddamn prints. The whole afternoon consists of taking down, packing up every goddamn piece of art and walking out the door past other artists bringing their work in for the next show. I compare this experience to that time in high school when, by some random act of Christ, you and the hottest girl in school hook up. Yep, you know she has a 'history' and she is completely out of your league but you really think you are hot shit and can rock her world. For exactly one month she giggles at your jokes, seems interested in the same music as you and makes out with you in your car. Then nearing the end of your month long 'relationship', the planets align, the heavens part and the opportunity to shank her becomes a firm reality. It the back seat of your car she and you are naked from the waist down and nothing can stop what is going to happen. Well, almost nothing. Maybe it was because you were nervous. Maybe you should have rubbed one out before the date; or maybe it was God having a big laugh at your expense. What ever the reason, your date is now yelling at you in the dark for 'getting that shit in her hair' and also ruining her new acid washed jeans that she just bought.
During the ride home, several quiet apologies are thrown up and allowed to drop without acknowledgement. The last words spoken by you is a quivering 'I'll talk to you tomorrow' addressed to her back as she is closing the passenger car door and almost running to her front door. You instantly know that whatever you had with her is now over, but you don't know how bad it is until Monday when you get back to school. She is now avoiding you in the hallways and when you do see her between classes leaning up against her locker flirting with other boys (athletic types) she whispers to them and they both look at you and laugh as you walk by. You never forget that feeling.
That feeling is the equivalent to the solo gallery show, nothing fucking sold, come pick up your shit, take all of the fucking show post cards too, walk of shame. While it may never get better, every walk of shame gets you further away from the first one.
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Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Thursday, November 28, 2013
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