Sidetracked Charley

Wish my pantry looked like this. What I have is a small closet just off the kitchen that I added shelves in for the storage of stuff. Once that stuff related to the making of masks. Part of getting out of the mask business and back into painting and building the studio was having that closet back to store necessities like light bulbs and batteries, and paper towels, and more and more canned and boxed goods. Three winters ago we had six feet of snow in two days. The entire county was paralyzed and snowplows were used for opening up major arteries which had been closed down for three days. You have to go through a canyon or over a mountain pass to get here. And the gas tankers, food wholesalers, and tourists were either not getting out or not getting in. The tourists not getting out meant the filling stations and grocery store were soon empty. Locals, who work in the tourist trade, were not getting out of their houses because the snowplows were too busy. So thanks to the three week suppl...

As a child and even as an adult, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland has made a lasting impression on me. The caterpillar asking Alice, "Who are you?" was one of the most frightening scenes in the Disney movie. Maybe because I had an uncle that was a great deal like that caterpillar. He used to pick up my doll and tilt her back and forth to see her eyes close and open and then pick me up and tilt me and ask why my eyes did not open and close like hers. Do adults know the scary questions they pose to children? I could not have been more than four or five at the time. I think it was later before Disney came out with the movie of Alice in Wonderland, though Dad used to read from the book certain selections. My favorite was The Walrus and the Carpenter. I used to take the book and read it to myself at a very early age. Is that why I have "Wonderland" dreams. Or do we all dream like that at times and Lewis Carroll tapped into it with his words. Last night was one of ...

Another Internet purchase has gone astray. I love to shope on the Internet but it comes with certain inherent issues; mainly shipping address. I live in a rural area and have a postal box up by the highway. And a street address. If a package is being shipped by United States Postal Service they will deliver only to the box. And if UPS only to the street address. Fedex in the area is so screwed up I don't even want to hazard a guess. But everything only gets more complicated from that point. Because my street address is technically one zip code and my box address another. I live in the unincorporated area of Black Lake which technically does not have a zip code. UPS and Fedex are not suppose to use zip codes for delivery, but they do and if I have my box address on a package then UPS gets it on the wrong side of the mountain and Fedex puts it in the wrong distribution center. If I put the street address on something which is being shipped by US mail it winds up in general delivery a...

One of the side roads I took last week with my sister and her husband was to this meadow at the crest of the mountain ridge. It was here a couple weeks ago we had seen the herd of elk and we wanted to go back to get better pictures. The elk evidently did not share our same agenda and on the two mornings we laid in wait with cameras did not show up. Day one we picked a location in the trees and suffered for our art as we watched the dawn sun begin to warm the air and earth just beyond where we stood shivering and hungry as we had delayed breakfast to be there. Yesterday we wised up. We ate breakfast before our early predawn departure and picked the sunny side of the meadow. We sat soaking in the silence and the sun and the beauty around us in relative comfort. We had even dressed in more appropriate predawn clothing. Yes, I know it is August but in the highlands that means the nights are getting chillier again. In fact we even had a hard frost the night before. That is early for even th...

I want to applaud former President Bill Clinton for his recent trip to North Korea to negotiate the release of the imprisoned journalists. Some of us are born diplomats and some of us aren't. I noticed we did not send GW Bush. And they did not send me. In my youth I used to do anything (often self-destructive) to a avoid a fight or not burn a bridge. I listened to a relative, a visitor in my own home, call me insane and crazy and held my tongue. I later quietly suggested to his wife they might cut their visit short or find another place to stay. But there was no yelling and hitting on my part at that time. Or most if not all of the hundred other times I suffered his verbal abuse. Somewhere in my thirties it dawned on me that holding my tongue was directing a lot of anger that belonged elsewhere back at me. I was chronically depressed, had a problem with alcohol, and liked to toy around with suicide attempts. I say toy around because the major criteria for any attempt at suicide wa...

There is evidently a lot of time, energy and money being spent on determining how and where dogs were first domesticated. Asia has been held as home of the domestic dog because of the genetic diversity to be found there but most recently scientists are leaning toward Africa . I have to wonder if in the grand scheme of things such as pandemics and world economic collapse it really matters. As a life long owner of canines I know one thing for sure: Man did not domestic the dog. Woman did. If the origin of dogs are wolves (or even jackals which are another counter theory based on white on throat and tail) then it was done as puppies and only women would plead the case of a litter of wolf puppies. Tribal man who just killed the mother wolf would have seen the puppies as future moccasins. However, I do hold to the theory that dogs domesticated themselves. Early man developed trash dumps and the omega wolves (bottom of the pecking order) in a pack would have seen that as a buffet. Omega wol...

I was in an art fair recently where the judge tried to cram as many $10 terms into a 50 word judge's statement as was humanly possible. It has many of us with too much time on our hands racing to the community center public use computer and going to on line dictionaries. And ending up in philosophical discussions about how the term was applied. One of those terms was geospatial cultural influences. Basically that is how the land in which we live influences our culture and ergo our art. By that determination I believe I am part Navajo in culture, because we love the same land. But it does not merely explain what I paint but it also explains what people buy to hang on their walls. So clearly I paint the wrong things for the visitors from the plains. But then I also live in the wrong space to nurture my geospatial cultural heart. But then priests don't all live in Rome. So what is my relationship with the geography around me? I grew up in New Mexico - split between the moun...