Five New Drawings with Brief Introduction

The Author as Psychedelic Leather Daddy

As my ever-attentive and heavily taxed mother walked me to school on my first day of first grade, I clung to and pulled at her desperately, pleading not to be made to go and face my inevitable shame, sure she’d have to come pick me up in a few hours after they’d flunked me out of school and society for good. For the most part, I would argue that my anger is well-bound-together and even at times crystalline, but when I start to get flummoxed and the cortisol starts overloading the entire central nervous system, I can be hostile and quite frightening in my extrajudicial outreach and ghastly pinwheel hyperactivity. It would not surprise me if I died in some unimaginably stupid way on account of an intense outburst of momentary road rage. Sometimes when I scream an obscenity aloud thinking I’m alone and realize someone else is in hearing distance, the wretchedness and pitifulness that befall me are like a kind of marvel. I think a lot about what happens when the flight instinct is turned on full blast for days and days and there’s simply nowhere to go and no damned end to it. Kierkegaard’s ‘sickness unto death,’ a sickness of the self in relating to itself, is precisely the living impasse of self-relating (which is mimetic of the basic condition of the addict). First we are alienated by basic epistemology and then we are alienated by our swinish fellows, digging in the shit in hopes of catching a quick tip. Your lack of emotional intelligence suits you. There’s no other way to access the trading floor. When I did a workshop with a pair of married gurus back in 2009, I was told that there is a massive amount of terror hiding in the base of my spine and that this terror is in my case unusually accessible. I can go from zero to full terror in fractions of a second. That’s where I was as my mother walked me to school that first day, commencement of years of trials and abuses concerning which no small boy could ever be expected to imagine any unthinkable particular: a nine or ten on the terror scale. Here again my strong intuitions prove all but perfectly sound. Grade school was a wasteland like Eliot’s:

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

The fluorescent lights at school gave me horrible migraines all the time. I seemed always to have contact dermatitis, eczema, and/or a mouthful of canker sores. My hockey padding and uniform were hard on my skin and sometimes playing was agonizing and very itchy. I knew the kids with whom I was growing up were going to devolve the world a good deal more than it already had been, possibly beyond recourse now anyway, and that this was terrifying and very unsettling. My body was rejecting the whole agonizing theatre of operations, entering into maladaptive patterns, looking for asymmetric ways to engage stronger adversaries. I wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of everything, not that I expected for a moment that such an entity would be able to comfort me or offer assurances of any kind. Filmmaker and alcoholic John Huston said that God is drunk. Surely Huston eventually figured out, either on this shore or the other: drunk is far too gentle a word for it. That surveilling eye in the sky? He’d apparently happily watch us all die, the more gruesome and protracted the better. I bet God is a fat sadistic fuck eating popcorn. The more optimistic undercurrent in this new batch of drawings hints I think maybe at the possibility that all kinds of people who like all sorts of puzzles will help put space-time back together again.

Walter Brennan Tripping on Acid at Christmastime 

I Love Chlöe Parks

At the Best Western Jacuzzi Suite

Cock, Balls, and Music Halls

Goddamn Fucking Pigeons