pebble ear, wrapped tree, untasted delights

1. According to the medical websites, putting objects in one’s ears is a characteristic of small children and the intellectually challenged. However, I know a highly intelligent adult –- you don’t know the fellow or gal –- who put a pebble in his or her ear the other night and hasn’t removed it yet.

2. Hula hoops hanging from a chinaberry; a locked door standing alone halfway down the path from the curb to the house; a dead tree trunk wrapped in white paper painted to have frizzy black hair, goo-goo eyes, and red lipstick, the two main branches turned into upflung white arms –- these things remind us that we’re in the bobo sub-art capital of the southwest.

3. Every Friday I hope to get the half-chicken special at Pok-e-Jo’s barbecue, which can serve me for two meals, but every Friday I either have something more important to do, or forget because I’m focused on work. I must learn to treat myself better –- as people are always telling me.

leaf impressions, quack not clack, Great Pyrenees

1. At the newly landscaped pond at the multi-use development, the designers imprinted leaves and grasses into the wet cement so that the impressions dried in. Not until after I drive off do I wonder whether they took real plants from the surrounding fields, or used ready-made stamps. Oh no, how will I know whether I’m allowed to like it or not?

2. A nearby clacking: at first I think it’s my phone mischievously taking snapshots inside my pocket, but it’s a pair of quacking waterbirds at the edge of the pond, small and black with off-white bills, quick-paddling this way and that through the grass and algae and dipping for munchables, and followed by three fuzzy chicks with red bills who wonder, “What’s next?”

3. The dogs are out, their masters putting on or taking off their leashes. From the other side of the pond I’m planning what I’m going to say to the leash-removers if I command myself not to chicken out. But by the time we’re all on the same side of the pond it’s occurred to me that these people may know how to handle their animals –- canine-human pairs stop on the path to greet one another and separate with no horrible consequences -- and that the only unpeaceful things in the scene are my own judgments. In a wild departure, I smile at one of the dog owners and ask him what breed his big beautiful dog is: it’s a Great Pyrenees.

rabbits are back, additional tax, gifted apprentice

1. For months the sign at Long Horn Meat has said “Rabbits Are Back.” I would have thought the rabbits would have run past by now.

2. I’m working at a café this morning but I forgot to get a receipt for my latte and schnecken. That’s an extra dollar I’ll have to pay in taxes!

3. The art on the walls this week is better than usual for this kind of place. The kid -– it’s undoubtedly an art student – can draw figures, has a sense of how to position the human body to compose within a frame, uses an attractive palette – lots of white, black details, and backgrounds in nuanced shades of warm and cool-– and rarest of all, can paint facial and gestural expressions. Oil/watercolor/marker on paper. There’s a closeup of a young woman tilting her head onto her shoulder, where the head fills the upper right quadrant with white skin, red lips, and black eyebrows, leading the viewer down to the white neck and chest of the lower left: geometric and human equally. It’s hard to tell whether the paintings were done from photographs. The faces are so real, I’d say yes; but the figures’ stances are paintinglike; people don’t usually stand in those attitudes unless posing. Skillful cropping of snapshots could do it. Which in itself requires a fine eye, so it’s not cheating. A future professional, perhaps a book illustrator. I’d buy a piece if I were a bit more sentimental.

simple, small, maybe

1. I like simple things. Japanese brush painting. Early Hemingway. Three-chord songs. Art turned down so much it explodes. I suspect that not only will I never achieve it, but that given my personality, my history, my aptitudes and limitations and environment, my neural wiring, it’s exactly the wrong goal.

2. Or maybe I’m a born miniaturist.

3. Maybe.

your friend the brain, it’s the arts, it’s all a conspiracy

1. The human brain has no delete function, yet there has never been a case of one running out of storage capacity.

2. Stories are an attempt to see the future. Music is an attempt to undo time. Painting is an attempt to unfold space.

3. Society is a vast conspiracy to miss the point. But that may be the only way we can get where we’re going.

Portrait of an Artist

Ellis Gallagher, a 32-year-old Brooklynite, began as a graffiti artist, but quit after a friend was struck by a train while painting in a subway tunnel. Then Gallagher was mugged by a guy wielding a machete. The traumas somehow led Gallagher to invent the genre of shadow art: he goes around Brooklyn with sidewalk chalk, outlining the shadows of common objects such as stop signs and bicycles.

Read about him here.