It is Saturday afternoon.

The bookstore (Cantos Bookseller in Roanoke, VA– thanks to Julia M for finding all these reviews of the nutty place) is deserted except for me, Mike, and a fiftyish bookseller with three feet of hair in several shades of gray and one of those floppy hippy dresses with a cardigan over it. Although I do not look at her legs, I imagine she is wearing striped stockings like the Wicked Witch of the East.

I pick up a book at random. It turns out to be cowboy pornography. I flip through.

I inform Mike, “This guy is having sex with a meatloaf.” I proceed to read the page incredulously out loud.

Distracted by this high quality* pornography, I don’t notice right away when the bookseller sidles up and hovers expectantly. When I pause to take a breath, she pounces.

“Interesting book, isn’t it?” She asks in a voice that grates and shrieks like sandpaper on a chalkboard in a classroom full of members of a preteen step team.

“Yes, it’s very… unusual**,” I reply.

“You actually have to BUY the books before reading them,” she snaps, snatching the book from my hand and putting it back on the shelf. “Otherwise it becomes A USED BOOK.”

I am dumbfounded and have no response. She flounces away, triumphant.

Discombobulated, I continue to browse. A few minutes later I see a book called How Starbucks Changed My Life. Thinking this looks like a refreshing change from the usual whining about how Starbucks is destroying an American coffeehouse culture it apparently actually invented, I pick it up. I am careful to only read the inside flap– hyper conscious of the bookseller, who stomps past me, glaring at my hands to make sure I am not looking at any actual pages. The book turns out to be a tedious mid-life crisis vehicle about someone who was downsized from a high powered job and learned to be a simple barista. The very thought makes me want to scream. I hate it when privileged people with tons of money decide they can reinvent themselves and join The Proletariat just by getting some crummy job that the rest of us had in high school and pray we will never have again. And then write a bestseller. (Admittedly, it can’t happen that often but I still hate it.) I put the book back as though it has burned my hands.

We leave the store. As we are leaving, the bookseller, who won’t look me in the face anymore, asks, “Are you just looking for a good book to read, or what?”

I mumble a reply to the effect that I was just browsing and escape.

Customer service, folks.

* “high quality” is a code word for “wrong- headed and poorly written.”
** “unusual” is a code word for “it sucks.”

Thesis accepted. Score!

And a dangerous foray into figuration. Or an embarrassing fumble into figuration? Who can say!

Not the world’s best painting, true, but I AM still painting, and painting something new, which puts me in the definite minority for recent MFA grads.

That’s right, baby.

Yesterday I passed my oral exam. Passed my exhibition too, and my thesis just needs to be formatted. I’ve almost got the MFA.

So I am pretty stoked about all of this.

Here is my gorgeous thesis. Hopefully the final draft.

There is another version, prettified in Adobe InDesign, and with the beautiful Caslon typeface, but I haven’t printed it yet. Or finished it, for that matter.

The show opening was awesome. I am totally stoked.

I was totally stoked pretty much all night.

A picture’s worth a thousand words.

And, here’s a new illustration.

“All Algiers lay around his feet like a cape of jewels and shells.”

From Camus, maybe?

This is one of the walls from my show tonight. Louise Wu, the artist I am exhibiting with, sent me this photo she took. The colors are not true to the original paintings- it’s hard to get colors right when photographing under gallery lights.

I hung my MFA thesis show today.

Only one piece did not get a home in the show:

It just wouldn’t fit anywhere. But life goes on.

So once again, here’s the info about the show.

What: Show opening!
Where: Flossie Martin Gallery (Powell Hall Room 200)- at Radford University
When: Friday Nov 7! 5-7 PM
After Party: 7 PM till Whenever! Sharkeys in Radford (1202 East Main) I’ll hand out maps at the opening.

Happy hour, with $1 mixed drinks, continues until 9. At some point, I will inevitably try to get everyone to dance.

Musical selections for this (enchanted?) evening will be the Top Gun soundtrack.

See you there!!

Yesterday I was overtaken by the urge to paint a bowl of roses.

So I am.

I choose roses based on?

Scent. And for some reason the hot pink roses usually smell great, better than the rest.

In drawing class today we were forced to draw hands. This always aggravates me because I have my own hands but I usually don’t have naked people lounging around the house. So it just seems like a pointless waste of class time to draw them. Not to mention the tuition money.

The model was holding some kind of rock. I thought it was kind of boring and remembered this image from Art History class last week:

It’s called Girl With A Kitten by Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud and considered one of the most important twentieth century painters of the human figure.

So just to make it clear- I’m not a sicko. This is not a scene that depicts animal cruelty. I love kittens, this one is completely imaginary, and no kittens were harmed in the creation of this drawing.

Sometimes in a life that includes drawing for 4 to 6 hours per day you have flashes of insight. Last week I realized that men’s genitals are darker than the rest of the skin but that you don’t want to draw them that way, or they become a focal point in your work, and then the work becomes either creepy or a piece of pornography. I’m not really into that. You want your work to look good, not necessarily completely accurate. If it’s just nasty, what’s the point?

Today I realized I had had enough of drawing our nude model’s grody colorful genitals. I put a fig leaf over that mess and I am a happier person. For your viewing pleasure:

Got new brakes this weekend. The truck stops a lot more readily and the moderately alarming shrieking metal noises have stopped. Sometimes I wonder if the thing is even turned on.

The car place guy told me several interesting things about my brakes. Another word for that might be, “mechanic.” First, brake pads should be smooth, and not look like this:

He said it wasn’t the most worn out brakes he’d ever seen, but was in the top five.

He also said that a problem with the Toyota 4Runner is that it’s so “sturdy” that you get situations like this one- it will still stop pretty reliably even though you have no brakes, and it will drive pretty reliably even though there’s no oil in it, and stuff like that. So I should pay more attention. I told him I would but I have to say his expression upon hearing this was somewhat skeptical.

Both lenses fell out this week. The culprit was a tiny screw that unscrewed itself and then disappeared. It is particularly hard to find brown screws the size of mechanical pencil lead on a brown carpet with one eye squinted shut and the other with a lens held up to it.

But it is relatively easy to grope around for paperclips. Unfortunately this means you have Crazy Person glasses and also blurred flying giant paperclip shapes in your peripheral vision.

Why it happens at 2/3 AM is a mystery to me.

I wrote a haiku.

daylight savings? no
real vacation. fresh sheets don’t
smell of unwashed man

The theme is Saturday laundry efforts and circular polarities of time.

Locked myself out of the house this morning. That jingle in my coat pocket was not keys, but loose change. This is why I clip the keys to my belt loop. It is to prevent Tragedy. Absentminded, they say.

It was a cold morning pissing with rain. Frigid. The day also featured playful gusts of wet, wet, wind – cruel like the whims of a child.

Very bracing weather. Such weather makes Men.

Fortunately I had Bruce, my landlord, on my cell phone’s speed dial. I stood stolidly on the porch, ignoring the elements like the neanderthal brute that I am. Eventually some toady of his showed up in a lined parka and opened the door. Our Hero was saved.

This, while not the optimal human circumstance, was a lot better than many human circumstances and did after all last only 20 minutes. And I was not naked.

I drove on to Starbucks where I consumed 20 ounces of coffee in 10 minutes and thereafter effectively joined the human race. I’ve been part of it for the rest of the day.