If you find yourself blocked while starting to write something originial, write a short piece on something you know. Pick your "Groundhog Day", the one day you could happily live over and over if you were stuck in a time loop.
Phil (Bill Murray) : I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster and drank pina coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. *That* was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over…
I have always been fascinated with caterpillars, the first thing I ever remember drawing was a green caterpillar, my first poem was about a caterpillar too, it went something like "catty hatty went to latty". The idea of metamorphasizing into another, more beautiful, creature has always stuck with me, perhaps it is my soul reminding me that we, as mortals, are merely larval too…
Spring 1990, my car had been towed away but I didn’t care, I couldn’t afford the insurrance, the wipers were broken and when the tire blew I knew it was the end. It had been given to me by my ex-fiances dad and I saw it as a poetic end to things, just leave it where it broke down and move on…
Lynn had been my first love, we’d been together for three years or so. To our friends we looked like the local version of Sid and Nancy and just as destined to fail gloriously. I knew that I had been to blame, at least partially, for the breakup and while I had virtually no experience in love prior to meeting her I didn’t think I’d end up feeling so dirty.
My worst fear was that I was an asshole like my dad, just not cut out for family style love and I too would end up running away to some third world country where life is cheap and rules are lax. I mean El Salvador was hardly a tourist destination in the 1980’s…
I didn’t dwell on it too much as I was having too much fun. In the microcosm that was MUW and the Possum Town area I was well known by sight and by voice. I might not have been the only guy who had a mohawk, possibly though, but I sure as hell was the only one who had had a fiance with one! I had the only car that was painted with peace and anarchy signs and had the first punk rock radio show on fm there.
The semester after the breakup I moved into the dorms on a campus that was 70-80% women, the school had been a womans college in the old days of segregation but now welcomed men, but because history and tradition meant so much to the board of trustees they still called the college Mississippi University for Women, which, I hate to admit, is one of the reasons I had made plans to leave after my sophmore year and finish my degree at Southern Illinois U.
I had a lot of friends, half a dozen of which I know are still just as cool, beautiful and creative as they were back then and they were the ones who I’d hug often. I had a few friends in town left from my air force days, my skate punk comrades and my stoner buddies. The art students liked me enough to make me their representative for the student government, not bad for a sophomore! and the teachers tolerated my eccentric use of their property, like the night we had that huge tye-dye party in the art building ha!
The art building is where I fell in love for the second time. My friends and I called her The Groovy Chick. She was a senior and I later found out that she was a non-local-born misfit too, she just didn’t make it as obvious as me. One night we found ourselves taking a break together outside the art department and it happened, totally unexpectedly, love in all it’s glory. Perhaps the fact that we were both moving on in a matter of months allowed us the luxury of romance without having to think of the future. Her friends appeared to disapprove and my friends were concerned that I’d get hurt which only made it sweeter for the both of us.
One day I picked a bunch of wildflowers for her and she had them on her desk in the graphic design room.
Which brings me to my groundhog day.
I visited The Groovy Chick at her desk one sunny day and noticed that the flowers had just started crawling with baby caterpillars! I called up Biff Brown who was DJing and asked him to get people to name the caterpillars and dedicate songs to them. Biff played along and so did the listeners. I remember that Brian Pounders dedicated "The Great Gig In The Sky" to the caterpillar called "No" who had died, I wonder if Brian remembers that? Was it Ultra Violet who gave the name of "Gloomchild" to one? I’m pretty sure it was Biff himself who named one "Reginald Gurmy Epstein the third" haha!
Biff recorded his show and gave me the tape, and below are a couple of soundbites from that day in 1990.
I don’t remember the rest of the day but it was perfect, I know that much….
Actually, it might have been the day we went off into the woods to pick blackberrys which inspired my great lost poem "Blackberry Pirates"….
The border on this acrylic painting called "The Family" was done with the crackle glue effect! This jpg however has a digital edge effect on the outside which distorts it somewhat. It was my first in an ongoing series of canvases with a frame or organic border painted as part of the design.