Lost in the Atmosphere

The night before my journey to Portland, my friend Lyn cooked a send off dinner for me. We ate and drank and watched “Son of Rambow” (great movie by the way). As is usual for us, the movie was paused many times for little vignettes of talking. We rarely get through a film, and if we do it is usually in the wee hours of morning. This evening was no exception. We didn’t finish the film and I passed out around 5 am. This was extremely foolish behavior as I had a lot to accomplish the next day for my trip to Portland.

I rose wearily at 10:30 am mildly but persistently hung over. I took my cat to my Mom’s house and jumped in her pool hoping that I could shake the mind fog to no avail. Getting back home and washed my dishes and cleaned the house up a little. I finally succumbed to the urge to catch a catnap before packing. I figured I would be ok when I got to Portland because I would just catch up on some sleep on the plane ride.

Sitting in front of me on the plane to Portland is a man in his sixties. His big melon noggin bald save for a small square soul patch on the back of his head; a small plot of soft short white hair. The kid next to me points it out. I joke that he probably doesn’t even know it’s there, but almost in answer to our query his wife’s hand slides up to the back of his neck and begins to stroke the small arid patch delectably.

The bald man also has two earrings in his left ear. One is the standard gold diamond stud. The second is a tribal black curly-q, like a sharp worm impaled in his fatty lobe. He wears glasses and has a generous goatee. He smells like an old-time barbershop.

The kid sitting next to me is named Kyle. I guess him at about 14. He is a friendly.

“Hey bra, what kind of music do you like?”

“I like lots of different music, how about you?”

“I like lots of different music too, you like Eminem?”

“Yeah some of it.”

“What about Green Day?”

“Yeah I like Green Day.”

He flips open his CD wallet and starts digging.

“Which album do you like best?”

“I don’t know…’Dookie’, ‘Insomniac’, whatever.”

He pulls out ‘Dookie’ and put it in his CD player. He messes around with his ear buds, stretching them out and straightening the wires. He hands me a bud.

“Here bra.”

“Oh no, that’s ok.”

“Come on bro, it’s better when you share music with someone.”

How can I refuse such and invitation? He isn’t making this offer the guy sitting on the other side of him. I put the bud in my ear and the volume is full blast, all the sounds distorted. I decide to endure it. I hadn’t listened to ‘Dookie’ in probably nine years. I don’t think this kid was born when it came out. Soon we are both nodding our heads and drumming on our tray tables.

After six songs I’m done. He is done too. I pull out my notebook and start writing about the bald guy in front of me. He pulls out a notebook and starts drawing. As I glance over at his picture I can see that he is completely engrossed in drawing this tribal design with a large eye as its centerpiece. After a few minutes he stops and admires his work for a moment.

“Awesome!”

He continues to draw, stopping occasionally to look and verify its coolness. When he is finally done he proudly shows it to me. The final product looks like a giant eye with wings and claws.

“What do you think?”

“Pretty cool, I wouldn’t want to meet it on the street.”

“It’s just a design dude.”

“Yeah well I still wouldn’t want to meet it.”

“Tell me a design you would like me to draw.”

That’s a tough one. How do you tell someone a design to draw? I sit and think on it for a while. His eyes are upon me and I can tell his patience is wearing thin.

“I don’t know man, why don’t you make a coat of arms for yourself”

“I had to do that one time in my history class, I hated that.”

“Well that was an assignment, this is just for fun.”

“That was supposed to be for fun too.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, my first suggestion and you hate it.”

“Ok.”

He goes back to drawing and I go back to writing. After about five minutes he pushes the picture my way. He has drawn a literal coat and put symbols on it. I recognize musical notes, a game controller, and a key.

“Tell me about this.”

“Ok so it’s a jacket, you know a jacket of arms, I thought that was funny.”

I smile encouragingly.

“So this is a key because every coat of arms has to have a key for some reason. This is game controller because I love to play video games, and these are musical notes, because I love to listen to music, play music and compose music. I compose music.”

“Really, what do you play?”

“Piano…want to hear one of my original compositions?”

“Sure that would be great.”

He shuffles through his CD wallet again and produces a CD with a picture of him playing the piano printed on it. I listen through one ear bud to a simple little song with a drum machine, cheesy strings and piano. He explains as we are listening that the strings and the piano are playing against each other to make it sound more realistic. I nod and smile and listen. The song is over in two minutes.

“That was good, I liked it.”

I never mention that I used to make music or that I ever played in a band. I figure I will let him be the man of the hour.

The stewardess comes by to get our drink orders. He orders a ‘Monster’ I order club soda. The stewardess tells him its $3 and then goes over payment options, cash not being one of them.

“Wow.”

“I’ll come back for the payment later.”

“I don’t have any money!”

“Ok then.”

Ten minutes later she comes back with our drinks. Sure enough she gives him a ‘Monster’.

“I bought it for you hon.”

“Thanks!”

The kid is a charmer and he doesn’t even know it. Thank goodness for that. I think it is his still child-like response to the world. We became friends in only about two minutes. Adults don’t do that. I usually smile at my travel mates, pull out my pillow and fall asleep. Even with my friendly companion I wanted to sleep. Something about plane engines makes me almost unnaturally sleepy. But that wasn’t going to happen on this flight.

“You wanna play a game?”

“Sure, what kind of game?”

“You pick a letter from the alphabet and then you pick a subject like ‘animals’ and then you try to think of the most ‘animals’ that start with that letter.”

I get out my notebook and pick the letter D randomly from pointing my finger in a book. We start with animals. After naming about 14 animals we are stuck.

“What about a dingbat?”

I laugh.

“I don’t think so.”

We move on to my specialty, band names, and we are really tearing it up. Do you know how many bands start with the word “death”? We get up to 24 band names and he tells me this is record number that he has never been a part of before.

The captain comes on to tell us that we are landing and I can’t believe how fast time has gone by.

Stay tuned for the next installment, “Fear and Sleep Deprived in Las Vegas”.

A little ditty

Joplin has a little secret in May's Drug Warehouse on 7th Street. They have a lot of really cheap stuff, the greatest liquor deals in town and the best Muzac in Joplin. Seriously it is really wild. Not only are the tunes diverse but the volume is pumped up. Somebody really cares about music there. Now I'm told that sometimes it is country but I have yet to hear any. Today when I walked in Pete Shelley's "Homosapien" was playing! Pete Shelley in a Joplin retail business? That was followed by Terrence Trent D'Arby's "Wishing Well" which is surprisingly refreshing after all these years. Following that, Prince "Delirious" and The Fixx "Secret Seperation". Yes I was there for a while. The thing about Mays is that it has all this stuff kind of randomly placed everywhere and there is hardly ever more than two other customers. It reminds me of an old Ben Franklin or Skaggs store. Just a little of everything, everywhere. I find it strangely comforting.

I have this love/hate relationship with my house right now. I love my house, but sometimes I just want to put off coming home. Such is the lonely life I lead right now. I know what is going to happen when I get home because I'm in charge and that means I get my way, no surprises. Well no surprises is boring sometimes.

I do try to mix it up sometimes. I dance for my cat and she either approves or runs and hides. I read in the tub. I manically clean a part of the house. I sit outside and offer my flesh for the insects, which they greedily indulge in. I cook enough food for a family.

Last week I had my nephew Gabriel for four days. I was thinking it would cramp my style to have a seven year old around the house all the time, but to the contrary it was quite agreeable. We had a great time. I high-lighted his hair, which he was very patient with, and it looks awesome. I will post a pic soon. I taught him chess, which I'm not sure he is overly enthused about, but we did play four games of it. I read to him and he read to me. He built cool stuff with Legos, Lincoln Logs (their small, their awesome, their wood), and Tinker Toys (god I love all of those toys, I play with them when he isn't here) He made balsa wood dinosaurs. It was great. After he went to bed I still got a little me time and it was just enough.

So there is a blog of no real value but a little something. I have got to get back into the habit. It is good for me.

Please subscribe if you like reading. It puts pressure on me to continue.

Coming up soon:
The banality of modern communication.
Censorship examined.
A New Writer's Group
How You Can Change America
AND
How I grew up and quit worrying about the end of days.

Thanks for reading.

Poetry in Motion

So in my never-ending desire for a degree I am slowly whittling away at it by taking night classes. I can't get money for college anymore so it is coming out of my pocket entirely without any assistance. So this semester I'm taking Creative Writing:Poetry. On the side I have been trying to get the university more involved with all things Spiva. I mentioned to my teacher that it would be a cool idea to use our current photography exhibit for an experiment. She jumped on the idea immediately. The students came to see the exhibit and based poems on the photos in the show. Then we had a reading of the poems in the gallery with each photo being displayed behind them on a screen as they read. It was a huge success beyond my greatest hopes! So here is one of the poems I wrote. If you all like it I will post the other two. I'm not sure if people respond to poetry on my space or not.


Inspired by Family of Origin: Skiers

Here they were:

Grandpa with a crew cut,
strong arms and a barrel chest,
the kind of physique you only see in old films
when men were still men.

Grandma thin but healthy,
legs tanned and tight,
wearing a full body swimsuit that shows off all her curves,
back when women were supposed to have curves.

The kodachrome color makes all these memories obscure;
world and past become unreal.
These can’t be my grandparents
they don’t belong to me
they don’t belong to my memory.

Sure they have told me stories of their life,
stories I knew were connected to them.
But it always seemed like they were relating a movie they had seen.
I could never place them in the stories.

Grandpa a puny boy with asthma,
the runt of the family,
the unloved and unfavored son.

When I was younger all the stories were of hardship
and personal glory at overcoming all obstacles of being underestimated.
Stories of outsmarting the smart guys with his sixth grade education.

He once showed me a picture of him as a boy with his brothers.
He pointed at his two older brothers and himself.
“Like stair steps” he said, “I’m the bottom”.

One day all the boys were dreaming of the future
A future away from the poverty and dirt roads.
Harvey was gonna be a doctor,
Warren was gonna be a lawyer,
Grandpa didn’t know what he was gonna be,
but what ever it was, he was gonna be a millionaire.
His brothers laughed and jeered at him.
Grandpa pauses in the telling, smiles slightly and says,
“Yep, they both ended up working for me”

It wasn’t always pride that was showing through,
it was vindication, not only had he survived,
he had shown graciousness in his triumph.

At the age of nine he was plowing a field
a boy, a plow and horse alone in the searing sun.
Having plowed from morning into the early heat of noon,
he took a break and went for a swim in a spring-fed pond.
His oldest brother came along and scolded him
jerking him out of the water and whipping his bare butt with
a blackberry briar.

That brother got a milking pail upside his head later that night.
That brother worked for him and they were close for life.

I have seen other pictures.
Pictures of parties,
everyone with a drink in one hand
and a cigarette in the other.
I recognize the sloppy smiles and half opened eyes
of the half lit.
They never told me stories about these times.
I recognize my Grandpa and Grandma in these cocktail parties.
The top shelf still has dozens of bottles even now
but I have never seen them ever once drink from any of them.

The kodachrome color makes all these memories look staged
from a Hollywood flash-back scene.
This can’t be my grandparents.

2009
Shaun Conroy

Art and Murder: The Musical

A while back I foolishly said that I was going to regularly write about day-to-day events in my life. I wrote two entries and then didn’t write anymore. In fact, I haven’t written any blogs for months now. I feel really bad about this for some reason that I can’t quite understand. I guess I feel that I let myself down. I know that there aren’t a whole lot of people out there chomping at the bit for my next entry. Nevertheless it is a healthy thing for me to do. I have had some people say that they think blogging is somehow a narcissistic endeavor. I guess it can be, but I don’t think that is the case with me. In sharing thoughts and things with some kind of audience it encourages me to write. For me writing is a pleasure that I avoid like the plague. It is so weird that this is often the case with a lot of people I know. Why avoid something that brings you so much happiness? Go figure.

So onwards and upwards. I’m not going to make any promises that I will most likely break, but I am going to go at this again with a more regular schedule. I hope.

The other day I was going through a bunch of papers and files at Spiva. For those that don’t know what that means I will explain. I work at Spiva Center for the Arts, a non-profit. We have classes on making art. We have three galleries that display art of various mediums. We have seminars, talks, movies, and generally try to encourage culture in this fair city of Joplin. My official title is Gallery/Gift Shop Coordinator. I actually find a way to do a lot of maintenance as well as stick my nose into just about every aspect of the place. It is one of the best jobs I have ever had. I love the people I work with, I love what we do, and I feel that the people I come into contact with on a daily basis appreciate what I do as well. It is a good feeling.

So the other day I’m going through a bunch of papers and files at Spiva. Due to our non-profit status we have a tendency to never throw anything away. “Do we need this broken piece of tile?” “Sure we might use it for some class someday.” This is a typical conversation. We also keep all paperwork that we ever generate as well as signs and flyers. We never know when we might want it for some unforeseeable reason. So there are really a lot of resources that I have no clue we have. On down time I look around and see what I can find. I have found a lot of things that had I known we had I could have used to make my job easier. As I’m flipping through stuff I find a file of letters from third-graders from a couple of years back. Every year we have all the third-graders in Joplin come through for a week of “fun and exploration”. It is really pretty fun and very exhausting for everyone involved. All told we see about six hundred kids come through in a week. So these were letters from a bunch of kids saying thank you for letting them come and all that. I decided to sit and read through this stack of about eighty letters. As I did I smiled a lot and sometimes laughed out loud.

Many of the kids had actually addressed their thanks and kudos to some of the artists that were in the exhibition that they had seen. That year our exhibit was a showcase of “outsider” artists. Outsider artists are people who make art that have no training in the arts. They are usually outsiders in more than one-way actually. Most seem to be eccentric older men who just spontaneously started creating their own unique vision. One of the artists was this guy who was one of like thirteen kids and one of the five or so that survived. After his son was killed in Desert Storm and his health deteriorated, he started making pictures and 3-D art out of cardboard. But this isn’t what your thinking. He used the corrugated stuff that is in-between the top and bottom sheets. He used all these little curly-cues to make portraits, and freestanding sculpture. The work was amazing. It is the kind of art you enjoy aesthetically but also swoon over the obsessive tenacity that it would take to create. The kids by and large loved his stuff and there was a large stack of letters written specifically to him. I decided that the artist would get a real kick out of reading them himself. There was one small problem. In spite of all the stuff that we save, I couldn’t find any contact information for him.

I looked his name up on Google and found only a few reviews (remember he is an outsider, most of the art world will have nothing to do with these guys) and a gallery that carried some of his work. I called this gallery and the guy was real nice and spent about ten minutes digging through stuff looking for his address. Finally he gave me his “handler’s” phone number. Some guy in Garden City, Kansas named Dwayne West.

My boss Jo heard me as I was on the phone and came in after I finished.
“Did you find his address?”
“No but I got some other guys number that takes care of the artist’s affairs”
“Oh Dwayne West?”
“Yeah”
“Well you will enjoy talking to him. He is a really interesting guy. He was the prosecutor in the Cl…”
“No way, are you going to say the Clutter case?”
“Yeah”
“Hoollyyy Shit”

When I was eighteen my obsession with Southern Gothic novelists began. I read a few Faulkner short stories and landed for quite some time on the work of Truman Capote. I consumed everything that Capote wrote and saved “In Cold Blood” for last. I’m stubborn that way. “In Cold Blood” rocked my teenage world. It was the first book that actually scared me and made me aware of the random evil that exists in the world. For those that don’t know “In Cold Blood” was a true story written like a novel, a new form that Capote invented and perfected. The story was about a farm family named the Clutters that get brutally murdered for no real apparent reason.

Right after Jo told me this I called and got an answering machine. I left my information and hung up. I opened the Joplin Globe (our newspaper here) and on the second page was the headline “Clutter Prosecutor Affirms Capital Punishment”. Talk about synchronicity! Here is a case that is fifty years old and the same day that I get Dwayne’s number the Joplin Globe picks up an obscure AP story and puts it on the second page of the paper! I knew that destiny was in play and eagerly awaited a return call from Dwayne.

A couple of weeks went by and the wow and flutter that is Spiva pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind. But the moment finally came and the call was sent to me and there on the other end of the phone was Dwayne West, a piece of literary and personal history. We exchanged greetings and he gave me Jesse Monte’s address (yeah I intentionally saved that for later as a gift for those that are still reading). After all the real business was over I took in a breath.
“Mr. West let me say that it is particularly exciting to talk to you. When I was eighteen I read “In Cold Blood”
A slight grunt from Dwayne.
I continued.
“I was really stunned by that book and it is just a personally moving thing that I am talking to someone that is actually connected to that book”
“Yes, I was the state attorney and it was a big case so I prosecuted it. The Clutters went to my church”
I sudden lump developed in my throat. This wasn’t just a story in a book. This was real. It was very real for him and I felt stupid for bringing it up.
“Out pastor was against the death penalty and ahh…well I disagreed with him on that point. There was no doubt that they were guilty because they never claimed otherwise and we got them hanged pretty quickly, relatively speaking, after that. And I can tell you one thing, they haven’t killed anyone else since.”
I laughed in the way that I have learned to laugh from being around my grandfather and other older people. If you don’t know what I mean I can’t explain it.
“Yes sir I don’t imagine so.”
“If they couldn’t find anyone to do it I would have hung the bastards myself.”
That was the definitive end of that topic and I knew it.
Dwayne went on to ask me about my job and what my interests were and we began a very pleasant exchange that was just as natural as talking to farmer at the tailgate of his truck. Eventually I let out that I had been in a few bands over the years.
“Oh yeah? What do you play?”
“Well sir, I’m a singer and songwriter”
“Well that’s good, I have been trying my hand at writing songs myself”
Dwayne went on to tell me that he had in fact written a musical with fourteen songs and two acts. The subject was the founder of his town of Garden City, a fella by the name of Buffalo Jones. If that name doesn’t sound like the makings of a folk hero tall tale then I don’t know what is.

Turns out that Buffalo Jones was so named for being quite a skilled hunter of said beast and later its benefactor. Buffalo Jones saw that the buffalo (really a bison, but I won’t go down that road right now) was in danger of extinction. Having been a part of the extinction process he apparently felt the need to take the problem upon his own shoulders. Bringing calves from Texas to Kansas he was able to raise his own herd and exported the unique American breed to zoos all over the world. He also inspired Zane Grey to write his first book, “Last of the Plainsmen” about Buffalo Jones after going on a hunting expedition with him. Dwayne was using Zane Grey as the narrator of his tale.

The whole idea lit my torch! What a cool old guy! What a cool idea! It was like “Waiting for Guffman” but real and hopefully a lot better. I encouraged him and told him about my limited experience with play production and such.

“Well I’m pretty anxious to get this thing going, I’m 79 and well I would like to see it done before I’m gone.”

I bet the man lives to be a hundred.