Sick Pirate

I have the cold Jack just got over.  It's not serious just icky and achy.  I'd like to sleep through it but there's a long list of things happening today, including treasure hunting.  My Dad is working on a salvage job at an old truck terminal. On the racks and racks of steel shelving he's taking apart and scrapping and inside the many semi-trailers sticking out from each side like appendages are the left overs of a hoarder extraordinaire who passed away.  I'm told the man bought out the remains of businesses gone under and resold what he could, what he couldn't was laid to rest there in the truck terminal.  I went last week to help dig through the mounds of dusty items in the offices and warehouse.  I found some old illustrations, lithograph gels and original paintings from the late 70s that I fell in love with and intend to get framed and install in our bedrooms; Sports illustrations for Jack's rooms, a Pegasus and Unicorn for Ella and Whales for me.  I'll post pictures when they are done.  I also managed to procure an old steel machinist's cart that I plan to clean up and put in the living room. It's pretty beat up and rusted and so I need to wash, sand and oil, maybe even paint it a tad before it comes to live here next to the computer, but it's pretty cool. (again picks to follow.)  I want to go back for a few picture frames and some reams of office paper today, so I need to borrow a truck.  All this in between a dentist appointment, a lunch date and preschool drop off and pick up and another construction call with my Dad. OR I could just call it all in sick and miss out on the lunch and the reams and the frames and pearly teeth and go back to bed.

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I think the militarization of our domestic police force is dangerous for our citizens.  I'm against Rockford having a tank.  We have neither the funds nor the training to utilize nor maintain such a thing.  Sell it and turn the street lights back on.

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Fall Art Scene deadline for artwork is just two weeks away and I want to do three new paintings before then. They're going to be wonderful.  I'm really stuck on the dusty palate of WPA art.  I feel like it matches not only my mood but my surroundings.  This is utilitarian, serious art.  Art made for working people.  It's not art for the sake of flinging haphazard party colors into your brain, it's art because it has to be.  I have to make it.

Sometimes I think about what it would be like to be a window or a sign painter and have everything hand made, hand drawn.  Remember the old number painter clips on Sesame Street? I think I really just wanted to grow up and do this.  Wildly finding a place to put an eight on my off hours. When I wasn't putting "Exit" or "Slow school" somewhere in the city.   I think making a lovely "Pork Chops .19 ¢/lb. " in red on a grocers window would be terrible zen for me; just as rewarding as painting "Little Red's Little Black Heart" and possibly easier to get paid for.  But, sign painters are gone.  Illustrators too, there are many artists in the collective I belong to who used to be illustrators.  They fondly talk about inking something perfectly one time and how fast they were and who they trained under and how many they could get done in a week and how meagerly they were paid.  These pieces I found in the truck terminal are the last remnants of hand painting original layout and velum overlays.  I want to keep it and frame it all.

I want to go back to when an artist was needed in daily life to paint murals and signs and numbers on random sunbather's heads.