Definition of Parallel Synchronized Randomness
The parallel synchronized randomness of pancakes
Okay, I use the term lightly, the PSR of my assemblage art projects. But it’s not a triple-threat made in Dead Mule Studio, it truly has a mathematical purpose, a reason for existence. I learned of it in “The Science of Sleep” – an extraordinary and simultaneously disturbing and brilliant movie.
To those who wish to delve into parallel synchronized randomness –
Imagine being asleep and dreaming about buying an ice cream cone, leaving the ice cream shoppe and then walking down the street while eating the cone.
At the same time, you realize that are awake and eating ice cream while walking downtown.
It’s as if you can daydream – remain in the dreaming state – while functioning in the now-world.
Sounds kinda’ schizophrenic, if one were to believe such mind-states existed. What? Who are you talking to? Shut up! God? Are you there? It’s me, Margaret.
One-Girl Band with Floogle Horn Attachment
I was a one-girl band in the mid-1960s. My parents somehow procured an entire “band” which could be strapped to one’s chest and hung over shoulders. The front contained a washboard with a scrub brush, a floogle horn-type assemblage, lots of cymbals, , a bicycle horn, spoons and the rear assembly could be activated with a lever. I don’t remember what all was included, just how wonderful the entire ensemble sounded to my seven-year-old ears.
My daughter likes to remind me (as my mother once did) that I was born to entertain my parents. Being one of those late-in-life babies with a sister ten years my senior, my parents were post-war pleasant folks. We all know that every child has a different set of parents. Personalities and stress change over time. This is probably rarely more apparent than with my parents with me versus with my sister Ann. She born in Norfolk in 1943 in an Army hospital while my parents both served the US during WWII. Daddy worked over-seeing the loading of liberty ships while Mom worked for Army personnel, interviewing women who came to Virginia to work in the shipyards. I have a cassette tape right here in front of me – it contains about an hour of Mom talking about her WWII job as a civilian in the Army employ. Daddy wanted to volunteer but rejection followed his request due to asthma. He waited for the draft and entered the service within a few months of trying to get in on his own.
Ann – born in to the post-Pearl Harbor melee, delivered by Army docs home to the states for a brief respite from war-time duties. Me – born into an era of new promise and a world changed forever… a time of promise not fear.
Okay, to consider any era fearless could be fodder for criticism but in this discussion, it’s relevant to note the disparity between 1940s War and 1950s Peace. All communist-menace conspiracies aside, all socialist agendas removed, Korean conflict and the coming Viet Nam debacle put to the back of the queue for now. It’s a relative discussion – as in – compare 1954 housing boom to our Great Depression Economic Funk. By 1960s, we hid under our desks for tornado drills, not atomic bomb threats.
So of course my parents purchased a one-girl-band for me. Perhaps the assemblage set the tone for my life-long obsession with coupling disparate objects through unconventional means. My strange affection for re-direction of physical forms. Assemblagists, it seems, acquire their skills over decades of study… literal formations created by intense modification of original forms. Linear transformations derived from circular patterns create intellectual dialogs requiring physical transpositions of the viewer. Or patron. Or casual observer.
To observe art? Such action can be passive, aggressive, oblique – it is a determination to attach some reason or meaning to what is placed before the observer. Right? It appears that everyone tries to insert some level of understanding (or misunderstanding) to the object. What do you mean by that? What is the artist seeking to convey? Or is the artist conveying nothing, a Dada bit of misconstrued physical jargon?
It matters not.
Meanwhile, the one-girl-band – long discarded – lives on in my memory.
And I assemble whatever is at hand to create my own inner music.
The Boy Inventors’ Wireless Triumph – Literary Bricolage
It’s a book by Richard Bonner, published in 1929 by M. A. Donohue & Company. The chapter titles clue us in to the drama to come:
A Marine Game of Blind-Man’s Bluff
Ned Bangs’ Story
The Chadwick Gas Guns
Drawing a Rascal’s Fangs
Herrera Is Not Caught Napping
“It’s Death To Remain Here!”
Dad! — It’s Jack!
and the ever wonderful
The Boy Inventors Solve a Problem
*Spending this afternoon with My Two Grandballoons makes me aware of Boy Inventors in ways never before considered. When the balloons go into their zone together, the world around them ceases to be as it is to you and me.
“Suspending his task of wrapping some new condenser plates with glittering tin-foil, he gazed about him. In front of the bungalow was a strip of dazzling white sand, — the beach. At a small wharf lay a capable-looking motor cruiser, painted white and about forty-five feet in length…
“Jack Chadwick galvanized from his nap into vibrant action with hardly less suddenness than had marked Tom’s arousing. Three times the gong, connected by an ingenious arrangement of Jack’s with his detector, beat out brazenly the call of Lone Island. Then came the signature:
“S-K”
…
“The few dozen yard between the bungalow and the shed of raw, resinous-smelling pine lumber that housed the wireless was covered in less time than it takes to tell it.”
Less Time Than It Takes to Tell It
So, as one seeks to assemble drama within a blog post, it behooves one (that 1 being me) to recall my reason for sitting down tonight, here at this desk. It was to check the obituaries for good names to use in stories (today’s leading contender will not be used, since Alexander Haig’s name will appear often, I’m sure)
Today’s winning name:
Vernetta
Shelter Island vs Rodeo
Well, the rodeo won out, with Shelter Island viewing coming in on Monday instead of today. We’re going to the Bob Martin Agri Center and I’m hoping the sights and scenes will provide much artistic fodder. Artists and writers must get out of the studio and observe, duh… of course you know that, but for me the real treat is in observing and photographing those who dwell outside my comfort zone.
Horses were a part of my life for many years.
thinking about horses, rodeos, Arkansas, and pecan groves makes me melancholy. I dug through my 1990s writing files and found this:
The Airstream and the Suburban
Part I
At first I considered combining lives I knew with lives I’d imagined.
I would make a kaleidoscope of characters,
mirroring one segment into another,
forming new
images
of
scattered
fragments.
Then I realized the people I made kept turning true;
fiction left the room.
In my twenties,
with toddlers scribbling nonsense papers
attaching them with magnets to refrigerator doors,
I believed the notion of another to be greater
than the reality of myself.
Twenty-four hour days,
three a.m. silent walks to and fro,
self-analysis required infinitesimal retrospect.
A mother,
a wife, a daughter,
a simple life
somehow filled with a sense of grace,
taken for granted.
And it went on for years, quietly taking up space.
I knew it for the short breath that it was.
I felt and mourned it.
Babies learn to walk,
children dress themselves
leave for school,
and even when they don’t take the bus and you drive,
you’ve lost control.
I fought becoming a cliche’.
I would not grieve for their independence,
I would exalt in it.
But still–
I kept them with me as long as I could,
not even allowing kindergarten to take one away.
But I couldn’t slow them down,
make them play My Little Ponies,
Strawberry Shortcake,
or dress up in their grandmother’s pre-war clothing.
They left without me…
We moved from the comfortable womb
grandparents,
aunts and uncles,
friends from high-school and college.
When we started this new thing,
this cliche’ of upwardly moving careers
fast-paced transitions,
we
lost the continuity
became
fragments
ourselves.
Pieces
began
to
fall
from
the carefully glued
puzzles
my father put together.
Everytime we moved I tried to reconstruct the security of those puzzles,
until at last,
they couldn’t
be
whole
any more.
I stopped trying to overcome my father’s leaving me.
His death,
the pivot point for everything lost,
assumed more responsibility than it ever should have.
Part II
I am
a cartoon character
with a thought bubble over my head.
What he says
and what he means,
two distinctly different conversations always go on when I talk to Frank.
He thinks madness aligns him with us,
puts us somehow on his side.
He couldn’t be farther from reality.
“Judicial Ethics Complaint Board…
they thrive on this kind of thing…
got her ideas from Lois who issued one last summer.”
Now I begin listening in earnest.
“Lois claims I hit her,
physically abused her when we were married.
Now she’s written her own letter,
Elizabeth has.
Told the board she could not,
in good conscience,
let me continue in the manner in which I lived my life without reporting it.
Elizabeth says the boys witnessed me hitting Lois.
…claims that she can’t be hypocritical while teaching Emerson and Thoreau to young minds…
they learn ethical behavior,
she wrote that in the complaint.
Accused me of betting with bookies,
using campaign funds to go to the horse races…
I don’t deal with bookies,
I just send bets with friends,
you know that…
and I converted my campaign funds to private income
and paid income tax on them.”
Frank’s voice becomes plaintive,
almost whining.
He thinks I’m sympathetic,
this man who represents all that is despicable,
loathsome
in the universe.
“It’s strange,
the complaint is dated August 11,
that’s the same day I filed against her
for violating the custody agreement
because she wouldn’t let me see Bobby this summer.”
I notice my hand shaking,
the one not holding the phone,
so I start making the bed while I listen to him.
I keep hitting the phone with my chin
and it beeps
as I try to balance it without holding on with my hand.
Anything to keep moving…
I fold clothes after straightening the covers.
I talk to Frank,
“I haven’t even laid eyes on Elizabeth
since two days before Christmas last year.
I can’t tell you anything about her.
I don’t know what she does
or how she spends her time.
Bobby is afraid to talk to us,
he hides from us
even if he’s in the same grocery store.
This town has only 9,000 people
and I never see her…
I don’t even catch a glimpse of her,
let alone talk to her.”
I sensed he wanted some dirt on her, wanted me to tell him she was a drunk or some sort of fallen character. He rambled on about small towns and his dog having puppies…I thought about Elizabeth
and the abyss.
Something in his tone of voice caught my attention again.
“Lucy talked to Tiffany,
you know,
my new wife.
It seems she spoke with Elizabeth recently.
Well, she told Tiffany that when she asked about your mother,
Elizabeth said
‘Flo has outlived her usefulness.’
Lucy,
tough as she is,
couldn’t believe it.
Lucy gets along real good with Tiffany, they talk a lot. A lot more than Elizabeth ever would talk to her.”
I begin loading clothes into the washer.
Trying not to think of Elizabeth
and the abyss.
Take a load from the dryer
I fold,
then
walk to the bedrooms
put the clothes into drawers
that I straighten as I put away.
Phone on my shoulder, neck crooked,
basket on my hip.
Still listening.
And thinking of Elizabeth
and the abyss.
Frank kept on talking for a while longer,
I’d finished listening
way before he hung up.
I thought about Elizabeth
and the abyss.
Fell straight down into the chasm,
recognized reality,
saw truth,
and wept
because
my sister was still in the abyss
and I wanted to crawl out with her.
Part III
The conversation hung around me for hours.
Just two days before,
as I drove home from work,
I’d had an imaginary conversation with Elizabeth.
I thought of myself
dialing her phone number
and when she answered
I’d just say,
“Do you ever think of me?”
She used to have an answering machine,
back when they first separated,
in Arkansas.
Circles,
more circles
thought spiralling out from the past,
and Arkansas in the middle.
You never saw the word Arkansas around here until Clinton began campaigning.
I don’t think anyone really knew quite where it was.
Didn’t Bush think the state between Oklahoma and Texas… or was that some other confused politician?
Spirals of confusion, trying to figure out where the center begins, my life’s grace has become a double-helix with no end and no beginning. I trace the pattern and get confused, I can’t find my origins anymore.
Daddy died in 1987,
must have been,
we bought a mini-van to drive from South Carolina to Arkansas for the funeral.
We knew it would be soon,
his leaving us
and we sold his Chevy Suburban because it had over 160,000 miles on it.
We got rid of it for more than just old age,
it sat in my driveway
like an open wound,
mute testimony of everything my father could no longer be.
The trailer hitch left vacant with the sale of the Airstream,
the Yukon Territory license plate,
and the compass from Brookstone,
bitter monuments to traveler’s dreams.
I drove from Arkansas
to South Carolina in the Suburban when we moved.
I drove the Suburban back to Arkansas
to live in my in-law’s motel
while I helped my father forget he was dying.
But the Airstream and the Suburban
seem to have become symbols
of my parent’s generation,
of snowbirds driving south from Chicago to Padre Island,
from New Jersey suburbs down I-95
to hundreds of thirty-foot slabs of concrete nestled side-by-side
somewhere in Florida.
My parents never joined the snowbird set.
Instead
they travelled by flat-car through the Baja Peninsula,
sitting comfortably in lawn chairs
as the train carried Airstream and Suburban through Mexico.
The dog, Barney,
on my mother’s lap as she smoked Winston’s
and waved at locals drinking grape Nehi’s while roosting in the doorways of abandoned boxcars.
My father coveted Alaska and my mother gave him his dream.
Mount McKinley,
the Bering Strait,
and huskies pulling sleds,
they walked on glaciers,
ate bread baked in kitchens beside the Alcan highway,
and saw the things my father knew he’d see…
Mr. National Geographic with his Minolta.
The Airstream and the Suburban
and my dad,
thirty feet of silver bullet housing
and one determined man,
travelling together through Nova Scotia
and across Canada.
They drove on.
I busied myself with babies and pre-school.
Every few months,
my parents would camp at Lake DeGray, some 45 minutes away
and we would go down there.
Loading up strollers,
diapers,
God knows how many boxes of Cheerios
and graham crackers…
and spend the day watching my father and baby Caroline
lying in the hammock together,
a six-week old human
fitting in gentle repose across a seventy year old chest.
He had a brief affair with a small sail boat,
a Folboat,
and he’d take then two-year old out for short rides.
They’d stay in the shallows,
she wore a red hat and big orange life-jacket
and he wore brown saddleshoes with white socks
and under his shorts
flashed freckled legs.
I could hear them laughing and eating apples
while they drifted slowly around,
close to the shore.
And I remember this
no one else is here that saw it,
because Daddy’s gone
Jane’s the player in the play.
Participants in the scene don’t remember the same way the audience does.
Looking in,
instead of looking out,
changes the shape of things.
When to create and when to relate.
It’s difficult to juggle creating art and knowing it. Shall I read what’s up with A Book About Death, work on web design ideas with 
to celebrate the upcoming release of The Eve of Fluxus, or finish the final two canvases for BCAC?
Part of me wants to clean house and stop apologizing for my kitchen mess. Dishes piled windowsill high and then there’s this problem with the cat and hocking up a huge hairball which I just now this second RIGHT THIS SECOND noticed by the chair over there under the library window.
Another part wishes I could have gone with local friends to the Pocosin Arts get-away, or maybe somewhere else creative but osteo-awful joints resist homesteading elsewhere. Once the studio is open and dogs are in place, it’ll be art-time today.
A big section of me, today, wishes for more sleep since grandson Oliver spent the night and woke at 6 a.m. full of vim and vigor. Vim? Great name for a character in a short story. Vim Sparkleton. He could have been Spencer Montgomery’s roommate in boarding school.
Speaking of roommates…
Murpat needs a hug, she had wrist repair surgery this week.*sqUeEZe*
I think of my Mom every day. There’s a thought in here about mourning her death before she died. We lost her about a year before she went. My grandfather John Theodore Chapman told my mother, in 1956, “I wish my brain had gone before my body. Watching myself deteriorate is torture.”
A hiccup in the process of release occurred and the difficulty remains. And they gave her pain, with me she had none. The nursing home, the hospital – my Mom never broke a bone in her body and within six months she’d broken her elbow, and a hip so badly fractured her pelvis was shoved into her internal organs. We know they dropped her. She couldn’t have fallen because she couldn’t walk. Pretty simple. Pain. She kept trying to smile for me. This gets in the way of Ruth Remembering. Pain. She smiled. Can you bear it? I’m working on it.
Quote of the week from Fayetteville, NC where a scuffle took place in a funeral home: