Chagal4's Blog

I dreamed I saw a cat

Last night…                       

It was standing on a wall.

Summer warmed the

Evening,

You could hear the crickets call.

Across the night a siren wailed.

Somewhere I heard a laugh.

I turned around to trace

The sound and

when I turned back

The Calico Cat

was

Gone.

Almost my whole life I’ve thought that it’s important to be curious. And I still am curious and I still think it’s important. But being curious doesn’t mean I understand things. I fact it seems to me that the older i get the less I understand. Last week seventy three men, women and children were found dead in a truck abandoned beside a busy highway in Austria. It certainly was an outrageous atrocity…but one that has been repeated and building for at least several years as people flee in the thousands from lands wracked by war, poverty, starvation and disasters. Shiploads of wretched humans push off in the dark and many of this human cargo ends up in the Mediterranean sea…dead. Do they know they could die there? I think that they do…but that it’s better to die trying to reach a place where survival and maybe more is possible. Two hundred years ago people were forced into leaky ships sold into slavery in the new world…there were also thousands who crammed themselves onto leaky ships to try for a new life in the new world.

The leaders of Europe are exasperated…what to do? They blame “human traffickers” for the “problem”…but the problem is so much greater and more complex. Blame rests with a world that reacted to terrorism with massive devastation of whole countries…a world that stood still while the destabilization of countries spawned civil wars…even more hideous terrorism…and the decimation of whole populations. Our civilized nations wrung their hands in the United Nations while starvation and genocide raged in Africa…while dictators used barrel bombs and poison gas on their own cities. The U.N. spends billions to set up refugee camps in deserts so bleak that not even a weed can grow…And the camps can hold only a fraction of people driven from their homes, their lives, their minds. And so they take every penny they have…they buy passage on a battered rubber raft and hope to make it to Italy…they get loaded onto trucks and driven into Austria…and hopefully to Germany…or England…or France…or anywhere…else. I can see the back lash building…I read comments on news web-sites where people write things like…”we should sink a few of those boats and maybe they’ll get the message” or “we should just pack them up and send them back” Or the most obvious…”Don’t let them land”. I know too that it’s all contributing to the growth of a vicious ultra right wing nationalism all over Europe that will inevitably lead to more outrages. I’m losing my curiosity about this…because I can’t imagine an answer or even the beginning of an answer…and the frustration makes me both angry and incredibly sad. I don’t understand but I’m pretty sure that this is our problem…all of us…everywhere. And here’s what else I know…if we were watching our children, wives, brothers sisters starve…hide in cellars from bombs and bullets…we would be trying to do the same damn thing those refugees are doing. Escape!

Things I remember about marijuana:

Cheech and Chong

Staring up at the starry sky for half an hour with my mouth open

Making love to the sound of music that wasn’t there

Big bad bikers rolling on the lawn laughing with a couple of puppies

Crying all night for a lost friend

Driving twenty blocks down Yonge Street at ten miles an hour because I forgot to change gears and the sound of the engine roaring made me think I was going too fast.

Bruce Springsteen live…the place wasn’t big enough

A sunny afternoon in a mountain meadow two days after the wild flowers bloomed…the fucking flies were murderous

Conversations that went on forever and changed direction viciously if you weren’t paying attention

Food tasted SOOOO GOOOD!

Some suit telling me that “there was nothing wrong with marijuana that alcohol couldn’t cure” and collapsing with giggles.

After years of procrastination (good word, that) and lazy thinking I have decided to try to put up some of my drawings and paintings on my blog. Somewhere along the line I may get smart and create a website for it…but for now my plan is to post one drawing or painting a day…I might write something about the piece and I might not. If you see them and like them let me know. I’d like that. Blues

There are places where they put pictures on the ballot for elections. They say it’s because people in those places are illiterate. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. If we put pictures on our ballots this is the one I’d vote for. It’s worth more than a thousand words and they’re all about restoring freedoms that are being eroded away in the name of “security” and “law and order” and the outrageous gap between the ultra rich and the poor. The words would say we’re not all the same but that’s alright…They would say chill out and eat a peach…have a glass of wine…smile at somebody…but don’t let them pick your pocket or twist your mind. Get on with it…there’s lots to be done.

Well, it was forty years ago…give or take. On Sussex Avenue in Toronto. The second floor with a big picture window overlooking the intersection of two side-streets. The city had installed some of those large round concrete planters filled with dubious greenery and intended to provide a little more pause for thought in drivers who blew through the stop signs, endangering the local children and those too old or too stoned to get out of the way. I heard these things called “road furniture” the other day…and laughed to think about the city employee who came up with that. Naturally the city needed to maintain these road furnishings…they certainly need more attention than a stop sign…and they had these two old boys to do the job. I must have seen them a dozen times before I gave them any thought. When I did, I saw in an instant what a gorgeous job they had. They had a golf cart converted with a box on the back for tools and plants and soil and the other things they needed to keep the planters happy. And they dressed like a pair of gentle reprobates. They seemed to talk incessantly as if on a conversation that had started before their first birthdays and scheduled to continue long after they were gone…which they assuredly are by now. I did several sketches of the guys until one day in October that year…the lighting and the weather was just right. It was as if I could finally really see them…

I lost track of this drawing for thirty years…only found it while digging for something else. Since then it has lived in a folio right here…about a foot from my right leg as I write this. I take it out once in a while and think about framing it…but then I smile at the old boys and put them back in the folder. Blues, August 27…2015