Chagal4's Blog

Well I’ll catch you later. It’s been fun doing this everyday for a while but I’m going to take a break. Doing this has given me some lessons and as I walk back through the posts I find myself smiling and also wondering what the hell was I thinking. I might cut back to a post a week for the cold months. The temptation to moan about the weather is hard to resist so…once a week is enough. There’s also the fact that I want to get back to my drawing board and I only have so much energy these days.

The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder…the down coats have moved to the front of the closet and the snow tires are waiting for my car…(this week). One thing I miss every year is wearing shoes without socks…a silly thing but it makes my feet happy. Winter is all socks and boots and heavy legs.

O.K. so it’s time for a drink and a snack. Have a good week.

He played the bongos on a beer stained mattress…in his underwear and one grey Ked. the smell of coffee floated on the reefer smoke and Ingrid, exotic, ripe, round and pointed, big eyed and wild, mostly sleepy…carried mugs, barefoot and carefull. Someone had dropped a wine bottle…missed some broken glass. Good thing those bottles were green. The tiny record player …”Sea Breeze…works good, kid…” Arnie said in the pawn shop. “twenty bucks…and I’ll give ya…five of these records” . Two of Miles Davis…both scratched…a nice Muddy Waters and a good Nina Simone. The bongos went bop-bip bop bop bipbip bop and stopped while Nina wailed on her man through the tiny, tinny, speaker. He stopped and took a mug reaching for faded jeans. What was this life people talked about, he wondered? A cold sun rayed through the dirty windows and striped the dull, grey, floor boards…worn by the tracks of a million cockroaches marching off to war. Out side there was nothing happening…at this hour…there never was. Car doors slammed, taxis honked their way past delivery trucks, drivers shouting rebop and Italian curses…fuck you and fuck you and laughing. Nothing happening.

“And…?” Ingrid asked. Part of a conversation started earlier…maybe yesterday.

“What…? He stalled, while sorting through the gibberish and discussion debris to find the tail of that thread…”oh…yeah…and then we make it on down to the park…nice day…check it out. We need some weed…Yes?”

“Mmuffftt” she said pulling a big black sweater over her head…he sighed watching those gorgeous tits disappear. “O.K. I need to hit the bank first…you got any bread?”

“About a yard…cool”

A siren howled somewhere and the taste of sour wine burred his tongue…the coffee was hot though and it would burn off the fuzz and the taste of too many Camels. Ingrid yawned and stretched and he grabbed her and they laughed and rolled on the old mattress. Life was good…but it was time to go.

It was only a lonely french fry…lying in the street. How it survived the traffic I don’t know and I have no idea how it arrived there. It was lying there quietly…saying nothing. Could have been dead from the looks of things. A pair of crows live in the tree across the street with a couple of their unruly and outrageously noisy offspring. Rowdy bastards. They keep an eye on the neighbourhood and no scrap of anything goes un-noticed. If those birds could be trained to watch for crooks…the city would be crime free. Soon enough the dead french fry must have twitched…because I heard the crow squawk and those huge black wings unfolded high in the tree…and he swooped…laughing all the way.

Now, there’s nothing graceful or balletic about crows swooping…They’re strictly business…just jump on the thing and go. Seagulls on the other hand are generally viewed as flying rats…but they are at least as noisy as crows and in the air they are a thing of grace and movement. I don’t know where this bird came from but it was suddenly there…slicing the air three feet in front of the crow in mid air and it snatched that french fry off the street without touching the ground. Oh man…that crow went nuts. The seagull shot away between two buildings and the crow called all his friends on the Crow Emergency Hot-line and the chase was on. Five or six seagulls appeared and an equal number of crows…O.K. it was going to be a game! They shrieked and squawked and dipped and dived and spun in the air. The seagull with the french fry was the centre of attention for all of the other players. And then he dropped mr. Fry…I could see it fall as the seagull cartwheeled after it…Crows in pursuit. Then another seagull caught it in mid flight and streaked off behind the buildings and I lost sight of them …but seconds later they were still circling and swirling in the air…having a hell of a time.

That french fry had no idea how much fun our street could be.

No, I don’t know who she is. Making this picture I remember talking with her for a few hours. She reminded me of someone I knew, I told her. Maybe a teacher I had in grade school or someone I met on a train…or it could have been a plane. It might have been in Vancouver or Toronto. Could have been in New York but I didn’t think so. Could have been in a restaurant in a hundred towns I’ve seen…but I didn’t think that either. In the end I didn’t know but that was alright with me…and maybe with her too. And the Z is just for mystery…or zen.

When I listen to jazz it’s always a mystery. I never know where it’s going to take me even if I’ve heard the piece a dozen times. I started listening to jazz when I was around fourteen…i mean really listening. I was also into rock and roll and Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino. Where I grew up, radio was king and we had two of the best music stations in the world. Motown was fifteen miles from my front door…on a warm summer night you could hear it without a radio (uh…no). So music was right there in the air…around the edges there was folk music. I thought it was mainly for college pussies…blowing in the wind. But I learned to like some of it and Joan Baez led me to Dylan and that was a revelation. I remember hearing the MJQ (look it up) in maybe 1956 and then Brubeck and the flood gates on a whole new language opened. It was a damn shame that rock and roll blew a lot of jazz greats into a corner but it was a revolution that couldn’t be stopped. Jazz in the meantime also grew and changed and you only needed to follow Miles Davis or Roland Kirk or Charles Mingus  to see how deep the well was and still is. Wynton Marsallis…bless the man. In the end…I came to love all sorts of music. It enriches my life and feeds my heart and soul. Some days it’s Guns and Roses and some days it’s Oscar Peterson…or Lenny Brau. Today it was Frank Sinatra and Dave Brubeck. I got some of those wireless Bose head phones…damn…those things are the bomb. I can dance again without tying my ass up.

I can remember my father using that expression when I was a kid. Haven’t heard it in more than fifty years but when I watched the election results roll in last night the pleasant astonishment I felt brought that old expression back into my mind. There will be many pitfalls in constructing a new government and delving into the dark corners where the previous gang of rats have left things un-shredded but those thoughts are for another day. Right now I’m just savouring the moment and feeling a small but promising glow that the days of divisive, bitter, petty, vindictive, and manipulative government may be over…at least for a while.

And that’s what these two old guys in the coffee joint are thinking.

Vote. Vote because you can. Vote for your grandmother, for the family dog. Vote for your high school lover. Vote for the tree down the street. Vote for Elvis. Vote for the car of your dreams. Vote for a peach or a grape. Vote for a new pair of shoes. Vote for the friendly elephant you saw on T.V. Vote for that nerdy guy who always spills his coffee on his shirt while he’s reading. Vote for your favourite hairdresser. Vote for the lady who helped you across the street when you had a broken knee. Vote for the guy who flipped the bat. Vote for fewer hungry children…fewer abused women…fewer crooked businessmen…fewer guns…fewer fear mongers…fewer racists…fewer bullies…fewer fucking lies…Oh, yes and fewer ugly neck-ties.

Use your imagination…but vote.

You sit down and you have nothing to say or maybe too many things to say. Doing this blog has taught me a lot about those guys who used to broadcast on the radio in the middle of the night. Every night they sit in front of the microphone and they have to wonder if anybody’s out there. Long haul truckers, all night restaurants, lonely people with heartburn, stranded lovers in the dark. And you wonder too what the conversation should be…imagine someone sitting across the table? I do that from time to time. Some of my drawings take a lot of time …and I talk to them. But sometimes it’s just play. I don’t care if nobody’s there. The drawing is like a little piece of music…something that stuck in my head and I want to get it out and listen to it.

It’s cold today…rehearsal for winter. One of those frozen October days when the light is hard and crisp and the sun flashes a dozen colours on the trees. They haven’t yet shed those leaves…but these cold nights and the shorter days will soon fill the sidewalks and lawns with colour and the familiar smell of fallen leaves. Time to start remembering where the sweaters and warm coats are stashed.

Last week I read that one percent of the population now owns fifty percent of the wealth in Canada. They oughta be damn proud….Outlaw bikers like the Hell’s Angels take this shit seriously. They wear a 1% patch on their colours. It has meaning. I wonder if the suits can get a 1% patch for their Georgio Armani’s.

We think in words…dream in words…In our imaginations we play and replay conversations, things we coulda, shoulda, woulda said. I’m a reader and I love words and I write a bit and words are important. But I’m also aware of how the words we learn shape our lives and the way we think. A Chinese person thinks differently from a French person. Ask a translator. The differences may appear slight but sometimes maybe not. Children think differently than adults. Oh O.K., of course. People develop dialects and modify language to differentiate themselves. Old-time jailbirds used to have a language barely understandable outside prison. Hipsters and subcultures have slang …Rappers…don’t get me started…are some of the best poets we’ve had in years…dance with language.

You can tell a lot about a society or culture by watching or listening to the words that are filling the air. Lately there are a lot of very violent words…and it’s growing…Fearful, paranoid, divisive words are becoming  more and more frequent. We should be listening with more care.

There are myths about words…That they are “things”. They leave our mouth and float around our head for a while and then slowly float higher and higher…joining millions of other words until they reach the atmosphere and freeze. I think there are events like wars, and bombs, and possibly hot rage that rise up and cause the words to thaw and fall…and blast our ears with a mighty, roaring, wind that makes no sense until we think it’s the end of the world…but it’s only our words. We should be more careful with them.

I’ve heard that at one time all creatures had words and they could communicate. Monkeys and mice and men and women and cats and fish could talk to each other. This is not a tower of Babel story….no. It’s story about lies. See, there have always been “eaters” and the “eaten” , and they all understood that. Still, they could communicate and there was a trust. We don’t understand that kind of trust now of course. The trust was broken when some of the eaters began to tell the eaten that they wouldn’t eat them. Well, it made it much easier to catch and eat them…Pretty soon those to be eaten got together and said…”Look we can’t listen to them any more…they tell us lies and eat us.” And so they stopped listening to the lies and stopped trusting the eaters. Now after a while, if you stop listening, you lose the language…lose the ability to communicate that way. And it spreads…the distrust, and eventually we end up here. We’re the major eaters …humans, and we don’t even trust each other. We’ve lost those words. I think that the other animals still communicate with each other though. And I think they’re saying that Mother Nature is watching…and listening and she’s not happy.