Chagal4's Blog

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 

O.K., skunks…I am certain that skunks have some valuable purpose in this world or they wouldn’t have been endowed with such a formidable arsenal. What kind of predator would  attack a skunk…unless one that can shoot the little buggers from a distance and then leave town for a few days.

A couple of things brought this to mind in the past few weeks…I was jerked awake in the middle of the night with tears in my eyes and my nose in shock…refusing to inhale. I live on the second floor and my brain told me that; first, it was a skunk or maybe a skunk convention…and second, the little bastards can’t climb up to the second floor and open doors….Can they? But I have to tell you that even though it was dark in the middle of the night, I’m pretty damn sure the air was a deadly shade of caustic green…

Then…last week a dentist from the midwest invested (is that the word?) more than fifty thousand dollars to go to Africa and kill a venerable and venerated old lion named Cecil with a bow and arrow.The dentist is being vilified as I write this. I have no particular interest in preserving lions…I think they’re beautiful wild things and they have a real and vital purpose in managing wild life…and unless they’re chewing on the neighbour’s dog or ripping the front tire off my car…I believe they should be left alone. People kill more animals around the world than lions do and I’m inclined to think that there are some living less than a mile from here right now who are ten times more dangerous than lions.

O.K. so…back to the skunks. I know that there are people who see them from a distance and think they’re “so cu-u-u-te”. But really most folks take one sniff and know immediately that it means start booking an escape route in the other direction. I have been familiar with skunks since I was a child. When that smell lit up the night and dogs began to whine and my mother ran around closing the windows and cars stopped dead in the street…when you’re five years old…you think…”maybe it’s a lion!!!” and run to the window to see. That’s when you get the small lecture about black and white striped kitty cats that must be avoided even if it means climbing a tree ( I believe that was the one and only time my mother suggested that I should climb a tree). Skunk. Fortunately they don’t seem to hang around all year…they’re not as numerous as squirrels thankfully, and when they are around…they don’t unload the WEAPON unless provoked…(pity the poor drunk who mistakes the little monster for the family cat). But when they do…birds drop out of trees and paint peels off pick up trucks.

It occurred to me that the dentist and his trusty bow could save a hell of a lot of money and leave venerable old lions alone by hunting a much more dangerous and nasty critter. Skunks. They’re made for each other, this bow hunter and skunks. He could start in our back yard if he wants. The neighbour’s dog would be incredibly grateful…apparently not having heard the little lecture Carlton (the dog) thought it might be a fluffy black and white squirrel. That was the night I woke up with tears in my eyes. And the neighbour found out that a gallon of tomato juice is hard to find at midnight and really…it doesn’t always work.

Nope, this looks like a job for a big game hunter…Of course we could discover that skunks provide a seriously important role in our ecology…I don’t know what that is but I’m sure we’ll find out. And if the skunk gets the bow hunter…we’ll take up a collection for tomato juice.

B.

July, 30, 2015

What can be said to the dead?

It’s like whispering to yesterday…or offering a word or two to last week.

And yet we do it. In our private thoughts and moments compose, whole paragraphs, poignant, erudite, angry, guilty, regretful, apologetic. As if for them but really for ourselves. Maybe to understand. Once a friend was leaving town on a train. Going away for good she said…moving to another city. New job, new life, a good decision. I was going to see her off along with other friends. I was late…missed the train. It felt like an old movie…standing on the platform at the station. Other pals drifting off back to where-ever…”Hey, where were you?” hanging in the air. Say good bye to the back of a train.

And maybe it’s all those things left unsaid…undelivered letters in my head.

My sister died…both of them now gone. Recriminations hung like wreaths around my shoulders. Things I might have said or done. But that’s all cloud work in the sky, tossed and blown and then they’re gone with a morning’s sun. There was nothing finally, that could be done. And that’s the way it always is for everyone…after.

How Cold?

So cold that smoke comes out of chimneys

and just falls to the ground…like grey dust.

So cold that cats are walking on two feet…

both on the same side of their body…alternating every

ten or fifteen steps…Quite agile really.

Dogs pee…pale frozen fog…hurts to watch.

Birds hang around squirrels…trying to

get wrapped in that furry tail.

Human necks shrink by two inches…or more.

Children in full Michelin Man outfits bounce

off walls, trees, cars and each other…laughing.

Cars go whirrr…whrr…w.t.f.

Fashion victims run from place to place

in skinny tights and even bare legs!!

Old guys with two toques and two scarves

and two coats and two pairs of pants,

heavy boots and gloves…sitting on the sofa,

Scared to go outside.

Parts fall off perfect strangers visiting

from warmer climes.

Books refuse to open.

Snow cries when you walk on it…

Groans when you drive on it.

Flags don’t flutter or wave.

Exposed skin ages five times faster than

Unexposed skin… people have older noses.

They say that alcohol makes you feel the cold more…

Until you drink enough of it.

I’m not there yet.

Blues: 16 02 2015

I will admit that as the years came up and mugged me the thought of holding the wrinkles and sags at bay with a little body filler and maybe a stitch or two crossed my mind. generally speaking for about three hundred days a year I feel just about the way I did when I was fifty or so. Which isn’t so bad when you’re seventy or so. The other sixty five days of the year are what I call the “age tax”…that’s when you feel like a truck ran over you while you were sleeping…or one of the millions of viruses or bacterias that cling to every surface in the world decides to cling to me.In those sixty five days i’m either sick or sore or convinced that the end is near enough that I should be in bed with tea and cookies. Leaving all of that aside, when I look in the mirror I know that fifty was quite a while ago.

Every now and then though I’m brought up short in my idle reflections on the possibility of knocking a couple dozen years off my face and body. I understand that it is supposed to do wonders for the creeping stain of depression that lurks when younger folks give you that “Hello grand-dad” look. Happened just the other day at the local coffee bar. No tip that day.

I can bear the depression and god knows here are far too many other things to be depressed about than getting older. No…what really drives all thoughts of this stuff from my mind is the forlorn despair I feel when I read that yet another gang of young women has been convinced to go off to a seedy motel where some ghastly creature will charge them thousands of dollars to inject industrial strength silicone or artificial fat into their bodies…in the interests of getting an ass that might be difficult to fit through a doorway sideways. I’ve seen a lot of those asses both real and imagined and honestly even if I wasn’t this age…I’d find the prospect of getting next to it after dark…daunting. Lots of people love them and I say hooray for them…what concerns me is not the desire to enhance the back of the pants…but the lunacy of thinking that a couple of hours in a low down motel is going to do the trick. And I cannot yet decide which particular ring of Hell the silicone injecting fake doctors deserve. I think maybe they belong alongside the creeps that rip off old people with Alzheimer’s. As for the foolish people who get the “work” done I used to think that there was a kind of celestial dome of protection over people that dumb. You know the ones…they step out of their cars into traffic without looking…They take drugs that a total stranger sells them in an alley…they think jumping off a roof into a swimming pool will impress the chicks…man. The celestial dome is extremely selective I find.

So whenever I look in the mirror and think “what if?” I just do a quick data search in the corner of my mind where I keep crazy shit…and pull out the latest news report of yet another bunch of people rushing off to hospitals to to have their brand new lopsided ass repaired or restored.

We should have been Charlie sooner… but how were we to know? They’d been dancing for years…out on the edge of the floor. Listening to music of their own. Laughing in the corners, drawing pictures on the walls. Sometimes they were funny, sometimes they were scary. They laughed at everybody and cried about the crazies. There was a madness loose in the world and some of us took it too seriously…stared at our hands…ranted at the darkness spreading like a stain. Charlie laughed with a pen and ink…We wondered, was that wise? How were we to know?

Can three assholes kill a country…by shooting cartoonists…What? Is that even sane? When I was six years old all I wanted to do was be a cartoonist. They were my heroes…they invented my heroes…they drew my heroes so that I could see them. Their heroes battled evil. I couldn’t imagine anything more honourable…It seemed such a…gentle…profession. Sitting with a pen and ink, at a table, inventing worlds. I drew on school books, on my bedroom wall, on scrap paper. I thought Prince Valiant was real. I was amazed about Wonder Woman’s glass plane. Mandrake the Magician and the Green Hornet guarded the door to my sleep. One day I woke up and I wasn’t a kid anymore. Damn! They were gone.

I kept drawing of course. And I wondered where they went…the cartoonists. When I found them again they were a different tribe. Oh, there were lots of gentle souls…cute little pieces of cleverness tucked into nooks in magazines…smiles. The New Yorker is full of them. I can always find a smile there. But out there on the edge there were ravers and ranters…Artist cartoonists, exploring, searching, driving their work into far out fantasy worlds and France had the best of them. A magazine called Heavy Metal. These people took the same drugs as me…ate the same food…loved the same music. And they had a culture…knew each other, shared work, competed.

Flat out political?…Hell, I don’t know…maybe some. Charlie was…is.

Out there on the edge…dancing…dancing…spinning…laughing and dying. Cartoonists are still my heroes.

We should have been Charlie sooner.

We should have known.

Every year I feel compelled to write something about the holiday season. Usually it’s an inarticulate screech. Very hard to capture in mere words. It’s not that I bear any particular ill-will toward my fellow man, although god knows there’s more than enough ill-will to go around these days. Nope…for me the growing anxiety and impending eruption starts sometime in November when I inadvertently catch myself humming along to some canned musik version of a christmas tune that has sneaked into my head at one of the citadels of stupid shopping malls. I shake myself like a wet dog and try to get rid of it but it only makes it worse, until I can get at least a block away from the place. I always wonder if those old 1960’s paranoid fantasies about hidden subliminal messages (like Led Zeppelin lyrics played backwards…hmmm!) are true and that these happy little christmas tunes don’t contain devilish demands that we should buy…buy…buy. Even if they don’t, the conspiracy of baggism has already started and shop windows shriek at us fro mid November…but Oh!!! even bloody worse. “Black Friday”.

What the hell is that? I thought Black Friday ought to be something remembering disaster…like several ships sinking in Lake Erie on the same day in 1916 maybe…or ten thousand trees falling down because of a flying saucer crash…or the day the zombies arrived (No…of course they didn’t.) But no…Black Friday is when who have just given thanks for being able to afford turkey dinner with friends or family or both…rush out to the local stores at some ridiculous hour in the morning to await the opening of the doors to OZ. Then they trample each other, rip sleeves and stomp toes and elbow old folks (What are they doing there?) to get at the “bargains”.

Now, something needs to be said about all those “bargains”.  Somebody explained that Black Friday is when people buy stuff for themselves and Christmas is when they buy stuff for others…Seemed logical I suppose.

All this excitement and anxiety about consuming has only the tiniest upside for me. It’s that for a few hours we can forget about the horrendous misery that’s happening around the world. It’s as if no internal act of will can turn off the madness and we need this shopping adrenaline to get some relief.

Yes I will…Yes I will go shopping for christmas things. Maybe not for a week or two though and I’ll try to remember my earplugs when I happen to go to the mall for any reason…because I really fucking hate “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”.