TOO HOT to hold...

Today....while up in SEATTLE....finishing a sign for an old employer...I got to witness a big learning lesson for my lil nephew....

...we had a lil bonfire in the yard....burning some wood that was lying around...just the remedy for this FREEZING COLD....it was HOT...creating a lil bubble of warmth arounds us....Joe put a pail of frozen water near it to watch it thaw....and then lil J grabbed ahold of it...the fire had made it super hot...and he howled in bewilderment at the pain...thinking, somehow...it was the water in the pail...he howled and sobbed for over an hour...reduced to almost animal-like shuddering and babbling incoherently...his face a mucousy mess....he had never experienced this sort of throbbing agony....it was hard to see him learning these lessons...FIRE HOT...

After at least an hour and a half...he passed out from shear exhaustion...he slept for quite some time...and when his mommy came home he was just returning to some sort of normality...ready to laugh and goof about...maybe bolstered by her presence...that despite this horrible event...life could still go on the same...and us trying to make him laugh even harder..as if trying to erase any last glimmer of pain from deep in his brain...trying to reassure ourselves there were no permanent scars.....but his body had learned too...that really bad pain goes away...and life goes on...AMAZING how resilient kids need to be in the face of the infinite unknown experience...
I don't remember experiencing that first pain...obviously the body needs to forget...thank god...so it was amazing to revisit that moment through his eyes....

OUBLIETTE

One of my favorite authors, PHILIP K. DICK....was constantly obsessed with the substance of reality...WHAT IS REAL?

I have had experience with this myself....One of my earliest "memories" is of me, with a large red lollipop standing outside a white picket fence, with a gate and a white wooden archway over it....And while I know that the place exists (see STREET VIEW)...I feel like the memory may have been a dream or something I made up....(a "long" and uninteresting story...).

THEN there is a "memory" I have that I have no clue about whatsoever:
when I was a kid there was this street going up to FRIENDSHIP PARK in my home town of SAN PEDRO, CALIFORNIA, and in front of one of those houses on this drive was a WELL (click on STREET VIEW). It's STILL there, though the place is totally renovated and lacks any of the character it had then....(I know it is still there thanks to GOOGLE MAPS- WHICH ALLOWS YOU TO SPY ON YER OLD CHILDHOOD TOWN VIA SATELITE AND STREET MAPS...it's cool too, because as you move down the streets the weather changes, and sometimes there are construction crews where you know there aren't any...(when I am searching NYC streets...) as some of the pictures were taken at different times, or updated))... I later discovered it was a FAKE WELL, but by then it had already, for some reason, lodged itself in my mind, and I had already imaged all sorts of possibilities for what lay at it's bottom...(I don't know WHY wells intrigue me but they do...)...And it is as a result of this memory that another one exists...

I have an image of a JESTER sitting at the bottom of THAT well....I think...and I seemed to remember him being rather sulky about it...(SEE IMAGE AT TOP, FOR MY QUICK SKETCH OF THIS, AS WELL AS I CAN REMEMBER IT...).

Now, there were a bunch of odd animated movies during my childhood in the seventies and the eighties...like THIS ONE....and THIS ONE (one of my favorites!). And I am unsure if maybe my jester inhabited one of these strange films, glimpsed on a gloomy saturday afternoon....

Alternately, it may have been a dream I had...(though it seemed like a movie....I can almost see the animated colorful style)....as dreams have a way of being utterly convincing....

Recently, I had a dream in which I was stuck in an elevator, and the cable snapped and it began to sway and lurch dangerously....And this somehow triggered, I think, this older memory for some reason- (the mind is a mystery)- of which I had completely forgotton..And it is just as much of a mystery as it was then...

I don't think I shall ever know what the truth is about it...but it has been shouldering it's way into my work...or rather the image of a well, has continued to fascinate me for some reason that I don't know either....









I'm not sure I really WANT to know the truth...For it has grown into something bigger than this one small memory can contain....and something about it is pleasing to me...reassuring....ANCHORING...so does it really matter...?

In a way, this JESTER, down a well, sitting there...sulking...or waiting to be let out....or just...representative of my subconscious....has BECOME a reality to me: When you live with something long enough inside your head, who's to say it ain't real....?