". . . doesn't the sky look green today,"

The title here is a line from one of my favorite Jefferson Airplane albums, "After Bathing at Baxters." When cooking dinner and listening to it tonight I realized that the first time I thought about green skies was one evening while standing on the hill next to Charlie Philbrick's house looking at the early sun set when Charlie came out and spoke to me about the color green in skies. I don't know exactly what age I was at the time, maybe 11. I must have been doing some painting around that time. That moment I spent listening to him always stuck in my mind. I was impressed by what I remember hearing when he told stories about flying P51's in England, and knew he was some kind of a writer, and taught writing or English at Brown University. I didn't know much about anything, but for what I was searching out around Blackfish Creek and in little golden books about nature. Those moments touched me as a boy, to have an adult come out and talk to me about color in the sky, how most people wouldn't think there was green in the sky at sunset he said, but there it was. Now I am reminded of all those DeChirico's with green skies.

It was like the time he brought me some Johnny Cakes. I felt he was being a friend in a special way, he being an adult, the way Gill Franklin made me feel, sitting with me drawing flintlocks and powder horns one day, and when Gill took me fishing in his little motor boat, like a brother, different from some adults, and we caught bluefish.

Charlie had boats, too. He and the boys would spend the first days of summer getting the skiff ready for the water with caulk and rope, painting the bottom, painting the hull. They didn't seem to like it, but I found it interesting. Maybe my interest in things opened a door for those men to connect. Maybe it was the painting, there was always some painting to do, trim, windows, screen doors, floors and decks, all that oil paint, not so bad, the scraping and clean up not so good. One summer he took to making a kayak from a kit, he and Ben. I found it interesting. I spent a lot of time hanging around with them, as they lived next door, in the big house on the spot we had opposite Pleasant Point on Blackfish Creek, South Wellfleet, Mass.

There was a kind of grand circle of friends my parents had. Always getting together for cocktails or dinner cook outs, beach fires, fishing, talking, well talking at parties, fishing was a different ambiance. Often there would be the kids hanging around playing in the sand, or sometimes just I, when the grownups all would cram into our small cottage for Portuguese stew, drinks, clams on the half shell and cocktail sauce, oysters, bass, usually somebody had caught or dug some sea food. The Portuguese stew was something my sister brought home from Oscar's mother, and it was a hit. Kidney beans, cabbage, hot sausage, potatoes, broth. Clam chowder was a dish my mom made from the quahogs we'd dig in the creek at low tide which she couldn't eat as she was allergic to bivalves, but often did anyway, she liked them so much. The little necks, many officially to be thrown back, were eaten on the half shell. Yes, I ate my share of sea food growing up under the green skies of Old Cape Cod in the summertime. Not much anymore.

Encouragement of the Painter

I've been a painter for forty five years, with some breaks. Even if I am not satisfied, or feel a painting is successful, there is something rewarding, something energizing about doing it. It's nice to have an idea or an inspiration that keeps images coming forth, but it's not as important to be considering a body of work or a gallery show, or even that a great painting must be made, and that is something of a relief. And it can ease things up for true engagement and enjoyment.

Discovering, playing, applying, making textures, my images can be of different styles. Color and paint alone is fascinating. I believe that color and texture carry emotion and that being open to what moves through me brings something to an image. I remember going to a counseling center and seeing a young persons work on the wall that made me look at it every time. There was a mastery to the drawing and the coloring that was inspiring and beautiful, not a typical childlike rendering, abstract, that showed the intent and abandon to expression that allows for magical things to happen with color, that's what I think I found beautiful in it.

I might have thought that somewhere along the way I had lost something of that energy , but seeing that piece took me beyond that, or I went away with the idea that maybe I could get it back, or find it again, uncover. Most of the time when I see good paintings I get inspired, and it feeds me somehow, and in that way I feel like a painter again.

Music Even in the Quiet

Sometimes I don't feel the cold and the wind when I look up at the stars or the moon. The moon lights up the snow, shadows fall of the trees and, the sense is almost like being on the edge of the universe, looking up, I almost have no body. But I do . . .

I chose this blog title for a song on "After Bathing at Baxters," one of my all time favorite albums back then, when it came out, and still is. An old friend gave it to me a few years ago, and like the boxed Jimi somebody else gave me, listening to it is like opening a doorway onto a room full of stuff. Music and smells do that, well, what doesn't do that, I guess. I have a program from an Airplane concert that I saw in Providence in probably 1967, that does the same thing. The "Ultimate Spinach" opened for them. I can still see the cops standing around the front of the stage, the classic light show. The program is a book with pictures and lyrics, what a treasure.


















Anyhow, it seemed encouraging, this title, and to name the blog in this way, even if nobody knows. I'm not sure I want to give it away, but I notice several folks out there on blogger come up with the Airplane in their profile. Cheers.

It's quiet and cold tonight, and if I try, in my head (feed your head) I can hear that band taking off.

Owling

This is something to do like morning pages any time of day. You know morning pages? Writing to unblock creativity. Let off steam, have something to look at and reflect on, to keep the magic going. I think it maintains positive thinking, which in turn makes me happy, connects me to my soul and the universal soul, and even though I am not writing on paper with a pen, something is heard, the energy of my conscious mind exists, helps create a reality. Good energy creates good reality.

I get tired of news now. Hype and sensation and only PBS news can give me something to think about, generally most of it seems almost irrelevant to me, negative energy that causes stress. I need less stress.

I like reading blogs of other folks out there that really have something to say about their life, thinking out loud. Some write really well. I know I don't usually, have to edit and correct voice and tense and type-os. My key board sucks, always leaving out letters and switching letters. I have to work at it, but it falls into the category of creativity. Even if it's only brain drain. So if I feel self conscious and vain, well, there are lots of others out there doing the same thing. We find our selves and similarities, feel humble, excited, and it yet looks good.

Oh, and by the way, if you don't know about morning pages, look up Julia Cameron's book "The Artists' Way" as it has lots of suggestions for why we get stuck, and it is available, or was, on cassette, probably now on CD. The tapes are a favorite of mine because you can listen to her voice and drive and consider things, all at the same time. I found them helpful. Julia is funny and interesting. Writing really works, too, dealing with any thing that seems to get in the way. It's not so new, a diary or a journal functions that way, like talking to myself, I get to express feelings, reach understandings about my self.

(And if you don't believe in a universal soul as in the universe has energy and consciousness, consider the universal soul is now on the internet in the form of all these blogs people are doing.)

Bay Rum

for Wendy

Could I buy a deck chair
one with plastic weave, aluminum frame,
nestle into sand of Duck Harbor,
smell the dune grass, sweet fern,
bay leaf. Like a loosed mooring,
or trap buoy that could,
when high water comes, go
drift flotsam on the smell of the bay,
the smell of the bay.
Face full sky above,
sea anemones below,
rub shoulders with angel hair,
dead man's fingers, rock weed.

Darkly Dreaming

Returning to a place can begin the reflection, roaming the memories that turn up the usual and the unexpected.

Don't know what it is that makes a moment of indecision hang around the brain, those words spoken without sensitivity, a blank heat swooped stare, linger. A misplaced expression of disinterest that won't leave you alone, returns, gathers reinforcements and leads to restless natives at the gates. Pretty soon everyone seems to be giving you a look like a seventh grade math teacher with a crew cut that takes you out in the hall and tells you why you should get a hair cut. And you always remember that before that time you were doing well in math.

Some will say it's not enough exercise, or too much drink, or smoke, or sex, or almost anything but that which would do you the most good. Like that chilly morning I wore gloves in gym, playing baseball on the asphalt school yard, when the teacher that had to have been a marine said, "what are you gonna do when winter comes?" Why can't people just ignore those things, stir up a bit of compassion to say I won't make an indelible painful memory out of this moment so small no one else will ever remember it. When someone does say something good that takes away the moment it is rare, and not usually our own voice from within, though it could be, as I find times when I have said such things to an other and made a friend.

Too often those moments are also rare. As when I said, "I understand," to a woman in college, we fell in love and spent a number of years together only to find that I didn't have the make up to say things like that often enough, and eventually she was telling me I wasn't aggressive enough. That statement was most confusing as she seemed like the kind of person that preferred collected balanced men, but in truth was attracted to passion and spirit. That was what she meant, but I didn't have a clue. Sometimes people don't say what they mean,I don't know, it was one of those times when one takes up reading, as I did, Loa Tsu every night, and tried to better myself, literally find or replace what was wrong with me and make it better. It went pretty well until one day while contemplating my condition with a candle in a cast resin candle holder, somebody distracted me. I don't know if it was Joe who, when I asked if we could talk said, "you never talked to me before," as if I had been secretly implying his inane behavior and gave him his chance to take a hit, as a few others were doing. In later consideration, much stronger moments, I thought, why didn't a friend say something, if I was such a stupid boy friend . . . and so times begin to add up, take confusion as a header, and end with the question why do people do things. But only long after an age of soul searching from the point of view that I was a jerk.

I came back shortly to a room filled with carbon and a smoldering candle holder. The smoke was thick, almost blotted out the light from the windows. The carbon crept into the open drawers of the dresser. Plastic resin carbon sticks to everything like memories of a break up. I was able, it seems for the most part, to forget the ordeal of cleaning, where to sleep, before or after, how we could have done it successfully, and all the details, are blank. These emotional moments remain, undetermined by significance, certain moments that leave questions in our minds or heart seem to live on after thirty years or more. They are clips or frames of a day with a person or two, a pot of soup, a painting, a house, most likely some words that have slipped away are why the clips are there, but perhaps, too painful to keep, the rest of the day hangs like a carbon covered coat in a closet.