First a sidetrack. Friday, my friend and amazing Absurdist, Zefrey Throwell, threw another episode of the Midtown Games and I was happily present and participating, even quoted in the paper.

Saturday was chill and cleaning.

Sunday was my Open Studio/Birthday party, which saw a number of great people stop by, look at my art and hang out with me.

Monday, I started helping a gallery in town run their social media channels.

Tuesday, I began thinking about campaign management software that combined the powerful notetaking and discussion within an organization of a wiki with tracking tools for the communications

Today, I started digging into some of the itchy questions which are beginning to burn the nerd side of my brain. Then I put the studio back together, now, now, I am 42 and ready to take another step into that great unknown, The Future.

After dropping the kids off at school, I read an article on The Atlantic’s website, via my Flipboard app so it was pushed to me, but I dither away from the burning topic of the day, at least for me. Let’s roll this story back nearly twenty years. I was 24 and just out of the military; broke and in a period of extremely influenceable flux. Somehow I managed to get my hands on a workbook for the I-ching. As I was trying to figure out what the hell this ridiculous document was, I was asking all sorts of questions and throwing coins to see what it would give me. I no longer have access to that volume so I can not recall any of the answers which were randomly generate for me. I can recall one of the bigger questions I asked. At the time, it seemed sort of like a throw away question that I was putting out there to gauge the results of my more important questions like “Is that girl I currently fancy going to sleep with me tonight or not?”

My big question was What would the world look like if there was no money?

Fast forward through everything but let the timeheads scrub the relevant information and you’ll see that I had a great interest in Second Life at one point, because it had an in game economy. I took every course that related to Economics offered by my college. And just last summer, I was half-seriously talking to someone about writing a MMORPG that has an in game economy which can be linked to the real world economy.

You can’t see where this is going can you?

One of the fascinating things about the article on The Atlantic was a discussion of Bitcoin, which I had looked at a couple years ago. I was also playing around on the Foreign Exchange at that time. I also have an account on Empire Avenue (just reactivated this week), as well as knowing my Klout score. All of this ties into the eBook “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” (download it here).

So the Big, Ugly, Hairy and completely Absurd Idea is to make a peer-to-peer exchange that harnesses the APIs and power of the networks that we already have in place, or are being rapidly developed and adopted across the planet, in order to be able to exchange real world goods and services. Basing this all on the amount of activity and influence an individual has developed through goodwill from his/her network of connections.

I so badly want to be paid in Galactic Credits for my services, and to be able to exchange them for things I want or need; rent, food, clean clothes, etc. Does this mean I need to start a credit union that issues GCs? Is this the work I have before me?

It seems like it could be a really interesting thing to be able to pay for stuff with an app on your phone, or send a message to be able to pick up cash at a dispensing machine. But when I start thinking about this, I have a follow up thought that says I am just one person and there is no way that I can get all the merchants of the world, or even a small portion of them to accept my crazed idea of being able to earn GCs just by checking into their location via FourSquare or whatever half-baked notion I have going around in my noodle. So, that’s as far as the idea goes. Once in a while, I express this idea to someone who I know will backup my doubt and let me off the hook of actually doing anything with it.

So if I don’t want to do anything with this idea, why am I writing about and publishing it for the world to see? I don’t know. Maybe I hope someone else will put it into place. Maybe I hope someone will ask me to work on it with them. Maybe, just maybe, I hope that by publishing this idea, I can get some help, some more ideas about where and how to start. I don’t know. But the idea of writing this out was pressing on my brain so hard this morning that I could feel my skull begging me to just write. So there, its out. Now my poor little brain feels better.

Enjoy your day!

Oh yeah, one last thing. I had the weird notion that 1 Galactic Credit would be roughly equal to 10 Milky Ways, you know the candy bar. So from the street price in my neighborhood that’s ~11.250000000 USD per GC

The entity that I chose to define as my Self is located at the intersection of mental activity, spirituality and physical existence. In order for my Self to retain all the wonderful aspects of life and its processes I must nourish each of these three parts in some manner.

How does this work?

Basically, its that whole process thing I was talking about earlier. But essentially, it’s all about about setting some goals. I can use an unordered list here because I’m a nerd like that!

• Spiritual
  • establish and continue a meditation practice
  • read and study texts which lead me to greater understanding of the Infinite & the Universe
  • look for opportunities to express gratitude in all situations
  • listen more
• Physical
• keep my bike central to my lifestyle
• eat more vegetables
• get the right amount of sleep
• create art
• Mental
• reestablish my coding practice
• maintain my artistic practice
• continue to analyze and express ideas

These are both challenging and easy, because they are simple. Simple can be incredibly challenging, like a daily mediation practice. Sitting for ten minutes every day sounds easy but so often the day is halfway done before I realize that I blew it off.

My Life is constantly in flux. I am always changing. In years past, many of the changes in my life seemed to be not of my control almost as if I were being victimized by the Universe. However, I realize now, that I was just weakly producing this perspective by refusing to take more assertive actions. Life today is so much more deliberate, less “random” and less chaotic. The manner of change which was put into place here was the installation of a major guideline.

Take No Action as the result of a Hot Emotion.

This does not turn me into an emotionless robot, rather it actually gives me the space have all my emotions, enjoy them like blooming flowers in a garden and then when their season has passed the logical & reasonable path of action is presented and I can make a sound decision. It would be presumptuous, perhaps even arrogant, to hang the label of wisdom upon this attitude; so far it has dramatically improved the quality of my life

I love how these posts are always about something vastly different when I am riding around thinking about writing. The action of writing drives the mind into new directions which I may not have been aware of which it was all within the land of theory and thought!

What does this mean for you, Supergenius?

It’s a fairly simple and elegant solution. If you want to be genuinely inspired, I mean truly inspired, then you have to work until you have exhausted every single avenue that you can find. Then work until you are exhausted, trying to create new avenues, build new accrues and when you have completely exhausted yourself and just can not take another step, switch gears. Do something completely different, like take a bath, go for a walk or ride a bike. Do not try to continue thinking about your problem.

It is then, when you are far away from your tools, far away from your working environment, far away from your problem solving mindset, that you will be struck with inspiration. I mean that sort of inspiration that has epic proportions, that will consume the rest of your life as you continue to build upon it. I mean the solution to all the space garbage and how to fund colony on Mars at the same time, I mean the solution to one of the Millennium Math Problems or whatever gigantic intractable problem you have been throwing your mind at.

BOOM!

I hope you can remember your dreams for more than five minutes after you wake up. Because your dreams are where your mind is most relaxed as it gets to play inside the boundaries of another Universe that has a different set of logic rules. It is where these inspirations come from. So practice writing down your dreams. Learn to keep an account of where your brain has been going when it wanders off alone. You will find that inspiration you need, that you desire and want so badly.

Then once that inspiration strikes, the hard work, the practice that you have developed in order to pave the way for your upshot to happen, will be exactly what you continue doing in order to midwife that inspiration into a whole and complete manifestation. Good Luck!

I would argue that a critic can serve a purpose to provide a touchstone opinion, one that is informed by spending a great deal of time looking at, experiencing and thinking about art, to those people who are interested in art yet don’t have the time to invest in becoming more knowledgeable. A critic can identify similarities and differences between artists, or thematic evolutions of an artist over time. This is because of their investment of time and organized energies acquiring that information and analysis.

I believe it would be a mistake of mythic proportions to allow a critic to be perceived as a tastemaker. This could be catastrophic for a local, regional or international artmarket; depending upon the size of the critic’s ego and audience, as talented and challenging new artists go ignored,under reported or publicly humiliated because their work, the result of their processes, does not match that super critic’s tastes.

Perhaps it is the rise of social media which solves this problem. It disperses the formalized response to a work of art to becoming the responsibility of many more people. There was a great deal of emphasis in today’s discussion on the necessity of viewers and readers of critics to exercise their own critical thinking process and critique the critics. This, I believe, becomes much more possible as the result of social media’s explosion.

Where’s the sink?

I’ve been playing the social media game for quite a few years. Mostly as an additional means of communicating with open source developers while I was in university. But in the past year, I have been paying some attention to a little site called Klout. It supposedly measures your influence across the social media spectrum; or at least along the accounts which you plug into it. I’ve put some accounts in, taken them out, switched my focus, changed my practices and tried other such experiments in order to see if I can find any correlation between actions and the production of the Klout score which is assigned to these actions. As you can see from the graph on the left, my activity in the past five days has resulted in a significant change in direction.

What the hell does a tangent about some social media influence score have to do with art criticism? Everything. There are a number of detractors of the Klout score but it does serve the purpose of assigning some arbitrary value to a Social Mediazen’s influence on the information economy. This is the same as being criticized. Someone works themselves into the position of some authority about art an declares that this is good or bad or progressive or whatever they say it is. Then everyone can offer their criticism of the criticism, if they are so inclined. They can also just accept that critic’s word as the standard and only go to shows that the critic says are worth seeing, only buying the works that the critic says are worth buying and thus subverting their own emotional connections with the works.

An important thing here that needs to be mentioned, is the necessity of having multiple active critical voices in a market. This will serve only to strengthen the discussion of art by providing more perspectives and more channels for the discussion to grow around. It will keep artists of differing manner of work, results from vastly different processes, covering myriads of themes and working at differing evolutionary paces under the big umbrella of Art. For good criticism; not necessarily criticism which is a positive review for the Artist; offers the Artist new avenues to explore and grow. Poor criticism on the other hand, only shuts down the artist, the viewer or both.

A final note. I would be personally aghast if a big time critic showed up at my Open Studio/Birthday Party and used their full platform to rebuke my work. I would also be beside myself with joy if my work were well received in that article. But mostly I would be a bit ashamed for that is not the intention of the Open Studio, to be fully thrust onto the main stage when my art is just beginning to emerge. However, if a Big Name Critic did show up, express some interest, ask some questions and carry on a conversation with me about what I am doing in my studio, that, that would be a good moment. Even if they did not like my work, they would at least be able to tell me why in terms that would not be offensive because no matter how many times you hear it, “My five year could have painted that” is not criticism, it is an insult.

I talk an awful lot about process; the process of creating art, of moving, of cleaning, of growing up, etc. This is relatively new to me, as in the last decade, but my awareness and knowledge of process is in the process of being more finely acute in the last six months. WARNING: we are about to enter the meta-meta zone of philosophical blatherings.

Let’s scale it back into examples to keep the conversation civilized.

Despite receiving a bachelor’s degree which includes computer science as one of my fields of study, I have been holding my abilities in tech issues in low esteem. I wanted to correct that, and the only way to improve esteem is through actions. The actions necessary here is to practice my coding skills. You don’t just sit down at any old computer and start blindly typing commands into it, there is some preparation involved despite the narrative tropes perpetuated by Hollywood. Sitting in front of my computer on Sunday, I started the process of preparing for taking these actions.

This seems to overlap many other areas of my life. If I want to feel better about my drawing skills, I must practice. In order to practice, I must have prepared myself by getting appropriate materials. Once, I’ve done that, I can begin. Fortunately at this point, my art studio is well stocked and I can find a piece of paper and something to make marks on it quite handily. My process of learning to draw is at the ideas of what to draw stage. My learning to code process is at the setting up my computer stage, in meta-meta terms, the gathering materials stage. My learning to love process is both far more advanced and behind simultaneously (more on this later.)

In real life, processes do not advance from stage to stage in clearly definitive movements that have accompanying thunderbolts and symphonic arrangements; see Life is not a movie. Instead, it is full of nuance and dependencies. What are dependencies? You know what that is, it’s when someone says “…depending on…” in context o what you are seeking to accomplish. Like my computer, it needs some development software installed on it.

Sunday, I set about doing that, but I ran into a dependency which I did not know how to meet. So, I sort of gave up. That hedge phrase “sort of” means I shifted focus from one task to another one that was seemingly unrelated to the original task, but as fortune would have it, actually ended up meeting the dependency for the first task. Life is funny like that. Now Xcode is successfully living on my CPU.

Now to today. I keep a list of things todo each day. This lets me set off on making progress towards some goals, goals which are set through a process of looking at achievements, skills, needs of myself and others and finding what I can do to move myself into the intersection of these. These goals are broken down into tasks and that pile of tasks is where I choice what to put on my todo list. Today, I’ve been trying to tackle my list and have run into several sets of dependencies which must be met.

Direct or indirect tactical approaches to meeting dependencies being equal in absolute terms of results, sometimes you just find more dependencies. I find when this happens, there is usually an expansion or clarification of the goals that has occurred. For instance, the dependency which allowed my error installing Xcode was cleared as the result of trying to install a script written in Ruby that would post my Things to do today on my computer’s desktop. In order to complete that task, I had to download, build & install several applications, and there we have a repetition of processes that advance me closer to the goal of improving my coding skills and a sharpening of focus on a language and a platform.

As if you care.

But it works the same way for everything else. Some times in life, we have to walk in the direction we do not not want to travel in order to get to where we want to go. Take love and other matters of the heart for instance. Because this involves real people, emotions and thoughts as well as chemical responses between them, it is significantly more messy than meeting dependencies for computer software. The road to finding love, being in love, staying in love, having a love that grows and develops is full of twisting, turning and an infinite number of dependencies that seem to change arbitrarily on a daily basis. That is as long as you remain determined to be in control of the process of love. Funny thing is, you will find your process is not bearing any fit if you strangle love with attempts to control where it takes you. The only process which you should be putting into love is repeatedly opening yourself to being carried wherever it takes you.

That’s it.

Seriously? You thought I had more than that?

Come back tomorrow maybe I’ll be wiser then.

Saturday was the astronomical midpoint of the Earth’s elliptical orbit between the two points labelled as the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice; the May Feast, May Day or Beltaine in Ancient cultures. While preparing to go celebrate this factoid of arcane knowledge with some people with whom share a secret handshake, wink and nod, I was unable to find my ceremonial robes and silly hat; okay, okay there’s no silly hat but I could use one. It was at this point in my life that I discovered that ultimate collection of chaos, the closet that everything gets shoved into.

Predictably, I find what I’m looking for, only by pulling half of the mess out of the closet. Pressed for time, I just leave it. Saturday turned into an awesome day hanging out with my kids & a group of friends in Central Park. I declared at dinner that no one had to clean their room, take a bath or go to bed at a reasonable hour and there was much rejoicing in the land!

Yesterday, Sunday, was an incredible Spring transitioning into Summer day that NYC is so capable of having this time of year, quite naturally! Ha! So the morning/early afternoon was in the playground. The rest of the day was spent working magic.

That’s right, I said magic. What you think the closet where everything gets shoved is cleaned up without magic!?! Really? Let me explain myself.

See that closet, gets that way because that is where we put all our problems, our fears, our worst nightmares of the moment. That is where we put the things that we do not want to deal with and secretly, or not so secretly, hope that they disappear. But contrary to what you may have learned at Hogwarts, that spell just doesn’t work that way. So I emptied out that closet, completely emptied it. Then using my magical broom, swept it clean. Then here’s where I borrowed some thinking from The Minimalists; only my favorite things went back into the closet.

By favorite things, I mean clothes that I selected; this means anything that a former lover gave me has been bagged and is off to the thrift store. The magic here, in my mind, is that if I am to be my own man, then I need to remove all the mental, psychological & emotional connections, no matter how subtle and nuanced they may be, from my daily life. Simplicity is the key here.

Those fancy shoes that I wear once or twice a year and are impractical even then, gone.

That shirt, those pants, that sportsgear that never gets used, the shirt I kinda like but is not my absolute favorite to wear; gone, gone, gone & yes gone.

Now, my closet is only a treasure chest of things that when I take them out and put them on, will make me feel like my favorite person in the whole universe. Magic! Mutatio! But wait there’s more! This process was so good, so healing, so wonderful and so unstoppable that it spread to the chaos under my bed, over to my toolbox and even to my son’s haircut. (He now looks like a three year old version of the 80s version of Tony Hawk! Skate Grommet!) All the technological gadgets and geegaws that are woefully out of date, gone. All the cables that spaghetti monstered everywhere, neatly wrapped and tucked away in a bag that was found in the bottom of the chaotic version of the closet.

There’s still plenty of more magical work that needs to be invested into this process,but cleaning out The Closet of Chaos is a wonderful start. The sense of motion towards that ideal self is easy to perceive with each action. Each change I make in my environment, is but a reflection of the inner changes as my focus shifts from “what has happened to me” to “what I can do.” Here is where the real magic, the real transformation takes place.

About those mythological beings

I am comforted in believing that there was, is, can be entities which are far superior to humans. One perspective might argue that humans are far superior to squirrels, but I have no need to argue this point. It gives me comfort to believe that connections with the universe through the inner path, will get me in touch with guides that are helpful to listen to as I happily trod my path to destiny. I have a friend who has labelled these guides as different names and claims they are all different and separate aspects of her personality. I chose to attach mythological entities to these. I pray to them, I meditate on things which are suggested by them and take deliberate action as a result. Its the same healthy way we treat friends, family and other relationships; we call, we talk, we listen and we respond. Belief in magic is the same as assuming that poetry is capable of expressing beauty whilst being beautiful. Belief in magic is not the same as a disbelief in science. Shoot, I had an advanced engineering class which relied heavily on calculus to work the problem and the instructor frequently answered questions of “how does that work?” with “PFM: Pure Fucking Magic!”

Call me crazy, I embrace it and you.
Call me a lunatic, I am happy
Call me ridiculous, I smile a goofy smile
Do I know something you don’t?
Nope, I just use it in a different way.

Finally!

Frequently, people wake up in the morning and a song enters their head of its own volition. Oh come on, you know I’m not the only one who has a catchy song that fills their head irregardless(sic) of what plays on the radio/ipod/mp3 player/etc. Anyways, I have been embracing that song in the morning and listening to it. If I do not have a copy of it, I have been buying it. Today’s song, well, I’ll just share it with you, hopefully it infects you too!

Since 1996, I have been using the morning pages concept from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way as a path for my journey. Well maybe not as the path itself but as method to record that path. I’m not so good at reviewing those pages at all but I have a stack of notebooks filled with the scratchy marks of a brain just waking up. The subtle changes along the way found me switching from any old pen to a specific brand of pen and then coming to the point two years ago where I switched to using a pen that must be dipped in an ink well to write. This has slowly developed a deeper connection to my inner life and it is one of the most rewarding parts of my day.

The notebooks themselves also tell a story. I started using sketchbooks, then went for dedicated journals with silky paper. I have even experimented with using digital notebooks; the best method was using Evernote to take screenshots of writing with a Wacom tablet in Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro. I have also found when looking at the stack of books that certain periods of my life are easily delineated by the notebook that I have selected for that time. Periods of rapid transition have occurred in notebooks that were special, they stand out based upon quality of the book, how individual they were made, etc. A month ago, I just finished using a volume that was super extraordinary. It has a wonderful archival quality spine and the paper was fine grade and rather parchment like. The growth that occurred within that volume was enormous and lead me to connect my pen and ink fetish to drawing Celtic knots which are springing into a life of their own.
Now, I am back into a Moleskine journal. I deliberately chose it as a fall back to normalcy and it will look like several other periods of my life when it is completed as Moleskine notebooks have been very popular for my writing in the last six or seven years.

All of this is preamble.

I have also been blogging, microblogging and generally being a presence on the Interwobble for the past seven years. I have switched things around, spread out, contracted and generally gone through the same sort of exploration, discovery and using what works or what seems to work process in that digital life. This morning, in my personal and private writing, I came to the conclusion that I have been doing things incorrectly. If I have been practicing this digital transmission and publication process for this long and have not managed to transition it into a viable profession, then the fault only lies in myself.
One of the problems, I find in myself, is a reticence to set goals and stick to them. Last night, playing around on twitter, I began to follow more people again, searching for some quality connections, and came across a tweet by Anita Bondi and responded to it honestly and in the process discovered a truth about myself.

This discovery was not one of instant enlightenment, rather I have been coming to this point for a couple days or weeks, slowly and deliberately in my methodical style.

The Big Discovery

I have been holding back. Yup, its true. I have been holding back on all of you but mostly on myself. I have a thousand ideas everyday, one or two of them I can easily say are my own and are somewhat original. But what have I been doing with those ideas? I’ve been letting them sit on my shelf of “get to them later” where they fade and disappear. For instance, I have been thinking about making changes to my website, this website, that broaden the scope of things. Last year, when I switched to this domain from one that I have let go of, I narrowed my scope to only discussing matters that pertain to Art. There’s plenty of material in that realm, but I find that my interests are far more far flung than just what I paint or draw and I am only doing myself a disservice to limit my writing and publishing in that single vein. So, from henceforth, the words which I select to line up and cover my thought will be about a much wider array of things. This I hope will help me to publish more frequently too.
It is frightening to open up portions of yourself that have been closed off out of fear that you’ll get hurt. This is doubly so after you have actually been hurt by being open. I realize that without being open to being hurt, you are also are not open to being helped, nurtured, guided, comforted, growing and all the other wonderful things that can happen in life.

The only way through this fear is to face it head on and walk right through it. Sure it’s going to hurt sometimes, but that’s life. The place on the other side of that fear is one of such wonderful richness and full of grand things that stimulate and inspire, so I know that it will be totally worth it to take these steps.

Is that it?

Well, no, that’s not all. I have also been thinking about reconfiguring the technical backside to this domain. Mind You, this is not aimless shuffling. My intention is to allow the blog to remain a place where I publish the wild thrashings of my mind, but I need to set up a better gallery system to display finished works of art. One that will allow me to sell some paintings. (Hi there, that sentence really hurts me somehow) Yes, I want to sell off some paintings and illuminations. This is despite my natural inclination to think of these completed works as not being worthy of being seen by others. I continually tell myself, “Well in another year, I’ll have a suitable body of work, then I can give it a go.” But truth be told, I have so many paintings in my apartment/studio that it is becoming a real logistical nightmare to create any space to live/work. I have to state that I have a suitably large enough body of work and most, absolutely most, get on with getting them out the door. This includes a couple of boxes of work that are drifting up and down the East Coast right now!

So what does this all look like from here on? I have no clue, really. I do know that it means that I need to be much more active in many different ways and that I need to grow more but this is certainly growth that must be done in the eye of the Interwobble and the world at large. The payoff has the potential to be huge or I could fail miserably, but either way I can not sit here as a bystander in my own life any more, holding back and refusing to share. If anyone out there has read this far, and can muster enough caring to poke and prod me occasionally, I will greatly appreciate it. I know that I can not do anything alone so, here’s my request for help on this journey out into the Great Big World.
First thing you can do is let me know if there is anything I have left out here. grin.

So the live painting was not something new for me, I have done live paintings in nightclubs in the past. They are great fun, and would like to be able to do that more often. Usually in nightclubs the general energy of the space is one of upbeat and ‘we are getting laid’ vibes. This theatre piece was definitely not that! There were some serious themes which the writers were exploring, and many of them were very close to home for me. So when I set out the rules for my piece, I was in for a ride.

The Rules

1. be completely open to all energies in the theatre
2. paint as long as the actors are working
3. do not judge my work

So, now I need to describe the play a little bit. There was an interstitial performance art piece which was light hearted and fun that started everything and separated the scenes, and even managed to tie them together. Easy for me to grab ahold of that energy and let it start flowing through me. Then came a piece about Paleo culture and the origins of conflict between ‘manly’ men and ‘beautiful’ men and led to the creation of the first cave paintings, using blood. Of course, I found the identification with the ‘beautiful’ man who can speak with good words and make pictures come to life. Yay! Heavy subject matter did not get too heavy. Interstitial piece. and then

BANG!!!

Heavy shit happened. Mom and Dad in waiting room of child shrink’s office, having an argument and disagreement about how to take care of their kids after the death of his sister. Business suit Dad answered phone and had to leave. Blah, blah, blah. Ok, so I can not really recall all the lines of dialog that went on in this piece, nor am I genuinely capable of determining whether or not the actors were the best in the world but for that moment in time (which stood still for me) I was allowed to witness a dynamic that both terrified and angered me. My responses at this point, following The Rules, were somewhat out of my hands. I threw the canvas off the easel onto the floor. I became the kid who was being talked about. I felt his rage, his fear, his grieving sense of loss and I threw a tantrum, brushes and paint. The canvas became my foe, and we battled royally. The dark themes which were more than hinted at by the writer and actors of the scene were coursing through me and left me wracked with tears on the floor, clutching the canvas, scratching at its surface with my fingers.

Intermission.

The rest of the play was a refinement along these lines. I had recovered my senses somewhat and sought to have the composition which was being crafted in front of me find a resolution. The abstraction which had been created was somewhat gross and disgusting and I did not think I could turn it into a thing of beauty, no matter how much material I dropped on it, or how much energy I poured into it, to me, it is a grotesque thing of horror.

Sunday night, I went to the closing party, where The Shelter was raffling off the works of art created by myself and the ten other painters. i looked at the still drying canvas and felt sorrow and compassion for whomever was unfortunate enough to end up possessing it. I did not want to touch it or to have anything to do with it. I even deferred drawing the name out of the hat because I wanted it to be far, far away from me. Right now, I am not so sure that I can call myself an artist after such a horrible creation has sprung out of me. I do not have a good photograph of this atrocity and plainly will not look for a better photo of it. I hope that no one out there actually sees this work and that it somehow disappears forever.