there is this sense, as an artist, that you deal with life in a rarefied plain, more emotionally, more subjectively, more objectively, more violently, more sanely. there are the late nights and early mornings of bad women you don't know and bad habits you know all too well. there are the old books falling apart-- brittle with age, the yellowed to brown pages crumbling with each turn of the inquisitive hand. there were nights where i never spoke a word of language other than the language of a brush or a scrawled pen in the dim light under my loft bed in the long island city studio as the street lights of 11th street blew out the glass brick windows of that concrete ground floor space.

the artist, robert kingston (at the time) was on the top floor and while walking his majestic dog, Reina, he would, at times stop to knock on the thick glass and he'd come in and look and we'd talk and think, for awhile, together, sometimes leaving the space to walk along the east river warehouses that, at that seemingly long ago time, lined the shoreline where the packs of wild city dogs crept out from the forgotten basements in the late of night.

at the time, long island city was part small town and part ghost town. part NYC and part??? there were young mexican families and old italians and if you saw someone more than once you at least nodded and said your hello. and it has changed... like so much of everything else in life-- it has changed. the old warehouses are long gone. the young mexican families gone or, if not gone, furtive, in hiding... the old italians? sadly, i'd say they've died off. and their children and grandchildren play at making a living off the new way of life on that side of the river.

but, clearly, i digress.

back to art... it is a singular game. there is little room for collaboration in the quest of a vision-- narcissus, the cruel master... it dawned on me yesterday, feeding my baby, that my wife and child have given me purpose. given my way and my life reason and a cause. i have been steadfast in my pursuits-- art, vice, poetry, violence, sport, what have you... but now... now there is a new speed and a newfound vigor to my practice of existence. and indeed, to the practice of my art

i owe this to them...

the poet, james dickey wrote,

"I begin to move with the moon

As it must have felt when it went

From the sea to dwell in the sky.

As we near the vast beginning,

The unborn stars of the wellhead,

The secret of the game."

yeah. that about sums it up...