art is hard

Sorry I’ve been away so long dear readers, for the moment I’m done with all the big projects I’ve been working on so I will be back much more! No pictures today but I had to share this poem from my brother’s blog, Musings From An Educated Hillbilly Iconoclast. He writes compelling and hilarious articles about everything from the racial implications of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire to the history of Shurons (the glasses Buddy Holly wore), as well as some poetry of his own. There is such a great voice and humor and about his writing that really echoes his personality. This was definitely my favorite poem…

on making art
art is ethereal
it cannot be measured or quantified
you can’t weigh it by the pound
it cannot be stored in a vault
or it dies like a crimson orchid locked in a dark closet
it cannot be caught in a mason jar like a firefly on a warm june evening
it cannot be tamed
sometimes it can’t even have a name
it simply appears one morning like a baby in a basket on your doorstep
a serendipitous apparition
it comes with no instruction manual
and even if it did the manual would be wrong and clumsy
full of typos and punctuation mistakes
it would say ‘insert tab a into slot b’
but there would be no slot b
and maybe tab a would turn out to be a reuben sandwich
making art is like trying to roller skate underwater
mistakes will be made
but they may be indistinguishable from graceful acts of brief genius
and in the end
if every cell in your body is bursting with life
all the while
it makes no difference

the magical world of white trash insurgency

I was just looking through some old blog posts by my brother, the hillbilly tycoon, when I saw this one about our family. I thought it was so gritty, true, and beautiful. Dan and I have definitely always been the odd ones out in my family. We don’t aspire to live in the suburbs and have a bunch of mediocre crap that we work constantly do get; and that supremely confuses our family. Any kind of behavior that they don’t understand becomes automatically suspicious (which is why they all think my unemployed boyfriend is a drug dealer). So here’s pretty much what any gathering is like on that side of the family….

Thanksgiving in New Richmond

When are you ever graduating? my aunt asked me from under those crayon eyebrows
a mixing bowl of green jello fluff is passed
a family favorite that horrified my Jewish New Jersey ex at first
so appallingly goyishe
evidently
it is: jello, cool whip, and canned pineapple
evidence of my disputed Midwestern-ness
this family never fails
to piss me off
dad is wearing the cosby-show sweater his ex-mother-in-law gave him when i was five
his Holiday uniform for the last decade

Next Spring. i answer
muddy workboots stacked by the door near my chair
the neglected labrador begs for scraps from the porch with his eyes
staring through the sliding door
these people think they have arrived now that my uncle built this new house
but they still drink orange Big K
shoot deer
never travel
don’t read
and think sophistication comes from a car dealership
my childhood remembers as a cornfield

What is your degree going to be in again?
History. i answer
What are you gonna do with that? she frowns
stupidly i joke, Good question!
an intended segue for explaining my grand plan to take over the world using my brain
Well you should have figured that out before you started! she interrupts
dumb bitch has no idea what i do
all she knows is nursing and driving an hour to waste money at the nearest mall
i try to explain about fellowships
graduate programs
tenure
my family eyes me suspiciously over their cranberries and green bean casserole
none of this is registering
You know your cousin really likes his new job in Chicago. she reminds me
he was the Junior Fair King
the heartthrob of 4-H camp
my uncle paid for his O.U. business degree building rich people’s bathrooms and sunporches
we are not as rich as they
my dad can only give me his sweat
when there’s heavy moving
ruptured pipes
or a dead car on the side of the highway
my trust fund is knowledge about how to dig holes expertly

my aunt talks about her new job in Kenwood
she likes it better than her old job at the hospital
doesn’t have to drive through
the ‘slums of Clifton’
my sister and i shoot incensed looks at each other
we have both worked our asses off to live there

i give up on these people
their provincial smugness too stupid to be angry about
i orbit in universes they cannot dream of
my superficial poverty more apparent than their wants
but so much richer
“Get in the car Miss Ceely!”

they will be even more flabbergasted when they hear
that i want to move to the Third World

reblogged from http://whitetrashinsurgentpoetry.blogspot.com/

hurloween

I really wanted to make a Halloween post to show off some awesome costumes I saw, but I neglected to do so because I was too busy living the fuck it lifestyle pretty hard. This mostly entails hanging out with really fun people, riding around in a 1982 limo, and doing whatever you want (short of hurting other people or stealing from anything non-corporate). Mark Twain had the same idea, he just said it a million times more eloquently. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

And it lead to one of the most fun weekends of my life I’d say. My brother recently moved to Columbus to get paid to go to school, but then realized that being a college dropout is much more fun; an idea I stand behind strongly. So he bought a 1982 white limo and dropped out, (accepting his hillbilly tycoon fate by doing so) which enabled us to bring 11 people and my dog back to Columbus to live the fuck it life, at least for a weekend. We partied with some really good people on Halloween, and I was very impressed with the caliber of homemade costumes.

Homemade Beetlejuice costume, awesome!

Best costume by far, and all homemade!

My brother, a zombie beauty queen

My brother, the zombie beauty queen (Miss Flint 1994)

Jacque Cousteau & Steve Zissou, best couple costume

Jacque Cousteau & Steve Zissou, best couple costume

My boyfriend as the Dude.

My boyfriend as the Dude.

I was Walter, but I don’t have one of us together yet.

So the morning after this obviously high-class shindig, our resident fantastic chef, Carey made us a feast that could not be beaten.

breakfast master

oven

fruit

And we spent the rest of the day recovering, watching It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and the thrifting until we dropped. Here’s the best picture of the weekend, all 14 of us just after we all piled out of the limo behind us.

the fuck it brigade

I highly recommend trying just a little bit of fuck it in your day today. See if it works for you. I bet it will.