Last July, I went to Smackover.

Smackover is where my grandparents live. I had an interesting time and took some photos. Then I got distracted and didn't finish what I'd started.

Spending a lot of time with his r/c car, Justin has. Modifying it, altering gear ratios, purchasing and testing different engines, batteries, and tires, etc.. gives one a certain pride in his own car, and a subsequent need to seek out other r/c enthusiasts who share a similar un-tame'able need for mini-speed.

Through the R/C store in Little Rock, he learned of an r/c car dirt race track , and subsequently of a race on the following Sunday.

So we went. Yes we did.
And he raced his car. Yes he did.
And he almost completed one of the three qualifying heats. You should've seen it. It was grand.
I took some photos.
..And captured some video clips. I ended up with three or four neat little clips of video and managed to piece them together with a, ..neat little software app on Corey's VAIO called Movieshaker.

So what we got is, ..a neat little pathetic fade-in filled video, complete with some pirated mp3 audio in the background. Wow. It shouldn't be that easy. It shouldn't be that crappy either. But it is. Yes it is. But I do however think of it as somewhat neat. And little.

The neat little movie. (1.3meg) Not exactly little little, but medium little. Little enough. It's neat though.

Doug Tompkins
Empire Builder
In 1964, Doug Tompkins—a ski bum and New York expat living in California—borrowed $5,000 and started The North Face because, he griped, it was too hard to find decent climbing and camping gear made in the United States. He sold the company for $50,000 a few years later, using the sluice to launch Esprit, a sporty fashion company that made him a squillionaire and opened the door to his passion for environmental land acquisition. Since 1990, Tompkins, 59, has spent some $55 million cobbling together more than 750,000 acres for a preserve in Chile. He's now buying up turf in Argentine Patagonia to establish a similar enclave roughly the size of Grand Teton National Park.

So if you do something really cool, like, say: start The North Face company, ..you can have a bunch of land in Argentina, and your own volcano.


......................................................

New.

Better.

Odds are, ..my camera is the bestest thing in the world.
Odds are, ..you'll feel better about your own teeth, by looking at mine.

My Cajun proffesor Dr. Martin, the kind of painter, drawer, and screenprinting artist that you'll never ever become, tells us about growing up and living next "door" to Jim Morrison, his good friend through grade school and high school.

..about the time that they were walking home from school and Jim coaxed him into his house so he could hear a Bob Dylan record, and how cool that Jim thought the record was, ..in spite of Dylan not being popular at all for the next year or two.

It's just interesting, that's all, ..finding ordinary people who have such close ties to someone who ended up molding popular music and popular culture. Uncanny weird. Very weird. The Behind the Music people would eat this stuff up.

Then he tells us about hunting "nutria" as a kid in south Louisiana.

"Some describe them as mutant rats, others as small beavers. ...these aquatic rodents are Nutria (Spanish for Otter). Weighing in at 15 to 20 pounds, the Nutria has the head and coat of a beaver, the tail of a rat, webbed hind feet and yellow teeth. It is equally at home in salt water and clear water."

"Originally from South America, Nutria were imported from Argentina to Louisiana in 1938. They were brought in by Tabasco tycoon E. A. McIlhenny who maintained them in a fenced enclosure on his Avery Island estate in southern Louisiana. However, in 1941, rising waters from a gulf coast hurricane enabled the nutria to swim out of their compound. Feeding on the abundant plant life in the Louisiana swamps and waterways, they quickly reproduced."

A funny nutria hunting account:

"I entered the fur trade about this time, in partnership with Howard Harris, a neighbor, and Dave Centanni, who in future was to become my brother-in-law. We took Howard's motor pirogue, a headlight, and a box of 22 long rifle cartridges for the collecting device, and set out at dusk into a canal just west of Avondale, LA as the "Great Southern Fur Company". Our plan was to sell the skins as fur and the carcasses as food for pen-raised mink to the nutria-processing plant in Des Allemands. We toured the swamps all night, accumulating layers of greasy mud, mosquito bites, fatigue and not a few exciting moments. Particularly motivating was the occasion when, stuck in mud up to my hips, I struggled to turn around and retreat, out of ammunition, as a wounded nutria vigorously tried to reach me to test, and perhaps attempt to alter, my manhood. I reached the pirogue in time to be handed two muddy 22 cartridges, and turned to face down and end the big yellow-toothed rat's suffering and ambitions. I am sure to this day that no rich safari shooter has had any more excitement from a charging lion."

heck yeah.

Feed My Giant Rat

Here's $2.9 million. Kill'em all.

mmmm. Nutria fettuccini prepared by Chef Philippe Parola, founder of the Louisiana Culinary & Hôtellerie Institute International


"Eradicating a population of that size would be very difficult, Linscombe said. So, Louisiana has worked to control nutria levels by developing markets for their fur and meat. Some Cajun chefs have concocted recipes for dishes such as nutria with mustard sauce and nutria fettucine.

On October 23, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and USGS sponsored the first official nutria cooking contest. In Louisiana, nutria hunters are paid three dollars and fifty cents for each animal. Some skins go to Russia to become fur coats. The meat is sold to zoos and alligator farms for animal food."

..."The correct recipe for nutria in Maryland, they say, is eradication"

So probably I'm guessing that a 1987 small-town vocational school in Maryland would offer VCR Repair courses, as well as "Nutria Eradication Studies". (NES for short, obviously)

Walk in the Cracker Barrell for an early supper.
I've never eaten at this one before.
Get seated at a window table and fixate your gaze outside such a window, staring at nothing in particular.

Do this for five minutes.

Watch old people test out rocking chairs on the other side of the glass. Cracker Barrel. It should be called: Cracker - we sell chairs - Barrell.

Reach over and grab that triangle peg-jumping puzzle. Defeat the puzzle soundly, three times in a row through red eyes and figidy hands.

"Have you tried Homestyle Chicken yet? It’s one of our new favorites. We take two plump chicken breasts perfectly seasoned, dipped in buttermilk and hand-breaded right in our kitchens. Try it before it’s gone. "

Eat. Stare. Eat.

College town. Biology major waitress lady doesn't understand the tradition of refilling your carbonated beverage. But you overlook. You sympathise. Or you don't care, ..same difference.

She hands me a dessert menu, "Saved any room for dessert? ..or have you had enough?"

No I think I've had enough.
"Sure?"
No I think I've had enough.

They sell silly putty here too. Not outside with the chairs, but inside, close to where you pay. Silly putty is the best.

Pay for one meal and one silly putty.

Walk out.
Walk slowly.
Walk to that red truck and go somewhere else.


Squirrel monkeys don't have days like this. Maybe they get eaten by lions or overtaken by ants, but certainly not days like this.

Lions and ants spell sure solid and certain outcomes. Nothing like today. Nothing like sitting and staring.

Mamma said there'd be days like this there'd be days like this my mamma said. Chorus: mamma said mamma said

No she didn't.

I don't know why, ..maybe it's because you're never used to seeing your own handwriting on a monitor - or maybe it's because you're not used to seeing it so large. In any case, even for an individual with the penmanship of a squirrel-monkey, I think it looks kinda neat.



This one is better though, just because of it's use of the phrase: "needy monkeys"

In other news, this is not a tote bag.
Still haven't gotten any buyers for the merchandise at MY store. I mean come on, who wouldn't buy a mousepad for six hundred dollars and twenty-six cents that says "you suck"?

Maybe if it were blue, instead of white. Because you've always gotta keep up with popular colors.
"Chartreuses, citrons, eggplants, or a mixes of blues and grays" are IN this spring. Sales from the store should dramatically increase when my new hue schemes are implemented.

It makes you never want to draw again when you observe someone in the act who is SO much better than you are. Same way for painting. Same way for alot of things. Why even bother. You're never going to reach thier level, so let them handle it.

Even if you liked doing it, ...geez, look at what they can do. Why even bother to draw at all, when you're never going to draw like they can.

I think I'm getting better at avoiding that attitude, ..and learning that it's not so much how well you can draw, but what you're drawing - what you're painting - what you're designing - what you're building - what you're writing about.

It's all about subject matter.

Something can bleed technical merit and precision - it can be perfect, but still be lacking in soul, lacking in meaning.

Everybody has stuff to write about and stuff to talk about. Forget about how well they say it. It's about what they're saying. Unique stuff is always unique, and other people value it regardless of technical merit or flare.

Art education does strange things to your mind. Don't ever go to art school. Be a plumber.

The weather has been so nice. These are perfect days -five or six perfect days in a row. All the flowers are coming out. All the dogwood trees are bright white and bright pink. I notice these things more than I used to, and smile more when driving down the road, looking through the woods at all the dogwoods. I have no idea why.

Talk to somebody old. Or maybe just travel back in time and start up a conversation with somebody sitting next to you at a roadside diner in 1948. Ask them about thier childhood and the things they did, the people they knew, the small town they were from and the quarky little goings-on of that town, local personalities, memorable events, etc.. You'd get quite unique answers, I think. Unique, more unique, ..than the answers you'd get if you were to, say, have two people my age having the same conversation, on this day at this present time.

Most people my age have grown up watching the same tv, listening to the same heavy rotation songs, buying the identical stuff from the identical shopping centers and eating the same Big Macs. It's like we all know each other. It's like we all have an enormous amount of things in common, because we all came from the same widget factory. We live in different cities and different climates, but we've all for the most part grown up sitting on fluffy couches watching the same drama's unfold on the same phosphorescent screen.

It's amazing how much we all share. Yes I remember that MacGyver. Fall Guy's truck was the best. Kramer is so funny.

Is this a good thing? Probably not. Odd to think about. Sometimes scary.

And as always it reminds me of a song, ..that we've all heard.

You grew up way too fast
And now there's nothing to believe,
and reruns all become our history.

Bull Dozers and Flowers and big Chrysler 383 Motors. Add cement. Take this camera away. Give it to somebody who has at least some small measure of focus and continuity.

What we have here, is certainly not an "uninterrupted succession or flow"; definitely not a "coherent whole."
What we have here, is a failure to communicate.
So sue me.
The confused are welcome to halt coming back. And the more than five individuals who emailed me complaining about the "rights of chickens being violated" are extended a similar invitation. Go get in your cars and sit in your leather seats and order some more drive-thru chicken mcnuggets.

Gather up large quantities yuppie supplies. We’re talking lanterns and tents and bottled water and beer. We’re talking big sweaty Antarctic expedition sleeping bags, and 48 lbs of charcoal. And the grill. Not just any grill. Bring the Texas Pitmaster 300. Bring the rolling infrared cooking machine, the one with 894 square inches of cooking area, made from heavy gauge carbon steel and commercial grade stainless, …only in this way can one bond with nature. To fully immerse oneself in the wilds, you’ve gotta be brandishing an axe, or at least a large knife, and lugging around your high powered binoculars. You must also snack frequently, or should I say “fuel up,” periodically - on Powerbars, and on trail mix. Because you just never know. Out here things can happen fast. Be prepared for “bad to worse” scenarios. The unprepared will run out of energy, succumbing to the elements and collapsing whilst trekking from the camper to the campground bathroom.

And bring plenty of cash. That way you’ll be able to purchase one of those disposable waterproof cameras at the gift shop. And obviously a hat or a nice tee shirt that says you’ve been here, because if you don’t have the bumper sticker, you just weren’t there man. You just weren’t there. Tote your new camera everywhere. Odds are, it’ll be raining next time you see those two mischievous raccoons trying to tip over your garbage can. Only the prepared wildlife photographer, with watertight gear, will get the shot. Use the rest of your money to make fire. The firewood people will only drive through the campground once a day, so have your money ready. And at night, after you’ve used up the rest of your lighter fluid to make this fire, you know that you’re finally “away from it all.” All that remain are the sounds of crackling green burning wood, and the whispers of wind blowing through the trees, and the echoes of Bon Jovi from the other campers of fifteen feet away. You smell the Barbeque in the air, even over the odor of Deep Woods Off. You are a a child of nature – at home in the wild.

Plenty of times I’ve seen these brand of camping scenarios play out. Most of them haven’t been as pathetic, but I think that most if not everyone who owns a popup camper or an Airstream has had the experience of getting home and being relieved – getting home and feeling at ease that they are back in their quiet houses, relieved to be out of a crowded campground, be it at a lake or a river or an overcrowded KOA on the outskirts of someplace nice.

I have a few memories like that, but looking back they’re overshadowed with better memories, from better times and better trips. Mostly in the spring or the fall, occasionally even during the winter, Dad used to drag us all over the state, I and my three brothers and my mother, mostly going on canoeing trips. We’d go to places like the Big Piney Creek or the Buffalo or the Little Missouri Rivers. Places like these were nice, as you could canoe for two or three days, get tired of being wet and cold, and then spend the next day or two hiking or laying around eating fudge and snickers, riding bicycles and generally being lazy – building large fires at night and sitting around during the daytime between good fattening meals, content and careless, nobody around, sporting weeklong unbathed hat hair and taking pride in your unchanged underwear that felt like an extra pair of skin.

Two or three days at time never really got you there. For me it seemed that only the longer excursions were the most memorable. After four or five days you finally seem to unwind and get good at having lazy fun, content to sit in a chair for hours at a time, listening the river and whittling on a stick with a dull Barlow knife, as your ratty blue jeans hang on a rope behind and blow back and forth in the wind. They’ll just get wet again tomorrow, because tonight the forecast calls for even more rain and the river should be back up at fun stage.

My older brother Jason and I can remember more of these trips than my younger brothers can, as many times they were too young to remember or even go along. As we all got older, most of our camping trips turned into one or two week stretches of camping on Lake Ouachita with a ski boat, and sleeping at night with a nice cool breeze blowing off the lake and the sounds of the small waves lapping up against the shale, and the sounds of the generator from the driving RV that sat two campsites down, operated by it’s inhabitants who stayed there all week and seldom ventured outside it, only occasionally, maybe to adjust their satellite or take their little rodent-sized dog for a walk around the paved camping loop. Those trips were nice as well though, in their own way. You could spend the whole day riding around in the boat, skiing behind the boat, working on the stalled boat, setting trotlines, checking trotlines, and spreading on incessant layers of sun lotion. Oh and eating, continuous eating, and drinking, beverages of all sorts, and spending large portions of the night layed out on lawn chairs looking up at the stars when it wasn’t cloudy, eating and drinking and talking and laughing, not having any idea what you were gonna do tomorrow or the day after or all next week, but knowing that it would be similar to what you did today. A whole lotta fun lazy nothing.

That’s why you have fun even while only in the planning stages of similar future outings, and such, or something, or whatever. Your mind floats around in stuff that you remember – stuff from way back when. You know that it might actually be like you remembered it, given that you think like a kid, and not care in the slightest. It’s harder to think like that when you’re older, or so I’ve noticed. ….Here is where I actually start talking about what this story is supposed to be about. Maybe I’ve spent too much time getting there. Maybe I’ll cut some of that stuff out. Because most of it is drivel. And the first two paragraphs were so promising. What a shame.

This morning I woke up late, around 10:30. For some unknown reason I find it easier to do this at my grandmother’s house. Maybe it’s because this bed in her “guestroom” is 74.28 % more comfortable than my designated sleeping furniture at home. Didn’t have class until 1:30 today, so that gave me some time to sit around and catch up on some reading and spend more than the usual one minute and thirty-four seconds to groom myself, ..even to put on socks that I didn’t wear yesterday. It’s a 40 minute drive to campus though, so I had to leave just as she was almost done cooking us a lunch of chicken and rice and squash and green beans. Microwaves are great. Sit down and eat that warmed up good stuff around 9:30 tonight. Put it in bowl and heat it up with the wonders of particle physics, stir it, heat it sommore, stir again, and eat. Squash is good. Yes it is. Don’t ever let anybody tell you it isn’t. Poke salad is an evil spawn of the devil, but squash is nice.

I ask her how often they ate chicken when she was a kid, back when it was a long time ago, back in East Texas when people still scratched a living out of the dirt before the oil boom. “Oh we ate chicken a lot, ..not all the time, but we ate chicken more than any other kind of meat.” Her mother raised chickens and those chickens led to breakfast eggs and the occasional fried chicken. “We always ate them fried, ..sometimes boiled, but mostly fried.” Her mother would let some of the eggs hatch and grow up, and the ones that got good and healthy and plump would get eaten. Yes, even I can understand this logic. They get fat, ..you eat’em. Chicken is good. She told me that her mother also raised turkeys. Not those small wild turkeys, but the big scary looking turkeys – the eatin kind. I told her that I didn’t like being around those kind of big turkeys because they made weird deep throated nervous sounds and always intimidated me whenever I would get close to’em. Our neighbors had some. She agreed. I figure most people would.

Back when I was 11 or 12, a bunch of those big turkeys got out of our neighbors fence and were chased by Skipper, our small black dog, into the woods behind our house. Me and Corey went to investigate, … and found our dog barking at a tree. As soon as Corey went and stood under the small dogwood, ..(this was summertime, so you couldn’t really see if something was up higher in the branches) right as this big huge turkey comes flailing out of it. So this big good eatin turkey the size of a washing machine lands square on Corey’s neck and shoulders, and grips tight with it’s claws onto his shirt, fearing for his poor turkey life as the dog is well within what could be called a concern to it. So he’s jumping around squirming everywhere and all I can see is from his waist down. The rest of his upper body is enveloped in shivering epileptic turkey. Lesson learned: Turkeys are good to eat, but not good to have on your shoulders. Just ask Corey.

We use to have chickens too. Lots of ‘em. You see it started out as a flea and tick problem. Having more than three dogs around the house and being surround by cow pastures, ticks become a problem. An itchy problem, ..one that eventually turns into a nightly ritual whereby your parents line four brothers up in a row and strip you naked, using the household tweezers to remove ticks from every crevice. Just like one of those grooming sessions on nature shows where clans of monkeys pick insects off each other, except mom and dad didn’t usually eat the ticks. Not usually anyway.

That’s why we acquired seven chickens. How I remember that we started out with exactly seven is odd, because I couldn’t have been more that 4 years old at the time, but we started out with seven. They were alarm clocks. They took over our yard and ate ticks whenever they weren’t running from persistent dogs. Our dogs obviously sucked at catching chickens, because over the course of 1 or 2 years, seven chickens turned into 40 plus chickens. Not 50, but 40 plus. At this time you have what scientists call a shift, or maybe they use a bigger word, ..where the chickens have eaten all the ticks, and for a lack of delicious tick snacks have now taken up new hobbies. Hobbies like decorating cars with white chicken crap, hobbies like certain Jerry Springer ghetto chickens laying eggs everywhere and forgetting where they were, letting them sit and rot under the deck and in the bushes next the sidewalk. Rotten eggs equals bad. 40 chickens let loose over a 1 acre yard turns into a rotten annoying disgusting thing.

Enter dad.

Grow weary of the family station wagon speckled with white dung, he did. For some strange mocking logic they all liked to hang out in the tree above the carport. For this reason, one morning he decided that all the chickens would die. A man of action my father was and is.

Enter dad onto the deck with gun.

We are curious and won’t obey orders to go into the house, so we’re instead instructed to stand behind him. Chickens died. Many of them. It was a hardcore poultry massacre. They never saw it coming. First were the ones roosting above the car. Then he spanned out into sequential zones of the chicken population, out into the yard. We knew where they hung out. These habits would ultimately allow for us to take them out more swiftly. An hour later it was an eerie scene. 30 plus chickens lay dead and dying. The rest had “done fleed” to the woods. Many of the birds were picked off while attempting to fly away. Many were wing-shot and slowly attempting escape on foot. He walked about the yard and finished of the wounded. Hardcore Clint Eastwood chicken justice. They never taught us anything like that the next year when I was in kindergarten. Nope they didn’t. It was a large wholesale genocide. A bloodbath.

That’s my chicken story.

I got lots more chicken stories, ..like the time Skipper actually caught a chicken and killed it, and I’m instructed to go bury it. And how the chicken wasn’t really dead yet but just “not walking”. It’s laying in a hole and I’m throwing dirt on it while he keeps moving his head and neck around, trying to squirm out. And the time that big mamma chicken almost pecked my head off when I got too close to her chicks. Bleeding scalp. Laughing parents. Repressed memories, good times, same thing. Chicken tastes good. Beef is better.

Life can be odd, especially during those “big change” portions of it. Sometimes I feel like an eighty year old lady, trying to figure out the air conditioner controls of a Honda Accord. You know that once you figure’em out though, it’s gonna be cool and nice and temperature controlled. Adjusted and adjustable.

Ready.

Paddling to Beautiful
Scenes from Lake Ouachita

photos by:
Beverly Buys (my photo instructor and a swell lady)

April 2 - April 30, on campus at the Russell Fine Arts Gallery