I Was Really There

Behold! It is I - & I am It. I am there (well, I was there) & look! I'm on the other side of the monitor now! It's that guy, & he's at Burning Man™ out there on that playa thing with his silly bike. Silly bikes don't get stolen, according to my theory. That's a kid's BMX bike I bought for Zerek in Santa Rosa California when he was like 10 years old. It came to Roswell with us. Zerek rode it here once maybe twice, had a dramatic encounter with a strand of barbed wire & a lot of goatheads/puncture weeds near the mall. Then it sat out in our 5 acre yard northeast of town for 10 years or so, through rain, snow, dust, wind & high levels of ultraviolet radiation.
The extended seat post is a chromed clothes pole for a store, that happened to fit into the right orifices. It hasn't failed yet, but it will, it's already starting to go, I'm still in denial.
The seat is from an old 3-speed from Bakersfield in the 50s. Really. It was my brother's bike that ended up being mine. The seat is still here & functioning, a little frayed around the edges but unbelievably still retaining its basic structural integrity. Weird. I mean, it's not as if plastics were better back then. Or were they? I don't think so.
That's my brand new Tilley™ hemp hat; my Toon Glasses - my own creation (I got the idea from Greg Duncan years ago); my necklace made from the stubs of Dixon Ticonderoga™ Number 2 pencils that I killed drawing Cherry Comics; & my cop swat team boots that I got online from Galls™.
Notice the fresh gash in the leg from a rebar tent stake that I had just pounded in.
This was probably not too long after I had returned from the Summer Of Love Camp & decided to dismount while the bike was still rolling & did so quite gracelessly in an awkward pirouette that concluded with my going right over into the dust on my left side, scuffing up my elbows & knees some & doing something to something in my upper chest which I took to be a pulled muscle. A week later, after returning home I realized that it was actually a cracked rib. A few days after that I figured out that it was the rib that I had already cracked while trying unsuccessfully the 1st time to install that big Signs Of Life sign at this location.

This is where I ended up, in Stag Camp.

Here's some but not all of the Stag Camp campers.







This was my gift. Well, one of them, anyway. It's a cut vinyl sticker about an inch & a half or 2 inches across. It's the Green Man, I say. It's the Corporate Green Man. It's ironic, 'cause it's vinyl & vinyl ain't green. Everybody who received one or more liked it/them, or seemed to at any rate.

I'm going to Burning Man

I just robbed a grocery store. I'm going to Burning Man.
No, not really. I'm just paraphrasing the song by Dada, 'I'm going to Disneyland'.
But I really am going to Burning Man, by damn. I got my ticket an everything. The ticket's pretty.

Dude, you're gonna have a horrible time. Yer gonna die. It's an endurance run, yer too candy-assed an old for that kind of extreme shit.

I'm doin' it. Hey, I've been in weirder places before. I was in Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love. I ended up sleeping in a borrowed sleeping bag under a bush in Golden Gate Park with a car thief from Chicago (not in the same bag, okay?).

That was 40 years ago. Yer a fossil. You'll crumple up an die. Nobody'll like you, these kids hate old fucking hippies.

Hey, I was never a hippie. I was a Freak, & remain so to this day. Hippies were those kids that showed up on weekends & we'd try to sell them bags of oregano for $10, which is what an ounce of pot went for then.

You went through the whole Summer of Love an never got laid. When fall came, you were still a virgin. That's how lame you are.
But then I went up to Seattle with nothing but my guitar on my back, to be with my ladylove. Then I got laid! Then I went down to Venice to not be with her. I've got such stories! These kids today, they're smart. They're conscious of their culture & how it got there. Some of them are, anyway. They'll sense my wonderfulness & love me. My stories will be my gift. I'm gonna live forever!

Those aren't stories, they're anecdotes. Nobody cares. The occasion will never come up when any of them will have the time or the inclination to sit still long enough to listen to you ramble on about what a loser you are.
But I'm a world-famous 'underground' cartoonist! I'm already an Art Hero!

But yer stuff sucks. And what have you done lately that's even remotely cool?

Well, I did this great big mural on a wall in Roswell. Outer Space with lots of rocket ships & planets & asteroids.... It's right on Main Street!

Facing the other way!

Well, it's a zen thing that's what makes it extra cool, right?

Sure, but nobody cares.

People come from other parts of the world and they take pictures of it.

Yeah, that & three & a half bucks or so will get you a latté.

Hey, I still got it. I'll be okay.

No, you don't. No you won't. You're so not prepared. It's yer first time you don't even know what the fuck yer doin' & yer all by yerself. You got no one to depend on but you, & you suck! You have unrealistic expectations.

I know. Nothing ever turns out the way I think it's going to. So if I think the plane is going to crash, well, then it isn't, because... Anyway, I'm going to leave my expectations at the gate, just like they say to do.

But you have so many. You'll never be able to let go of...
Oh, shut up!

I don't have to.

For at least 5 years, probably much longer than that, I can't remember when or where I first heard about BM, I've been (not) experiencing it from this side of a 17" monitor. This year, now, soon, I'm going to climb through the looking glass and be on the other side. In it. Like the Grand Canyon: all the pictures you see of it, even a Circarama™ presentation in Disneyland™ are really nice, but don't give you anything of the feeling you get when you're standing on the edge of it, looking a mile down into the bottom of it & having it extending out from both sides of you farther than the eye can see, as the wind blows on you & all that. Not the same. I know that. I gotta do this. Even if it kills me. There are definitely worse ways to go. I'll bet.

Yer a jerk. Yer gonna hate it. They're just a bunch of rich assholes. Sticking their heads in the sand as the world goes to hell. Yer just gonna be perpetuating the idiocy.
Yeah, but there's all this really cool art that I just have to see!

Yer gonna hate it. It's gonna suck.
I know.

4th of July in Roswell

Now that Zerek has married Caryn & they have produced an offspring, we are part of a whole 'nother family.
Zerek completed his submarine school course in Groton, CN, so he got a break so he & Caryn & Elijah (Caryn's child from before, that's another story) & Cadence (Sharon's first biological grandchild) came to Roswell for the 4th of July.
So Cadence (They refer to her as Cadybug or Cady) was there with her mother, both of her grandmothers & 2 of her great-grandmothers.
I've never seen anything like that.
More photos here.

AP Roswell Story

Here's the piece AP did on the tchotchke trade in Roswell.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19637638/

It's Coming

Now it's actually summer which means the UFO Festival is almost upon us.
Gotta get ready. Gotta stock up. Get shirts printed. Make stickers. Get more done on the mural on the wall outside. That's what I'm doing right now at 2:00 in the morning. It's too hot during the day.
Anyway, here's the shirt art I did for Bob for the Roswell Runners club. It's my response to the art the '07 UFO Festival Committee is putting out as the main image for this year, meant to look like a pulp thriller paperback cover. I thought they were going for comic book cover which really pissed me off. So I did a real comic cover.

Spacewalk video

This has been around for a while, I guess. I googled "Roswell Spacewalk" & this is what I got.
Totally unauthorized, of course. I guess I need to stick a notice up on the front of the thing claiming copyright & all that. Not that I seriously give a shit, I just like to know when stuff is happening.

We're going nationwide!

A couple of guys came into the store the other week. I happened to be down there in front with Sharon. Of the Roswell Space Center that is. Usually I'm in the back, which is Signs Of Life, upstairs in my hidey-hole designing or cutting vinyl or tripping on the internet or something.
Anyway, these two guys were from Associated Press. Tim Korte from Albuquerque was the reporter & he had a little notepad & a pencil, just like like in old black & white movies. The other fellow was the photographer, I didn't get his card so I don't remember his name. He had this totally kick-ass camera, a Canon that looked like a 5x7 SLR, but it was digital, of course, with this huge lens sticking out of the front of it. He had another one hanging behind his back it turned out. But of course.
So Mr. Korte gets us talking about the upcoming UFO festival that happens here on the 4th of July weekend (Sharon & I were on the UFO festival committee for 6 years, that's a whole 'nother story), the Roswell tourist trade, & the announced plan for a UFO themed amusement park here.
He's doing 2 stories. He's already done the one about the theme park.

  Link

The other will be about the festival & attendant tourist trade, it will happen later.

In The News

I made the front page of the Roswell paper, again.
It's about the Snazzy Pig, which has been closed because the city council won't let them have their beer & wine liquor license because they're too close to a church (St. Peter's Catholic) even though the church is okay with it.
I finally get to do almost everything for a new restaurant & it goes & bombs!
Oh well....


Here's some other stuff I've done for Cattle Baron Restaurants:

Stormchasers

A few weeks ago we had a hailstorm here. I was here at the shop late as usual, trying to get inspired &/or motivated to do something really great that will make our life better, hearing the rain coming down harder & harder, then the rattling on the roof so I ran down the stairs to pop the back door open to check it out. Sure enough, there's hail coming down & it's covering the ground, making ice floes on the river that just started flowing down the alley beside the shop. Normal sized hailstones, then it kicks up a notch or two & really starts pounding & the hailstones begin to look like mothballs. Down at the Old Base, a few miles south, they got stones that were two inches across. Then it stopped, the hail, anyway. It continued to rain a while longer.
A few days later the Hail Damage Guys started showing up. In one day three different guys came to the shop to get me to do signs & banners for them as they're setting up at auto dealers, tire shops, auto glass shops, parking lots & whatever with their trailers & tools & crews. In a couple more days there's like thirty different outfits set up around town doing Auto Hail Repair.
Now it's been weeks & most of them are still here, still busy. It's like around $1,500 a pop, more if it's a big ol' Expedition or Navigator or something.
We made a bunch of money, well, not a big bunch - we didn't get into five figures or anything - but it was real easy, slam-dunk cut vinyl sign work, the kind that pays the bills without stressing you out. Some clouds do indeed have silver linings.
It hailed for like ten minutes or so.

A Sign of Life

We've been at this location for a year now, & we finally got our sign up.
It was made for, & hung at our previous spot at the Stripmall of Death, I mean Monterey Plaza, one mile west of here. It's a big heavy thing, it's got 2 inch angle iron on the back of it to stiffen it up. It took 4 guys to get it off the roof where it's been laying, down to the hanger bracket that we bolted to the wall a couple of months earlier.

The Connecticutt Welzes

Here's a family portrait I did for the ZMonkey family in Groton.

Einstein's Birthday

Well, it was.
He would be 128.

Oh, I was on TV today. On the news! No, I wasn't arrested.
The guy from KBIM TV Channel 10 here in Roswell came in the store this afternoon to interview me about the Roswell Spacewalk which is our little roadside attraction. It's a walk-through blacklight installation that takes you back in time (dioramas of the Roswell Incident) & then to the future where you find yourself on a spaceship, looking through the portholes at spinning galaxies, planets, satellites & flying saucers, all in perception-altering Lumiere Noir (blacklight).
Sharon & I have built this thing out of mostly scrounged materials, set it up, taken it apart, hauled it somewhere else & rebuilt it about five times since 1999. This is the abridged version.

People come from all over the world to Roswell. Because it's Roswell, man! And they want to see something Roswell. So they go to the International UFO Museum and Research Center that's in what used to be the downtown movie theater, the Plains; & that's okay, but they take themselves seriously there, so it's not very entertaining, & after that, there's nothing to do but buy more T shirts. So we humbly offer this little attraction to give visitors something that's uniquely Roswell, as we try to sell them more T shirts & tchottchkes. I guess you could call it folk art. People mostly seem to get a kick out of it.
So the guy, I totally forget his name, did a little puff piece about it. Turns out he's the anchor guy, but it was just him & his camera, he was the whole crew.

Cadence Leigh Welz

Some Other Stuff I've Been Doing

Okay, this is making me nuts. I can't edit this shit at all.

The Blizzard of '07

I can remember it like it was yesterday. Or the day before, which it was.
Actually, it was the 2nd Blizzard of '07. The first was the week before, and it mostly hit Albuquerque. This one (the 2nd) mostly missed ABQ but hammered Clines Corners and Santa Rosa. On Friday, we left Roswell at about 7pm in our little old Ford Tempo to take Sharon up to ABQ so she could catch a flight early Saturday morning that would take her eventually to Rhode Island, from where she was then to be brought to Groton, Connecticut to be with Zerek and Caryn for the birth of our grandchild. Zerek has joined the Navy and is in submarine school there in Groton. He and Caryn just got married and moved into a house there. There's more backstory, but that'll have to wait for now.
After carefully checking the weather reports and road conditions, we decided that it would be okay to go ahead and take the regular normal shortest route even though there was going to be some snow. As we left Roswell, going up highway 285, the wind started blowing pretty good, not quite head on, at about a 45 degree angle from starboard to port. Less than half way to Vaughn, which marks the midpoint between Roswell and Albuquerque, it started to snow. Kind of pretty at first, sparkly flakes shooting by you, making it look kind of like you're going into hyperspace in Star Wars. That didn't last too long. Soon the flakes and chunks were horizontal streaks. None of it seemed to be sticking to the ground, so it was cool, I could still see the road, though not as well as I would have liked, but at least it wasn't turning white. Yet.
I slowed down. Then the snakes started. The snow close to the ground, going slower than everything else, but still moving right along, began bunching up into serpentine streamers, shimmying twisting deliriously across the road, splitting apart, joining together, curling up and straightening out faster than the human eye could keep track of, obscuring the road and the dotted line now more, now less, reflecting our headlights back at us in a brutal assault on our retinas.
"What have they done to Vaughn? They seem to have moved it. Why are we not there yet?"
By the time we did get to Vaughn, the snow was building up, the road was disappearing. We stopped at the store in Vaughn to take a pee and see if we could get any information on how bad it was going to get. The kids at the register didn't know or care. A fellow traveler called the hotline number we gave him on the pay phone. Cellphones don't work in Vaughn. "Everything is still open. Just go slow."
Dancing snakes all over the road.
"Where's the line? Oh, there it is. No, that's not it! Oh, shit! Oh, there it is. No, wait!"
Sharon is muttering incantations... "Stop snowing. Stop. Just stop! Just for a little bit. Give us a break. Just stop! Honey, you're over too far, you're going off the road!"
"What road? I see no road!"
I slowed down. Now we were doing 35-40 mph, and it seemed way too fast. I'm losing it. I'm losing the road. But I gotta keep goin'. Can't stop. If I stop a huge truck will run right over us. Can't pull over. There's nothing there. We'd become a snowdrift and they'd never even know we were there. Gotta keep going. Someone's comin up behind us. Actually, it's a bunch of them. They're gaining on us. Great. Maybe they can find the road. I'll follow them. There's a flashing blue light out in front of them. What is that?
It's a snowplow, leading a small convoy. I pull over. Not too far. Snowplow cruises by. The first guy in line behind the plow holds back and blinks his lights at me, letting us in in front of him. Now we're the front of the line, right behind the plow, which is barreling ass up the road (at about 35mph) shooting a huge plume of snow off to port. There's still a lot of snow and ice on the pavement but there's black marks where his tires have been so I know where I'm supposed to go. This guy's havin' a good ol' time. And makin' a lot of money. He's my hero.
This goes on for miles and miles. This is great! We'll get on up to I40 where things will be better. Then he pulled over and stopped. What? No! But... but the road keeps on going up that way and it's all covered with snow! Waaaahh!
I slow way down. Braver souls in hardier, better-equipped vehicles roar on by us, taking the lead. Thank you. But we still haven't made it to that last long steep grade before you get to Cline's Corners (and I40), and here's the snakes again, thicker and faster, punctuated by huge gouts of snow blowing up from the east side of the road and dumping themselves right on us. Completely blinding us momentarily. Over and over. The road disappears. The line keeps moving. BRRRAACKK!! The right wheels hit the corrugations at the edge of the road. So that's where it is. Sharon is coming unglued. "Honey, you're too far over! You're going off the road!" "I am not! Oh, shit, I am!" She tries to be good. She closes her eyes. She pleads with the storm. She begs it to stop, just for a while. Another dumptruck load of snow hits our windshield. Gotta keep going. Can't stop.
Life is like a mountain railroad.
An old bluegrass gospel song is running through my head.
With an engineer that's brave.
There was a time when locomotive engineers were regarded as major heroes. It was the coolest thing a guy could be or do. Not like rock stars. More like NAASCAR drivers, I guess.
We must make the run successful from the cradle to the grave.
I'm not just listening to it. I'm singing it. No, I'm not a Christian, but some of that old gospel music is just fun to sing. You know, like that stuff in 'O Brother, Where art Thou?' I love that shit.
Watch the hills, the curves and tunnels.
The road no longer exists as a physical object. It's a concept. A set of parameters. A hypothetical proposition. A figment. A fragment. A fragmented figment? A figmentary fragment?
Never falter, never fail.
What's that movie where Marlon Brando asks somebody,"Do you believe that life is like a mountain railroad?" Was that 'Apocalypse Now'? Naw, that can't be right. I can see Kurtz saying that, though. Oh, it must be 'Missouri Breaks'. Yeah. Where he's Lee Something or other the insane regulator and he's about to kill this guy and he asks him that.
Just keep your hand upon the throttle,
Maybe I'll just go ahead and sing it out loud. I dunno... might disturb Sharon. So I sing it over & over in my head.
and your eye upon the rail.
Well, it's better than having like a Michael Jackson song stuck in there.
We can tell we've reached Interstate 40 by the clearance lights on the rows of truck rigs parked along it. They're not moving. Cline's Corners is not the welcoming, beckoning, attention demanding tourist trap that it normally is. It's a black hole surrounded by mud & trucks. Off to the side there's a convenience store with gas pumps. Hardly anybody getting gas, but everybody's going into the store. The snow is blowing straight across from east to west, which is the wrong direction. I'm trying to get information on how bad is it between here and Albuquerque. Guy working the store tells me we should just go, if we stay there we'll get stuck, 'cause it's gonna get worse. So we go.
I40 isn't near as bad as 285 was, but it's still pretty hairy. The snakes are still doing their dance. The division between lanes becomes indistinct, if not nonexistent, which is not all that important anymore as we're all going single file mostly. We're passing each other all right, but then we get back into the tracks that somebody else has made & there's only one set going this direction.
And so on over the pass & through the canyon to Albuquerque. By now it's like 2 in the morning & we've been at it for over 5 hours. It usually takes 2 and a half to 3. Albuquerque is calm, light snow falling falling gently straight down. There's still snow all over from last week's storm, but it's been pushed out of the way. We find our friends' house that we've never been to before with no problem.

Highlights of the previous Circumsolar Cycle

Some stuff I did last year. This here was for Cattle Baron Restaurants, Inc. here in Roswell. They recently moved their corporate headquarters to a building that used to be the State of New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department. Their offices only take up the back half of the building. The front half, facing out onto south Main Street, which was the Motor Vehicles Division, where you would get your driver's license and shit, they made into a "BBQ Joint" which they call The Snazzy Pig.
This is a new concept for them. That's what they call a theme in the restaurant biz these days: a concept. CBRI has done a few different concepts already:
Cattle Baron (there are 11 of them) is a steak house.
Farley's (there are now 3) is eatertainment.
Tia Juana's Mexican (only 1 so far) is Tex-Mex.
Santino's (1 in Ruidoso) is Italian.



The whole thing happened in about a month and a half. That's how Mr. Jeff Wilson likes to do things; in a frenzy. First I had to do a logo. What does a Snazzy Pig look like? Is he in a zoot suit or white tie and tails?







Then I had to quickly design a neon sign so that it could be fabricated and installed by Dec. 2 or so. A big one.

They were going to be making, bottling, and selling their own BBQ sauce, so they needed labels; 2 sizes of bottles, hot and mild.

Oh, and also they were gonna do this spice rub, or butt rub as it was sometimes referred to, so I had to do the Pig getting a massage.

They also wanted something on a wall outside in front where they were gonna put a patio dining area, so I came up with this. I wanted to develop it a lot further with a lot more stuff going on, looking like a fresco on the wall of a church, maybe something about St. Anthony (San Antonio), the patron saint of pigs, well, of swineherds anyway; however I was unable to convey to them how cool it was going to become clearly enough to justify how much I was asking for it. So I got half of that for doing this.






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