Feb
14
NOW….Where Were We?
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This female outline is composed entirely of the word NOW repeated hundreds of times
Dear Readers
I have not posted in well over a month and many are asking what’s up? Fear not, The Patio Daddyo is alive and well. The reason for the lag has been a significant and critical overhaul of my manuscript, preparing the first 40 pages to send to publishers. That required tightening up the timeline and transitioning it from a series of blog entries to a fluid memoir format.
In so doing I’ve come to realize that my initial gameplan to chronicle the first year of Kai’s life from the copious journal entires I wrote the past twelve months is not what this book wants to be. It wants to be the story of finding love, the struggle to have a child, Kai’s ultimate mythic arrival and the transformation I have experienced as a result. And so, I am now writing the backstory and filling in around the episodes you have already read. The process parallels my painting, when so often the original direction has little to do with the ultimate finished work. I love this process, though it is both frustrating and exhilarating. I have learned to listen to this process and follow the road where it wants me to travel.
From now on, this blog is my art studio where I can make a mess and experiment. And that is where you come in. Going forward, I ask you to engage if you feel inclined. My postings will not follow a schedule and will not follow the story in a linear manner. They will be pieces of the greater puzzle that I wish to set free for feedback and commentary. I want to know when something works and when it falls flat. If you are moved by a line or a scene, let me know. If I leave a scene too short and you want more detail, tell me. If I run too long and begin to bore you, tell me. If something is wooden and unbelievable, tell me. If an entry is written as exposition but would be better served by scene and dialog, tell me. Basically, tell me what you want and I will take it all under advisement. This blog is a tool which will help me write a better book than I could if I were sitting alone for two years listening only to myself.
And now for the next posting, a reworking and fleshing out of an idea I touched on in a previous post:
NOW
At 29 I wanted a child. Not sure why. Just felt some primitive urge to procreate. As if some cellular biological clock alarm went off and said, “Hey big shot, maybe there’s more to life than bouncing from one conquest to the next. Perhaps a good woman and child might give you what you truly want.” Only trouble was that love was truant as a high school delinquent at the time. I had just moved across the country to California to seek my fortune as an artist and find a soul mate. I had neither. My last serious relationship was five years in the past with no hot prospects, or even warm leads, on the horizon. So I hit the snooze button. Ten years later I was still asleep … hung over and lonely and fearful that while all my best friends were bouncing their grandkids on their knees, I’d be eating tuna fish out of a can in a filthy terrycloth robe, sitting three feet from a snowy TV watching nature shows. So, being an artist, I slid into my paint splattered ripped kneed Levis and began creating the essence of my desire. I painted furiously for over a year and a half in my cramped San Francisco kitchen/studio on Portrero Hill, working on a rickety aluminum easel with a spatula duct taped to the top of the vertical upright to support the oversized canvases I needed to fill. I splurged on Golden acrylic paints, the best possible, for my dreams would not be painted in second rate material. And I experimented with new warm and buttery colors like green gold, red oxide and titan buff. I also impulse bought iridescent gold which became a staple in later work.
Though a bit cramped, I loved my work space. My apartment was built in 1902 and had stood firm and tall as San Francisco fell to ruins in the great earthquake of 1906, for Portero Hill is a hump of solid granite. The ground below me was firm and the natural light that poured into my kitchen kept me and the work bathed in clean fresh hopeful energy. A classic antique wood burning stove served as my work table, constantly covered in paint tubes, assorted brushes and cups of brush cleaning water in varying states of cleanness. When I needed a break I could pop up the hill two blocks to Farleys, one of San Francisco’s finest neighborhood coffee shops for a strong cuppa with cream and sugar. These little breaks helped the paintings. Like short refractory periods between sex sessions. I’d return home jacked up and eager to assume the position before my canvas, all my tools at the ready: a plastic cup of clean water and a clean rag to wipe away do-overs when the bottom of my hand smudged an earlier effort. I’d place a dollop of paint on my palette, insert my thumb through the thumb hole … and go to work.
A compelling series of nude silhouettes emerged, varied in colors and moods. Like my desire they were large and complex. The outline of each silhouette was composed completely of a tiny word repeated hundreds of times, NOW, with each letter in the word NOW no bigger than a baby’s eyelash. I’d place the minute tip of my finest brush in my mouth to wet it to a tight point, then dip it into the acrylic paint and apply one small letter, then dip the tip in my water cup, dry it on the ass of my jeans, back into my mouth, dip in the paint, write a letter, rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat. Standing back from the works, if you didn’t know better, you’d think these multitudes of NOWs were mere brush strokes. But each was a precise mantra. And the tedious process of writing that fervent word in paint thousands of times day after day reinforced my unbending intention to solve a lingering problem which also happened to be my very deepest desire: to find love and share it to make my child. I loved these countless hours. The repetition. The focus. It was all a cosmic dance with the CD in the living room ending and then starting over, and me too in-the-zone to change it. The music repeated just as my hand repeated and my mind repeated the message. I was inside these paintings.
The silhouettes had curves. Luscious curves. Stately curves. Confident curves where seduction met power. Each lived in its own abstract background with its own mood: fiery, cool, somber, exuberant. No matter the mood of the work, the subject stood with her muscular arms raised in triumph, because she would feel as lucky to have me as I would to have her. Titles such as City Girl, Tahitian Mermaid and Le Petite Mort spoke to aspects of the fantasy I sought in a life partner. Explain it to Me One Day, Don’t Box Me In and Angel in a Snowstorm spoke to my pain and confusion from a lifetime of disappointing relationships. Over the course of eighteen months thirty five of these pieces emerged and sold out quickly. And not long afterward a truly amazing thing happened. Her name was Jodi. She was 5’2” with a short brown pixie cut and knowing hazel eyes. She laughed easily, exposing a healthy set of teeth straightened by teenage orthodontia. Her healthy balance of serious and silly was packaged in an hourglass figure. She was not afraid to subtly expose the right areas in the right amounts to keep my eyes returning for seconds and thirds. And most amazingly of all, she looked exactly like the figure in my paintings.
Jodi made me laugh. We met online and she gave good email. Witty, confident, silly exchanges in which she was not afraid to throw a punch. I was taken by her eloquence, her playfulness and her yoga-toned NOW body. She was a successful advertising exec from a gracious family, the daughter of a hard-working pharmacist who got up each day and went to the same pharmacy he’d started at forty years earlier. On our very first date we walked through Crissy Field at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The winter air added a snap to the steps of countless walkers, joggers, strollers and dogs. The sun reflected off Jodi’s sunglasses and sassy short brown hair as we sat on a concrete pier looking out at the iconic bridge that connected her home in Marin to mine in San Francisco. She wore a bright orange vintage 70s ski jacket with white lambs wool at the wrist and the initials MJ sewn into the breast pocket.
“Is that a Michael Jackson?” I asked.
“Marc Jacobs,” she said with a chuckle.
“I brought you a gift,” I said, reaching into my pocket for an organic tangerine. “These are really yummy. I had one earlier.”
“Thanks, I’m actually hungry,” she said as she began to peel it.
She handed me a slice and we looked out at the water for a while and ate. I could feel her next to me and wanted to touch her. Then I looked directly at her and said, “Take off your sunglasses.”
She obliged.
“So that’s what your eyes look like up close.” I recognized myself in her eyes. And could see that we wanted many of the same things. I saw both joy and pain. I liked those eyes.
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Dec
23
Clear the Books
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A brisk winter day from our bedroom window
12-29-07
There’s an episode of Gilligan’s Island where a crate of irradiated vegetables washes ashore and the castaways each eat something different. Thurston Howell III’s eccentric wife, Lovey, eats the sugar beets and begins hyperactively running around at warp speed and cleaning. That’s just what my mother in law (MIL) is doing around me as I write these words. Guzzle a Redbull and a shot of espresso then chase it with a line of coke and you have her baseline energy level. And when you need something organized, there’s no one more primed for the task. MIL flew in from New York a few days ago for “Operation Get the House Ready for Baby.” If she were a superhero I’d call her The Swiffer, keeping the world safe from dust bunnies. Sure enough, within an hour of her arrival she was Swiffering the wood floors upstairs. Her first morning here we awoke to a totally cleaned out fridge and rearranged pantry, and yesterday in the kitchen junk drawer I discovered little separate bags containing match books and rubber bands. She’s even washed a dozen loads of donated baby clothes using Dreft, a special baby-friendly detergent, so our baby’s butt stays soft as a baby’s butt.
Early this morning I encountered her moments after I’d awoken as I lumbered up the stairs rubbing sleep from my eyes. Before I’d even turned off the top step to the kitchen for coffee I heard her say, “Honey, I can’t reach way back under this sink. I need you to scrub it for me.”
Splayed before me on the kitchen floor was every cleaning and utility item from under our sink, and she was upright on her knees next to them with a giddy smile, like she just guessed the correct door on The Price is Right. Having slept poorly for the umpteenth night in a row I was hardly on the same page.
“Um, I can’t do anything before a coffee right now. And THAT is not what I care to do first thing afterward,” I said as I stepped over the Comet to get to the fresh squeezed black juice.
It was on Christmas day that my MIL and I actually transformed Jodi’s office into the baby’s room…an auspicious feat given that exactly 2007 years prior Mary transformed her office into Jesus’ baby room. Kai’s zebrawood crib now sports funky fish pattern sheets in the corner where Jodi worked selling ad sponsorships for Rolling Stone the past five years. A changing table awaits its precious cargo where a bookcase full of music biz shwag stood. Unfortunately, my personal files and boxes full of books are presently stacked haphazardly beside my bed, creating a hideous late night obstacle course and making me ornery the past few days. Jodi and I have been bickering over critical life issues such as whether to giveaway my copies of New American Paintings (who recently rejected me for the fifth year running) or hold onto her collection of Anais Nin. The basic book rule now is keep only your absolute faves or those you’ve yet to read.
Houseboat living mandates minimalism and order, and our 928 square feet, while certainly delightful for two little birds, is already tested for comfort by one more. I don’t fly well when my nest is ruffled. Of course, all this lofty effort is mere prep for the battle against infant gear sprawl. And, frankly, I fear we’re holding a saber to the incoming tide. The sea always wins. Whatever, it’s a crisp blue sky winter morning, the type for which all houseboat denizens give thanks for our little spit of planking in the middle of a languid bay. My room may be a mess, but Kai’s world headquarters is geared up and ready for action.
“Nice day, huh,” I said to my neighbor Play as he walked past.
“I aint complaining and I aint explaining” he quipped through his Cheshire smile.
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Dec
18
More SNAP!
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12-21-07
I’m going to start calling you Kai, for I’m all but certain that is your name. The other candidates, Slater, Elijah, and True, just don’t work. Slater’s a bit too wannabe surf grommit. Elijah is too bible shepherd, and True, well, that’s just pure shaggy California hippie. We both like the rhythm of one syllable followed by two syllables – Kai Sheldon. Unique. Sharp. Sure.
The sonogram showed nice little meaty crinkles along your side from your arms to your waist. Four pounds, fifteen ounces … with rolls of fat. You have undeniable substance to be sure…but it’s the rolls of fat that excite me. They give you snugglability and “babyness” and prove there’s a healthy growing boy there, someone to squeeze. Someone to talk about. Someone named Kai Gallant Sheldon.
Landing on your name is a big step for me, for words are favorite toys of mine. Speak eloquently and it’s Christmas every day in my world. I read dictionaries for pleasure and get a runner’s high from a seven letter word in Scrabble. I’ve played with words for as long as I can remember and wrote my first poem as a little boy. Wrote it for your grandmother, in fact, when I was still in Toughskins and PF Flyers:
I love my mother
She is nice
And I know
That she likes rice
Sometimes she loves me
Good and bad
But she is my mother
That’s why I’m glad
Perhaps you will be a poet too. I hope so, for good poets provide answers, and the world is currently long on questions. The page is blank for you, so say whatever the hell you want. Just say it with power and verve. A glide in your stride and a dip in your hip. Here’s a poem I just wrote for you. Think of this the next time you pick up your pen or step to a microphone.
SNAP!
Bring more SNAP
Mister Open Mike
Don’t ask us questions
TELL US THINGS
We don’t know
Or things we do
Just told different
Than we’ve heard before
Bring some THWACK
And hit me twixt
My bloodshot eyes
Where my thirst begins
Bring knowledge
From college
Or otherwise
Don’t care where you got it
Just that you BROUGHT it
So bring it Mister
Be like Mike
Slam dunk your voice
To the back of the room
To the front of my face
Make me care
Cause usually I don’t
Serve me
Nothing tepid
No one wants soup
That aint hot
Bring it till it’s brought
By the cup or the bowl
Steaming hot
With a fresh baked roll
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