Latest literary acquisitions:
Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden ~ edited by Stephen Jones   Dali on Modern Art ~ Salvador Dali   The Jukebox & Other Essays on Storytelling ~ Peter Handke   The Dark Matter ~ Wallance and Karen Tucker   Murder Manual ~ Steven Womack   Metapatterns ~ Tyler Volk   Dog Anatomy Illustrated ~ no author   Preseving Today (food) ~ Jeanne Lesem   Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play ~ Ben Watson   As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl ~ John Colapinto   Down Home Wholesome ~ Danella Carter   The Portable Henry Rollins ~ Henry Rollins

Reading:
Neverwhere ~ Neil Gaiman. Savoring it.

Listening to: nothing at the moment.

I went with my mom to Watertown TN this weekend. There were yard sales galore and not much of anything that I was looking for...but that is par for the course.

I've found myself gathering a small collection of things that spark my imagination and that will (hopefully) be incorporated into future paintings. Driftwood; feathers, small figurines, bones, pottery ~ you name it. The things that has really caught my attention, though, are old dishes. Not the perfect, flawless things that abound in antique stores but the old, beat up and charasmatic ones that folks put out in yard sales, hoping that some strange person will find value in it.

This platter was the exception. I found it in a quirky little store in Gallatin several months ago where it was proudly displayed on a little corner table. The photo really doesn't do it justice. When I saw the cracks in this old platter, they instantly reminded of some photos I had seen as a child. They were of the 'Lion Man' ~ an ice age figurine of a man with a lion's face. For many years, the body and face had been known to exist but thought that they belonged to two different pieces...anyway, back to the point: They had included close up photos of some of the cracks in that figurine, in order to show how they proved that this was an authentic piece and not a hoax. Those cracks had all kinds of little bits of aged minerals from the ground water in them ~ black, tan, white...and here was this old, well used platter with its own aged cracks. I felt as if I suddenly had an artifact of my own for a whopping two dollars.

I don't think my mom ~ or many folks at all ~ understand my attraction to these rare things. It's not the fact that this dishes are broken. Anyone can break a dish. It's the story ~ or the mystery ~ of how these dishes got to be the way they are. Like the platter in the photo: what gave it such an interesting array of cracks? Why did the owner keep using it afterward? (You can tell by the way the enamel is discolored) What was served on it? Was it her favorite platter ~ or simply useful for serving Sunday dinner? Just how old is it? So many questions...what a history it may have.

I found the second of my two dishes this weekend. It was in one of the last yard sales that we visited: a nice, huge white house not far outside of town. This platter has also been well used: the floral decorations have faded, and in many cases disappeared altogether while the enamel has been completely worn away in places. You can tell that this platter has been used repeatedly for the same dish ~ who know for how many years? What was the dish? Did it belong to someone in the family? I didn't get to ask because the lady running the sale was quite busy with another customer who had bought $335 dollars worth of plates that looked to me that they came out of Wal-Mart a few weeks ago, at probably considerably cheaper prices. But who am I to judge?

I bought two other things at that sale: an old blackberry wine bottle with the original...oh! What's the word? damn. You know ~ the tags that say what brand it is and such. Labels! That's it. (Ugh. My mind has left the building.) I love the way the light catches on all the little molded bits. I also bought this god awful, ugly 'chalice' (for lack of a better term.) I couldn't just leave it there. The second my hand touched it, I had an idea for a story: what if the Holy Grail was hidden in plain sight? What if, in order to protect it, someone had covered it with clay and purposely made it ugly in order to disguise its true appearance? Would it still be hidden today, hidden under fired clay and yellow pigment?

There was a news article a few weeks ago about something similar happening to a Buddha statue (can't remember where, though.) One of the monks had accidentally banged the statue and knocked off a bit of the clay...only to discover that the statue was solid gold underneath. They figured that it had been done during a war, to keep the statue from being melted down.

Ah. Life. It's alright.