DJG Design

Slug got tracked through the house. Starting point was a squash in the loose tile carpet from a dilapidated office space in the suburbs. He didn’t see it coming. I didn’t see it coming. Still fresh and noticeable. It must have taken him all day and night to get there. Inspiring and sad. He wanted under a paper stack, I think. That is all he wanted. Later that day I got the mail from the box, tucked it under my left arm and went inside the house. Laying the mail bundle on the table a ball of lint with legs shot out fast and I jumped like I had my Air Jordan’s on and a low b-ball hoop. The little spider smelled Spring and hauled it across the table and thought he was hid under the lip. Nope. I smashed him for real with a paper towel piece. In such cases, the first thing you want to do is smash it to bits. That’s sad. And usually you can’t find anything to do it with and you don’t want to mess up the sister-in-law’s birthday envelope that was return-to-sender in the mail. Ya know? (more…)

He was carrying the sneakers over the shoulders/neck across the street. I thought they were guns strapped to a chest, about to be pulled and me shot through like Bonnie & Clyde. Competed. Completed. Repeated. America’s team. The truck honked a big one for the team too and didn’t need to “insert French slang” here to sound authentic. To sound like a smart soul. “For the times”, she called as she blew out the elbows over the course of sweet spot door pushing. Germs weren’t on the menu, but unavoidable. While I wished to cast mine out, she asked her demon out to licorice beat box at the corner dollar shop. A conversation to reply to, but she could read my mind. I know she could. I’m not sure what happened next but I noticed the church went poof and the air was silent in return then I nearly lost footing on the jostled loose rocks from a snow storm plow from weeks ago. Offerings to me and my flat tires, I assume. Resettling I found clubhouse walls barely quaking from vibrations as the midtown bowed and I shot up with a pint of wonder as if I saw for myself the drippy dollar sundae in the collection plate. Just like old times and old years. Just like when we made the pact to stand and stood in the pack next to the candy machine, individually dispensing out mixed nuts and hardened fruit flavored chews and then a third option came available. Just like post-modern dandruff apps. Just like Coke bottle glasses.

-djg

I smelled like the bus I’d been off and on 4 or 5 times throughout the day, but I stood my ground. A man pulled a double cheeseburger out of his britches, grease spots lined up like a dalmation absorbing spots. He claimed he knew the best deal in town on cheeseburgers. The biggest and thickest. He claimed to the whole party that the best television show on at the time was that “Fiesty lil’ Mexican chick judge”. He also liked to check in on “Days of Our Lives”. Though, at the moment, wasn’t as interested in it because he was just starvin’.

-djg

Arrows slice. Sun slats in on us. I bump fists with the Statue of Liberty as buses pass with dirty sides and messages written. He asked me, “You don’t got a car yet?” I replied, “I don’t need one. I don’t have far to go.” Re-runs have been running often, since January two years back. Back in the truck after knocking Bambi down, “Desperado”, followed by, “Stuck in a Moment and You Can’t Get Out of it” instantly play in a rock block fist bump of their own. I blew the knee out, sighed, walked around, sat down, bit into a generic vanilla sandwich cookie and stared at the early drapery.

-djg

My elementary school art teacher supposedly spent a day at Disney World with half his trademark mustache shaved off. This was the summer after he left duties, I believe. I only had him as a teacher for first grade, but I don’t remember anything else about elementary art class after that. His name (in grade school, at least) was pronounced “Mister Coldflesh”. Seriously. It was spelled different than “Coldflesh” and his first name was not “Mister”, but, you get my drift. And to a first grader in a new school, that was King Tut awesome.

I remember making a book that year. The one I authored and illustrated was called “The Ghost Who Came to Dinner”. Get it, instead of “The Guest Who Came to Dinner”!? It was about a ghost who just wanted a bite to eat. That was his reasoning for haunting you see, he was hungry! But the family at the home he spooked wouldn’t feed him. Well, they said they would but they instead tricked him by having him help take the trash and food left-overs out. He obliged and they burned him in the trash barrel behind their house. The End. Man, I want to find that book but it might be burned by now. It is/was one of my favorite art pieces.

I think I’m finally inspired to redo it, but it won’t have the naive urgency of a six-year-old. Or, could it?! I vividly remember the final haunting image of a ghost burning to death, sticking half-way out of the trash barrel. It was such a tragic story. Everybody else was making happy books with happy endings and mine was about a dead guy’s ghost who is refused food and then ends up dying again. An apparition burning to death a second time, turning into smoke. I never even thought of that being morbid at six. But now, I think I’d send myself to get evaluated!

-djg

And yes, there is no corner of the BSWZ that we’ve yet to trudge through and overcome. And we shall continue to overcome. I plan next year to write more. Within the frame of my 31st Januarys, I plan to finally put to paper the BSWZ. The true spark of Springsteenian knowledge, possibly diploma, given to me when I hung that piece of oddly shaped cast iron component of a whole, oddly resembling the end of myself, on an assembly rod to be painted as I hung with men two-to-four times my age, half-disillusioned. I then somehow was “volunteered” after eight hours of non-verbal crap shooting to drive the men back to the “Work Today, Get Paid Today” paint-peeled 1970s sign to indeed “get paid”, pile back into the car to sign our checks in half-frozen complimentary pens in the dead backdrop of FeBROary to proceed down the road to “get cashed” at all manner of half-boarded up convenience stores and makeshift one-stops with six layers of hand painted ’70s inspired signs of their own. I was always given the simplest of instructions, “Wait in the car. I’ll be back in a sec.” Waiting in a car is easy, but never preferred by a naive early-20 dumpling, whitest of white bread boy in parts of Kansas City, Mo  USA that have yet to be discovered in the many years of land management since our homeboys Lewis and Clark….

-djg

The 3 am basement was David Lynch directed. The Banshee screech belched constant call for my wake-up. Aggressively I threw off my portion of the covers and crawled feet first out of bed to my cat’s meow. I approached the stairs to the bowels of the house with a one foot blue flashlight, low beam. As my hips and arms shifted, the light hit every speck of dirt and cat hair that had been brushed by my socked feet of the past months, to the corners of each step. At the bottom, breathing to the loud Banshee beat, was an overhead coil light in the southeast corner. I sprayed light, slipped between the water heater and the work room, flipping the furnace switch to silence her. I could have easily walked around the furnace back side, but I chose the warm comfort of slipping through the other. Banshee still screeched. It didn’t work. Only she worked, as I can still see her teeth. I shone down. I stopped at a cutting matt on the cold, cement floor. Part of the matt squirmed. I focused on a good-sized slug squirming in site of me. Had I chose to walk the typical easy back side furnace path, I would have trailed slug back to bed. I’d walked that way a hundred times over the other choice. I stood still for a few minutes, focusing attention between the ear-deafening screech rhythm and the slush sounds of slug getting stuck and un-stuck on the rubber matt. I turned and let my back swallow darkness, as my forward followed blue flashlight’s splatter back up the filthy stairs. –djg

I know you’d like to Bickle through last year’s pickles, resurfacing and popping inner tubes, making biscuits and new and old acquaintances. Pushing it all to the gutter with a big arrow rocking out towards the down. The year’s melting already. I saw it in brick flesh beneath the pavement, exposed like a piece of Superman’s tights torn and peeled back to showcase that red wounds and red wins, on the day of death. Each piece of bacon was laid to rest by noble hand and then greased over by big ol’ boys doin’ dirty deed. Do you ever get a billion ideas flowing first thing? Decompression before the decomposing? Switch it, maybe? It’s my cup of Joe. But, it’s kinda like running a nursery to the gung-ho. Nobody’s labeled their blankies neither. I saw the impression the milk crate met with the snow drift. Somehow, it snuck around the legs of my back porch table, floated and fled. The world of ticker tape tells it like it is. Another one, is my ol’ school mate Matt who remembers being weighed just shortly after birth. It may sound weird, but I can vividly see before birth, from an outside source, or sorcerer’s stone on high. My mother is being transported on Jan. 15, 1979 by tractor through ten foot snow drifts in order to get to a clear road, so I can get here. A month later, I remember visiting my aunt and uncle in Garland, Texas when. I remember laying in my portable chair thingy and staring through the column slats on the half-wall of their home, next to the front door in the foyer as we were leaving to come back to Missouri. They were saying bye to me and how nice it was to meet me.

-djg

So, when you drove by the car caught caddy-whompus in the snow drift and our private drive this morning, your headlights shown a head bobbing down. I went down there to inspect after your tail lights left me. A betting man would wager against me going into the dark, but the snow and a new year do funny things to a man’s brain.

Also, I thought this somebody was either stuck in the snow drift, in need of medical attention or just plain scared. I thought maybe it was a woman. I don’t know why, but I was compelled to help. The whipped topping was I thought they saw me and I couldn’t just run back inside, closing the door behind.

I put my jacket hood on and bulked up, approached the car. I went to the left hand side, the side that wasn’t as snow drifted. I couldn’t see much from the position I was at, definitely didn’t see a head bob, so I just casually spoke “Do you need help?” into the black interior. I then noticed t he driver’s side window was cracked a bit so I went around and said a little louder than before, “Do you need help?”

A half-grunted, undistinguishable reply came from a man’s voice inside. Not one to fully relay the exact in a repeat performance, especially a third time, as one can always get it better the second time and with the third it’s usually something different, something that can easily have the volume be raised, I did my best and repeated what I said in the first and second, “Do you need help?” There was another grunt. Of course, I said, “What?”

Adjusting to the interior black and a bit of rustling of that inside, I could make out a man laying in the driver’s seat, positioned in the full recline, to where his back half was in the back seat. His only companions a blanket and obvious hangover. He said, not really said, but slurred, “Just sleeping.” And I said, “OK.” Immediately I realized this man indeed was hung over. He was a young man, maybe mid-20s. He had crashed both his car and himself for the night, in the private drive near my home. Or, maybe he either parked for the night and immediately fell asleep, or just got stuck. It isn’t too uncommon for people to park in the private drive. I then thought about how I would never crack my window in this neighborhood after dark. I would never sleep in my car after dark too. (more…)

It’s not that I hate fruit. Although, I approach it with the buxom bulging, beautiful eye candy of the advanced life drawing professor selecting for still life, I still wrinkle a nose before taking a bite, and before that bite, will choose chocolate with unanimous vote, if given the choice, of course. I think that fruit is a wonder of God’s and Mother Nature’s bed pan, but I still don’t want fruit for Christmas. This time every year here in the confines of my 9 to 5 second story, planted at one of the busiest and non-fruit growing intersections in the city, there is a little extra articulated artifice of office hope and joy as multiple parcel services bring us brightly wrapped boxes with bows. I went back to the day job kitchenette, to the boxes and bulging sacks with beautiful bows of snacky surplus well-concealed, yet yelling from within, filling, flowing and frothing over the small counter top space between the sink and the coffee maker. Once again the office is generously gifted from those who somehow believe we’re doing an esteemed service in their world. As small and obtuse as that service may seem, I have a little more hope and care that I’m doing something redeemable here, especially while downing decadent truffles, chomping white chocolate dipped pretzels and devouring piles of gourmet peanut clusters like a pack of hard-up foxes. If there is a time of year to lose one’s self, or, one’s elf, this is it. But, fruit for Christmas? Not me. No sir…

-djg