shellsandleavesandsticksandrocks

Spring Cleaning: the opening of windows and freshening of linens and dusting off of bookshelves and vacuuming in the corners of ceilings, an annual frenzy of “getting ready” for the longer and warmer days of the year - which ironically are most frequently spent outside. ’Tis the season for that kind of thing in New Zealand right now, where Winter is just ending, which is odd (also, the water there twirls down their drains counter-clockwise? Utter madness.). But in our Northern Hemisphere it is time for Fall Cleaning, a necessary re-negotiation with living spaces many months neglected, passed over for picnics and hikes and visits to other people’s living spaces. O, but winter is coming, and the time has arrived to store away our short pants and prepare for when that throw blanket on the couch (which serves as decoration the rest of the year) at last becomes a treasured necessity. We are deep in the throes of Fall Cleaning at our home, along with our preliminary decorating for Spookytime™, which the family has agreed is not quite here yet but just around the corner - that corner, there, at the end of that long and dark alley, just a few steps beyond the dimly flickering street lamp. Fall Cleaning is always a bit of a refocus. We store away objects of leisure and comfort to make room for more items of practicality and utility, trading long sleeves for short sleeves, sweaters for swimsuits, and in our case cleaning up the various random items we’ve collected over the summer. For instance, I’ve been banned from ever purchasing those popsicle molds from Whole Foods once we found three layers of their various plastic pieces at the bottom of a drawer. To make things worse we found seven random regular popsicles hiding the back of the freezer. We're not even really a “popsicle family”, if there is such a thing. So all that had to go. We end up collecting a great deal of nature in the summer. Sticks. Rocks. Leaves. We’ve gone for a walk and seen something interesting and brought it home to share. Maybe we had a really great conversation on that walk, and that little stick represents it, or the sky was an incredible blue holding unbelievable clouds through which the sun shone on this particular rock on the shore of the lake. So we brought it home, like a photo we didn’t choose to take, but instead stored the moment in wood or mineral form instead of film or digital space. Trouble is, by the end of summer some of those sticks are just sticks again, since we can’t remember quite exactly where or when we found it. The meaning of these objects depends only on their time interacting with us. Random memories triggered by random objects hold varied permanence. We end up with a lot of that stuff by the end of the summer, and not just natural items, but tiny plastic models of frogs making oil paintings and collectible ICEE™ cups and kawaii hair clips. After we go through the house collecting them all, we place each item on the dinner table for analysis - if we no longer can remember its story, then we no longer keep it. There are other categories of summertime detritus (Books We Intended To Read, T-Shirts less Comfortable than Threadbare, Interesting Soda Cans): it takes about a weekend or two to pull everything together and reset the apartment. Then, of course, we cover the entire place with pumpkins and black cats and skeletons for the next month or so. In pursuit of even more extra space, I decided to clean the closet in our little office room, the one that hasn’t been re-negotiated since we moved into the apartment over eight years ago. There I found plastic bins containing precious oddities, including train tickets, foreign receipts and coins, dried rose petals, a glass fountain pen and a vintage yo-yo. Every one with a story (not that I actually remembered them all). I also discovered box after box of Old Writing, some of it from ten years ago. Then I found pages from twenty, thirty, forty, and even fifty years ago. Now technically, all this is just trash - either the ideas aren’t finished or the stories are dated. It’s just paper that matters to absolutely nobody else on the planet. Ream after ream of 90’s prose with 80’s plots and characters: certainly this can all be recycled and made into new notebooks for someone else to take their narrative shot. But I couldn’t just throw them all away. A few of the ideas weren’t that bad, and some stories had been in my head for so long that it was comforting to see how much work had been put into them - inspired me to even polish a few, if only to see them finished. And it was here, in this great pile of potential art, that I realized my Third Act goal: ALCHEMY. I don’t want to dwell in What Was, but I don’t want to just burn it like garbage. Instead, I’d like to upcycle the past, re-use and combine my previous art and experience to create something new. You see, if I can just make something good, and I mean REALLY good, then all these random papers would be transformed into museum worthy historical artifacts, like lead into gold. Each curious page would be a piece of the puzzle of my artistic journey, as we watch the young man from Kansas evolve into a unique talent reminiscent of a young Norman Lear. Or maybe, Aaron Spelling. It’s a good goal. And this year the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator actually did make gold from lead (for a few milliseconds), proving that after centuries of attempts, alchemy is now possible, if not practical. That is scientific evidence in support of the longest of long shots. So, y’know… it could happen. 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