The Seagull

I tried to take a picture. It was there right in front of me on the glass as clear as a bell, wings splayed out with its head clearly defined. But like a ghost it seemed to disappear when the lens was pointed in its direction.

A seagull had crashed into our front window while we were away at work and left a perfect dusty imprint of its outline right smack dab in the center. Out on the lawn was a ring of feathers where, what I suppose was a crow, had attacked it’s dead or maimed body and plucked out it’s feathers before finally devouring its meal.

I wanted to preserve it somehow, maybe take the glass out of the window or transfer the impression onto something. Surely this would be great art if I could just find a way to save it. This had everything I thought great art to be; interesting imagery, both beautiful and horrid at the same time. The great drama of life and death’s circle, unwrapped in a single moment using feathers no less. All this captured in a gossamer imprint that seemed to get fainter the harder one looked at it.

I’m thinking it was a crow that got to the seagull. Crows know no boundaries for cruelty; they just know a good situation when they see one. The other day I saw them attacking a starling that had been stunned by a passing car. Taking turns to attack it, in between the cars and trucks making their way to work.

Jackson Pollock used to attack his canvas in the same circling way. Throwing paint in a kind of dance; moving from right to left, sometimes leaping over it as if he too were feeding upon a wounded starling or seagull with a broken neck.

I stood on a chair, hoping to capture both the sickening circle of bloody feathers and the imprint on the glass at the same time, but this never really worked. When I got the pictures back they all seem to be about out-of-focus lawns and blurry streets. I could never bring the outline and the feathers into anything as powerful as the first moment I saw it; nothing that captured the size, both of the bird and the ring on the front lawn.

Perhaps I just lack that certain hunger; the kind that makes one dance in and out of traffic and weave paint onto the canvas at my feet.

Seattle International Film Festival

I thought this week I would put up a shameless plug for the movie Kennewick Man: an Epic Drama of the West for this week’s forum. It’s hard to believe that it was all the way back in October when it had it’s premier at the Seattle Art Museum. Where does all the time go?

The movie was accepted into the Seattle International Film Festival and will be showing on Sunday the 26th and Tuesday the 28th.

If you get a chance to see it, go. I say this not because it’s my brothers first feature documentary, nor do I say this because he was kind enough to ask me to do the soundtrack. I say this because I truly think this is a very good movie. It’s a complex story told through interviews and presented in a way that makes you think about it long after the movie is over.

Speaking of my brother, he and his wife and new baby just got back from a month in Europe. We got together last night for dinner and heard all the stories and saw all the pictures. Made me want to pack up the family and head out overseas. Sweetie and I went back in 94 for our honeymoon, before the boys were born and we had just bought our first home. Before I knew anything about the insides of Children’s Hospital, or the frailty of life; back when I was invincible and so was everyone I knew.

I showed her all the places I had lived in as a boy, staying with old family friends and small hotels along the way. As with all trips of that sort, two weeks wasn’t enough and now in hindsight, it hardly seems like we were there for any time at all. Just a little blip somewhere back in the recesses of my head.

The older boy and I got the raised beds planted this weekend. Put down seeds for cantaloupe, lettuce, lupine and sunflowers. The boy had wanted to plant corn but we ran out of room, so we left those seeds for next year.

Anyway…go see the movie. I think you won’t be disappointed.

Mother's Day

Well now happy mothers day to all you mothers out there. This is a picture of me and the boys taken by my good friend Corlis. We gave it to Sweetie in a nice frame so’s she can take it to work or do whatever with. Me and the older boy made her waffles for breakfast and tried to let her sleep in as long as we could but it was pretty exciting for the boys and try as we did, she didn’t get to sleep past nine.

The older boy somehow got it in his mind that he wanted to get mom some purple lipstick as a gift and made sure that on Saturday we went out and got her some. Fortunately we met a nice sales lady who managed to talk him into something not too purple and on Sunday, Sweetie seemed to even like it. I thought it looked pretty nice myself though by the end of the morning, Sweetie had marked just about everything with a lip imprint.

It was a beautiful day, with the sun all hot and shiny and hardly a cloud in the sky. Sweetie got to take a nap in the afternoon as me and the boys got our new raised flowerbeds ready to be planted. In the afternoon we visited the Grammas on both side of the family and brought them all flowers and drank weak iced tea.

Our neighbors, Heather and Earl, have put a little pond in their garden with a fountain on one end. Me and the boys found and old rubber duck and when they left to go visiting, we snuck it into the pond. It looks pretty happy there, sitting amongst the lily pads and aquatic grasses. Even in a garden that’s flowers were in full bloom, the bright yellow duck looked right at home. Like the tub he had been built for had always been a zoo and we had now, finally released it to his home in the wild.

The younger boy had a bit of a temperature last night and Sweetie’s taking him in to see the doctor today to get him all checked out. The older one had sported a fever a few days back and I’m thinking that he must have passed it around a little bit. We’ve been pretty healthy lately so you wont find me complaining about it too much.

The boys and I just want to say how happy we are to have Sweetie as a mom. There is no end to her patience or her kindness and it makes the entire running around getting things ready for mother’s day process, a lot of fun. I just hope all of you who read this had as good a day as we did: Out in the flowers and grass on one of the first truly warm days of spring.

Nothing

I’m feeling particularly un-inspired this week. But I also feel that I should be updating this web page, so there lays the conundrum. Is it worth my time to post a boring update? Ever since Minnie fixed my web page it has made it a lot easier to update so it’s really not a big deal to do any more. It’s really just a matter of preference or aesthete I suppose.

Also is it worth it for you to even read this? If you read this lousy uninspired update and have never visited this web page before you might blow it off and never read any thing else I’ve written. Of course you might just blow this off anyway regardless of the quality of today’s update. You might hate my name, or the fact that I live in a trailer park, or any number of things.

But since this page is free, both to me and to anyone who comes into my little web world, how do I quantify worth? Worth in this case, has nothing to do with money and everything to do with everything else. Is it worth Time, or Effort, or The Stress of writing something “Good”? Just because something is worth it right now, I could be that in an hour it won’t be. If September 11th has taught us anything, it’s taught us that there is no intrinsic value of “worth” and everything’s value is subject to change at a moments notice.

Now, if worth is totally subjective and in a constant state of flux, does that makes it impossible to define good or bad in areas such as worth? The worth of Art, the worth of Writing, the worth of Happiness or sorrow or life or death, the worth of Beanie Babies and baseball cards. These things all have “worth” but not the same worth to the same people. Where does this spiral of subjective worth end?

Does anything have real, solid, stone under foot, brick and mortar, worth and if not, then what makes updating a web page worth it?

Is worth, as Stuart Smally says to the mirror, “because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and darn it, people like me” or is it a little bit more?

I'm thinking that worth of this page or my writing or anything else I touch must be priced by the unfettered ego. So I guess if that isn’t looking into a mirror saying self affirmations than I don’t know what is.

...well now thats bleak...