Jesus Christ!

NOTE: This photo essay is admittedly one-sided, but so are photographs. Photos only show one side of a point of view the photographer had at the time. So this is nothing new.

I'm not a fan of Jesus Christ. I dont think much of Fundamentalist Christianity nor any of the world's other infamous and notorious religions (i.e., specifially Judaism and Islamic Fundamentalism) -- three major aberrant sociopathic blood-thristy world religious movements on a collision course with mass destruction.

Religion is the ultimate "weapon of mass destruction". Nobody is making an effort to stop the proliferation of religious beliefs world-wide. I say, stop religion! and we'll soon see a more peaceful, tolerant, well-adjused mentally and spiritually healthy earth. Let the proliferation of religion continue unchallenged and we'll see the end of civilization on earth as we know it.

I posted these photos to express the dark semi-secret side to this blood-thirsty, death-obsessed, dysfunctionally and mentally unbalanced aberrant pathological religious phenomena: Fundamentalist Christianity. It's as much a fascist terrorist organization as Islamic Fascism is accused of being and I'm no fan of that either. Judiasm is included in my view of Christianty since our support for Israel was, initially, a religiously motivated excuse. There's more excuses now.

For decades, anti-semitism has been a good excuse for irrational, unjustified military support for all things Jewish. To say anything bad about the Jews is to be lumped in with Hitler! It's easier to get away with hanging a hangman's noose on a tree in Mississippi than it is to disrespect a Jew! Israel/USA is always right and, given enough time, the rest of the world will be dead wrong! And for what? 8500 square miles of dirt.

To keep it simple, I used Roman Catholicism to visually represent the black heart of death. Like a Trojan Horse, it comes bringing honey and sweetness with the "baby in a manger" fairy tale. As a trilogy, the Bible, the Torah (Talmud) and the collected written/verbal teachings of Muhammad are the definitive Big Book of Curses.

Make no mistake, fundamental Charismatic Evangelicalism is no less insidious and dangerous to the future existence of humanity than catholicism and Islam. It may have less recognizable symbolisms for its contempt of human life, freedom of thought, tolerance for diverse lifestyles, behavior and individual creativity, but it's no less visible and controlling.

Most powerful symbolism of social/cultural death-wish inherent in fundamental Charismatic Evangelicalism: modern religious, political and economic systems. Democracy, Capitalism and Religion: the ultimate Triad and Axis of Evil. Systems responsible for the wars we fight, the costs we pay for living, the costs we pay for dying. Hopelessness future generations can look forward to.

Symbolism of Charismatic Evangelicalism: consumerism, coal lobby, big business, oil lobby, fast food, junk food, run-away health care expense, recession, unemployment, red state-Republican-dominated bigotry and self-righteousness, blue state-Democratic-dominated governmental activism and imperialism, homophobia, gun rights legislation lobby, white fat middle-class male-dominated environmental rape, Orange County CA residential demographics as a model and goal of conservatism, the auto industry, right-wing talk radio shock jocks, Wall Street lobby, the anti-choice lobby and the failed, fatal legacies of Dick Cheney's administration and his stupid puppet George W Bush.

If I offended anyone, I'm not the least bit sorry. Read Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ. It makes me look like a Zionist!

fOOT fETISH sEQUENCE 1 thru 6

It's 3am. I'm coughing up blood. No wait. That's not right. I don't think that's blood. I think that's the color red from her short red satin skirt pulled up past her hips to make it easier to dig my way through the rock and pitch a tent inside that cave. I'm spitting out the fibers from her see-through blouse that got stuck in my teeth when I ripped off the zipper holding it together. I'm spitting out the soap and water that turned red from when she washed her short red mini-skirt with the slit up the side, washed it the kitchen sink with her red panties, her red lace stockings, her red high heels dripping dry in the bathroom hanging over the shower curtain. No, wait a minute. That must be a dream. I had a dream that I sucked all the color red out of existence because I loved it and had to have it. I was jonesin' for it like an addict who wanted to know if she had any meat. I loved the color red. Red hair. Red sunsets. Red Rodney. Red Norvo. Red Ryder. The Red River Valley. Little Red Riding Hood. Red Mitchell. Red herrings. Better dead than red. Red blood shot eyes. Red Rock Canyon, white out and blues after hours.

I was lost deep in sleep, sloppily slurping (?) the juices of forbidden kinky pleasure. I rested my head on her thighs, my face hidden by the shadow of her legs. I was as happy as an alcoholic at an open bar with my tongue hanging out waiting for another round. I was alone and content to dream about her short red skirt and red high heels with little metal clasps like handcuffs that pinched her ankles making bruises. There were tiny hooks painted red piercing her skin, which always got my blood to boil over. Large drops of blood found their way into my spoon. Little balls of cotton floated in water.

In my dream, I grabbed her ankles, sucked her toes. Suddenly I heard a loud knock on the door like I'd expect from cops. I woke up, sat up and looked at the door waiting for a big foot to come crashing through it without a warrant based only on a suspicion or a tip from a snitch. The last time this happened I was staying in a southern California resort town, a temporary resident of a cheap motel near the San Clemente pier. Coppers stormed in unexpected-like, planted stuff in my shoe and found works in the closet in a shoe box. It was a bum rap. The stuff wasn't mine. I was holding it for Benny the Jazz.

Anyway, there were no cops this time but a big brown manila envelope was shoved under my door. It was from someone I didn't know. He thought I'd be interested in his foot fetish. I was doing undercover work for deep background. Since he had a foot fetish he sent me pictures to prove it. (See JPG photos posted as "fOOT fETISH sEQUENCE 1 tHUR 6") He numbered them from one to six. That was the sequence he used to ignite the sparks of his perspiration. According to him, he only sweated on the right side of his body. Without his meds, his right armpit would heat up with a burning sensation usually when urinating. The hair under his right arm would be as tangled and matted as a wet mongrel dog. Strange as it sounds, his left side would be as cold as ice. In fact, his left arm pit had no hair at all. He looked and smelled like a Chinese Crested hairless.

In the package he sent there was a letter in a plain white business envelope simply addressed to "Dear Film and Tape Music". I opened it carefully. It could've been a stink bomb. I read it slowly, but first I poured myself a shot of whisky. Then I made myself a sandwich. Avocado, peanut butter and organic alfalfa sprouts with honey mustard dressing and soya sauce with artichoke hearts on the side. I had another shot of whiskey and sat in the chair to read the letter.
He asked me if I wanted to make a movie about his whole life. He said he would sell me the movie rights. He wrote, "I have 40,000 points of power. The C.I.A. gave me finding power. I can find anyone in the world. Sanction power. Market power." He told me to contact Homeland Security to find out when they're going to rent him a loft in New York. He wants to sell me some power. Foot fetish power. Power of the feet. Pisces power. Neptune toes. Saturn soles. He also told me he wants to get started in the porn industry or else.... and he writes this underlined with a bold red magic marker: "I can destroy it (i.e., the porn industry). You either my friend or my enemy (sic). My enemies I will destroy. I am serious." I get it he's serious. I have another shot and cough up some more phlegm. I spit it out into the envelope he provided. The letter's hard to read. I can't keep my hands still. (They twitch a lot more now since I was held against my will at the convalescence home in San Francisco.) Getting back to the letter: he says he'll put sanctions on me and "shut me up permanently!" if I don't do what he wants. He ends his letter and signs it, "May God bless you. Contact me. I am a God. Sincerely, L.L.S."

I sat there for a minute or two in dumb silence. Maybe it was an hour. I just stared ahead, looking out the window with a bland expression on my face as usual. I saw the morning paper spread out in front of me opened to the want-ads. I looked at the first ad; it was the only ad. I pushed the paper away and threw the shot glass in the sink and broke it. But before I did that I had another drink or two. I looked around for the spoon and the works and got ready to get high. I got high. The stuff was really fresh. Little sharp crystals dissolved in water instantly and so clearly I could see my face smiling at me, waving from a great distance and drifting further away. I was hot. Sweating. Breathing hard. I tried to get up from the table but something was different. I felt strangely connected to all living things. Consciousness itself was an odorless substance that I could touch and taste. It was bitter like lemon juice and sweet like a sugar baby. I saw my body with a creature living inside reach out its arms from the centers of all my chakras. Fingers of an alien being living on another planet pulled matter, energy, space and time into my body and pushing it out again worse than it was before. Transforming Kundalini. Renewing a sick feeling of something unforgiving and yet easily forgotten five minutes after it left my body. I saw that my feet had changed and now they had long thin beautiful toes instead of short little hairy stubs with toenails that were falling off. My feet were finally part of a cosmic holism Beyond Good and Evil.

I was stoned. The room was spinning. I couldn't stand up. My ears were ringing and hissing. My eyes were blurring. Everything I saw sort of glistened and sparkled. I was shining. The pupils in my eyes were as big and black as bowling balls. I crawled over to the bed and climbed on it with a lot of effort. I was listening to Beethoven's Piano Sonata #14 In C Sharp Minor, Op. 27/2, "Moonlight" - 1. Adagio Sostenuto. It was raining. It was dark outside and yet a weird laser beam cut into my brain like a carving knife on Thanksgiving. My head was a cooked turkey. My brain, oozing the color red flowing like water out of a rock rolled down my face, rolled down my chest, rolled down to my feet. Chemicals dripped into my spoon. Floating balls of cotton were dark red with blood, almost purple from the main artery. I watched them bob up and down like red apples in water. Red nylon stockings dissolved into crystal fibers. Rain soaked her red mini-skirt hanging on the clothes line out back. Little red high heels hung over the telephone lines in the street. I was a afraid of something, but I didn't know what.

I turned off all the lights in the house. I locked all the doors. I felt like someone was in the house besides me. My head was hurting. My arms ached and were bruised. I thought about going to the Ebony Black and Blues Cafe on the corner of Columbus Ave. and Kerouac Alley. It stayed open every day of the year from 6am till 2am. I looked for my shoes. My feet begin to itch between the toes. I reached down to scratch my foot and fell off the bed. I hit the floor. Hit my head. I could barely see the photos the guy sent me. I thought that if I post them up on JPG maybe the pain in my head would go away. Maybe I'd be able to breathe again. Maybe my skin would stop crawling over my body, like rats running up and down my legs from the inside out. Maybe the light would stop blinding me. Maybe the creatures would run away. Maybe, but not this time. Not today.

CLONAZEPAM/KLONOPIN: Kicking the Underground

Coming off Klonopin, an anxiety med. Doctors in San Francisco misdiagnosed my natural interest in whether or not I was going to live and thought it was "anxiety". For six months I've been taking Klonopin and because it's addictive I can't stop cold turkey. I need to taper off slowly. So that's what I did. Now I'm taking ½ tab once a day. I stopped drinking. I exercise. I go to the gym. I drink three, four liters of water every day. I sit in a steam room or do a sauna. I shower in the nude with other men. Then we walk around the lockers showing off our admiration. If I didn't have anxiety before, I do now.

Klonopin never did anything so that I could tell it was helping. It was what I didn't feel. I didn't feel like I hated the world or people. I wasn't bitter or nervous. I didn't flip out over small things, only the big ones. I didn't feel like I had somewhere to go or something to do. I don't know if Klonopin made me calm, but it made me think I was calm. It made anxiety seem weak, cowardly and vulnerable. I could have victory with meds. I'd need another victory after that. And another after that. Discomfort comes with the withdrawals. Diarrhea. Headaches. Nausea. Boredom. Irritability. Driving in traffic. Insomnia. Restlessness. I used vicodin and hydrocodone to help get past the withdrawals. Without Klonopin, "BE-HERE-NOW" became "be anywhere but here now!" With it, being here is better than being anywhere else.

There are many days when I have no photos and no words. No creativity at all. I'm not interesting and I'm not interested. I've tried to force it, but that's stupid. A waste of time. So I find something else to do and wait for images to come to me. Taking a picture, getting the shot, right now, is as good as any other. Missing it can be better still. It's not taking the picture that makes it; it's what I do with it. A picture is taken. Shutter snaps. No flash. No focus. No thought. Camera and eye, hand and mind all moving without purpose. Or at least it seems like there's no point.

It's no sweat to take a picture. I don't think about it. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to put any thought to it. I want my hand, fingers, eye, camera, thoughts, everything going on inside and outside to be a conscious unified field of experience without distinctions or classifications. That's the way it really is, anyway. I look at the photos and maybe I can make something out of them. "First you take the picture; then you make the picture." Anybody can take a picture or bang on a piano, but I have to see something to make the picture or turn the banging into a form of jazz, which is the kind of jazz I like to play best. It takes being conscious. Awareness of being aware. Klonopin keeps me a little less than fully conscious. And that pisses me off. I have to work harder at it. Go into my high metabolic zone.

The anxiety comes in not being able to make the picture how I want, when I want, because I want everything and I want it now. But it doesnt work that way. There are many days when I see nothing, when I feel like I'm on a respirator. Life support. The image comes to me only when I can see it, feel it, touch it, smell it, love it and hate it, all at the same time. Being willing to give it up. Knowing when to stop, when to wait, and when to start again. Start-Change-Stop. That's what I'm learning about photography and the metaphysical facts of life.

Every night I go to bed. Every morning I get up. Either way, it's been a bad summer for Yin and Yang, the Siamese twins and whores of Chinatown. They sing the blues on weekends at the Buddha Lounge on the corner of Grant and Washington where white is still the color of Ornette Coleman's plastic alto. Sidewalk cafés stay open late just to appease their appetite and it's still a long ride on the Geary 38. I took that ride one night back and forth from the bus terminal on Mission to the Great American Hiway, sleepless till dawn. In those days the shadows of the Golden Gate formed silhouettes of a crucifix across the city, shrouded in a scratchy wool blanket. Life as I knew it was a black and white Zen clock, but beautiful.

Stuck between the bookends of my habitual existence are photographs that articulate my life, often with ghost eyes staring back at me in my nightmares. They fill up scrapbooks either showing me doing nothing or showing me leaving nothing undone. I don't shave anymore and I don't smoke cigarettes but I don't hate them either. Death is a cage of silence to fall back on like a second job where I find things to do to keep busy. My life is really very simple and simplicity is the map for my sacred tour. It's not a very complicated tour. It begins as a numbing sensation in my fingers and goes up my arm until it scrapes the flavor of blandness off my lips. Since I don't believe in God I don't go to church and I don't go out much either. I don't think one thing has anything to do with the other but it just happens that I stay at home most of the time as much as I can. When you think about it, home's the best place for me to be for the good of everybody. Anxiety comes in all forms and sizes. It never used to bother me. I used to crave it but now I don't. I kicked the hard stress. Now I go to the gym, the liquor store and the farmer's market to smell the farmer's daughter. I go down town Nashville to take photos or else I stay home and make love to Nico until I go insane from alcoholism or we die in each other's arms from some other pleasure. Life is sooooo complete.

Today I thought about the challenge. JPG says: "My Precious stories are JPG's version of product reviews, where members write about their favorite and most precious piece of equipment. Tell us about a product or accessory you use and love. It can be new or old, a hand-me-down or the hottest thing on the market. A flash, a lens, a camera... YOUR precious......." OK. I thought about this in the steam room. I think more freely when I sweat. It burns up brain cells and washes the dead ones down the shower drain. I'm going to use a broad brush to paint the JPG guidelines because when I get an idea I'm lucky if it'll be a good one. (Please note: I wanted to submit this story to the JPG theme, but apparently it doesn't fit the parameters of its intentions and I'm unable to make that contribution. Lucky you, here it is anyway.)

Just exactly what is my "precious"? My precious what? What piece of equipment is so important its absence would deprive me of gratification? What product or accessory can I not live without, such that without it I'd merely become a male prostitute with a beard who'd give anything to live a glamorous life in order to get it? Tough questions utterly unbelievable; maybe there are no answers. Efforts to know the answers often kill it. Suddenly a silent sweat drips from my armpits down my stomach, to my legs and down to my feet. An idea, maybe an answer, hit me like a shot of chilled whiskey. There I was in a neighborhood bar drinking again and listening to sadly monotonous jazz. I remembered what it was all about: survival! That's IT! My "piece of equipment" is my impulse to survive! It's the negative of the positive side of life! It's not about kicking the habit of self-deception and self-enabling. It's clearly about photography as an accessory to a daily practice of surviving without resisting, without illness, without spraying my head with glue to keep my brains inside and without having to stumble down the stairs to the men's room. Survival is an image exposed from one world, developed from the negatives of another! Photography is an accessory of survival, plain and simple.

Survival isn't a game to see who or what wins or loses the most, or the least. It's not a game played really well or really badly. It might be a game in the long run, but in the short run it's not about struggling to stay alive to avoid dying just to see the sun rise one more day or to see the full moon shine another month. Survival isn't frustration besieged by circumstances fighting to breathe. Survival as I see it isn't about putting up with, or settling to be, a bored, sterilized, quarantined contradiction without life support, living on antibiotics and narcotics. (By the way, have you ever noticed that the best things you can say about narcotics are the worst things you can say about people?)

Survival is not a choice between eating out or being hungry. It's not about sleeping late on the weekend so we can sleep longer on a weekday. That's not surviving; that's a fatality and a futility. That's airplane food, hospital food, botched blood tests in the middle of the night when you don't know if you'll live to see tomorrow, but you probably will, and of course you always do for a while. Real and powerful survival from an artistic underground sub-culture point of view, as I think of it, is an existence into a future. It's a function of prosperity. It's not conquering life by being separate from it and paranoid as if we're strangers suspicious of it; it's overcoming a tolerance for the mediocre by absorbing and including weakness and flaws, and then transforming that into something simple and easy to experience. It's not defending ourselves against the unknown; rather, it's assimilating the unknown into our imagination.

Survival as a piece of equipment shapes photography. It points to artistic levels, knowable and unknown. Life is experienced through images. Life becomes an accessory of survival itself as an image, such that photography is a child of the affluent. Through photography we index our survival as individuals. Photography shows us that we're sexual beings as resilient in community as we are elastic in the unified field of a greater humanity. The products and accessories used (and photographed) by our intuition for survival are the impressions of all living things surviving as universe, spirit and infinity. Ultimately, photography represents the survival of energy, space, time and material. Using digital cameras and film, these representations eventually become self-portraits. They become images of men and women living within intimate relationships outside all barriers of sexuality and they all have their own stories. These are visual documented histories of the migration of whole generations preserving the memories of friends and lovers, young and old. Through photographs we capture survival of unpredictabe and volatile crowds and their protests. We see the survival of panoramic landscapes and the vast, unending beauty of nature. Photography is all about survival and if you don't get that you might be missing something.

JPG described the "Precious" challenge in terms of writing a review of one's favorite equipment, accessory or product. I thought long and hard about this at the spa in the steam room. I reduced the idea down to its most minimal simplicity: photography is an accessory to survival.

I want to clear up what survival is and what it isn't. Survival isn't a choice between life and death. Death isn't surviving, so that's not a choice. If you're not already dead, then living (breathing) is the default condition. That's not a choice, either. So living or dying, either one or both, is not surviving.

What survival is as I'm considering it has to do with a fundamental impulse to exist by will, or the will to power, as Nietzsche thought of it. Survival is the will to power on different levels of self-expression of life and the will to express existence with authority. Survival is a driving force. It's the source of creativity, curiousity, power and the will.

We put this insight into several areas of life every day, every time we take photographs. As photographers there are five areas of life that we can photograph, five out of eight. They are (1) self-portraits of ourselves or portraits of other individuals. This includes the nuances and atmospherics that surround us, our histories and stories of ourselves surviving as individuals. (2) Men and women surviving as a form of relationships, survival in terms of sexual intimacy, lovers, and children who are products of intimate sexual activities of survival. (3) Groups of people surviving (self-expressing) as members of communities, networks, familes and larger centers, but smaller than "mankind", thriving and interacting as groups. (4) We photograph movements and migrations of human generations in time on a global scale. This is survival as humanity, inhabitants and occupants of a planet. This includes the survival of cities, towns and dwelling places. (5) And, finally, we photograph survival as nature, with landscapes and the panorama of living things in relationships to biological organisms, plants, animals and the effect their survival has on us.

Those are five major areas of life's interests that we photograph. I think every photo can be placed, liberally, somewhere in those five categories. Except for scientists and satellites with advanced space-age technologies, we haven't photographed (6) the universe, (7) the spirit or (8) the infinite. But five major areas of life itself are available to us to photograph. We are not separate from them. We are not strangers to them. They are not outside of us. They are where we put our survival. They are where we plant our survival. Where we live and promote our existence.

Every photo we take, every time we snap the shutter, it comes from an impulse for survival. To survive not being separate from it. We survive by being intimate with... and at One with... these five identities. Survival as life is common to all of us regardless of what we photograph or the quality of the work, or what we know or don't know. Photography is driven by impulses to survival and survival drives us together, and holds us together, as people. Every photo we take reinforces and strengthens our claim on survival as individuals. As sexual beings. As members of groups. As parts of greater unified humanity. As a co-equal with all of nature.

What started out as a joke about knowing something about photography, has become a truth for me that I cannot avoid. It stares me in the face everyday. Everytime I take a photograph I see it: "If you know the difference between a bus stop and and f/stop, you already know too much."

Survival is very simple and uncomplicated. The easier a photo can be experienced, the more profound is its emotion. The simpler the emotion, the more authentic the image, the more complete the experience of survival. At least it is for me.

Anyway, this whole thing was written in context of that challenge, "My Precious" which for one reason or another didn't work out. So if this is too philosophical for some of you, too bad.

i cant think of everything. im not a miracle worker. im not a mind reader. sometimes things just go bad. it's nobody's fault. nobody can explain it. it just happens. or it doesnt. i was living in a house in hollywood between fountain and santa monica blvd. not sure exactly. the house caught fire. everything burned except my drums and piano. the dogs died in the bathroom in a corner. i was working in long beach. drove home at three in the morning. the street was filled with fire trucks. the house was gone. i lost everything except the car and my drums and piano. the money was in the bank in a safe deposit box. it wasnt much to begin with. i worked in burbank at a cable tv company. me and this other guy sold converters. i'd get $1000 a case. went to mexico for a vacation twice. i had a good time. got a tan. floated in the salt water. drank rum and coke and snorted coke everyday between three and four in the afternoon. it was late. i was tired or sick or alone. i dont remember. i dont care. i used to play piano and write songs. i'd sing them and record them. had a dream i'd be somebody sometime but sometimes never came soon enough. it was always too late too much too soon but always late. i took my camera downtown to make photos of my shadow as it passed by but i wasnt fast enough to make it happen. my shadow went past like a comet in the sky, like the right story gone wrong too much too fast. a kid washed his car at 11pm at night and he was shot in the carwash. what was he doing washing his car at a carwash at 11pm in the first place? it sounds too stupid but it's true. if i had a son and he said, hey mom, i'd like to wash my car at 11pm i'd say like hell you are, stay home, you stay home with me, with us. but it rained last night. i woke up this morning and took my meds. i was taking one tab twice a day, then one tab once a day, then a half a tab twice a day, then i'll take a half a tab once a day, then no tabs no time a day. i watched a news report about fat people getting fatter. the skinny stay skinny and the fat get fatter. pancake batter makes people fatter. save a penny, stay skinny. eat more vegis, drink more water, kick the habit kiss the cat wear a hat. the sun was bright and i could see my shadow just like peter pan i had a golden tan my body was strong and full of muscles dancing shadows on the wooden deck. my shadow doesnt spend any money. the recession doesnt bother my shadow. there's no money. there's no time to jump start the engine. face life. foot traffic. transformation for years to come. the life and death of a private life out of sight under the influence bloodshot eyes and an odor like alcohol bailed me out. discover the body. heartbreak gridiron. prayers fall on deaf ears. nightmare's not going away. it's real. it's what happened. a lot of things happen. devasting dedication. why's it so hard to believe? get over it if you can get over it. be patient. a blond in a red dress. a blond in a black dress. driving around giving hand jobs in the front seat. pulled into an alley give a blow job in the back seat of big box chains. big box stores. it's an art. cold coffee coffee black fat belly pulled tight with a body glove. black belt unbutton your pants fake it. it's not hot. i dont feel sweaty. it doesnt itch. it's perfect to hide bra bulge. back fat. be still. take a gun and shoot me and bury me just like you. the curse of death? death is not a curse. death is the other side of the plug nickle. the coin. the two sides of the story. open and shut case. slam dunk. over and out. all washed up. clean up your act. get a bite to eat. dont stop now, first come first served. the master and the servant. yesterday today and tomorrow. get a lawyer and get it done. catch a falling star. it's all over now. not a moment too soon. red high heels. call it quits.

Every Bourbon is a Whiskey, but Every Whiskey's No Bourbon

I go to sleep and it's winter. I wake up and can't get back to sleep. I try hard, real hard. I take pills. I have some drinks. And then some more. I watch TV. I turn it down low. I turn on the fan and the air conditioning. I fall asleep. I have a dream. It's a bad dream, a real nighmare. I get a phone call in the middle of the night, like two or three in the morning. It's springtime. I answer the phone and a voice says: "This is the Sheriff's Department. We have deputies at the door. Open the door and do not have anything in your hands. I repeat, this is the Sheriff's Department........" blah blah blah So I open the door. The cops come in and search the house. There's nothing there. Nobody but me. They said I filed a false report, which is a felony. I get five years probation. I wake up in a sweat. I'm still watching TV. I'm eating fruit. The clock is ticking. Time is running out. It's the Summer Equinox. I'm living in Los Angeles, the Hollywood Hills. The Santa Ana winds are rough. So I move to San Francisco. Nashville. Where am I? I wake up. My bed is wet. My pillow is wet. I'm playing drums with Jerry Inman in Jackpot, Nevada with Garland Frady from Austin, Texas. It's a casino on the border of Nevada and Idaho. We get drunk every night and take black beauties to stay awake and party. I wake up and it's the fall. November. I'm drinking at the Foothill Club in Long Beach.

In my lifetime so far I've been a card carrying member of the Moral Majority, the John Birch Society, the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and Planned Parenthood. I was in the Cub Scouts and the Order of DeMolay's, which is apart of the Masons, which Christians's are afraid of. I was in the Naval Reserve in Nevada LOL. I went AWOL as a conscience objector which was denied, worked at the Monterey Pop Festival on my way hitchhiking to San Francisco and got out of the navy with an undesireable discharge because I used too much LSD. I guess they were afraid I'd be on watch one night and hallucinate a big flying boat coming out of the sky to attack the ship.

I've studied yoga, meditation, all sorts of magick occult practices, new age crap, and practiced hard-core fundamentalist christianity for several years. Apparently, none of it has done me any damage and I survived in spite of it. I've been pro-choice and anti-choice. I was on staff with Scientology for two or three years. I voted for Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Al Gore and Obama. I've been an atheist for ten years going on a lifetime.

I've been a musician my entire life practically. I played drums with Charlie Daniels, Doug Kershaw, Charlie Pride, Conte Condoli, Carl Saunders, Al Bruno, J.D. Manis, Rick Davis, Garland Frady, Earl Ball, Roy Clark, Pat Boone, The Imperials and a bunch of others.

I've had my fill of every drug addiction you can think of and kicked it, enjoyed my share of alcoholism, vegitarianism, fruitarianism and meat eating. I took the Rosicrucian cleansing cure and detox, studied astrology, numerology and tarot reading.

I've been politically far right, far left, centrist, anarchist and socialist. I protested the Viet Nam war, the Iraq war and I hated Bush. Every day for eight years I woke up and went to sleep hating that mo^%#r f&%@king c&*%k su&$%ker! Now that he's gone and the country's in good hands again I don't care about politics anymore.

I've been trying to be a photographer for the past few years, and before that I worked in offices with a coat and tie and no tie and no coat. I havent held a steady job in over eleven years. I've had run-in's with the law, been all around the world once. I've been married and divorced a half a dozen times or more. Luckily for me I was paying attention to destiny and fate and I finally found my one true love of a lifetime living here in Tennessee. These pictures are pictures of her. She's the best that ever happened to me.

And in all this life time of experience and education in the cities of the nation and the world..... after all the experiences I've had and have yet to have...... there's one thing I've learned that has given me a true perspective on life and the true meaning of existence, and that is this:
EVERY BOURBON IS A WHISKEY, BUT EVERY WHISKEY'S NO BOURBON!