FUBAR in Prescott (again)

I sometimes remind myself that I am only average at ruining my life and the lives of those I love. My failures and missteps are at best ordinary and not worth mentioning. My brother N, on the other hand, is in the middle of another one of his addiction cycles and if things go badly the best he can hope for is a prison sentence. I don't want to talk about worst case scenarios, but anything is possible in the world of alocoholism, automobiles, firearms and knives. Things have gotten dark, very dark, in Prescott. A phone call could come at any moment, a call that could change everything. We sit here in Tucson, not knowing, not able to do anything. That's the way it is. It makes me want to reflect on my own life and the choices I've made. I am thankful that I can drink a glass of wine and go to work in the morning. My brother cannot. He must choose between sobriety or death and I'm not sure he even has a choice.

Gallery Openings, Art Sales and Other Silliness

I've been an artist for a long time and have been selling my work for several years. I have no idea why people buy art, or why they buy my art. Tonight I went to a gallery opening for Bill Dubin, a watercolorist and new addition to the Mo's Gallery art scene. We hit it off immediately (a fellow insane person, willing to paint using the world's least forgiving medium, watercolor). The show was great and very cohesive. Lots of lively pictures of trolleys, including the ones down on 4th Avenue here in Tucson. Most of the people who showed up were friends of Nathan (the manager) or other Mo's people and their affiliates. Reminds me of the show I had at Alliance Bank, where everyone who showed up was a friend or an acquaintance. Unless you're way up there in the art scene, it's hard to attract the kind of unknown buyers who will purchase a painting opening night. Paintings usually sell prior to the opening or afterward with the possible exception of a very strong piece where the buyer doesn't want to lose the piece to someone else. To make a long story short, Bill didn't sell anything. I hope he will, but the art market has been very flat lately (along with just about every sector in George Bush's economy). I haven't sold anything in quite a while.

Until tonight. That's right, I sold a little oil painting at Bill Dubin's show. Ridiculous. Absurd. Painfully unpredictable.

But that's how it goes in this business. You just never know.

2nd Street Tree House

This is one of the paintings I sold at the 2nd Street School auction. I made the school over $800! Cool.

Fajitas

My Neighbor, the Hedonist

Tom, my next door neighbor, has given up totally on physical health and prefers instead to bask in the glow of cigar smoke and very, very good wine. He has three bottles of Velvet Glove in his fridge and I am determined to share one with him, perhaps over the best f*cking ribeyes you’ve ever had. Tom is the operations manager for El Charro. He works six days a week, doesn’t keep up with his landscaping, and travels to California to taste wine with the likes of Doug Shafer who Tom says used to live in Tucson and who seems to know Tom and vice versa, allowing Tom to visit one of the finest wineries in Napa and try out past vintages of Hillside Select Cabernet. Needless to say, I’m very happy to know Tom, if only tangentially, over the cinder block wall of our shared back yards. I recently had the opportunity to trade him a bottle of Boarding Pass for a bottle of Molly Dooker, again through the chink in our shared wall, while sipping some Blue Moon Zinfandel from one of Tom’s Riedel glasses that he purchased at cost (the wine and the glass). He told me to set the glass on the wall when I was finished. That’s just the kind of guy Tom is: generous, and fatalistic. I love him. We have nothing in common but a shared interest in really awesome red wine, which apparently is more than enough.

I love my neighborhood.