Spring please now thanks.

It's strange to go into a grocery store and be aware of the consumer demographic the place is targeting. Yesterday, I went to Foodland in what I guess is north Charleston. The frozen foods section was bigger than the produce section, and the frozen desserts section was even bigger than that. There were two whole aisles of candy. Country music piped through the store speakers. As I drew my conclusions about all these observations, I started to feel unbearably self-conscious about myself. What is my target demographic? Anyhow, the store did have RAMPS, which I can't even find at the farmer's market.
The Foodland in Kanawha City plays old-timey 40's music, they keep a real butcher on staff during the day, and it's full of old people. Asshole place on Corridor G sells sushi, wine, and fancy soap, and it's full of assholes (aaand some nice people, including me..buying sushi..sometimes.)

I finished my design for the East End Streetworks banner project. I have no idea if it's what they were looking for, or had in mind, but it's "my interpretation" of the east end...
Beginning sketch:


Finished Product:

spring is here, cornchips and beer

Piping Hot

Chemistry is often called on to heal the rift between body and soul. The relief that people that people express when a doctor says their depression is "chemical" is predicated on a belief that there is an integral self that exists across time, and on a fictional divide between the fully occasioned sorrow and the utterly random one. The word chemical seems to assuage people of the feeling of responsibility for the stressed-out discontent of not liking their jobs, worrying about getting old, failing at love, hating their families. There is a pleasant freedom from guilt that has been attached to chemical. If your brain is predisposed to depression, you need not blame yourself for it. Well, blame yourself or evolution, but remember that blame itself can be understood as a chemical process, and that happiness too, is chemical. Chemistry and biology are not matters that impinge on the "real" self; depression cannot be separated from the person it affects. Treatment does not alleviate a disruption of identity, bring you back to some kind of normality; it readjusts a multifarious identity, changing in some small degree who you are.

--Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Mental cobweb dusting blog post update.

The past five months have been chock full of fantastic. I went to Clifftop and wound up in a documentary about the festival by John Nakashima while playing fiddle with Chad. Still looking for video of that online somewhere...
I painted a mural on the Habitat for Humanity Restore
And it was voted #1 by the folks who came out to the unveiling. yay! I got some cash and a hefty gift certificate to the restore. how in the world will i spend it? wacky chandeliers? sacks of old cutlery for to make jewelry with? oh boy.
I visited an old friend in Pocahontas County, where we hiked through some fields & picked apples for pressing into juice. We took the fruit to a farm where folks were taking turns working a late 19th century press that had been restored by the farmer's grandpa in the 1920's. The juice was better than anything there ever was.

Aaaand I continued a collage/illustration series from where I left off in college:

There's another giant picture pages post on the way to document the fantastic Buswater show, music playing, and vietnamese food eating.

Love,
A