September 10, 2026
Hi, I’m sitting here in the car, just staring up into space and dictating this post. This morning. I was quite emotional working on a 4×6 piece. Am I going a little too far with it? I don’t know, things have been exhausting lately. They’ve just been very exhausting. This post has two subjects.
I had physical therapy today and it was okay, it was quiet. The person that worked on me, he’s pretty good. He paid more attention to my hips than anybody has, and I’m grateful for that-and I told him that.
I’m also confused because there’s this young lady there that’s a physical therapy tech—I think they call them—and she never really smiles unless she’s around people like her co-workers, her peers, and on occasion her friends will stop by. And she’s very happy with them, but everything else, she’s just pan-faced. I try to say hi to everybody, and she’s not as receptive as the others, and that bothers me in a way.
Now, there’s a little bit of history with this. On my first day of PT, she seemed happy. But she’s got these piercing green eyes. I mean, not like just regular old green eyes that look like they might be brown or olive—no, they’re literally green, like in that 2% margin in the world. And they’re really wild-looking, these eyes. So, me being the outgoing person that I am, I looked at her and asked, “Is that your real eye color?” She gave me a strange look and said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, they’re quite rare.” She’s like, “Oh, okay.”
Then she was helping the person that was actually my PT Doc, and my PT Doc tells her that I do a lot of different voices. She goes, “Pick a voice.” So the green-eyed girl said Australian, and I did an Australian accent real quick. She laughed and really liked that—that was very funny.
So, then something happened right after that, on this same day where she mentioned something and I gave a little bit of unsolicited advice, you know, just off the cuff like I always do with people. She didn’t seem receptive to that. She kind of made a comment like, “I didn’t know I was in ‘therapy’ right now,” and then I made a comment back saying, “You’re always in therapy whether you know it or not.” And I left it at that.
So I don’t know if it’s me or what, but ever since then she’s just been, not chill with me, but kind of like, “That’s a weird dude, I’m gonna do my thing.” For example, I say hi and bye to everybody before I leave no matter who they are, because that’s just my way of doing things. And it’s almost like she dreads it when I come around. Today, she was looking straight at me and I just said, “What’s up?” She’s like, “I’m good,” and I said, “How are you?” Then, instead of responding, she just went back to looking at her computer screen.
So I’m trying to nail down exactly why it’s bothering me. Something in me says I know what’s going on with this girl and I want to help, but another thing inside of me is just like, let her fate happen. Then another part of me tells myself I’m just mad or upset or worried because she’s not receptive to me like most people are. So I don’t know, man…I keep going over and over in my head this ADHD fantasy of how I can give her a lesson so she’ll feel better for the rest of her life and smile more often, but then again, that’s not my responsibility. So I don’t know, I’ll just wing it, leave the ball in her court, and just work on myself. That’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m not out to save everybody.
Afterthought: It’s me. I’m almost certain she’s not reacting the way most others do…I need to respect that and move on. My bad.
Anyway, on to the art…
Now, there’s a piece I finished today which should be scanned in and up on the 4th floor gallery by now. It’s really interesting. (well, if you see it here to the left, it’s on the fourth floor. Duh.) There’s a lot of stuff inside of me that I need to overcome and move on from. This is very, very old stuff—it really is. It’s like an old jar of something you find way back in the back of a cabinet. You don’t know what the hell it is, so you throw it out. There’s a lot of me in that piece. So, I’ll leave it to the viewer to interpret. I think it can be interpreted in many ways. Some might find it comical, some might find it very deep and dark, but that’s the way it is for me. It’s part of me expressing myself here lately. The colors I’m moving toward lately are black, yellow, and orange, and I don’t know why, but a lot of my chaotic pieces like this last one carry that color scheme. 60-30-10
Anyway, for this one, I tried something different. I had some scrap window screen. When I was growing up, window screens were a thing for doors. All the outside doors had screen doors on the outside, then the regular door. You’d open the regular door and the screen door would let air in, but not flies and stuff. I remember these screen doors had long springs on them, and they would open up and make strange noises. When I was a kid, I used to get in trouble for opening and closing them because of the noises they made. They were also hard to see through, which is my point for this piece.
A bit like, you know what you’re looking at from the outside, but the details inside are hard to make out. Like a dream.
So I decided to take a piece of screen and use it not only as a template, but also incorporate it into the piece itself. It’s interesting—I have a couple of underpainting layers on this piece using this screen – where I let it dry, peeled it off, and it just gives this texture like a bunch of little squares. Well, you’ll see it.
Anyway, I hope I didn’t confuse you too much; be good to each other and have an awesome day.
Love,
Mark