Holly Northrop Blog

Still shooting with the Horizon 202 and I've got about another week before I should 'respectively' give it back. Seeing how I have to go into Manhattan twice this week I should be good. Going from the solid square format of my Holga to shooting in panoramic is a refreshing change. Suddenly the world has opened up. Not all shots can be pans, although it could be fun to do a series.

Martha and I went to see Batman over the weekend. We originally had tickets to the IMAX in Nyack but we decided against making Martha basically drive to work on a Saturday. After driving all week long from Hudson to Mahwah and then back, by Friday she's pretty bat shit crazy so adding another day, is nothing short of cruel. At the time we ordered tickets it sounded like a fun idea but on the day of the event we changed our minds and went up to the local crap theater, here in Hudson.

There were maybe fifteen people there but the truly stand out bunch was a family that sat in the last row up to our right. There were four of them, mom, dad, and two sons and all so very, very overweight that together they could have made three more people. They sat in the last row with an empty seat between each one of them and proceeded to wrinkle paper and chew food for a solid two hours of the two and a half hour movie. They would eat and eat and then every fifteen minutes of so they would send one of the kids down to the concession stand to stock up on candy and free refills on popcorn and soda. They only stopped eating when the food trough closed. Finally, the last thirty minutes of the movie were quiet.

The movie was long and Heath was awesome. I found the nurse outfit more disturbing then anything else. Free refills and processed foods should be eliminated.

I think I might be reaching the end of my ability to go to a theater. Martha and I have large TV so honestly what the fuck are we doing? At home we can get fucked up, pause for bathroom and water breaks and the occasional 'I need a moment break' without any trouble at all. I can touch and lay on anything I want without fear and stickiness. The only things that are sticky in my house are the things that are supposed to be sticky, like tape and spray mount. Ok so we don't have surround sound and for the moment we have to wait until things are released on DVD but still.

Jasmine's apartment saga continues. She's found a place that she loves, and is in the high range of her price range. That's funny, it's not really her price range it's more like ours now isn't it. Martha spoke with the landlord, she being the more responsible sounding out of the two of Jasmine's mothers. Technically, Jazz has three mothers, but none of us considers that beer-drinking bitch in PA to be anything more than a pain in the ass.

Speaking of asses, Jasmine's father has yet to pony up any money to help his daughter out. He gave her 100 bucks for her birthday, which she proceeded to spend on gas money to go see him, visit a friend in Pittsburgh and then back home to school. Nice. You know, I could get over shit faster if he would stop doing shit.

Anyway, the plan is to go to Pittsburgh once Jazz is a little settled. I think we are going to stay a few days and hang out with her. I want to visit my grandparents' graves and Martha wants to see actual living people. It will be hard to resist the urge to drive that extra hour up Route 8 and burn down a certain brick house with a recently landscaped yard, but I'll try.

A quick look at April and I see that Jasmine is coming home for a weekend visit. I'll be shooting a friends pre-wedding photos all around Manhattan. Then I'll be alone one weekend when Martha travels to North Carolina to visit her mother. This time I'll be baking cookies for profit and hopefully visiting lots and lots of art museums. Somewhere in there maybe I'll get an interview or two.

Before a job interview last week, Martha and I were lying in bed enjoying a little morning conversation.
"I had a dream last night that I had cancer." I said.
"Oh god holly"
"Yep, I was in a hospital bed and I had cancer. Oh and I had to have a little dental work done; they did it right there in the bed."
Laughter
"You were there, I had started chemo, and well yeah, that is it. It was..."
"God Holly", she interrupted, "why don't you cheer up a little?"

After I printed out the last page of my resume packet, the printer died. But considering that it's almost six years old and the endless amount of prints, resumes, letters and general directions I've printed out on the thing, it's amazing that it has lasted this long.

I use shit to death. I wear clothes until they are rags. I rip though coats like nobody's business. It seems like at the end of every season I need a new coat. My CD player is eighteen years old, the receiver is roughly thirteen, and the turntable and cassette deck I've had for at least ten years. The speakers however are new. I even have vinyl records that I bought when I was is high school. My Canon 35 mm camera is the one my dad bought me (new) in 1981. Even my Holga is over three years old and they are not supposed to last past a year. Right now, all Martha hears is that I have a bunch of shit that is going to break all at one time and I will need $1,000 to upgrade. She did buy me a new printer, however.

The older I get, the older all my crap gets.

There are only three physical things that I have left from my marriage. The emotional things are too numerous to mention and in reality, it's not what happened in the marriage so much as the outstanding shitty behavior that happened well after the divorce. But anyhoo, all three of these things were already old when we bought them. There is the Victorian lamp in my photo room. Originally, we bought two of them; Jim got the other one. I am sure his second wife promptly made him throw it out along with all of his guitars and other musical instruments and anything having to do with his former self. I suppose that is one way to weed out the past. Let the replacement dig through your crap and make a new life for you.

Ok, obviously I'm having a few issues here but let us press on.

Jim and I bought the pair of lamps at the Salvation Army in East Liberty for $14.00. The lamp I have still has the price on it, written in Sharpie Permanent Marker on the metal base. I have a 1960s marble table that I now use to cut mattes and file negs on, but back then, it was our kitchen table. Many a thanksgiving dinner and morning cereal has happened around the thing. I think we paid $20.00 for it.

Lastly, there is the 1940's red leather chair in the living room. Jim and I bought the red chair at the Salvation Army in Bloomfield for $45.00, the most we ever spent on a thrift store item. When Lily was a kitten, she went after it so there is some damage on the left side but over all it's in great shape. I am debating on giving it to Jasmine but not until she looks to be a little more stable in her housing. Could be awhile.

I've been thinking about throwing out a bunch of stuff. I know I should. I've done this before but I could always weed out more. What is the fucking point of dragging around crap year after year? Ok fine, I understand why it has happened. My mom threw away anything that I couldn't take with me when I left home. She tossed out paintings, drawings, journals, yearbooks, photos, furniture, art supplies, clothes, sketchbooks, reading books, letters etc. Gone, all fucking gone. The problem is, that shit was not hers to throw out. I would have eventually put it on the curb but I lost that opportunity.

So now, because I'm so damaged I hold on to things like grim death. I have a painting that a friend did, that I hate but cannot seem to throw it away because a friend did it. A friend I no longer talk to. So it sits in the sunroom facing the wall in the corner. I have old journals that I WILL NEVER READ, and most certainly do not want anyone else to read after I'm dead, so I really should toss that shit out. I have stacks and stacks of old VCR tapes from when Jim used to bring home the video camera from work. He would put the thing on the tripod and film whatever happened in the living room for hours and hours. Mostly, it is of Jasmine running around the room, chasing the cat with her bubbletop toy vacuum cleaner, screaming out total gibberish all the while looking like an add for Ritalin. Although the tapes could be used as a public service announcement for birth control, the thing about the VCR tape is that Martha and I don't even have the VCR hooked up.

So maybe some weeding is in order. Seems like my life, while tidy, upon a closer look is pretty chunky with useless crap. Throw out all the shit and have the VCR transferred to DVD is what I'm thinking. At least the storage of a DVD is much, much smaller. Eventually, things will be so small; I won't even notice them at all. And I suppose that is the real point.

The very first time I was ever laid-off from a company was in Denver, Colorado, (Aurora, to be precise), in September of 1987. It was a small design shop consisting of an owner; a female Art Director (an odd sight for the decade and someone I considered to be a mentor); and a female bookkeeper. All were full-time employees. I was hired as freelance contract work. Specifically, I was hired to paste-up the Yellow Pages.

There was a typesetter who came in twice a week to print out galleys and galleys of type that I had speced. Specing type is an art form unlike anything that goes on today. It's a mathematical formula involving a pica pole, words and the ability to problem solve without approval and/or praise.

While this wasn't my first job in my chosen field, I had previously worked at a print shop, it was the first job that I liked the folks I worked with and enjoyed, for the most part, coming to work.

I was young and had so very much to learn about business.

I worked there for roughly a year and a half. Once the Yellow Page contract was finished, I moved on to bigger and better projects. Things like hi-comp work, where I was able to play with Letraset films, papers, Pantone Books and press-type. Mostly I did hi-comp work for Coors Beer and AT&T. It was a good gig and I was happy.

Then somewhere around the beginning of spring 1987, the company hired a bearded hippy guy, who I considered to be a slimy fuck. He was a fast talker and knew everything about everything. He also had a knee-slapping laugh that sounded more like a bark, bark, bark, and a snort, then anything normal. The hippy guy was hired to help out on an enormous production job; pasting up direct mail pieces. You know, that junk mail shit everyone gets, discounts on dry-cleaning, and half-off on pizzas? Well, I've actually made those.

After a few months the direct mail contract was finished, and much to my annoyance, this hippy guy stayed.

Not only did he stay, he started going out to lunch with the Art Director, something that I had never done. The Art Director would slam me with work and then have closed door meetings with the hippy guy. Considering that the office space we all existed in was about the size of a one-bedroom apartment, having a closed door meeting of any kind was weird. Sometimes I was the only one who wasn't in a meeting.

As spring turned into summer, the work started to dry up. 1987 was a weird year for business. Reagan was president and in the middle of the Iran-Contra Affair, the stock market was going nuts, (and eventually crashed i.e. Black Monday) and the economy was starting to suck. I spent a great deal of time at my desk painting personal projects and turning up my radio to avoid hearing the Art Director and this hippy guy laughing at each others jokes.

Then on the first Friday of September at 4:45, I was called into the Art Director's office and asked to close the door. I sat there, all of twenty-five years old and wide-eyed like a puppy, notepad in hand, thinking we were going to talk about a new project when she folded her hands together on the table, put on a sad face and in a soft voice said, "We're going to have to let you go."

Go where? I thought and then it occurred to me that something very bad was happening. I immediately asked about the hippy guy (like this was important) and the Art director informed me that it was just me that was being let go.

I couldn't believe it. I was devastated but more importantly I was blindsided and I hate that. No one likes to be taken by surprise but I vowed to never, ever let something like this happen again. Oh sure, I can be laid-off, it is after all, the nature of this business, but not without seeing it coming first.

But back to September of 1987.

After leaving her office, I grabbed a cardboard box that was full of reams of copy paper, dumped the paper on the floor and started packing up all my shit. All my tapes, art supplies that I brought from home; rulers; orange triangles; a set of Rapidograph pens; a pica pole etc.; all jammed into a box along with my radio and Violent Femmes, Patti Smith and Husker du tapes. Intermittently I was spewing profanity at the hippy guy by telling him to 'fuck off'.

As I was just about to leave the office for the last time, the Art Director asked to see what was in my box. I was horrified. I completely understand this thinking now, but at that time, I was personally offended. I could not believe that she would think I would steal something. Standing in the small lobby, while the bookkeeper, hippy guy and the owner stood guard, the Art Director dug through my box of crap at a slow, meticulous pace. I just stood there with my mouth open, trying not to cry.

Then on top of that she pulls out a metal 12" printer's gauge claiming it to belong to the company. Hippy guy made a gasp and the owner took a step closer to me. I explained to her that it was mine, that I had brought it from home and I used it instead of theirs because the numbers on mine were easier to read. Theirs was faded. She then made me walk back over to my desk and show her the other one.

Once I got out of there, I threw all my shit into the back of the Dodge Omni coffin car that I drove, (yes I even drove then) and cried.

Being laid-off that time unleashed a shitstorm of events that were impressive only in their combined determination to punish.

Because I was always contract freelance and never considered a full-time employee, I was unable to collect unemployment. So right out of the gate, Jim and I were screwed, living from shitty paycheck to shitty paycheck, we had maybe twenty dollars in our checking account. Oddly enough on the day I was laid-off, in the mail arrived a brand new MasterCard with a $3,000 limit in Jim's name. Our grocery store just started taking credit cards, and so there you go.

Three days after I was let go, I was pulled over for going 45 in a school zone. I started crying as the female cop gave me a ticket. She was unmoved. After I got home from that horseshit, Jasmine's pre-school called me to inform me that they had had a Chicken Pox outbreak at the school and were sending all the children home for two-weeks, could I please come get my kid. I called the doctor and he said that there isn't too much that can be done at this point but to watch Jazz and if nothing happens by 'Day 10' then all should be clear.

'Day Ten' Jasmine woke up with a pox on her back. Three days later, I woke up with a pox on my shoulder. I'd never had chicken pox as a child and had no idea what I was in for. The first few days I felt weird but was able to take care of Jasmine. She was covered with Chicken Pox and I covered her in Calamine Lotion. She looked like a three-year old chalk child. Jasmine kept scratching at herself so I duct taped mismatched oven mitts to her arms. She was covered from her fingers to just under her armpits. She looked like a floral and plaid penguin. Yeah, I know, ok but you weren't there. In the end, this is why she doesn't have scars all over her face.

Just about the time that Jasmine was due to go back to school, I started to get really, really sick. I had pox all over every part of my body and could not stop throwing up. I was so sick that I was puking up bile. I spent all day for several days in the bathtub filled to the top with Aveeno oatmeal bath. The last day Jasmine was home with me, I had set up two child gates at each end of the hall so she could only be either in her room or in the bathroom with me. Those were some good times.

The toilet was next to the tub and every few hours I'd wake up in cold water, the parts of my body that had been in the air completely dry, sit straight up and throw up in the toilet. Jasmine would hear this, knowing I was awake and come running in asking "Do you feel better, mommy?" and "Can I have some juice?" Then she would then run back into her room where I'd hear her playing with her toys singing "Mommy is sick. Mommy is sick. Sick, sick, sick." over and over again.

At this point, I had been unemployed for about three-weeks with no hope of even getting close to any interview of any kind soon. I had over eighty-seven crusty chicken pox on my face. I know this because one day, when I was able to sit on the couch for hours on end, I counted them. It was around this time that two other things happened.

I'd been sleeping on the foldout couch for days, coughing up phlegm and running a mean fever. One night, as Jim sat in the chair beside me doing bong hits and watching The Outlaw Josey Wales together, I seemed to have stopped breathing and had he not been there to bring me back, I'm not so sure I'd be around today.

It was about this time that my mother called to let me know that they were coming to visit. Now, I can count on one hand, (and still have three fingers left) the number of times they had visited us over our then, five-year marriage. In fact, if I count the total number of times that my parents have ever come to visit me anywhere, I still don't think I would use up all the fingers. Even more disturbing is when I really think about it, that visit, was the third to the last time that I would ever see both of them alive together in the same room.

So let's review. I'm unemployed and feel totally betrayed. Jim and I are charging food on a credit card that we will never be able to pay back. While I had stopped throwing up, I look like I've had acid thrown in my face and simply cannot be seen in public. My parents are coming and I have a $100 speeding ticket that we need to pay, in cash or they are going to put a warrant out for my arrest.

Yet, somehow, we moved through it all. Jasmine went back to school. I got another job, be it a sucky one but at least I was working. We paid the speeding ticket and soon after, I caused a multi-car accident during rush hour on University Blvd while on my way to an interview. Boy did that end my desire to drive. My parents came and went (literally) and Jim's parents ended up begrudgingly paying our MasterCard bill.

All this memory stuff has come up because of two things. My time at the Voice is coming to an end, (something I've been out in front of for sometime now), and that makes me sad, scared and unusually hopeful. The other thing is when I was putting on makeup the other day, I noticed a chicken pox scar on my face and surprisingly, it made me smile. "Mommy is sick. Mommy is sick. Sick, sick, sick." Indeed.

After a few days of negotiations, I managed to convince Martha to let me open one of my Christmas presents early. I already knew what it was, the surprise element wiped away by a steady email stream between the two of us about various brands, woofers, tweeters and pricing. I was getting new speakers and Martha was organizing a deal with a guy she used to work with. Once we decided on a pair, they arrived rather quickly. I came home from work and there, behind the doorman, were two 4-foot tall boxes. Taped to one box and in plain view of about two-hundred people was a packing list with Martha's complete credit card number (including expiration date) flapping in the breeze.

After we got the boxes in the apartment, and called the credit card company to place the exposed credit card on hold, I had to make the case as to why we should take the speakers out of the box—for space reasons, of course. And if we went so far as to hook them up, well then, we could remove the nasty boxes AND the enormous Harmon Kardons that the new speakers were replacing.

Speaking of the Harmons, I have had those speakers since Jasmine was two. I even remember the day Jim brought them home. Originally, they cost about as much as our rent, which at that time was around six hundred dollars a month. Jim got a deal because they were the floor models at the stereo store in the same mall where he worked at a photo lab. Much like Hyde.

We were living well beyond our means in a two-bedroom one-bath condo in a condominium village called Southglen Commons just on the inside of Littleton Colorado. We were living in Littleton specifically because it had the best pre-school in the Denver area. Yes, that's right, it was all just down the street from Columbine. If I had been a completely different person, not gay or a vagabond then Jazz probably would have been a sophomore at that school, instead of a disgruntled one in Pittsburgh in 1999.

While we were not the lowest form of white trash to live in Southglenn Commons, we did live above them. The two guys who shared the two-bedroom below us were perfect in so many ways but to me their main function was to keep the gaze of the neighbors off of us. They were young, loud and drunk most of the time. They listened to heavy metal and I'm almost positive they sold drugs. To live below us during those years had to have been ridiculously loud and only someone who was louder, and more fucked up would have been able to stand it. Jasmine was two, three and four while we were there. All she did was scream her head off while running from one end of the apartment to the other. She would scream just for the pure joy of screaming. It was great. Between Husker du and Jasmine, the only neighbors we could have had were young drunk fuck-ups. Any other normal hardworking asshole would have constantly complained and probably called the cops. All things I totally understood then and now. I knew how lucky Jim and I were to have such crackhead neighbors. They never fucked with us for two obvious reasons. We looked like dirty poor hippies and we had a kid. This was back in the day when there was still honor among thieves.

One night I woke up to red and blue flashing lights swirling around on the bedroom ceiling. I screamed at Jim to hide EVERYTHING and ran from our mattress on the floor to the big living room window just in time to see the Denver police dragging both shirtless boys from their apartment and through the snow towards the flashing police cars. As I watched the cops shove each boy into a police cruiser, it made me sad to think that they were gone. Thankfully, that apartment stayed vacant for the rest of our time there.

Before the Harmon Kardons, I had a pair of Panasonics that drove my mother to attempt murder on several occasions. They made it to college and beyond, a feat that should not go unnoted. After all, they survived nine crucial years, (1977-1986) before being regulated to 'second pair' and spent their twilight years hooked up to the TV blasting The Smurfs and My Little Pony commercials. Jim and I never threw anything out because we started out with nothing. We bought other folks yard sale crap and kept it all until it disintegrated. The bright yellow dresser that Jasmine grew up with was 'found' on the curb a block away from our apartment in Pittsburgh. I was alone and on foot so I pulled it down the alley, the asphalt slowly shaving the veneer off the bottom. When I got about three houses away, Jim came out only because he had heard this god-awful sound coming from out back. He had looked out the window and noticed my red head over the fence tops, slowly bobbing up and down to the rhythm of a loud scraping noise.

Ah, yeah... so, um... right. As my neighbor's can tell you, I have new speakers and deep down I am only thirteen. It takes every bit of my adult fiber to keep the sound at a reasonable level. All I did Saturday was sit at bottom point of the perfect sound triangle in the living room, listening to music. They are great and I hope to get a good twenty years out of them. Sometime around 2025 I should be bugging Martha for a new pair.

I don't want to talk about my tumor. I still have it and every doctor on the planet can kiss my ass.

Well, well, well. Miss Jasmine has signed a lease on her first apartment. It is all so very exciting and honestly a little frightening. It is for her junior year and is considered off campus housing. It is loosely connected to the school but normal working folks live there too. Her roommate, and one of her best friends, is a flaming homosexual who collects FiestaWare and needs to get the hell out of PA when he graduates. When I spoke with her the other day she was in the middle of discussing with him a color scheme for the bathroom. Jesus. Martha made the, "How about the 'no mold' color scheme" comment that almost made me spit tea out of my nose.

But all and all I understand the whole move out of the dorms thing. Dorms are only for freshman and the majority of sophomores. For a junior, even if you have your own single super-cool-chick room - a room that is the size of a very generous studio apartment in Manhattan - it still kind of sucks to have to wear flip-flops when you shower.

THE APARTMENT
I moved out of my dorm room and into a house with five guys during Christmas of 1981, in the middle of my second year of college. One of those guys was Jim, my future ex-husband. We had been seeing each other for about 6 months. It isn't as though we were crazy in love and had to live together as much as I had a bad situation in the dorms and needed to leave as soon as possible. Interestingly enough, this is a reoccurring theme in my life. Anyway, I had already been spending most of my weekends at his place so it seemed like the solution to my stupid roommate problem.

He had rented a huge house on Stratford Ave. in Pittsburgh. It had three floors but only the top two floors had apartments. The first floor was still the old parlor, dining room and kitchen from when it was a single family home. No one lived on the first floor and it was littered with building supplies, old doors and a broken toilet that sat in the middle of the dining room. The 1930's floral wallpaper was peeling from the walls; the hardwood floors were dull and covered with dirt and nails, but the French doors, original tiled fireplaces and ten-inch thick baseboards were inspiring. It was an awesome space and I moved my studio into the parlor area and placed my drawing table near the stain glass bay window. There was no heat on the first floor and I wore fingerless gloves and my coat while I worked on my portfolio throughout the winter months.

No doubt about it, straight boys are gross, and with the exception of the gay guy who lived in the back bedroom on the second floor (his room was always very tidy) that whole house was nasty. I lived with Jim on the third floor in an apartment that was split into four simple rooms, two in the front and two in the back. It was a semi-furnished apartment with two full beds, two dressers, a couch and a kitchen table. Everything else we hauled up three flights of stairs from the curb on trash days.

We had a roommate named Rick who was the definition of strange. The other definition: weird and creepy. He had the back bedroom next to the kitchen. Jim and I had the front two rooms where the ceilings slanted halfway down the wall because it was the attic. So actually, the apartment was small. Floor space was large but genuine moving around space was limited. There was however, an exceptionally large closet in the center of the apartment that Jim turned into a darkroom. It was perfect because it was in the center of the house and had a high ceiling. Up to three people could squeeze in there if needed. Brian, who lived in the second floor apartment, had an enlarger. Together we all bought chemicals and paper but the rest of the darkroom supplies we lifted from the school's photo labs.

There was no ventilation in this room and Jim and I would sit in there for hours under a red-light smoking dope/cigarettes and breathing in fix. God, I hate the smell of fix. We would develop rolls and rolls of black and white film and 8 x 10 prints. It would get so hot in that room the sweat would come out of every pore. It was like a toxic sauna. We ran extension cords from all of the other rooms into the closet to feed the enlarger, the red-light, a radio and a fan. I used my fingers in the developer, the stop and the fix until we finally were able to get tongs. Everything was makeshift. The enlarger sat on milk crates.

The kitchen was exceptionally large because it used to be a bedroom back in the day. The walls were lime green and lined up along one wall was a sink, a stove and a baby refrigerator. Three quarters of the room had nothing in it. Technically, it was the largest room in the apartment. So Jim set up a studio in the unused part of the kitchen for when we needed to do product stuff or head shots. We found a set of broken lights on the curb and after Jim fucked around with the wiring, we had studio lights. Granted, they were a total fire hazard and I would stand next to Jim with a broomstick "just in case" when he would plug and unplug them. There was no switch, so they were either plugged in and on or unplugged and off. Regardless, they were never to be left unattended, but hey, we had lights.

Ironically, none of us were photographers. Well, we were, but it wasn't any of our majors. We were all majoring in something else. Jim, Brian, Rick, Paul and I were Graphic Design majors and the gay guy - whose name I simply can not remember and if I still had a conversational relationship with my ex-husband I could just whip-off an email and ask ..."Hey what was the name of so-and-so who lived in the back bedroom on Stratford?" but no, that's not how things work after twelve years of divorce bullshit - was majoring in Interior Design.

I never paid a dime in rent because I didn't have a cent to my name. This, I am sure, pissed everyone off at certain points throughout our time together. But whatever, I had nowhere else to go. Student loans paid for my tuition and I worked part-time at Duquesne University in the lunchroom. I was the chick who walked around and picked up all the fucking garbage and revolting towers of slop that the Duquesne dicks would build on the tabletops after they finished Hoovering the nasty cafeteria food. They constructed these things out of a mixture of food, (like mashed potatoes), glassware and napkins. I was lucky to have a job so finding a new one was out of the question. It was 1981, and Pittsburgh was becoming extinct. Unemployment was over 10% and life outside of a college university was discouraging. Anyway, Jim and I never had any money, and what money I did make went right back into school supplies, which was not covered by tuition. Jim made a connection with someone in the Hill District and every now and then he would come home with a long rectangle box of government cheese and a box of government hamburger meat. Then we would eat hamburgers morning, noon and night. It was that, Ramón noodles, Kool-aid and steak'ums.

But we always had pot because I was a mooch and would persuade anybody who came over to leave us a bud or two. I mooched anything I could. What the hell, everyone else was on mommy and daddy money and I was stone-broke and had no shame.

Broke your tip off that orange plastic triangle? I'd take it. Too stupid to clean out your rapidographs when you were finished using them and now they are clogged shut? Give them to me, I'd soak it for days in rubbing alcohol and get it to work. Whatever you had I'd take it. Either I would clean it or maybe Jim could fix it. It was around that time we started growing our own pot. The stuff we did grow gave us all headaches but it worked.

When I got sick, I went to the free clinic in East Liberty. There was no school nurse or school insurance. If I needed clothes, I went to the Salvation Army. Christ, the Salvation Army had all the stuff we needed. Dishes, glasses, silverware, pots and pans, sheets, shoes, lamps and a trunk we used for a coffee table. Jim and I used to make midnight runs over to the Kroger's to steal milk crates. They had the good metal ones. We also lifted several blue and orange plastic 4 x 4 bread crates that we stacked up in my studio and used as flat files.

One quarter, and I am not really too sure how this worked out, Jim took his student loan money and bought a 1976 turquoise and white VW Micro bus and a new turntable. Then he had his dad pay for that quarter's tuition. I think. I seem to remember it being a spur of the moment thing so I doubt his dad knew it was coming.

Once Jim bought the van, he started driving to school with all our friends in tow. He charged $5.00 a week per person for gas and parking. This worked out to be around $100.00 a month and helped keep us in steak'ums.

GOOD VIBRATIONS
Rick, our roommate, became weirder and weirder as the months moved along. Of course, I have no doubt that Jim and I SUCKED to live with. We basically took over the apartment, blared music at all hours and sometimes all night long. Somebody was always in the darkroom stinking up the place. Not to mention we were constantly doing drugs. Acid was like candy and we would sit in that apartment talking nonstop about the beginning of time and the end of the world. Both of us were big on the Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry, which translates into "crazy fucked up artist shit" i.e. hell to live with. Pink Floyd, or better yet, the sounds of this screwy Sid Barrett import I had, would float out of the 3ft x 4ft Panasonic speakers. In the background, a black and white TV set with the volume off was always turned to the evening news, PBS or The Muppets. Constant flashing images of Ronald Reagan, Fire Ants and Miss Piggy were part of the permanent interior landscape.

Friends would stop in at all hours of the night bringing with them records to listen to, dope to smoke and stories to tell. Some came to work in the darkroom or in need of a studio set up. Others would bring paintings or drawings that they had just finished and wanted to show and still others just wanted to hang out in some other place besides their own apartments. It was always busy and usually strange yet through it all, Rick never came out of his room.

Then there was the period where Jim really got into oil and water painting. What that meant was that he would fill the bathtub up with water and pour various colors of oil paints and linseed oils in the water. The oils would float and he would stir it around, gently with a stick that he had found in the yard. Then he would place canvas paper on the surface and the paints would stick to the canvas.

He did this for hours and days on end. It was cool, but it destroyed the bathtub. Nothing and I mean no amount of scrubbing ever got that shit out of the tub. I think at one point I filled it with Clorox and still nothing. All three of us had to shower with that shit. I didn't mind, but Rick started using the shower in the 2nd floor apartment.

Rick also started keeping non-perishable food in his room and locking his door when he was not home. I do not blame him one bit. Once Jim and I would run out of our government food his room was the first place I'd go. His dad was a mortician and had a family business in Youngstown. How Rick explained it to me, back when he was still talking to us, was that his dad wanted him to go into the family business but he wanted to go to Art School. So there was some family tension on his part. And that is all I really know about him because it really didn't take him too long to start hating life on Stratford Ave. But he stayed until we all graduated. Paul met a girl named Jackie and they moved into their own place down the street, but the rest of us stayed until the end. Three months after Jim and I moved out, we were married and living in a ground floor two-bedroom condominium in Ohio. That lasted exactly one month before I lost my shit. We loaded up the VW Micro bus and moved into a one-room apartment in Denver. But THAT is a whole other story.

I hate getting sick in public. I wasn't in the mood for my normal lunch of a weird side salad/nut combination so in search of something different I walked over to the grocery store on St. Marks to dig around. It was somewhere around the soy chip isle that my stomach started to flip-flop and I became nauseous. I couldn't figure out if I was getting sick because I needed to eat or if Paul McCartney's voice "speaking words of wisdom" to me over the sound system was making me want to vomit. Forced to listen to Let It Be is never a good situation to find one's self in. I don't even listen to it at home when I do play either version of the album. The Long and Winding Road is another one that I simply cannot stomach at all and my fear was that if I stayed in the store long enough I would hear that one too.

In a sweaty panic, I grabbed a blueberry yogurt and a large water and headed for the checkout line. Yes, that was lunch. Sometimes in New York, all of the food choices for lunch can result in no food choices. I barely made it outside. After about half a block, I felt noticeably better. It must have been Sir Paul that caused my uncontrollable need to retch.

GADGETS GET ALL THE GLORY
I love, love, love the Holga camera. Too bad I don't know what the hell I'm doing but it is fun to learn. The digital gives me the constant reassurance that I crave but waiting on a 120 process/contact harnesses enough anxiety and self-doubt to feed a whole classroom full of first year photography students.

Now I just have to figure out the cheapest way to reproduce the images. The scanner negations between Martha and I have begun. I already have a good one but it can only scan 35m not 120. Getting prints at $10.00 a pop, on a roll of 16, will drive Martha to tears in no time. After all, this is WHY she bought me a digital in the first place. Film processing, prints and contacts were killing us. But if I get a new scanner... the birds will sing and she can inherit mine. It is quite an offer.

I have started making posters of the 2003 and 2004 Photo of the Day archives. The 2004 file has roughly 350 photos on it (duh, it is a yearly archive) and until I get everything just where I want it each image is on a different layer. I think the file size is something crazy like 150 mgs and each image is only around 2 inches wide. The final piece is 23 x 35 and will be pretty cool, but right now, I am just trying not to crash my computer.

Martha ordered a cooling system for Jasmine's computer and I ordered a bunch of Japanese incense. Somehow, the two things are related I just know they are. When the laptop fridge comes, I'm going to run the shit out of her computer until it either shuts off or I get bored and surprisingly I don't get bored as quick as you might think. I'll probably be burning incense when I work on it so maybe that is the connection. If the cooler thing doesn't' work then we are going to replace the fan but I would really rather not have to open it up. The whole idea of the what's under the hood mentality never really caught on with me. When I was a kid those 'Do not touch risk of electric shock!' stickers seemed to be on everything and I took all of that very seriously. I never fucked around with the back of my stereo except for the splicing of speaker wire but even Barbie can do that. I never messed with the guts of a TV or a camera and almost every computer that I have ever had, on the day it went to the dump, the seal was still unbroken. I once blew the Mother Board on a Pentium II that I had a few years ago but I made a friend come over and deal with that nonsense. Forget about anything motorized. The closest thing I have ever come to dissecting and general mechanical fucking around with, was the vacuum cleaner and that was the monthly digging out of my long curly red hair from the roller. Nice.

MOVING TARGETS
More Vancouver talk. Martha wants to lock down days for the trip. I wish we could take two weeks but it looks like only a week. This is no time at all to gauge a city properly but I usually fly by the seat of my pants with these things. In May of 2000 I few here with two pieces of carryon luggage and from the moment I got out of the taxi mid-block on 53rd Street I knew not only that I wanted to live here but that I could handle living here. I could say the same thing in reverse about moving to DC. From the minute that the moving van pulled away from the curb and Martha and I tried in vein to find someone to deliver food to our new apartment, (no one would come to our Shaw neighborhood), I knew that I didn't really want to live there. I needed a job and everything about that city was temporary - except for Sheri. Oh no, that girl is the real deal and probably the karmic reason we ended up there in the first place. But handling the District of Columbia was never an option because Martha and I were never ever able to cope with DC.

Admitting that you can "deal with DC" is a very different animal than saying you can "deal with New York". The two cities very different places.

Moving to Denver was even more than I had anticipated because I had never been west before and this was the first big move without my parents. I was nineteen, newly married and a college graduate. It was Halloween and things just sucked all around because no one had a job. Ugly turned pathetic real quick and by spring, all I did was cry. But it took me five and a half years to leave that city with no other motivation than the sudden realization that I hated my life.

I commuted an hour and a half by bus to a job in the foothills of Golden Colorado for a company that made trade show exhibits. I was one of two graphic designers. The other one was a total Bronco loving asshole that never said two words to me. I suppose in some ways that was best for all involved. I spent most of my days alone in the darkroom shooting stats and blasting Sonic Youth's Sister & EVOL, Husker du's Candy Apple Grey or on those rare 'up' days, a Cure tape that had Faith, Seventeen Seconds and a little bit of Three Imaginary Boys on it. At the end of the day, I would get back on a bus full of crazy Colorado people and ride on down to Littleton where Jim and Jasmine would pick me up an hour and a half later in our Dodge Omni at the bus stop.

We lived in a two-bedroom grey condominium complex called Southglenn Commons that was right across the street from Southglenn mall. The only reason we lived down there in all that fucking republican whiteness was so Jasmine could go to good daycare. We were totally the shitend of the demographic down there and all of our money went to rent. (Hey, that sounds familiar.) By that point, I was 24 years old and lived like a middle-aged housewife.

But Denver wasn't a bad move it is just one of those moves that everyone makes and some usually ride that shit out and some run like hell. Some carve a little bit of something out of nothing and make a life. Oh sure, Jim and I could have moved up into the mountains to a little shit shack and had a real nice time of it growing dope and hording firearms. Jasmine could have gone to school in the little mountain towns of the Colorado. Jim would have his model train collection and I could have taken up sewing.

I don't regret living there 'cause there are much harder cities that I could have learned those early twenty something lessons in. Christ, I remember there was talk about moving here in 1982. That probably would have been bad. I would have "handled" New York City in an entirely different way then and it just might have killed me. But hindsight is neither 20/20 or funhouse mirror with thoughts like those. It is all just memories with a few "what ifs" added to the pot. Sometimes I really can see how things might have played out if I had not of freaked out. But I was destined to flip, so it was probably the best to do it in Denver. It's a good town to flip out in and run from. Not as good as DC but it is a well deserved second.