Letters to Wookiee: The Daily Spew Forth: Random Quote #1

Monday, December 19, 2005

Random Quote #1

A few years ago I spent a summer driving back and forth to Seattle, sometimes twice in a day. I had met some bohemian artists down there and was spending a lot of time in their circles, going to art walks, studio shows, poetry readings, underground shows. I stayed at their loft in Pioneer Square and while under their influence started to remember that I once had artistic tendencies. I started taking pictures again, we would collect objects off the street and make art out of them, sometimes we would go back to the street with what we made and staple them up to walls, we would have impromptu jam sessions with broken instruments, we wrote and wrote and wrote some more. Ruby Jets was a writer, he had several published books to his name, Joseph Jackson Wartes made a lot of found art (I have two of his works on my wall right now), Adrienne Moloff painted gorgeous colourful pieces that exploded with emotion (my favorites of hers were these paintings she did on giant windows that she hung against the brick wall of the loft), and Eric Anderson, well he was the quiet young one, he was a budding painter and writer. I gave him cigarettes on the first day I knew him, and in return he gave me one of his watercolour paintings. It was not a fair trade, I was no artist in comparison with this crew, I couldn't give him anything like that, I think I ended up providing him with lots of coffee and cigarettes, all I had to offer was spiritless money. Anyway, these guys were amazing, they welcomed me into their little circle and inspired me to remember a side of me that I had forgotten in recent years. I had endless amounts of fun with them all over the Seattle area, but the only thing I ever wrote down that any of them said was something Eric said out of the blue that I always felt was like his version of Confucius. He said, "Sometimes my piss smells like tuna even though I didn't eat tuna."