It was this Roxbury, this stamp of disapproval that persuaded me who I am.
              WHERE WE WERE                

   Roxbury was an economically mixed neighborhood of middle income and
professional people content to live in middle-of-nowhere surroundings and
send their children to a country elementary school, a ruthless middle school
and on to a very popular HS which the two former schools had not prepared
them for. What's new. This subdivision was located in the middle of a vast tract
of back woods, sparsely populated by descendants of Scotts-Irish coal miners
and folks who would rather die than live in cities. The filling station we hung out
(Petee's, not the real name) was our center of adult education for slang, cuss
words, sex ed, sexual BS, and vending food orientation. We, some of us, learned
allot about cars, why babes liked them, and how car racing was a metaphor for
all forms of recreation, perpetuity and heavenly reward.

   I started off as a potential hoodlum but soon learned there were more creative
ways to let off steam that could lead to the fame and stardom I have today. I can
at this time in my life present my ideas to the entire planet. I was warned however,
that one could build a website and no one would ever see it. Build it and they will
come, I thought. A few stopped by. But, as someone once admonished me - No one
is interested in your head trip. It took awhile to understand what he meant. Home
movies, I thought, people get bored and fall asleep. If you can't get it across in
one gestalt moment you never will. I'm still searching my head movies for that
one moment. Where we were and where we went may have a bearing on why
we, some of us, ended up with a certain video delay.

   I don't blame any group or individual for making my adulthood seem so far away,
nearly unattainable. Youth demands to be trusted to venture out, do adult things,
achieve the world of their dreams. Some of us were not ready for them. The taller
and better looking, the more likely you were to screw it up. My father convinced
me to hang back and wait, not be in such a rush to prove that I could handle all the
challenges of everyday life. Every time an affluent teen, car, job, girlfriend, became
a road fatality, my father's I-told-you-so logic prevailed. I was ok with caution.
School was no different, the yellow light was always lit. We were made to wait.    

   There was such a vast change between students of my time and ten years later.
You could not beg enough to take a class you were keenly interested in taking.
Oh, no, you had to proooove your eligibility and comprehension before you were
allowed to waste a teacher's time in class. In ten year's time that role was reversed,
teachers had to beg students to take an interest in something, anything. I remember
being fascinated by computers but was told you needed math skills that were
beyond average comprehension to get near one. When the first PC's came into the
classroom kids ran and hid, not because of lacking math skills but from the thought
of sheer boredom learning to operate it with all those macros and protocols, still
reeking of do-this-before-you-can-do-that. The Kennedy message was, "just do it".

   By just doing my computer I have helped them rebuild it and never got a dime out
of it, while all those run-and-hide students have now glommed on to Face Book and
cell phone tech and will tell you to your face how much more they know about it
than you could ever know. In your retirement 60's you could hardly proooove anything
to those subsequent generations, the ones that replaced you. But, where we were in
middleclass nowhere gave me a constant head throb that assured me of what I wanted
to do and how quickly I wanted to leave there and start doing it. Yet, where we were
is what gave me all my ideas about life and how to keep it real even though the life
that I imagined was a complete fantasy.

                          

   Walking through those yet uncut woods around my house was like As You Like It,
books in brooks, tongues in trees, and of course there were tree sprites high in the
branches who were looking for young poets and artists, someone to play their raves
and raptures, someone loyal to one nymph goddess alone, in exchange for life long
inspiration. What I wouldn't have done for that. But, I kept that idea to myself.

   The paintings of Rainbow Drive, especially the one above, are filled with a rush of
energy, anger, frustration and zeal, such that I have to wonder what ever gave me the
insight to channel all that energy into painting, poetry, and music, with the calmness
of an oriental master. My young years were anything but calm. I think it was my on-
the-road band trip that wore down the shoulder chips and roiling static electric effects
of my life, trying to deal with the loss of my father at nineteen. I like to praise the
bouncer who threw me out so I could be here now. There were many tough love folks
I encountered who played that role and got me over myself. My band excursion only
went six months and then I was back here again, living at home, finishing college.

   These were my Woods of Arcady, not yet dead, nor as utopian as Tempe, but a hint of
what we all were missing as progress trampled on, making more gas stations, housing
projects, shopping malls and schools for children who would never know what the world
was for. In many of my landscape paintings there's an orangey glow that hints at events
other than sunset or dawn. A fire is coming that will consume everything. The starter is us.
We are no mere killers of frogs, birds and saplings. We can no longer hide behind childhood  excuses. What made us what we are is what we failed to learn from real up-close nature,
the kind you can walk through and show others what astounding ideals are being
demonstrated freely and openly without self regard. Yes, I gave tours to fellow students. 

   Admittedly some of those tours were just cheap dates, the turkey farm ruins were my
favorite. Gangs of painter friends and art students made the journey out to the boonies to
view and appreciate my transcendental vision of the suburban disaster that was encroaching
on wild America, on life as it should be. The frog pond, though done for as a habitat, was
my mea culpa, a metaphor of how one substance can be transformed into another, a reason
for poets and artists to wake up and begin the real work. Gather the facts of one's art.
It is not enough to recollect in tranquility, there may never be any tranquility, it's very
expensive. It's the energy you capture that is always alive, forever part of your life.

   Though it seemed like an utter nowhere it was enough of a somewhere you could learn
from and take very deep lessons with you. Children usually remember where they were,
not just the moments of shock and national disaster, but that sense of home turf where a
hard won piece of it still clings to what you stand for. A place where a faint smile comes
over you as you drive through remembering every nuance of the young, still wet canvas
of your life. It seems like after a great hesitation and quest for answers to self mystery that
I found a way to internalize, accept and see that where we were was more relevant to my
future person than all the classrooms, all the shops and gas stations, all the conveniences of modern life. Though my tongues and books were bulldozed and burned they were not lost.
They are my sacred artifacts of where we were.