Living the vida loca

So spending three weeks with my family in China took me back some, but there is too much to tell and I don't need to spend much time reliving that stuff. If or when my family reads it, I will just be hurting them. So let's move on to something else about my life that disturbs my family. Living in a bus. After a months vacation I am back living in my vehicle rather than out of my backpack. Groggily waking up as the street where I have parked comes to life. I sit up in bed and swear some guy crossing the street is scowling in that how could this be, this eyesore, right here, sort of way. People have a very visceral reaction to the bus. Children get excited and squeal. Some people wave or give me the thumbs up. And then people give that disgusted eyesore scowl. Let me describe the beast. She is a short bus. Mostly yellow, except for the side I painted white. It is like a massive beetle in the world of motorized vehicles, high of the ground, but a slow mover. Sitting on some street. By a warehouse. Train tracks not far away. I know it can be seen as trouble. But it drives, and I don't spend more than a couple days. And no residential neighborhoods. Anyone can call the cops on you at any time. They will either ask you to move along, or start writing you tickets. It is actually a testament to this city that I have not had many more run ins with the cops, and that they have not been all negative. But the ones that are make you nervous. They put you on guard and every thing that you have, your home, feels vulnerable and in question. Which of course it is. So you pull in the periscope, release the moorings, and sail off to a new curbside. Some place that seemed safe last time. Or at least less in danger than where you are. 'Cause no place is actually safe. Legally I need to parked on private property. That sounds pretty good to my anxious heart. But a neighbor can easily call the landlord, a roommate can no longer be jazzed. Gotta be ready to move faster then the haters. gotta predict their next move. Don't get comfortable. Don't get complacent.
     And I shouldn't. It is good for an artist. The big bus I endearingly refer to as Bertha is my art now. More than the landscapes i paint, she is the story of my life right now. And there is no way I would rather be living. Oh wait, I wanna make money, have a place to park, and a real roof over my head.

The Butlers

I am gonna jump ahead a little. Anyone could tell we were a dysfunctional family. We were blatant mutants. Each child rebelling anew against parents too tired, too isolated, and overwrought to be concerned. Our landlords, the Butlers, were saints to my mother, and they probably are the only altruistic landlords I ever met. They could of rented that apartment for easily twice what they got from us. We payed a thousand, which is still a lot in the eighties, but this was a four bed room three bath, my father had a little study, my mother had a porch study. Which was always cold or hot, but was a storage space for her art and art related stuff. Which was extensive. We had space in the basement with a washer and dryer. And we were in Brookline. Brookline is a quaint little town surrounded on three sides by Boston. It is comfortable and peaceful in a way that makes a person feel that rational intelligent beings operate in the world and make well considered decisions. Until you turn on the TV. The city of Boston is the hub of education in the world, with over a hundred colleges in the area, including Harvard, MIT,Boston College, Tufts, to name the power players. The city line of Brookline runs just on the far far side, away from the river, of Commonwealth ave. Which runs from the commons, a central park downtown out to Newton somewhere. It runs past Boston University and Boston college. Essentially beginning at the doorsteps of these educational institutions. I lived by packered corner, where Comm ave and the B line turned and   Allston grew out of some vague tail between the Charles and Comm ave connected to Boston proper. It was an ideal location. A couple of miles up Comm ave and you were in Kenmore sq., or cut down Linden street and into Lower Allston and you could easily cross into Harvard square in Cambridge. Brookline could of been called little Israel. Or it could of been called the Professors neighborhood, but that does not have a good ring to it. It's public school was in the top fifteen high schools in the country, public and private. So that thousand dollars a month rent went a long ways. Consider as well that they allowed five people, three of them teenage boys to live above them. And you could hear us. I distinctly remember being in their side if the house and hearing someone upstairs, and thinking, damn, we run around the place like that all the time. My family is a herd of wilderbeasts tromping up and down the stairs all day long. It was then that I started to realize my mother was right. the Butlers were Saints. They were the only thing holding our messed up little family together and they were not even connected to the family. We never even gave them a thought. There was a time when we had been friends. Before we lived there we would visit them. They had spent time in Japan, and my parents had been married there. They had met my parents at my first nursery school. A little place on a dead end street in Harvard square. Matthew, their oldest was in the grade above me, but I was young anyway, so we were probably thrown together. Aaron would of been to young. Matthew and Aaron were good kids. they did well in school. Matthew got in to Pole vaulting in High school. They looked like nerds. But gone were the days of watching dukes of hazard in our youth. Gone also were the days of playing ping pong in the basement with Mark and Chris Bradley. At some point the Butlers just accepted they were stuck with the Boyers for at least ten years. But the less we actually saw eachother, the less they had to think about our dysfunctional existence the better. Or at least that is how I assumed they though. Jim, and probably more Susan may have had their spats with my family, but it was never a big deal for me, and my mother kept me up to date. So yeah, they were saints

Lines in the sand....

         Now all I want to do is right new titles and breath deeply thinking about the next step.  This is the year of the horse and I think I might f caught my breath for good. There is one major problem with living out of a bag, it is that you are living out of a bag. But the benefits. Especially for a landscape artist. I mean I do have allot to haul. the bus is a very good mobile home base. But it must be tucked away for now.
        Of course once I write and feel upbeat about what I am saying I question myself.
        Maybe I should explore heavier concepts and see if the mood lasts. A picture flashes into my head.  It is a dolled up street where the Chengdu gets to be tourists in their city and in time. Red glowing orbs are hanging from stone shops and restaurants. Small vendors encase a lilly pond and Bantu tree bathed in hanging red prayers.  How this spot has survived or evolved I do not know, but it has mutated into a street mall selling the memory of itself. I am sure there is one in every city, even if it be an abandoned row of warehouses telling a story of lost prosperity.
       Well this place was in Chengdu. Sichuan providence of China. I took a picture of my parents. Ernie is caught unawares, his patented smile replaced by a tired and probably uncomfortable man. Pamela leans in. It is not that she is in a bad mood. It is simply that so much information is flooding in to her face through predominantly the area around her glasses. She squints. Her brow comes down. She will be locked in this state, chewing her tongue, until you say something to her. Then a youthful innocence bursts forth, until the dwarfish golem returns. So Pam needs a nap. It is the only picture of them together looking rather miserable.
      It was the first time they were in the same room, except for two rather short events, where they were  promptly able to complain about each other, or escape each other in seventeen years. In someways they behaved as people who could not handle it. Each brother had a suspicion on who was crumbling, turning biter, or holding together. We all had sides. Sides OI never wanted to exist. But old cracks had been exposed.
       If Gabriel's bride was to be brought back to the states, she needed a visa, and a couple of sponsors. Gabriel had asked Nathan and Ernie, his brother and father, along with Pam. It was the end of the scmester for Nathan. He got back to Gabriel about two months later. Gabe always talks on Skype. Grace was in the room when he turned down her sponsorship. He told Gabe he had worked hard for what he had, and lawyers explained that if there were problems with Grace's finances he would be held responsible. He called Ernie and Pam who both contacted lawyer's they were related to. Ernie, his wife, who advised he not do it. And Pam's niece, who does not study that form of law, but got Pam nervous enough for Pam to tell her to stop telling her about it.
     Gabe suddenly had only his mother sponsoring his wife's move to America. Who is some where between thirty and a hundred thousand in debt and working at peir one imports, having taken a slightly early retirement from teaching due to extended abuse from New York Public schools. Grace it seems at that moment questioned hr move to America and some elements of the family she was joining. I got to sit on a moral high ground on the sidelines, since I lived in a bus and had technically no income to declare the previous year.
     Ernie, Nathan, Gabriel, Pam and myself. The five are united again after all those years. Ernie is ultimately alone. He has Nathan and Gabriel as allies in a way because he has raised them in his intellectually abstract form of expressing his thoughts, beliefs, or whatever sense of himself he wants to talk around. Pam is the rogue, to charged with emotion to not be isolated.  Except at an early age she kept me close, I learned where her rage came from and turned into a force of nature that no member of the family could contain. Somewhere around six or seven my rage emerged. I fought like a demon possessed. With my brothers mainly, but it spilled out to the streets and my parents thought outside forces were turning me into a little gang kid, moved me to a Quacker school, kept me back a year, and eventually moved the family to Brookline. For some reason the anger did not abate until I was able to focus my energies on fencing. I had to wait. My mother had informed me that she would be divorcing my father once I graduated high school. Since they had kept me back a grade, I now had about ten years to wait.
        My father and I have never really got along per see. I think my anger scared off him and Nathan. After about six or seven I remember a cooling. My birth house in Maine was sold off then. The only home my parents owned together, and a fantastically unique place that i have only two bottles from. Dr. Trues Elixir,  who had his laboratory under the garage a hundred and twenty years ago.

Well it has been a while, but some point in China I realized I had allot to say, and needed to get back to writing. Don't know where I am going to go with this right now. Probably ramble like the life I am living for a while. I have in many ways been on the road all month and have no intention to stop. The thing about this life is a person has to be both flexible enough to go along with whatever is going on around you, and focused enough not to loose one's sense of mission. I feel almost like a teenager again. I really could pick up and go anywhere if it seemed right. Or lets say if it seemed like a good move for me artistically.
       So much of my life, particularly right now is about finding a way to wrestle with my own mental outlook. If I can stay productive and positive in the tumultous upheavle that is my life right now then I have little to no doubt that eventually I will succeed.
       Art is in my blood. It just is. I know that in many ways I have chosen a seemingly futilist path. An all or nothing mentally, with both a high probably of failure and no exit plan..... oh shit gotta go to Motley crue show., Ta