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Lookeba, it sounds like an indigenous tribal name– but it’s not.  It is a town in Oklahoma named after three white men: Lowe, Kelley, and Baker– it’s also where my family lived for a few years in the late 70′s.  This was our house that we built between just outside of town.  My brother-in-law asked for the address so he could drive by it on his way home from New Orleans recently.  Not much has changed.  The big cedar tree out front is gone, and so is my dad’s short bed Chevy truck, but I can still hear him practicing his scales on the trumpet.

The internet was a weird and wacky place when we first found it.  Where did all these things come from?  Who was making it possible?  How did we get from the top to the bottom 43 years ago?  We scrolled!  The arrows were pointing the wrong way at first– but we still scrolled, doggone it!  If you want to relive the retro magic of scrolling in the early years just click here and scroll like there’s no tomorrow– only yesterday!

I always think of this scene from The Last Picture Show when I walk out onto the spillway at Lake Olathe.  Ben Johnson’s character reminisces about the past at a remote fishing tank, and I am reflective and nostalgic around a similar spot at the spillway.  

This donkey jumped out at me the first time I saw the painting on the side of a tattoo parlor on Rainbow Boulevard– not literally of course, that would be something that would happen in a movie.  It would probably look something like this: a donkey in a painting jumped out from his 2-dimensional existence onto rainbow boulevard and brayed at traffic until animal control materialized on the scene– they actually emerged from a nearby billboard where they had been figures on an advertisement.

Sounds from the past met a sight from the past when I drove to an abandoned Kmart on State Ave. last weekend.  I found some cassettes that played inside Kmart stores when they were open in the 90′s, and drove north to see if I could find a time portal.  I parked the truck, popped the cassette, and heard Little River Band’s hit, ‘Take It Easy On Me,’ followed by an advertisement for specials in the auto department.  My eyes were closed and fingers were crossed, but I was still in 2024 *sigh*

…make it SOUND broken!  That’s what I did when I bought this $40 Flamma FC05 pedal for my guitar.  Last week I took some time off work to do “Dave” stuff & one thing I did was try all the settings on this pedal.  Chorus, flange, and phaser are 3 of the 11 effects.  When I found vibra, the guitar sounded like a cassette getting chewed up in a tape player, and that’s when I knew I was onto something cool.

James Dean, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Durante… if I let my imagination run wild, anyone or anything could emerge from the fog– even dead celebrities.  When my family left California, the smog was so thick we rolled down the windows to listen for cars before driving through an intersection.  Last week there was a heavy fog that settled over the metro.  My eyes were peeled, and my phone camera was ready, but no one from the past ever came out of the fog.  I shrugged my shoulders and went to work.  This is what it looked like at 7:30.

I am not greater than, I am not less than, I am equal.  That’s the message on this t-shirt that I designed a few months ago.  If I have hard feelings toward someone and blame it on the other person’s behavior– I am being ‘greater than.’  If I feel intimidated by someone else and their personal convictions, I am thinking of myself as ‘less than.’  Being ‘equal’ to everyone, and recognizing my own value and worth without anyone’s approval or validation is a new concept to me.  It’s going to take practice and meditation, but I’m worth it.

They were bright, red, and beautiful.  Betty had the brightest pair of fingerless gloves I’d seen in a long time.  When I told her I had a green pair, she said “I can’t feel anything unless I wear these!” I nodded my head and asked if I could snap a picture of our hands together.  She didn’t hesitate.  Afterward I read back her name & birth date, and handed her a clipboard to give her nurse.  Yep, I check in some cool people at the clinic.