KNACK Magazine #6

issue 6 a commemorative issue for Mark Wagner

Cover Art by Zenon Stacy Photography by Sandra Schonenstein

Editor’s Note Knowing Mark Wagner was a gift. I can say, without doubt, that if any person were asked to describe their relationship or interactions with Mark the story would begin with a smile. Mark was like that, a kind and curious person who truly wanted to know a people. He was a soul seeker, inquisitive to understand the core of any human being he interacted with. If his soul and spirit had a hue, it would shine like the sun, encompassing, illuminating and enlivening every molecule it came into contact with.

I began to know Mark during the summer of 2010. It was a time of intense creative incubation for myself and my good friend, Mark Williams. He is a painter, like Mark Wagner. Mark Williams and I were spending all of our time (outside of work and daily routines) creating art. He was painting four or five canvases and I had wallpapered an entire section of the studio that we were working with white paper. I was mapping the beginning of a novel.

Mark Wagner was the security guard on the College of Santa Fe campus. He worked the night shift. I had seen him around, but we had never connected. He was, at that time, a periphery figure. One evening I arrived to the studio ready to work and Mark Williams was looking through a portfolio. He explained that Mark Wagner had been keeping an eye on what we were doing, and feeling inspired by our energy, left us pictures of his own paintings. Looking back, I see this as Mark Wagner’s peace offering. It was his way of saying, “I know what you are chasing, and I am with you. Keep going. We are co-creators.” From that day I could count on running into Mark in the late hours of the night when writer’s block had set in or I needed fresh air or a break from my computer. He was always willing to talk. It didn’t matter if it was about art, the many relationships in our lives, feeling down and out or high from

connecting to a flow of expression, Mark always had something to offer. There was trickster energy running through his veins. He always made me think and most conversations we had ended with me saying, “I never thought about that. I like it, though. I’ll see what I come up with.” I could count on going back to him a few days later for another check, like a never-ending game of chess.

After graduating from College of Santa Fe, I began a fulltime internship and quickly found that making time for my own art would be the challenge of daily life as a post-graduate. I happened to be on campus one afternoon that summer and I began to tell Mark about my concerns. He looked at me, deadpan, and said, “Ari, if you want to keep making your art, you have to make time for it. Life will not do it for you. You need to make a discipline for yourself, even if that means waking up at 5am. Do not let your art fall away. No amount of sleep will charge you the way creating does.”

Those words have stuck with me and that advice is the reason why I continue to contribute to KNACK. When Mark passed away suddenly, the loss of his spirit was immediate. At the same time, I began to feel his presence all the time. The KNACK team decided to dedicate an entire issue of KNACK to Mark to honor the artist he was and the significance he has had in all of our lives. We have left his writing and paintings unedited so that you may experience the work that we have as he presented it to us.

If you are reading this, understand that it is a testament to the power that one person, one soul can have on the universe. Mark Wagner inspired and ignited the artistic spirit in me as well as others. It only takes one conversation to impact the world.

—Ariana Lombardi

MARK EDWARD WAGNER

I WA S B O R N I N B E R K E L E Y, C A L I F O R N I A O N M AY 1, 19 6 2 T O A N

American father and Mexican mother. I never resided there. My mother’s pregnancy was carried to term in El Cerrito up the street. I was moved to and resided in South Miami till 1973, after little time in California.

In the baby crib I found my first medium, it was in my diaper. My older siblings painted me with red oil enamel and by and by, through trauma and caution my Mother, a painter herself, saw the need to restrict me from media in general.

By eight I was aware that I wanted to make art and realized, painfully, that I had no subject. I still remember the time in kindergarden when, armed with large paper, poster-board and colors, I was consumed and recognized certain aspects of painting like saturation and obfuscation. I know now that being right-brained has always played an important role in my life and my artwork.

At age eleven, out of the forth grade in Sunset Elementary, the family moved to Mexico City. After two years of private tutoring I attended private school through the middle of middle school. At home I liked reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sri Aurobindo and watched many black and white American films with subtitles in Spanish.

At fifteen I moved with my Father to Ojai and then Santa Barbara where I lived with and was taught by a Yogi. I became a house painter. During the off season I traveled extensively through Mexico, as well as through the United States. At this age I traveled alone to Europe and visited with U.G. Krishnamurti for over a month in Gstaad, Switzerland and with J. Krishnamurti for a month in England at Brockwood Park. I also spent a week in Assisi where I had one of my first spiritual experiences.

My early independent studies included Nutrition, Religions of the World, Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, Bhagwan Sri Ramana Maharishi, Bhagwan Nitananda and Bhagwan Paramahansa Yogananda. I also studied grammar, math, time and motion analysis and cultural psychology during this period.

At twenty-one I returned to live in Mexico City, Yelapa Jalisco, Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, Oaxaca and the Yucatan Peninsula. At age twenty-two I began painting pictures. Although there was a period in early childhood when painting was very important to me, none of my childhood work survives—a pity. At twenty-six I moved with my mother and siblings to Santa Fe, New Mexico and established a painting/contracting business and continued painting pictures for myself.

1990 to 1998 was a prolific period for me. In 1991, I obtained my GED at the Santa Fe Community College and began taking college courses. I returned to take classes several times and have forty-some college credits. In 1997 I traveled to India. I spent some time in Miami before my departure. Then time in India, a month in Benares and two months plus in Tirumvanamali, Tamilnadu.

From 1999 to 2009 the only painting I did was at the SFCC, mostly mono-printing. It was definitely a hiatus albeit due to the lack of wall space than to a conscious decision not to paint.

I lived in a car for a few of those years and had an epiphany therein out of which came an inspiration to write. There are now about 180 pages toward a book with the working title of “Anecdotal Evidence From The City Different”.

In 1999 began educating myself about Technical Analysis of Financial Markets, the Elliott Wave Principle and Human Social Behavior as an independent and self-motivated study course. I still study these regularly.

In 2003 I began an exhaustive reading phase, Mystery. I read author after author, from John D. MacDonald and Lawrence Block to Elmore Leonard and Ed McBain. This intensive lasted into 2009.

It was in 2009 that I found my brushes again. I have been painting almost everyday since my first piece (Quadrangle #4 ‘Night Life’) of this period. I still study scientists and disciplines like Permaculture, Water (Victor Schauberger and Callum Coates) as well as modern painters, painting techniques and sound painting practices.

an excerpt from:

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE {from the City Different}

by Mark Wagner

Some days go by with no more than the passing of the sun from horizon to horizon the very light remaining unabsorbed. Other days transit from one to the other seamlessly with predictable routine. This one day transfused like a well attended nighttime party, with all the trimmings and an array of corners, nooks, shadows, rooms and patios to hold in abeyance all the frolic, a transcendent crowd, individually absorbing all the energy and force in one pinpointed spot, only to be dispatched to another by a bursting of that static electricity which moves all.

This was no ordinary day. It dawned with a crackling dark cold that persisted past the rising sun. The eternal wind set the chill at an unreasoning seven below. Pratt Ripples stood on the dusty clay, by the side of the road, not trying to sense the warmth of the sun in his face. He half paced in place between native withdrawn grass clumps, to the left into the wind, where the bus would please appear over the top of the farthest hill, then to the right seeing the autos pass or stop or turn at the corner to his right side and straight ahead again to the east, the sun, the tarmac under his gaze, into the windshields of the oncoming vehicles. A slew of drivers: young, old, pretty, ugly, all innocuous. The occasional glance from a given driver un-tensed by a green light would size him up: “Look at that one, in his military style parka, bet he could’ve bought a little Japanese wreck for what that coat must have set him back. Damn it must be freezing out there; guy’s got nerve standing staring me down with that rubberneck. Like my truck do you?” Or: “I would have liked to check you out, but your eyes were already all over me and my sense of insecurity, so I’ll grope at my wheel and stare at the traffic signal.”

With two-minute downtime precision, the square box made itself known at the hilltop to the north.

“Morning, I need to count.”

“Good morning, that’s okay.” The driver stated with less than alac-

rity. “Just don’t pause for to long before deposits or the machine will reset itself.” He said the last as Pratt finished feeding a hundred pennies in and turned to count the second ten times ten. Once the task was completed, day pass pocketed, he sat and quickly felt the cold hanging onto his twenty digits. Wiggling toes inside fine Italian leather hand-me-down boots kneading hands together Pratt thought: ‘They say some of the richest men in the world wear old rags not fit for a thrift shop. Here I am in what must be five hundred U.S. worth of wool, mercerized cotton and all. I don’t even have enough capital to buy the shiny eyed lady smiling at me, a college cafeteria breakfast.’ The contradiction recalled to his mind thoughts of Frank Aileo. What a smooth operator, that one. Walks into a bank dressed up like an airline pilot, cashes a bogus check for ten grand, millions worth of them, for years on end all over the world. The crafty louse had landed in the Riff-Raff café in ‘95. They’d played chess over a period of quite a few weeks. Frank had even invited Pratt along for a bout of thievery. Said he’d be perfect for that type of operation.

“You have the look of a graduate type. Your voice and word construction are professional to the point of being poetic. And with that face and eyes, I betchya could lull the bib and panties off the most astute cashier.”

I thought the guy a queer and got up to belt him one on the jaw. Before I cocked my arm he’d backed down with a childish and cowardly “sorry, sorry. I don’ mean anything by it.”

Pratt got out of the warmish passenger crate with a “Don’t be dealing in any wooden nickels.” The driver chuckled folding the door shut.

On the pavement his heels making that business-like clacking sound, hands in pockets along with sleeve ends. Walking with rhythmic stride, he was aware of each footfall ringing in his head. As he calculated distances between sun and shade, he clung to the Sunnyside, all the way.

Passing the Riff-Raff Cafe, he spied his first objective: Ahead at the

corner, a bearded shorty on the raff side of the riffraff. “Stitch, how’s it goin’? Loan me three dollars so I can pay for my drink at the high-end spot where I have a business meeting. I stand to get a real job.”

“A real job, huh?” He said as he opened his trunk pulling out a quartsized jar, tucking it into his coat pocket. “What? Three? Sure.” He pulled a wad of bills and kerchief out of frayed pants one handedly loosing three ones from the haphazard wad.

“Yeah a real job calling the markets, thanks. Those wheels are sitting out there by my van. The other autos are gone. Come over and pick’em up any time you please.”

“All right then, PR.” He said a little lugubriously.

“Okay thanks. See ya later.”

PR is what his friends call him aptly. He is known for a perfect way with words, a power of communication known almost only to gods and Mother Nature herself.

As he walked head into the wind he thought: ‘this old goat may not even show and you can’t count on him paying for the tea. Its two bucks to heat your space for four hours... what’s next?

Pratt walked into a den on the northern edge of the two-story building; Competition to the neighbor with its’ five levels with below ground parking. Feeling the warmth of the narrowed room he opted to walk to the back asking for green tea, jasmine in passing the lonely barrister. It came. Pratt relished the warm cup in his hands, sipping deeply as he inhaled the vapors until they were gone, looked at the miniscule so-called pot. Looked up, caught her eye, asked for more water, please. Then he opened the little book in front of him.

It was a chacatureish entry of enumerated entries dealing with that human condition where a person sees other people as objects, subject to his own will. In this case the will of punishment and subjugation. In a

moment of insight, seeing the dog chase the chicken before inevitably getting a kick in the ribs by the farmer’s boot, Pratt saw that this little meeting was nothing he thought it would be. Having pondered the question of what a man in business as a financial advisor for half a century could want with a self-taught technical analyst of eight years vintage.

In retrospect, he thought, the insights kept coming to him in flashes.

In coming in and grabbing the paper cup, tendering the cash, Grosz Sabius had looked anxious to get to Joe Spigot, though the cup was merely of eight ounce capacity. Looking at me with smiling certainty his amble betrayed that anxiety which had turned his hair to a marble white, along with the coffee. Pratt wondered if the market dip of 2000 - 2003 had been the cause of the whiting. Or had it been reduced in color as far back as 1987?

Plopping his Ushanka (fold-down fur cap) onto the table, saying his name through the whoosh of it, hanging pocket-able down coat on the chair, all in a flash like a pro casino-dealt hand, extended his as Pratt stood up. He shook it, looking into Sabius’ eyes, felt the cold of outdoors in it. His hand felt ... like Pratt’s own hand might feel some forty years hence. Dry, soft skinned, firm yet sensitive. Grosz Sabius sat next to him and after having said “I have about twenty five minutes for you”, he’d thought ‘twenty-five minutes...I could read you one of these precious episodes out of the little book and even that would be cutting it close to the wire. Doesn’t anyone, even an eighty some year old, like to appreciate discovering some long lost human contact, an affinity to self, and a sense of common ground? Maybe even a desire to break through to a freedom unimagined?’

“Well,” he said after a brief query of what Pratt was reading, “what do you have for me Pratt?”

“Not much really.” Pratt said. And as he looked into Sabius’ eyes, he

saw the admonishing face of a strict schoolmaster.

“But surely you must have something, a track-record, a summary sheet, an account balance statement.” It was a statement of assumption, a natural expectation. So that’s it: show off a profitable trading record and we’ll roll out the well worn red rug so you can walk on it, spilling your blood with each and every step. At the frayed, bitter end of it there is a big yard full of your predecessors’ head stones.

“Why would I bring you a balance sheet that ends with zeros and began in zeros?” I’d said handing him a copy of my condensed bio.

Well less than two pages. He gazed over the first page, spilled a good drop on it, looked up at me chuckling as he wiped the widening soak with his smooth palm.

‘On second thought my hands will never be like that’ Pratt thought.

‘My hands will always be reaching into darkened barrels, hard to reach bends in a night-cast tunnel seeking to pull out the known and the unknown alike. By the nape or by the foot or by the hook, I always will strive to discover. To find the truth you have to handle the dark: The foreboding, the unrealized.’

Sabius looked at him with kind resignation as Pratt thought: ‘there it is: the sinking boat, first time in the water and not holding any of it. Not a lot you can do with a vessel which won’t keep water out.’ He looked at the over-small teapot to his left. And when the vessel is so small it could fit in a dollhouse of what utility could it be?

Pratt Ripples heard his own voice speaking to himself inside his head: You are. I am. He is.

He looked Grosz Sabius in the eye and said, “I spent my last few dollars shorting the Dow Jones Mini.” Silence. “How about you, how have you been fairing with the markets?” He added, “I thought long and hard about what you had told me on Tuesday, you know about closing your

office here. The only reason I could find is that you are looking for better values down south. Everything here is clearly overvalued.” Pratt could see it on the old prim face. Defeat stared back at him without a doubt.

Then Grosz let his own hen out. “I’ve done better for my clients than I have for myself. I’m closing down my office here because I took a 40 plus percentage loss on our home here. The loss represents four hundred and forty grand. Now I have to downsize my small outfit.”

So the truth on our small coffee table was that we were both in the same unworthy vessel.

Ripples had contemplated all the angles about this man’s circumstances. He owned an independent operation with few employees and a market capitalization of between twenty and forty mils. With the market as it stood in late 2005, contrasted with how the market stood five decades previous, when Sabius had incorporated, Pratt reasoned that in 1955 Sabius had probably started out with around four hundred thousand.

Time had ticked away. The hours had turned to years. The months had turned into decades.

So time had ticked by for the older of the two and Pratt wondered how Grosz had managed through the bear market of the nineteen sixties.

He would have been about the same age Pratt was on this day in late 2005. One thing was clear, even throughout the sixties there were, now in retrospective clarity, good values out there. Early computer technologies, money market accounts tied to interest rates, gold and silver. Just tying capital to interest rates would have provided some excellent safe haven for the prudent investor.

Pratt fuddled there for a spell after Grosz had pointed out the window to his waiting SUV’d wife obstructing traffic. “Keep in touch.” Grosz had said turning to sail out the door. “Sure” was Pratt’s reply, “I’ll E-mail you.” Grosz’ answer was a turned head with the expression of a ‘you can

try that if you think you have something eye grippingly compelling for me’ on his face. So Pratt sucked his mug dry, rolled up a cigarette, placed it on the little blue book, rose and meandered to the restroom across the enclosed courtyard, there to satisfy the urge induced by hot liquid.

Fifteen minutes later he was outside leaning on the low wall at the edge of the property by the statue honoring the Spanish conquistadors and/or the native peoples who were conquered. He was not sure what the hell that pillared statue honored…Friendship possibilities?

The three dollars was still in his pocket.

He looked up the small three-block street to see an ancient acquaintance opening up his overflowing art gallery. The paintings seemed to pile out behind Frank Fairaday saying: ‘let me out of this crowd. Show me off to the people, would you, please? But Frank knew the truth which all those renderings, landscapes, portraits, abstracts, did not even suspect. Frank knew the people. He knew that most people would never buy one painting in a whole lifetime. So he treated his fifteen hundred square foot place like a well-tattered, over-stuffed, sanctuary of moments captured by brushes and pigments. Older items toward the rear, stacks & stacks neatly leaning against every available vertical rise like geometric deities. The windows allowed less light into the wintering fridge of space as paintings occupied their every available pane. Frank rode a ‘beater’ and had two bulldogs who were more slobber and smiles than bite or bark. He treated them with gruff angry commands that worked on the amiable pair, sometimes. So Frank had his whipping boys, Pratt mused.

Humans need outlets for their emotions. Guess it’s better to show them to a pair of hundred pound hounds who can eat you alive if they really want to, than to a bunch of non-reciprocating, complacent tourists or residents who always respond with a kind shallow ‘see you later’ ’good to see you’ or ‘have a nice day’.

“Morning Frank,” said Pratt after treading to his door.

“How can I help you?” came, the terse reply.

“Well, uh, I’m looking for work and I thought you might…”

“Things are dead in this town. I don’t have anything right now.”

“Aaah, my name is Pratt Ripples.” He stated, extending his hand.

“I’ve taught myself to read the patterns in market prices. But I’ve also just learned how difficult it can be to break into this type of business.”

Frank looked up at him from the easy chair he had just taken stating without hesitation: “Get published man,” and rattled off the names and penchants of three local weekly periodicals. Then he gave his dogs another piece of his mind.

“Thank you a lot. That is a good idea. I’ll follow up on it, online.”

Pratt answered.

As he walked away he heard another admonishment to the canines and thought to himself ‘positive reinforcement man, positive reinforcement.’ When a dog does what he is told, the proper response from the human party is to give praise, reward for good behavior. And to get the dog to do as you wish be stern but also be kind, encouraging. So many reflections of the human condition are reflected in their behavior toward so called ‘animals’. What are we anyway?

Two weeks previous and on a less cold late afternoon, Pratt had gone to visit a not very old, but very good friend who was on his very last legs.

Dehydration, lack of exercise and a diet not befitting even a hippy painter which Slim Ash was, had taken their toll.

The bladder is a distensible membranous sac that expands as it fills up with fluid. When blood circulation is languid and Water is absent the bladder begins to atrophy as it accumulates less than fluid substances until it says with a pain in the small of the back ‘so long, been good to

be a part of you, adios.’ Slim Ash was no small individual, a big lanky cat with a huge tuft of kinky red hair & beard to match. He was the only human Pratt had ever met who could tell a story of personal experience with photographic detail for forty five minutes without pause and tell the same life episode years hence: verbatim. He did so regularly of many roads and friends, other horizons and other times with the same cadence & verve. Slim had come into the world with a foot on the route 66 and a big soft bony hand in the oil jar. He had an eternal mindful disposition of never be sad, angry or bad assed, always be on the Sunny Side of it all.

Time never existed as a passage for Ash. He lived in a seventies two story affair overlooking I-25. And I-25 was his escape from time immemorial along with…well, painting paintings for one. He’d been a Federal Agent in Mexico during the so-called ‘Paraquat Movement’ i.e. the pot eradication movement of the 1970’s. When that operation ended with little effect on the import and distribution of said natural herb, Slim had inherited the cream of the Sierra Nevada.

How can you read that time in someone’s life for all things pernicious and healthful alike where they go past the point of no return?

Where does poor health, weak constitution, turn into a sure short end in darkness, dirt and ashes? There must be some threshold in life labeled ‘No Long Life Beyond This Point!’ ‘Stay Clear of Entryway’. On this side of the doorway are the vices, persistent habits, attitudes and dispositions that foment decay, disease, demise. At varying distances away from this marker is another threshold which says ‘Passed This Point You Are in Good Health’, in good hands as long as you don’t get swallowed by a Tsunami, crushed by a Quake or helloed be a Hurricane, you can live with your finish un-meted.

Pratt rapped on the familiar door of a place he’d been to repeatedly more than a decade ago. ‘No accidents’, he thought as the images soaked

back into his conscious mind, of the garden with its young wisteria plantings along the high adobe wall. The house long front porch covered with its’ New England style beach weathered boards. The windows with their small panes, where in front of one Pratt had sat on the small wooden bench while Manning (Man for short) had taken a black and white of Pratt there in a short sleeve shirt with thin vertical white stripes and broad vertical dark ones. With the mullions behind him, the effect of the picture was close to what you might see if viewing a portion of a chessboard from an acute sidelong angle. A single white playing piece superimposed over and through the board. ‘King, Pawn, Bishop… Who am I?’ Deedee Dougins answered the door with “Hello. Good to see you again. Come in. I’m busy with the nurse. Slim is right in there. He may be doz(s)ing. Just raise your voice to rouse him.” The short stout one, black hair chin length, silver something, was back past the garden walk up the steps, past the porch and disappearing through an inner door as Ripples replied still deep in thought: “Thank you, I understand.” Clack of the door. “I actually know the way.” But it was her house now. Man had moved on and Slim was there to supposedly convalesce at his ex wife’s home there on that quiet street, but he was actually coalescing.

Manning Foresighth had put a huge amount of practical work into the place before moving on. Double French paned doorways separated each of three ample warm rooms with twelve-foot high ceilings. Lots of broad shelving was built into the diamond finished plaster walls, with countrystyled whitewash narrow-gauged pine plank flooring. In a quiet dark Westside ‘hood’, it was now Deedee Dougins’ place. But Pratt remembered coming here. Each and every time to find Man busy with some chore for the place and the place changed completely over those few years back in the late eighties.

Pratt reflected on the vast contrasts between Slim and Manning, both painters: between this manicured well-finished home and Slims own rented bulging artist’s pad. Both men were from the same area: The Los Angeles Basin. Both were from the same generation circa 1940 some. Slims’ pad was unkempt, cluttered to brimming countertops & tables, bookcases and end tables chairs and floor. The shag carpet was like the floor of a woodshop toward the end of a busy week. The Drawing board was the only cleared surface and it was permanently fixed at a 27degree slope. Man’s work was small and delicate while Slims was, well psychedelic.

He looked at his emaciated friend who was contorted into an ess position in one of those electronic contorting hospital beds. Slims’ bloated stomach made a pregnant impression in the white cotton blanket.

After weeks in the town’s big institution, under the influence of a steady dose of opiates and simultaneously withdrawn from his habitual TBN/THC dose, he was now freshly released from hospital care, in a state of sublimation between dream and loose wakefulness. Pratt recalled four days before in the hospital room. A more lucid-than-usual, if yet emaciated Slim had laughed about an old story of his own. Then in a spell of silence Ripples had made a comment about how Slim was getting ready to trip hard since he was heading home and would be free to toke-up for the first time in a moon cycle with the addition then, of Demerol or whatever; he was going to go for a ride in the Holy Throne.

“Well there you are in the astronauts’ chair.” Pratt stated, looking into the hairy face.

Slims’ bright blue eyes came to life, a contented little smile appeared on his mug and he said with slurring syllabic command, “Hi, pull up a chair.”

Pratt did so and didn’t wait to pickup the journal book that lay on

the bedside table there in front of him. Slims’ expression tightened as he reached out his large hand. Pratt said with a halting hand, “Just let me figure out a few more pages and enjoy the ride, okay?” Slims’ contented face returned and Pratt began reading quickly in silence. After a couple of minutes he turned the several pages back, cleared his throat loudly as he glanced over to the bed, then began reading aloud. This reading process had been ongoing for a few years since that time when Pratt had arrived at Slims’ pad to find an old-fashioned tape recorder sounding out Slims’ tripping, trippingly adventures in the Big Apple. On the spot Pratt had offered to read what slim had been putting together, saying: “How’s about listening to your writing in my voice? I’m an excellent reader and I really like what I just finished hearing.” Slim, in his easy demeanor had replied with a smile, “sure Pratt if you can read my handwriting, then as soon as I’ve enough out to warrant another recording, we can start.

Reality had morphed into another one altogether though and Pratt had been witnessing Slims’ slip into that dark gray area beyond which death beckoned with certainty. For over half a year the grayness of poor health had been darkening in him, promising in its’ progressive gradients to soon enter a black shade where the light of life would no longer be permitted to shine. When Pratt had first noticed the change and for weeks afterward, he’d given Slim soft bits of healthful encouragement.

“Drink plenty of water well before you eat anything.” Or, “let’s take a walk Slim.” The response was always a sort of self-assertion, as much as to say ‘I know what I’m doing. I’m not concerned about death. Sure, I’d like to stick around for another while but the grim reaper will knock at my door one day and there is nothing I can do about it. Let’s have some more fun. No more talk of the morbidity of life. Let’s watch the Simpsons.’ And they would. Pratt would make it a point to arrive just in time to watch Homer do his thing.

So Pratt read the pages aloud to Slim and to the pretty little room there. Pages about Slim and his friend back in the Sixties in Brooklyn.

About getting a speed fix and then fixing a flat tire in a wired dream state. When he’d finished reading he looked over at Slims head propped there like a flower in a vase: eyes closed, mouth open, breath coming in short intermittent gasps between stillness’ that conjured up realms of The Beyond. Between his frail condition and the manner in which his caretakers were treating him, Pratt knew it would be only a matter of days before the crystallization of dehydration and halting circulation, forced a final breath. And so it was only days later when he heard the obituary read over the local public radio station. It seemed to have been the next day. And it came as no surprise, as a sort of amusing anecdote, then, in the following few days that no stay of execution was granted Tooky Williams, and Richard Pryor followed along, to add some substantive humor to those departed. They would certainly make one another the best of company.

Ignored by the majority, thought is a relentless little virus that seeps and creeps its way into a distortion of reality, Reality itself being everything that exists already until the little mind comes in through a crack in the door to reek havoc. Absent this small mind condition, humankind would exist in an incomparable paradise.

Let us go back though, back to that transfusing cold day and the equities markets. They are the best reflection of humanities’ mind-filled, ceaseless attempts at reconciliation with the mundane search for wellbeing, as well as its’ fight against inequity, poverty, strife. The Markets themselves being the ultimate strife match.

Ripples recognized that Sabius would likely go belly up. Pratt pon-

dered his way up another windswept street toward an unpremeditated destination. Time was not a constraint at ten thirty am. But the cold bit at his feet and face, so he kept up a brisk pace. Blood and emotion were coursing through him in a manner akin to the wind; the ceaseless wind pushing through the bare limbs of the wintering trees. ‘If you can make a decision which cost you almost half a mil’ he reasoned, ‘then you are running scared already.’ When the next time comes for Grosz to make the correct move he’s going to be tied up in knots (or ‘nots’ depending on the viewer’s perspective) and when his threshold of pain is reached he’ll give up decades of profits with so much emotional investment that he’ll go home to his wife and sob in her lap. She will pet him on the head and say with that motherly touch given to a weeping child; ‘Now, now, everything is going to be alright my dearest.’ But Pratt wondered if she’d read Nietzsche or Herodotus or neither or both for that matter.

At the core of his mind Pratt was convinced there was some magic way to get through to the old friendly coot. Their being in the same boat labeled looser may leave them incommunicado…All the same Pratt would make a move to bridge the gap. He changed his heading and made his way to the library, to E-mails, charts, the world wide web of interconnectedness, inter-connect-ability.

As many as there are different types of days, just as many are all the sorts of people. Most people require a healthy amount of love affection, complicity, authorization or just plain silent company. Others are contented with just their own immediate surroundings. Picture a beachfront cabin in the Mexican southeast, along a two hundred mile long oceanfront, housing a small family with savanna jungle for a backyard. They are dedicated to the sun, the ocean and the fish. Tropical fruit abounds: Papaya, coconut, and banana. Or a man living in a high-tech tent with

cutting edge cooking gear and clothing, he moves with the weather and lives on pennies per day. These types of people are so tuned into their environments, love and happiness stem out of them like the fecund manna-of-life, to those who are receptive of that.

For those with emotional needs it is a different picture altogether, a dreary existence of a prison sentence endured. For some people only time and lifetimes can awaken them from the slumber in which they claim sometimes to exist. They are inside looking out, love and happiness are a farce or at best, which is not good at all, a thing to be achieved, earned through arduous toil, endless scrapes on the knees and elbows of life. When you are outside looking in it is a universe apart from when you are inside looking out. It is an architectural thing really a question of design. When on the outside you are, in truth happy, in fact you’re beyond so called happiness: ‘the You is not’. When inside looking out you are in the confines of your own perceptions. The difference is between being conscious and that of a state of super consciousness.

The man in the hammock on the porch somewhere along the Caribbean coast yawned stretched exhaled with a ‘huaaah’ breathed deep, stretched again. He turned, curled himself over to his left side looking through threads into the distanced grove of dozen year old palms, two hundred yards out to the beach and another twenty to the shore. His eyes focused beyond to the sea, the rising sea and rising eye together to the skyline barely visible through the clearing. He blinked once, focused on the jagged narrow strip between frond points and trunks and sand. Then he whispered, “Cielo azul, que raro sueño.” (Blue sky, what a strange dream.)

“ Cielo azul,

que raro sueño. ”

Art by Mark Williams, who was profoundly inspired by Mark Wagner and his work.