Tag Archives: family

y chromes and Chuck Barris

y-chrome donor in garage

Today was my Wednesday off. I didn’t do jack aside from get up, load the dish washer, and chain nap all day.

Got a call from my pop late that night. Apparently someone in his subdivision was throwing out some willow furniture and wondered if we’d be interested in savaging some of it for ourselves.

I was just getting ready to propose to Kevin and Chad that we go for a walk since I was in the house all day and had a slight touch of cabin fever.

This was a good excuse to get out of the house for an hour – so we jumped in the car and made the very short trip over the river (well more like creek), through the woods and to Daddy’s house we went.

I’ll refrain from the little cut-away, frustrated socio cultural anthropologist micro-essays I tend to slip in these entries. My father would require a small book and to try to wrap him up neatly in a paragraph would be an exercise in dismissive minimalism.

The furniture wasn’t our bag… Too rustic.. no…. “too neo-chromagnon”. Pop however liked the table so we nabbed it up and carried it down to the house to add to the other stockpile of items he’s collected over the past few years.

Dad, who’s now on retirement disability from the railroad, was originally trained as (and in my opinion never stopped being) an artist. After my mother left him at the end of last century, his eccentricity hit new heights without having a spouse to keep him in check.

His favorite activity is dumpster diving. Not the kind you see homeless guys do, rummaging for tin cans and spiders in discarded gin bottles. Nope. Dad likes to snag up discarded and damaged items from craft stores. In the past four years he’s filled the garage, and several rooms of the house, with all sorts of odd items. Picture frames, bras headboards, baskets, floor tile samples, etc.

Most of his spoils are used to make these “found art” sculptures that defy description. I own two.

I’m happy he’s creating again.

Back to the house to take in a rental: “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”….
The story was a little snoozy, (probably COMPLETELY uninteresting if you weren’t cutting your mass media teeth, like I did, on the likes of The Gong Show and know who Chuck Barris is). But I really liked a lot of the production. The DP really had a nice style and they did a lot of “practical / in camera” effects which is always charming. It gets a good 4 to 4.5 Monkeys (out of a possible 6) on the Monkey Scale.

Shit… The boys are oversleeping – and if I don’t stop not blogging, we’re all going to be late to work.