“I have no idea how we are going to get her clothes off,” the Red One said.
“Patience,” the Priest said, “You are Death, but Buddha will provide.”
Wake Of A Buddhist Robot—A small service
Posted by Dan Ryan on January 25, 2012
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2012/01/25/wake-of-a-buddhist-robota-small-service/
Sleep Out For The Night—A small luminous
The sky is on fire, a kind of cold fire, like some other country’s war is in town for the night. At the distant stadium, there’s men bitching over cheap cups of expensive beer and torn tickets. But the town is quiet. It isn’t the kind of place that salesmen in some real estate stage play would break their balls, backs or ethics to sell to old people on fixed incomes.
But it’s home, and it’s raining and it’s beautiful, and I wish I had a waterproof sleeping bag so that I could sleep out for the night.
Posted by Dan Ryan on January 22, 2012
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2012/01/22/sleep-out-for-the-nighta-small-luminous/
Bored, Rainy Day—A small wandering story
There’s a map of everything to everywhere…..
….on my front porch.
There’s nothing deeper here than that
except
a lesson I may have learned while I was out past my porch running some errands for my in-laws.
My mother-in-law
needed me to dispose of a stiff, dead opossum she had found in her yard.
My father-in-law
needed me to buy him some Duracell 312 hearing aid batteries and three packs of True menthol 100 cigarettes.
So, the opossum ended up in a bag which I tossed into a dumpster behind our local grocery market here in Brisbane,
and I
ended up in a run-down CVS pharmacy just off the El Camino Real in South San Francisco, California.
Cigarettes and hearing aid batteries for the elderly are always in such places. It is the joy of these places.
And they have El Jimador tequila, which I have never tried.
But I have smelled it because of the weaving-drunk man who was behind me, even though I didn’t ask.
We were both in line, and I had
my cigarettes and batteries.
He had his fifth of El Jimador tequila, and a copy of Maxim magazine
(which I found pleasing because it had a picture of a lovely woman with enormous tits on the cover.)
And this guy looked rough, and he was Latino, and that didn’t matter
because he looked my age
and it was Friday night
and the only thing he could weave about to plan and do was to buy El Jimador tequila and Maxim magazine
and go off wherever he had to go in the rain.
My birthday is upon me.
I’ll be 48.
And I don’t pray but I did make a sort of vow to myself that,
for the rest of my life,
I will never be the kind of man who swerves into a run-down CVS pharmacy in South San Francisco, California on a Friday night
to buy
a bottle of cheap tequila and a big-titty-girl magazine
and then shuffle off into the rain and the night.
Posted by Dan Ryan on January 20, 2012
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2012/01/20/bored-rainy-daya-small-wandering-story/
The Passport Photo—A small reflection
I need a new passport for an upcoming trip to Tokyo, Japan. So I sent in my application two Fridays ago.
And the State Department rejected it, the bastards. They didn’t like my photo. Said the dimensions or background were wrong. I have the memo. No biggie. I’ll just pay closer attention to the required photo specs, have my wife take another picture of me, and re-send the application in a couple of days.
I’ve got 2 1/2 months until I need the document anyway. Maybe I should get a haircut first.
But this upcoming Tokyo trip is a huge deal for me, a potential life-changer. So for a few minutes this morning I felt impatient and considered trying to re-shoot my passport photo myself.
And while I thought about how to take the passport self portrait, I looked in my bathroom mirror to see how presentable I was.
Then I remembered it was Martin Luther King Day.
So as I looked over my face, noted my features and how they have aged in nearly 48 years, I asked myself a pretty serious question: Does the color of my face matter any more now than it did when I was four years old and this great man was still alive, still fighting for all of our rights and, more importantly, for our dignity?
“Yes,” was the brutally honest answer I gave myself, as my eyes welled up with tears.
And they were tears for this great man, tears for myself, and tears for the state of things that makes the color of my skin perhaps more important to some people now than it was when that coward shot my hero down in Memphis on an April evening in 1968.
Posted by Dan Ryan on January 16, 2012
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2012/01/16/the-passport-photoa-small-reflection/
The World Holds The World Up—A small incidental
The world seems to hold the world up, to support itself with twigs and leaves blown into place by the wind. I’ve never been much for hippie Rachel Carson thinking, but you can’t crush that kind of determination, that kind of will. We break something, and the world fixes it without us or our help.
That just seems to be how the world works. We are, at best, incidental.
I’m good with that.
Twigs of Genius.
Posted by Dan Ryan on January 15, 2012
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2012/01/15/the-world-holds-the-world-upa-small-incidental/
Sometimes I Feel—A small, strange compulsion and…
…the artificial moons that dot the landscape remind me of…
…the warm, burning slumber of home.
Posted by Dan Ryan on January 12, 2012
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2012/01/12/sometimes-i-feela-small-strange-compulsion-and/
A Picture I Took What I Liked—A small time exposure
When the space rockets come from Jesus,
they’ll park down the street from your house.
Posted by Dan Ryan on January 10, 2012
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2012/01/10/a-picture-i-took-what-i-likeda-small-time-exposure/
Brisbane Nocturne—A small lunacy
Quiet moon, I hate you, hate your brightness.
At these times of the year, you won’t let me hide from the evil I know the night normally harbors in the darkness.
So, I guess those sons of bitches will see me coming.
But on the bright side, I suppose, it will make it easier for me to see and kill every last goddamn vampire in Brisbane. I should be able to kill them all by the end of the month, or at least banish them back to San Francisco.
Yeah, always look on the bright side.
Or under it.
Posted by Dan Ryan on January 8, 2012
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2012/01/08/brisbane-nocturnea-small-lunacy/
A Quiet Street in Hollister, California—A small Christmas Day
The tombs of the pharaohs aren’t this quiet, even this close to a Mormon temple…..
The street is quiet and it is Christmas Day and for the first time I see in the landscape and the architecture something of the neighborhood in Richardson, Texas where I spent part of my youth.
My niece and her husband live on this street and I have known them for twenty years and they have lived here for at least that long and I have never noticed until today that this place in Hollister, California could be the street upon which my middle-school friends and I played in the wintertime when ice freezes the vibrant heart and most of northeast Texas.
It surprises me the things I see for the first time after so many years of knowing family in this place.
The wintertime in northeast Texas will freeze the skin, but some families celebrate Christmas until it freezes the soul. My family was a bit like that, because when I was growing up there was only me, my sister, my mother and my father. There are greater burdens of love and appreciation placed upon each member of a family at Christmastime, usually in inverse proportion to the number of members in that family.
My father, for example, read large-print storybook copies of “Twas The Night Before Christmas” and “Santa Mouse” to my sister and I on Christmas Eve every year up through 1976, when I was twelve and my sister was nine. They got to be a bit much, those books. But my dad had some need from his own childhood to lavish upon my sister and me things he felt he missed or did not receive in suitable abundance from Santa Claus. My mother was raised in the Christian Eastern Orthodox Church, so she indulged my dad but really didn’t give a shit one way or another. I always rather respected that about her.
1976 was an unusually cold, icy year in northeast Texas. It was also the year my sister and I each got our first cassette tape recordings for Christmas presents. I got Wings At The Speed Of Sound and she got Destroyer by Kiss. I don’t know if my parents had foreseen something most parents cannot, but the tone and musical style of the tape my sister and I each received that year were superb indicators of the personality types we grew into as teenagers and adults.
Strange how these things grasp me now as I stand on this quiet street in Hollister, California and wonder at the temporal and physical distance between this day and Christmas Day in northeast Texas in 1976 and it is a surprisingly happy reverie that holds me for the time it takes me to light and smoke two cigarettes down to the fingertips on my right hand.
And then I’m done.
So I just stare down the quiet street one last time and I am very thankful that I cannot see any cars in the nearby Mormon temple parking lot nor hear any Mormons singing.
Posted by Dan Ryan on December 25, 2011
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2011/12/25/a-quiet-street-in-hollister-californiaa-small-christmas-day/
The Grief Sculpture—Part I of a small, inadequate way of coping
Grief is an unconquerable emotion. You can only manage it…..
I am both embarrassed by this thing, and rather proud of it.
You can have a closer look at….everything. If you’d like. The whole thing, each small packet. You can think of it as a mixed-media piece, which some proud but confused parent has displayed on the front of a very large refrigerator. And if you look long enough, you’ll easily figure out the overall subject of the piece.
But the context of this is mostly explained at the end of Part II.
Fleeting Thoughts on a Solid Core in its Entirety:
Packets of the Main Board, Part I:
Go on to Part II
Posted by Dan Ryan on December 21, 2011
http://brisbanegraphicartsmuseum.com/smallstories/2011/12/21/the-grief-sculpturepart-i-of-a-small-inadequate-way-of-coping/
