t . s. m c c l e l l a n

Examing Life

Meet Toby

Posted on | November 8, 2011 | No Comments

Category: Daily Living

Take Two

Posted on | November 1, 2011 | No Comments

In some ways it feels like I have been here before. Regrouping and reorganizing the details of my life is something I have done several times. But while it looks and feels familiar, I realize that I am in uncharted territory. I am single again and living in a small apartment for the first time in years. My studio will be outside my home for the first time in twenty years and my art career, such as it has been, is in a rebuilding phase, to borrow a sports phrase. It does feel though I am starting over. It feels more like I have stripped away one of my painting panels, removing all indicators of how it appeared previously and leaving only the framework and the support to rebuild upon.

That is a fitting description of how this phase of my life feels right now. I have finished stripping things away. What is left now is to get back to work and see what I might make out of all this.

Category: Uncategorized

Jefferson Davis and the One Dollar Taco

Posted on | August 19, 2011 | No Comments

If I am honest, I have always been an early riser. It is the rare morning I languish in bed much past 7:30 and usually I am awake by 6:30 with or without an alarm. I tend to sleep six or seven hours no matter what so if I want to sleep in that means going to bed later. I stipulated the beginning of this with “if I am honest” because this is one of those little things where I hold an idea of what I like that is contrary to what I actually do. In my head, I am a deviant late sleeper capable spending an entire morning wasted away between the sheets. The reality is that I get out of bed to wake the roosters and I almost immediately set about doing something.

Early morning are times where I can accomplish quite a bit, yet I would recoil if someone said I was a morning person. Morning people are cheerful, interactive, optimistic and just love to talk and they drive me crazy. I wake up very slowly and I relish quiet in the mornings. I let the dogs out, start the coffee and check email as I begin the slow slide into wakefulness. This morning I noticed that ants I am sharing my kitchen with had been up for a while and congregating at a dog food lid I mistakenly left out the night before. I cleaned this up and the found two or three other small things that needed relocating, wiped or arranging. All the while I am turning over in my mind the things I need to do or want to do in the day ahead. I love mornings, but I just don’t want to have to talk about them.

This week has been a delicious mix of productivity and recreant deviancy. I have ambled from activity to activity without any organizing plan or agenda. There were some things I knew I wanted to get done this week and I did them in no particular order. I took the section of fence that was removed to make room for the motorcycle garage and re-purposed the fence boards into a table. I spent a morning in the new studio with Tom clearing out space and building a new painting table. We re-worked a shelving area in the new space and pretty much whipped the studio into a condition I start to work in. While I was there working with Tom, I discovered one dollar tacos.

As I was dragging a piece of lumber I heard Tom say “Now that is a good sound.” I had missed whatever he had heard and said “What sound?” Tom replied “The sound of one dollar tacos.”

There are a lot of migrant workers in Richmond whether people realize it or not and many of them are Hispanic. The new studio is located near two or three construction projects and there are scores of Hispanic workers. The silver trimmed lunch truck of my youth has morphed into the Taco Wagon. We decided to wander down the two blocks to where the lunch trucks had wedged themselves between two buildings so that I could discover the joys of one dollar Tacos.

They are served on small soft burritos with your choice of meat and there is a large selection of toppings to choose from. It was a simple arrangement but I can attest to the joys of one dollar tacos. There was something mildly subversive about eating open faced tacos mid-morning surrounded by people who spoke jovially in a language I understand poorly and knowing that I was standing in what was once the the heart of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis would be horrified and that thought delights me.

Category: Uncategorized

Purging and Certainty

Posted on | August 10, 2011 | No Comments

Last Thursday I attended a writing class for the first time since college. It was a small group that focuses on timed exercises that we read to each other. I was struck by how low key and relaxed the entire group was. I discovered it about a week before the first session and I know the facilitator, so I decided rather impulsively to attend. I couldn’t think of any good reasons not to, nor did I really search for any.

I am in one those pesky phases where I am reinventing my life again. The ink has been dry on my divorce for almost eighteen months now and I am settled into a quiet routine as a single man again. I have been rigorously simplifying my life, purging unwanted or unneeded possessions and jettisoning anything I can identify as extraneous or that doesn’t work as it is designed. This process of simplifying has been going on for over a year now and is nearing the end.

I moved into half of a duplex that I own, the sole remaining property I possess following the financial collapse of 2008. It is considerably smaller than the house I lived in until last year and about a third smaller than the temporary house I was renting this winter. It suits me though; it is compact and comfortable and easy to maintain. It is and will be my home for the foreseeable future.

Beyond purging my life of the unnecessary, I have been working on creating a space for myself. I rented a painting studio that I will soon occupy and I set up a large storage building on my property that I will use to house my growing collection of motorcycles. I have cleared out much of the debris in the yard and I can see the skeletal outlines of what will eventually become my garden.

There are ideas turning over in my mind like a restless child who cannot embrace sleep. Right now they are jumbled and indiscernible. But I feel them kicking at the sheets. I know that I don’t really need to do anything except to pay attention and continue to put things in order.

There are some things that are quite clear to me right now. My life is going to be slower and more deliberate going forward. I have no desire to live recklessly or impulsively any more. As I recently told a friend, “There are no do-overs in life. Take the extra time and try to get it right the first time.” It is also certain that I will paint again. I am determined to make art again and I am open to whatever evolution has taken place in my creativity during this long layoff.

The other thing of which I am certain is that I am a writer. I have always been one, but I have not always written. This brings me to a curious twist in my thinking. Once I committed to painting, I never doubted that I was a painter, even during this last break. But I have never permitted myself that same certainty of knowledge when it comes to the written word. I have some strange ideas about what it would take for me to call myself a writer. But I realize now that these ideas are one more thing that I must discard.

Last Thursday, I sat in a small circle, the air stifling and moist while my hand tore across the page. Working with only a simple prompt, the ideas streamed onto the page. And as I let those thoughts loose on the paper, I realized something that I learned long ago with painting. I don’t need to concern myself with the result. I need only commit to the process. The results will form themselves.

Category: Creativity and Art

Surprise

Posted on | October 18, 2009 | No Comments

I was up early and pulled up the Times online to catch the headlines. I was surprised to find Richmond, Virginia on the front page. Granted it was teaser for a small Travel section story, but nonetheless; we were on the front page. Now, if you live and Richmond and have followed any of the antics around the city’s hammed-handed efforts to create an arts scene, you will find things to chuckle about. But on the whole a nice piece.

Category: News and Information

Entertainment Value

Posted on | May 26, 2009 | No Comments

It has been fairly entertaining listening to Republicans carry on about how closing Gitmo will result in terrorists roaming amongst us, living in halfway houses. What is even better is the parody this is inspiring. What is sad is the Harry Reid took the Republican’s bait.

Category: Uncategorized

Doubts Dispelled

Posted on | April 21, 2009 | No Comments

I went to be after posting on the release of the torture memos feeling clear about things. I have been thinking about this for a long time. I have always been clear that abandoning legal protections for prisoners and breaking from established international norms like the Geneva Convention was a mistake of biblical proportions, but I never fully resolved myself with the idea that our interrogation practices since 2002 amounted to a regime of systemic torture. I am now fully resolved with this idea.

If I had any doubts lingering, they were swept away when I went to the NY Times and was greeted with this headline:

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects

Emptywheel has a great post breaking this down.

Despite all the legal justifications and euphimisms, what we have is a carefully crafted program of torture. Waterboarding is a war crime and the United States has prosecuted it as such. The architects of this program must be denounced and held to account.

Category: Uncategorized

Got To Go

Posted on | April 21, 2009 | No Comments

If the rule of law is to mean anything, then those that twist and contort it to the detriment of other must be removed from positions of power.

Category: Uncategorized

New Read

Posted on | April 20, 2009 | No Comments

I read the Political Animal daily and through that I have become acquainted with Hilzoy, who posts at Political Animal frequently. But I had not read her own blog, Obsidian Wings. I highly recommend it if you follow current events at all.

Category: News and Current Events

Torture Memos

Posted on | April 19, 2009 | No Comments

The Obama administration released the torture memos yesterday to considerable criticism. The administration also announced that it did not intend to pursue prosecutions against operatives who engaged the practices detailed in the memos. In my opinion they made exactly the right choices.

Releasing the memos continues to put distance between the Obama administration and the criminal actions of the Bush administration. Opting against prosecuting operatives who were acting within legally sanctioned guidelines makes it possible to keep moving forward without abandoning the possibility of legal accountability for those who authorized the torture of detainees.

There can be no mistake that we are talking about torture here. Despite all the euphemisms and qualifications, the interrogation methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration were clearly beyond the bounds of accepted practice; otherwise it would not be necessary to justify them so exhaustively.

The clearest indication of our imminent decent down the slippery slope came when the it was announced the United States government held that enemy combatants captured in the so-called War on Terror were not subject the protections of the Geneva Convention. It would not be necessary to justify removing those protections if those captives weren’t in danger of needing them.

They in fact did need those protections as it turned out and the United States will be paying a large price for it choice to abandon the rule of law in favor of a specious need for expediency. There isn’t anything to be done about that now. We can only make real and honest attempts to correct our mistakes and to acknowledge the tragic consequences that been visited upon some genuinely innocent people.

Obviously there are some genuinely evil people who are in our custody and these people are to be held to account for their activities. This is not in question. But how we go about that and how we treat these people while we impose justice upon says a great deal about ourselves and nothing about them.

There was no decision this administration would make regarding these memos that would be entirely satisfying, but their release and the decision not to pursue prosecutions allows the United States to continue rehabilitating its reputation without engaging in the sort of scapegoating that accompanied the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Category: Uncategorized
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