Would you like cheese on that?

Public TV Chef Lidia Bastianich was asked her opinion about putting cheese on a fish dish.  She put her hands firmly on her hips, and answered:

 "If you go into any real Italian restaurant, and you ask the chef to put cheese on your fish, you won't get cheese!  An argument is what you'll get!"

You will get a similar answer if you ask a good hot dog vendor to put ketchup on your hot dog.

Personally, I don't care what you eat, or how you eat it, but I do love their passion and the drive that they possess to preserve the purity of the art form that they have worked so hard to hone.  They don't want their work - as they see it - bastardized.

One of architect Frank Lloyd Wright's past customers called him and asked, "Can I hang my new painting on this wall?"  Without skipping a beat, ole Frank answered the homeowner, "Not on my wall!"  Mr. Wright's art form was architecture, and instead of paint, he used building materials. Any and all buildings that he planned and built are his own distinct vision.  Changes to his vision - his work - were more often than not. declined,  

It takes great strength to form an accurate and clear vision, and even more intestinal fortitude to maintain and uphold those standards.

Quoting Chad Michaels from "RuPaul''s Drag Race":
"I'll never apologize for striving for perfection."

At first inspection, it seems like artist Salvador Dali is letting us off the hook, but in reality - he is not:
"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."

Translation:

Striving for perfection is like looking for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

It will always be just out of reach, but that doesn't stop me from chasing it!  :)

When I get frustrated at a particular piano piece (knitting pattern, Blender computer generated graphics project, etc), I pull my face out of my hands and "clog onward" when I realize that even though I'm not doing whatever it is as good as I want to be doing it - I am doing it better than I did a week ago, and far better than I was a year ago.  A year from NOW - but not now! - I can say the same thing about today's source of frustration.

So.... go ahead on, Mrs. Lidia.  Put your hands on your hips and stand your ground!

15 yrs. of St. Louis' City Museum

15 years ago, The City Museum (St. Louis) opened it's doors to the public.

Every time I go to The City Museum, I cry.  

From The Enchanted Caves, City Museum St. Louis, MO

Before the death of Bob Cassilly, my tears were from the sheer joy, relief, and the sensory stimulation that I crave. Now, just a little over a year after this tragic loss, my tears are from both: mourning a hurricane-force wind the blew beneath my sparrow's wings, and from enjoying the magnificent space he created before we reluctantly relinquished him to the ages.


If you have ever stood on the side of a major highway, and had a semi truck pass you, you will have experienced the same gust of wind that I felt the day Bob Cassilly flew past me when his soul escaped the bonds of this Earth.  I can still feel that wind as it blasts out of this realm and into the next.




I get "my fix" in abundance when I walk through the front doors and let my mind and body wander and expand, and for the few hours that I am there, I can momentarily fulfill the bottomless, ravenous hunger that I contain that gnaws at my heart, mind, body and soul for creativity, ingeniousness and diversity.

When I walk - and climb! - through this imaginative space, all my circuits start cookin', and my emotions are nothing more than a mere outward physical, instinctual manifestation of the activity created by fine-tuned neurons in my brain that are produced and maintained from major daily mental exercise, and my gratitude for the precious gift that I received:



My gift is not the musical instruments that I play daily, nor the things that I create both with natural fibers and in the digital realm.  My gift is much more simple in nature.  It is the ability to "know the difference", and to be acutely aware of the insidious hazards of ignoring that difference.  Another brightly wrapped package that I received at birth is "Curiosity".  A gift card for "Creativity" was attached to the top of my parcel.

After all is said and done, the creative and curious adult is the child that survived.

For more information:http://www.citymuseum.org/site/

- Michael

Charlotte's Bad Day

I ain't 'fraid of spiders.

I will readily admit that I don't want a spider crawling across my face, as long as he stays in his corner, and I stay in mine, we'll get along fine.
I have had several generations of spiders living behind a statue in my living room. They catch flies, moths, mosquitoes, etc. (If he's on my face in the middle of the night, that story will end altogether differently!)

I had a spider living in the back of my truck all summer several years ago.

When I drove to work in the morning, I would tell him, "Hold on! We're going to work!" After I got to work, I inspected his web, and all the finer threads had been blown out by the wind, leaving him with only the main structure of the web. He would have the web completely repaired when I got off work, and I would tell him, "Hold on! We're going home!" When I parked my truck in front of my apartment, I noticed that his web had been once again reduced to just the main threads. He would have it repaired before morning, and our cycle would start all over again - the entire summer.

One morning, early in the fall, I walked into the office that I did medical billing (shirt / tie job). I poked my head over the short cubicle wall to talk to a co-worker before the day started. She said, "Michael, you have something on your neck!", and she started clawing at her own neck, indicating that I should mimic her motions to get the offending foreign object off my neck.

I did as she compelled me to do. With one quick motion, I flicked my hand, in a fast swiping motion across my neck. The movement was too fast for me to see, but I could tell by her wide open mouth and bulging eyes that I hit my target. That poor spider choose a bad day to leave the bed of my truck, and accompany me into the office. HE was the 'offending object'. With one swoop, I flicked him from my neck smack dab in the middle of her forehead!

My 'slightly' frightened co-worker jumped up from her desk - screaming and cussing - ran through this HUGE, crowded quiet office on high heels that she couldn't handle under such circumstances. In cartoon-style, she was bouncing off the walls of every cubicle down the hallway, screaming, yelling....cussing..... all the way out off the office.

My poor, carpooling spidey met an unfortunate demise that morning.

(As for me, I was curled up in a ball on the floor of my cubicle - in shirt, tie and dress pants, laughing so hard that I was crying my eyes out!)

When I was a child, my mother would find an innocent little garter snake in the garden.

Actually, he was just doing his job - eating grasshoppers, etc, that ate the vegetables.

The only time in my life that I have ever seen my mother move this quickly, she would post me to keep an eye on the poor little snake, and she would RUN to the garage to get a garden hoe to chop the poor little thing into pieces.

I had to make a decision:

Either spare the life of an innocent creature that has every much of a right to live unharmed as the large, scary creature that was trying to kill him, or I had to personally face the wrath of the large, psychotic creature that had a weapon in her hand.

(Remember - I am blind in my left eye. That isn't ALWAYS a downfall or a curse!)

Many, many times, while she was running to the garage, I would scare the little snake away.

When she got back with the hoe, demanding, "Where did it go? Where did it go?", I would put on my best acting front, and I would throw up my hands, shrug my shoulders, and say, "I don't know where HE went! You know I can't see very well, and it's getting dark out here!"

(Notice how I made the snake a LIVING, breathing being by calling HIM a HIM, rather than an "IT". To this day, I loathe when people call ANY animal - or their babies! an "IT", and I will correct them every time I get a chance!)

Long live the little snake! Every snake on my property will live his natural life, unless he runs into a hawk, which becomes a deal between him and the hawk, and I stay out of that fight as much as possible.

(That woman never did figure out that almost every time, *I* was the one that chased the snake away!)
- Michael

These Dreams..... (sung like "Heart"'s 1986 hit song)

Honest Injun:

Ask Mark for validation: I have to carefully monitor what I watch on TV, what I see, do and talk about during the day, etc, because I WILL dream about it with the next night or so. It's not so much the things that I think about for a period of time, but images (such as commercials on TV, billboards, or any other object) that I might briefly GLANCE at during the day. Within the next couple nights, I will be revisiting those "flashes".

Besides the fact that a very active brain will have exponentially more dreams than a non-active brain, I have other factors that make me dream more than the average person. (Yes, there are *lots* of non-active brains out there!  Many of those that don't suspect that they are non-active actually qualify for that category, too!)
Another factor would be early childhood trauma.  I was born with severe clubbed foot that took years of extreme surgeries and physical therapy to marginally correct.  People that experience early childhood trauma - whether it's physical or mental trauma (or both!), will have much earlier memories, and more dreams.  As an example, I can remember the minister's wife rocking me in her arms, and rocking me in the cradle in the church nursery - when I was 18 MONTHS old.  I remember it so well that I can draw detailed pictures of that scene.

I had nightly nightmares for MANY years.  My mother threatened to kill me if I woke her up because I was crying as the result of having a nightmare.

(Trust me when I tell you that she really meant it. Her first cousin is a serial killer, her brother served 6 years in prison for armed robbery, and there are a LOT of legally-confirmed still-practicing thieves in my family, my current and still-living mother, GRANDMOTHER and uncle are not excluded from that number.)  

There are several times that my mother would have honestly killed me when I was a child, but she knew that she doesn't have the mental wherewithal to do it and get away with it. (Translated into layman's terms:  She's too stupid to get away with it!)  At least she had enough sense to know that much!

(She also refused t0 buy me a chemistry set when I lived at home, because she told me that I would blow her AND the house up - and I would do it on purpose.  Come, now!  Why would a 'loving', doting mother say such a thing?  Answer:  'Loving' and 'Doting' are words that nobody that has **EVER** met her would ever use to describe her!  But - that's a different saga for another day.)

Leading up to the dreams:
Have I told you about my dreams? I do ''conscious dreaming' (also called 'Lucid dreams'), which means that I have conscious control about how I want to handle a dream if it 'gets too rough'. I can choose from several defense mechanisms:

1) I can wake up, go to the bathroom, and when I go back to bed, I can 'pick up' the dream right where I left off, without changing a single detail.

2) I can wake up / go to the bathroom, and when I go back to bed, I can select a different 'ending' to the dream than the original ending of that same old dream.

3) I can go 'into' or 'out of' the dream, and either watch it in the 3rd person (like I'm watching a movie), or I can enter the dream and play an active part.

4) I can 'play chess'.  I can watch the dream in '3rd person', and if I keep getting lost in the same maze, for example, I can say, "Alright!  I'm tired of this crap.  You've had this dream MANY times.  THIS is the way out of the maze.  Then - like I'm playing a SIMS game, I can pick myself up by the collar, and plop myself outside the maze, for example.

5) If the dream gets too rough too quickly, I can terminate it right then and there, and not deal with another second of it.

(All those things come from the fact that I had nightmares as a child, and my mother honestly threatened to kill me if I woke her up at night because I was scared.  Her first cousin is a famous serial killer. Trust me when I tell you that she wasn't joking. So.,.... in 'Sybil-fashion', I had to develop a defense mechanism that I still use to this day to help MYSELF through the problem.)

I have at least 3 - 5 dreams every night of my life. Now, because my poor little brain has nothing better to do when I sleep, I have been going back over the past 30 years and dreaming re-runs. 

Re-run dreams are not at all new to me, but the way I am dreaming them IS new to me. I go back and pick up an old dream, but this time, there is exponentially more detail in each dream! I am now redecorating dreams! People that were once shadows, for example, how have faces and names. If something in a dream was plain concrete, it is now beautiful green marble, and the dream remodeling list continues! 

My dreams - and the lack of sleep - occurs for the same reason that small children can have bad dreams if they watch TV before they go to bed (they are still actively learning. Their neurons are still growing and developing.)

Learning and maintaining new skills (reading music, knitting, using GIMP and Blender software, and much more) are keeping my poor little neurons developing at the same rate as a small child. 

That, in itself, is probably a huge piece missing out of the puzzle, and it should explain a lot! :)

- Michael

HO HO HO .... or.... BOOOO !

(Depending on my mood at the moment!)

Today (early October), I was waiting in line at a local Schnuck's (St. Louis, MO area grocery store chain) pharmacy behind a little boy - less than 5 yrs old - and his mother.

It soon became apparent to me that this little man had visited one too many large Halloween stores, such as Johnny Brock's or Spirit.

He turned around, looked at me, and oh-so-gently, touched my forearm. I moved my head to look down at him, and he JUMPED out of his skin, and stammered, "HE...HE... HELLO, SIR!"

I answered my curious little fan with, "Hello, little buddy! What's up?"

At that point, his mother turned, and told him, "Oh no, don't touch (me)!" I told her that I know that I don't look like the average Ladue, MO resident, and that I understand his curiosity.

In a tone which indicated that he meant no harm at all, the little boy rationalized his behavior by answering his mother, "Oh, I had to check to see if he is real! It IS Halloween, you know!"

I know I must have cackled at his innocent observation. The kid thought I was a Halloween prop!

But then again, in the middle of July, in a mall, when I had my beard bleached white, a little girl asked her mother, "Isn't that Santie Claus?"  (When kids asked me / their parents if I was "Santa Claus", they thought it was much more formal and polite to call me "SantIE  Claus" rather than "SantA Claus"!)

Her mother seemed very embarrassed, and said, "Oh, no! He is just some ordinary white man! Leave him alone!"

The little girl had enough of her mother's disobedience and she jerked her hand back from her mother's grasp, pointed her finger in her mother's face, and said smartly, "Watch your mouth, young lady! You never know when he's watching!"

I had to absolutely cackle!  Then, I bent down and gave the brave little lady a quick squeeze and a peck on her forehead! That inspirational individual should have turned 19 this year, and for YEARS after our meeting, SWORE that she met Santie Claus in a St. Louis Mall one hot July afternoon!!😂😂

- Auckland

"Stress Relievers" and 'Time Served'

Alton Brown (Food Network) says that the only unitasker in your kitchen should be a fire extinguisher. All other gadgets in your kitchen can have more than one function. I live in Ladue (St. Louis), MO.  Almost every home in this area has a grand piano.  Rather than to serve only as a status quo, that piano in your house can actually serve to relax and center you, AND keep your brain sharp, rather than just be a heavy weight to hold the house down when the next tornado comes through!

If an acoustic piano is unfeasible  buy a digital PIANO (different from a digital KEYBOARD, a digital piano should have 88 weighted keys.)

I come from a family of legally confirmed thieves (they are in my IMMEDIATE family), and prison time has been served for armed robbery. My mother's first cousin is Donald Leroy Evans, a serial killer that served time in prison in Mississippi before a fellow inmate cut his throat and killed him in prison in 1999. He was SENTENCED for the killings of 3 people, but charged with the killings of 12 people. In every murder case, the authorities don't leak out ALL the information to the public. They keep a few major details to themselves. In that manner, when a suspect talks about these details, the interrogator KNOW that this suspect most likely committed the crime, because these particular details were not released to the public. Donald knew enough facts about other serial murders - 58 other cases! - that even though he wasn't tried for a total of 70 murders, he most likely committed those, too. (Look up "Donald Leroy Evans" anywhere on the internet. He has his own Wikipedia page, and several other webpages.)

My Ex once told my mother "When I can't keep up with Michael's brain, he gets upset with me!" My mother responded to him by saying the only thing that was the truth in her LIFE, "You'd better be glad that Michael uses that brain for GOOD instead of for BAD, like the rest of us, because if he didn't you would be gone, and nobody would know where to find you!" The buggy look in his eyes, and the agape mouth on his face that ensued was camera-worthy, and priceless!

Music, my friend. Music. Not just listening to it, but playing it yourself on an instrument.

Music has kept some big, bald guy named "Bubba" from making me his permanent Bitch in prison, making me bring him his meals, light his cigarettes, and satisfy his nasty needs while the others look on. (Said activity might be fun OUTSIDE the institutional walls, and on equal turf, but in this environment - where HE has all the control - NOT SO MUCH!) he he he

Caution: (Insert announcer during drug commercials on TV):

"Using music may increase your rate of nightly dreams, it WILL improve your memory and brain, in general, music will calm and center you, and - Mark can vouch for this one - it will make you scream impromptu - out-loud in public!"

(Don't give me that crap about 'I don't have time to do that." Ask my mother - my GRANDMOTHER - my UNCLE - and my cousin Donald Leroy Evans about 'time' (served). Their perception of 'time' will most likely be different than mine, because I used my 'time' wisely to center and improve myself. Those folk that I just mentioned. Not so much! :)

Click your heels together 3 times, sweetie. The answer to your problem is closer than you think. It is already within you, and it could already be within your house, too!

(You could also try a SLOW walk through the Missouri Botanical Gardens, especially the Climatron during this time of the season.)

- Michael

My first Beard Contest win! (Hey! It's a personal triumph!)

This is the half-pipe cap - with a Van Dyke mustache and goatee printed on it - was in my little prize package for winning my portion of the Beard / Mustache contest at The Grove Fest on Manchester Ave. (St. Louis) this weekend.

After I got my little bag of goodies, I had not yet 'looked in the bag', and Mark asked me, "What's in the bag? What did you win?" I answered him, "It's not about the trinkets. It's all about
the win!"

He looked in the bag, and found this cap, and instantly claimed it as his.

But....but.... Even though the design on this cap is a fun, simple little nod to the mustache / beard fan base, and it is a bit weak compared to what I wear on a daily basis, and Mark would like to THINK that he is an adventuresome soul, I think it is still a bit too far outside his comfort zone for him to actually wear it, so I think I'll be getting it back.

"Comfort Zone". Could somebody please tell me exactly where that is located? And while they are assisting me, can they well me where this "Over The Top" place can be located using Google Maps or GPS? This is a rhetorical question. I know where those things are located, and they are closer than we think. They are in the minds of people that surround me.

- Michael