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A Motorcycle Dream

03 July 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Out from our travels came our time. We ended up in Japan. A new life, a new bike, more times to come. My wife was off with friends. I was studying my new motorcycle, getting a lay of the land from our home. The upstairs room was no larger than a cockpit, but it was cute. I was in it, studying the little keys. They were toy keys, like the type you can bend with three fingers. They were for the motorcycle. You could actually take the handlebar off, I guess for security reasons. I was playing with it outside, wondering how we were going to make life with this motorcycle work. Downstairs, the one lavatory was nothing more than a toilet taking up center space, surrounded by patterned curtains in mostly red. I was getting a phone call. My wife was telling me about her time. But then, two men entered our habitation and went into the bathroom together. My wife was describing the half Japanese singer that sang well, even though he smelled bad, and I was trying to talk to the two guys behind the curtain. They were taking turns defecating, making a virtual party of it. When they were bowing and thanking me as they exited, I noticed all the shit stains covering the toilet bowl. I had hung up, and didn’t know what to do. I felt the motorcycle would be in danger. I went out to try to take it for a spin. It was not easy since I was not a motorcyclist. When I came back, it was evening again, and our residence was now acting like a restaurant. Now I understood why there was only the small space upstairs and the toilet in the center of the communal living space. The owner was giving me a sly look from behind the counter. He was reprimanding me in a jocular fashion because they had quite a job cleaning the bathroom. I was giving him my best facial expression for such an event, almost explaining to him the two homeless guys, but I then started to go through mental math about why we couldn’t live there anymore, and then I woke up.

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Lola

12 June 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Being original is going against expectations. I was working at changing everything about me. You know how people react to things. The obvious answers to situations were what you didn’t want. So you worked at the opposite. You don’t want to be a type, but being the person that goes against the grain just becomes another type.

Ultimately, what was I going to make of myself in this memoir piece that came from source materials so old, I had long lost any strain of visceral connection with it? I was trying to pick her up, but she was a mother, and I wasn’t sure if I was interested in going in that direction. None of this was made up, and even so, this was not really my story. What I mean by this is that it was something that happened thanks to the mother, me, and the baby, along with a bunch of other people that were falling in and out of our conversations. These other people would be called minor characters in a work of non-memoir, but that was a reductive way of looking at the affects each one created for us. So, in a sense, I was not the author because there were too many things to it that did not have their origin in me. Truly, I had no interest in playing with her kid, but it was that thing that we are expected to do when an infant is present. That means that I didn’t even have the power of volition in this, which makes me less of a source.

If I were writing this script, I’d make the mother upset. He’s horsing around too much, and the playing with her kid is getting prolonged. That would make the story more interesting. In the real event, everybody was being polite, the mother looking on with a stiff smile, probably waiting for it to be over already. She never struck me as the patient type. Actually, I never got to know her because relations were cut off soon after this. There is no chance we could ever meet again today. But still, I have to play it safe and come up with a name for her that feels like her real name, but it has to be a name that is different enough so that she wouldn’t’ recognize it in the event she stumbled on my writing, happened to remember my name, and then recognized herself in this little anecdote that was growing to be more and more meaningless. If I were coming up for a name for her, it was going to be Adeline. Her name was actually striking, and in the time we went on those couple of dates, it really meant something. It was after it was over that it meant everything that was bad. And honestly, I am going to have to embellish those ugly parts with some better details. So for this recounting, I name her Adeline because that is a name that doesn’t mean anything to me yet, and so it can grow with what it could mean in this retelling.

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The Long Reflection of the Present

05 June 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I am thinking back on that time when I made all these paintings. It wasn’t just one time, but they are grouped now by the position I have now in regards to them: they are the past, through which all things seem to be in a continuum, and I am in the present.

I am photographing them, remembering what they meant to me while I was making them. How could I forget when there must have been a time (a single moment) when each one meant everything to me! In one flow of days (that perhaps spilled into weeks), this one naked woman made of acrylic paint was a beauty I was trying to recreate from what could be memory mixed with longing. I can’t remember a thing about it now (not one wish that fueled the drive for this one piece), but it was strong apparently, because it carried me forward to the end, where I deemed it finished. I gloated, and then on to the next.

I will be using their photographs as if they represent my present work, and in a sense, they do because they are the latest that I have shown, but if I am photographing them, it means they have nothing to do with what I am doing now.

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A Philosophical Take on a Mundane Occurrence

17 May 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When putting gas or delaying it until the next drive, what is the proper perspective? I have always thought it was stretching the tank as far as possible in order to do fewer gas station visits in one lifetime.

I haven’t met a person that thinks like this, but I am sure there are a lot of people that that put such things together like that.

I do know some people are procrastinators. They just won’t do it if they can wait a little longer, even if it means that they will have a harder time with it later. This is a completely different angle on the same thing.

Imagine being stuck in traffic on your way to work and then desperately needing to fill the tank! This is a possibility both of these perspectives open up.

I am starting to think that if you want to find a reason for going to the gas station only when you absolutely need to, it’s better to take the position of the procrastinator. You delay in order to put aside that which you need to do, instead of philosophizing about the end of your life measured along a track of how many times you escaped doing something unpleasant.

I don’t want to be the procrastinator, and I don’t want to think the way I have about such things anymore. I am starting to consider little duties like pumping gas as moves that need to be timed. For example, if I have a quarter tank, it may be enough for the weekend, but then what about work on Monday? The right move is to do it now, so that you don’t do it under duress.

Reflecting on this for a second, I have the feeling that this is how most people behave, just from my chats about other’s weekends, including their obligatory trip to the gas station. In fact, it is starting to dawn on me that this is how everybody does it — except procrastinators, of course. I feel that with this new outlook, I have attained a modicum of wisdom, but then that means wisdom is far more common than I expected before I ever started attaining any of it.

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Second Life

29 March 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The art accumulates. More artists in the world and longer-lasting materials forces the situation to pile up at the museums. The proposed solutions are not pretty. All the art in the world is sifted through six echelons of importance. The majority of the art ends up on the lowest rung. Endless symposia are resolved with no easy answer. Next is the fact that cramped spaces are no longer caused by humans themselves but by human works. Something palatable is arrived at. Let’s make synthetic trees and abodes out of the lower art. Yes, it will go beyond its intentions, and many of the artists whose works are so relegated may not be happy with the fate of their art but at least it still exists and put to (some would say) a better use. Paintings drape over rectilinear sculptures to form colorful walls. Installations turn into trees with an interesting look. It’s a win win situation for all but the extremists.

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Rearview Perspective

22 March 2020 by Rey Armenteros

A rearview mirror has a limited breadth. In this small area, I was watching a man in a wheelchair contend with getting out of the car and pressing the latch that would close his trunk from where he probably took out the wheelchair. I was getting comfortable and had not yet turned off the car. I was listening to a song I wanted to finish. And I was looking at this man have to go through his maneuvers. I assumed he worked at the college because he was parked in the “Staff” lot.

The world has made it easier for this person to be independent. The wheelchair was a well-calibrated piece of machinery, helping him direct it at every turn of the wrist. I was studying him in my rearview, suddenly self-conscious of what I must have looked like. I was the routine indifferent jackass who had suddenly had a moment of understanding.

He was gone, and in the limited scope of this rearview, I saw another person get out of her car, and then another that was closer to me, presently closing the door and locking it. Each staff member going to work was one row closer to me. It was layers of distance.

I then took notice of how the electric light in this parking garage did not cross the sunlight coming through various openings, and yet the frontier mixture of the two types of light were running softly together, providing me with the ambient light I could not quite see.

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The Unlikely Chance

02 February 2020 by Rey Armenteros

The image in the middle came about when I was making the image on the left. The one on the left is the backside of the plexiglass; it’s what shows through after applying frontside brushstrokes. In ways I only now understand, the middle one is more interesting. But that version is now gone. The way I work, it was never intended to be seen. It was always intended to be sandwiched between the backside of the plexiglass and the original paint skin that I will adhere to the frontside (which is the one on the right). It was nothing but something that appeared in the middle process of creating a double-sided painting.

When I finish and you are holding the painting in your hand, you will see the right-side version on the surface, and when you turn it around, you’ll see the left-side coming through the transparent plexiglass. But the center version you will only ever see in this photo, and it makes me want to go and make a dozen of them on frontside-intended paint skins so that I can also have it. Why a dozen, one might ask. A dozen is the minimum! I would need to make a dozen because I would need to recreate it under the auspices of spontaneity; this type of painting only works if it were tossed off, and a dozen attempts might give me the desired look one of those times. And it might not. Because spontaneity is more like throwing dice than deliberately moving pieces.

Another way to look at this is that the one-of-a-kind look has already happened, and it is now buried under another image, with no hope of ever coming back — but I’m going to try it anyway. Because that is what I do, follow the path of most resistance.

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No Pause for Effect

08 December 2019 by Rey Armenteros

“I was getting up, and the guy just sat in my seat — didn’t even wait until it cooled off or until I got my things off the table. He couldn’t even know if I was finished with the table. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, of course.”

“So, I was looking at the guy. And he looked up and said something about good morning.”

“So, what did you say?”

“That’s not important. The story was just finished when he said good morning. You don’t get it?”

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My Courtroom Drama

24 November 2019 by Rey Armenteros

You ask me don’t I have this kind of book in me or that one, and I wonder myself. For example, one of you brought up the fact that I have several loose thoughts on the ludicrousness of present-day law, wouldn’t I just love to pen a poetic work on such a theme, to have such a book in my career?

And I first have to say that I truly appreciate your outlook on my body of work. Yes, it is deficient of a courtroom drama to properly expose the shortcomings of the court (all courts), but I can confidently say that I don’t need one. Everything I have to say about such a thing already resides in another book, a book titled The Trial by Franz Kafka. And he happened to say it exactly how I would have wanted to say it, so I find no need to pursue such a thing. On the contrary, whenever I want to recall exactly what I feel about such things, I merely have to read The Trial, and it all comes back.

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