Photo by Amy Groleau
Hello everyone!
I hope everyone had a great January. Here in Vermont it’s gray. Very gray. The general mood I’ve been encountering tells me we need some sunshine, asap!
In recent newsletters (the previous four) I’ve been writing about slivers of my life as I am able to recall them. I haven’t been writing about every deep dark corner (we all have them) of my life, though I have been touching on some parts of my life that I’m willing to share.
Please do keep in mind that I in no way advocate, suggest, or recommend things in my life to anyone. We all are on our own journeys which include a multitude of what later turn out to be “good” and “bad” choices based on a multitude of factors.
I began writing Part 5 this week with the intention of covering the rest of my time in high school, after the first year. The more I wrote, the more I realized that, not only would I not be able to cover everything, but that there are some things about my life that I’m not fully comfortable with sharing to “the general public.” In addition to that, I wrote about three pages and began to wonder who might fall asleep while reading it and that maybe I should write about something different in my next newsletter, just to break things up a little.
So this week, I will give a general overview of what was going on for me in high school and then write more about a few specific areas later on in part 6.
Questions Answered
Where did your artistic journey begin? (Part 5 - more of the highschool years)
My first year at highschool ended. I never experienced having my head flushed in a toilet (did anyone?) I was singing in the high school chorus as a second bass, hanging around in the audio/video room and learning more about black and white photography. I had begun to make friends with some of the older kids who hung around the auditorium, partially because of the chorus and its proximity to it. There were some quirky theater folk who hung out there as well.
My first year in high school I didn’t do that well. Better than my older brother had, which helped to distinguish me from his legacy. I mostly got B’s and a few C’s. I vaguely recall my parents' concern with it. I think it had more to do with who I chose to make friends with though.
During my second year, in chorus class, I became smitten with a girl. She had brown eyes and curly-ish locks of brown hair. She was a year younger than I was. Another young woman, in her third year, would always talk to me, which ended by her punching me in the arm. Years later, I would realize that this actually meant she liked me. However, you don’t know what you don’t know and I worked up the courage to find out more about the girl with brown hair.
[ Note: I recall thinking as a small child that because I had blue eyes, I would grow up attracted to people with blue eyes. Later, some event happened that I don’t recall and I decided I wanted to do the opposite. It would be interesting to figure out what it was. ]
Doing my best to hear everyone’s name during attendance, I decided to see if I could find out her name without actually going over and just introducing myself. Upon figuring out her name, I slowly worked up the nerve to talk with her. Without going into too much detail, I will say that we ended up dating off and on for about two years. It was fun when I look back at it. Not without its tragedy. Maybe, I’ll write about it someday in greater detail, though I don’t know how relevant it is to my visual art. It did impact my creative writing in English classes though, especially poetry.
About this time, thin whiskers were growing. I wanted to start shaving and after my brother stopped laughing, my father reluctantly let me use his electric razor. Not too often, maybe every few days. At Christmas time that year, one of the presents I received was an electric razor, a Norelco. It had three shaving heads. It wasn’t long before I became frustrated at the lack of dexterous control the electric razor provided. My whiskers were probably not super thick, even though I thought so then.
They would grow and become thicker.
I was required to shave now. Mostly because if I let it go, it was noticeable and I felt self-conscious about it.
After a while, I requested a razor and shaving cream. I wanted to do the opposite again and, in my case, it worked out well. I cut myself occasionally, though I felt it provided me with the desired control I desired.
In addition to school, girls, and shaving, I was working at 242 Main. 242 Main was a teen center started by the Burlington Mayor’s Youth Office under then Mayor, Bernie Sanders. It was somewhat of an oasis for me. I was making a little money and meeting lots of other kids, many of whom had similar rebellious streaks.
There was a lot of Punk music. If you look up 242 Main online, you can spend lots of time reading (and listening) all about it. Do so at your own peril.
I would arrive at work and cook food for others, my first experience cooking in a restaurant, if you could call it a restaurant. There was a flat-topped grill and a fryer. Making round steak fries, or “cottage fries” was a skill I excelled at. It was also my first real introduction to coffee, which I was responsible for keeping full in addition to other duties, such as sweeping and mopping, and occasionally cleaning out the grease trap that smelled like a mixture of fermenting grapes and rotting grease. That part wasn’t fun and I’m glad that I never had to do that again in any other restaurant I worked at later on.
As the day became later, I would stop cooking and “work the door” taking money to pay for the bands that played there (see the photo above.) Burlington bands with names such as Screaming Broccoli, The Hollywood Indians, and The Wards would regularly play shows, in addition to “big name” punk bands on tour. Kids with tall mohawks held in place by Knox gelatin would come and slam dance to the punk music on a weekly basis. Even though 242 Main was supposed to be drug and alcohol free, many older young adults (in their 20s) from the “old school” punk crowd would show up and regularly party behind Burlington’s Memorial Auditorium where The Teen Center (aka 242) was located.
I was exposed to people smoking pot and drinking 40 oz bottles of beer. It became natural to let people do their own thing, unless they were obviously intoxicated and then it was my duty to find my manager, an absolutely wonderful woman named Kathy Lawrence, to let her know so that she could handle it.
Even though I hung out with a group of misfits and punks from all over the state who came to see the bands that played there, I was also listening to a lot of Bob Marley and The Wailers, Peter Tosh, and other Reggae at home and later in the car that my father let me drive. It wasn’t long before other kids became aware of my dual musical tastes and began to tease me about it, calling my a “pippy.” Short for punker-hippy. I didn’t mind it was fun being part of a group, any group.
It didn’t take much Reggae before I became aware of marijuana. Primarily from the music, but also kids hanging outside during concerts.
I began to wonder what all the fuss was about. Health classes in high school didn’t help answer the many questions a curious teenager might have. With the whole “just say no” anti-drug campaign in full force in the 1980s, and all the talk of marijuana being a “gateway” drug, I started to internal question some of the messages we were presented with. Especially because older kids would verbally bash what was being taught as nothing more than goodie-two-shoes government propaganda.
Curious as I was (and am) I decided that I needed to go to the library and do my own independent research on the matter and figure out if, and any, of the drugs that were labeled “bad” were actually harmful. I spent hours reading multiple books that I could find in the high school library during free study periods, searching for countering points of view, actual medical studies, and common threads. Not long after, I tried pot for the first time, having determined that it was probably much safer than we were led to believe.
I also came to form an opinion that marijuana was probably a gateway drug for a very good reason. That it wasn’t as dangerous as people were being taught, and as such, people figured that if that was “okay” maybe all the other drugs were safer than the literature made it out to be. Whether there's any weight to that idea, I’ll never really know. It made sense to me at the time though, especially considering how overly prescribed the populace of the United States was, and still is.
I was a weirdly “responsible” person who didn’t really want to be doing anything terribly bad for my overall health and I took it into my own hands to try to figure out what was truly risky and what was probably “okay.”
As high school continued, I would get an occasional comment from a few teachers about my hair getting longer and my scruffy appearance. I don’t think it had the intended effect. In fact, between discovering that some of the things in health class were most likely propaganda, if not outright lies, my long hair, German field pants, and jungle-style combat boots (which I wore almost all year round) the comments made me want to “prove” to adults that I could straddle a thin line as a misfit and do well in school. By the end of my senior year, I had obtained very close to a 4.0 grade average.
It occurs to me now that my story is growing like ragweed in the summertime. Even though I’ve only painted a very brief introduction of what I remember in high school so far, I will do my best to dive into a few select experiences next time without covering things that I suspect many teenage boys go through, at least in some capacity. I realize that I didn’t really get to much of what I had said I would last time, so next time I’ll do my best to cover:
The death of my choir ‘career’, a teacher named Mr. Greenwald, ceramics, physics and being the yearbook editor.
News of late
- Slowly people are showing up at the Generator Makerspace for Open Jewelry Studio night. I hope that I’m helping them. The feedback has been positive so far, so I guess that’s a good sign.
- I’ve continued to work on converting my drawings to vector graphics. It’s a long slow process that I’m hoping pays dividends later on.
- I was able to find a replacement for my old 2014 Prius. It’s a huge load off of my mind as I generally dislike the entire car shopping experience and the whole process was taking a lot of my mental capacity. It was sad to say goodbye to that car, even though I only had it for about three and a half years. It helped drive my son to college several times, a few of which included most, if not all, of his dorm room. I’m still amazed it was able to do that when called upon.
In the Works
I’m currently working on cleaning up a charcoal casting I did for a Fehu pendant I did late last week. I’m also feeling like switching over to my new web shop provider, even though it’s not quite ready. In addition to those things, I think that I’m going to choose one of my pendant-shaped knots and begin working on that so that I build a bit more confidence before making a cuff bracelet with a knot on top. Oh, and taxes. I want to get those started because that’s almost as much fun as car shopping!
I do occasionally take pictures of the pieces I’m working on and if you are interested you can see them on my Instagram account.
Until next time,
Justin