After my Mother, Margaret "Miss Margy" Gatherum Smith, passed away in the fall of 1999, I was asked for legal purposes to write a brief description of her and of what she meant, and continues to mean, to me. Long have I debated whether or not to make it public, whether it should be put up for the purview of other eyes. Finally, I have decided it should. I do not consider it ideal, and it could never be considered complete. But it is somehing, and something is always better than nothing. Or so they say.

My artwork has increasingly drawn on traditional biblical and mythological themes, hearkening (I hope) back to the traditions of the master artists of the historical West. Along those lines I did a drawing interspersed with text entitled "David". After considerable thought on this theme, I decided to try my had at expanding on the theme, discussing a full day in the life of the King of Israel in his older days. This story is the result of that work.

In Consideration of Grace
(Jill's Essay)
December 2000

Recently a friend of mine, Miss Jill Lambert, posed an interesting question to me: what does it mean to be graceful? I found myself completely wanting for an answer and promised her to pursue the conundrum further. This work is the result of my machinations. . . prehaps it would be better described as a collection of thoughts leading to a thesis rather than an essay. . . or perhaps not. Regardless, I think its scrumptious.

This story remains a work in progress. . . I have some ideas for what I want to go on while Malley's mother and the father of the narrator talk, but I haven't figured out how to make it work. Regardless, after having delved into several histories, movies, etc. on the Vietnam War, I found that I needed to react. I didn't think that I had the personal experience to really relate an actual scene from a war, so I wrote about what it might be like for the son of a Vietnam vet to help his father confront his demons. This story has definite potential, I think, but I still want to make it something more. Look for changes in the future as my studies of the Vietnam War continue.

This piece, inspired by the Biblical book of Revelations and an earlier poem of mine entitled A Saturday in Virginia traces a day in the life of one of the Four Horsemen, Death.

This short story is an entirely fictional version of how my life might have turned out. . . and I can't take all the credit. I was listening to a song entitled Unemployed Boyfriend by the alternative rock group Everclear, a tune about a man falling in love with a woman and everything just working out, the kind of song that is so hard to write, happy yet still good. Rare and wonderful. And so, as I listened to this song over and over again, well, I decided that I wanted to try my far less delicate hand at this sort of thing, this humble work being the result.

I wanted to try my hand at writing an essay, a work that exists solely for its own sake. This is it. . . an essay, written in the style of an instructional pamphlet, about my pal Robb "Horsestall." Its all sorta' true, except for the parts that aren't. Enjoy.

So, I was shopping for furniture, and in particular, I was shopping for a dining room set. Well, I ended up buying a fairly nomal table and three fairly normal chairs. . . and one red chair. I was sitting in my living room and glanced over into the dining room, and there it sat, crimson against the white of the walls and light tones of the wood. And so I wrote a story. About a chair. A red chair.

The very true story of how I became the man I am today, how I fell, and the journey that let me realize I needed to, and could, put it back together.

Thinking about making people think about things.