My Great Grandfather Was the Waterboy 2018. Acrylic on panel, 48 x 24"
The title of this post is lettered on a restaurant marquee in my little town of repetitive woe. As an artist and overly sensitive canary bird, I realize at least once daily, that I am sick in a sick society. Today I think I’m gaining interest in the money, the cash, moolah, simoleon grease that, in endless abundance of barrels, lubes the roughest, most decrepit cultural tubes. I’ve got to get out of the world I’m in, and all the free trials have been exhausted. Yes, I’ve tried meditation—the Krisnamurti jive check-to-check thinking people mumble in the head straight to the $2,000 cremation they can’t afford. Yes, I’ve tried hair shirts, self-flaggelation and Eastern philosophy out the yin-yang. I think those methods could work among like-minded and visibly rib-caged ascetics rumbling belly gongs in the same mountain village of simplicity. But that’s not here. That’s sooo not here. Here I’ve tried wage slavery, entreprenuership, theft of wife’s bank account, near starvation to save a nickel, converting cans to nickels, and along a similar vein, hawking paintings and hack writing to make a few bucks. But I want a million bucks because that’s what it will take to make the great escape. But where to?
Beautiful Sutton-cum-Lound. The home of my patronym—the paternal ancestors. In 1598 William Throope was churchwarden of Anglican St. Wilfrid’s in Scrooby (a few miles up the road from Sutton-cum-Lound). Mayflower William Brewster’s Dad was baliff to the archbishop there, and according to my ancestor William, “repeatinge of sermons publiquelie in the churche witout authoritie for anie thinge theie knowe.” As we now know, Senior Brewster was gettin’ all Puritan-like on the status-quo, and his son William would take this angry God gobbledygook across an ocean to plant the seed of the cultural hell hole we live in today. A generation later, in 1660, William Throope’s great grandson, William, followed the Brewster Puritans to America to join in the poisoning of Wampanoag ears while cancelling their bloodline with a multitude of ravenous microbes the great pissed off God forgot to mention.
Yes I have oatmeal! Yes, I have a guitar! Yes, an automobile, Netflix movies, dinner dates, smartphone, underwear, cash flow, affordable living— Yes, yes, yes! But what good is this security bubble when it pops and the air sprays McDonald’s farts and diesel cheese? I am so tired of picking up the pieces of this broken down, overworked, exploited, propagandized, teenage-brained culture. I need the million bucks to settle in the land I was re-made to live in.
Dear Sutton-cum-Lound, please take me and my wife. I will paint your pictures, write your history (a part of mine also). I’ll pour your pints in the pub for pennies. Just sponsor our housekeeping in your beautiful, ancient village. Start us up in a little flat by the village green. Yes, I’ll clean the sheep shit. Yes, I’ll bury your dead and one day you can bury us in the same churchyard beside the 16th century Throopes—William and Jenett, Thomas and Elizabeth, William and Isabell… It will be worth your while. Resident artist/historian for the next 20+ years. I’ll work for room and board. I’ll work on my accent. No future generation needs to know how you saved a sick man from his sick society.
We’re sober (enough), Rose and I. We’re older. A good, creative risk. Invest in us, Sutton-cum-lound. I can’t guarantee return on investment. But I can make for certain a grateful return, and never-to-leave again promise.
At St. Batholomews church, gardeners Ron and Rose make flowers spring.
I will pour your pints for fee, Christopher!
