At his trial in 399 BC, Socrates proclaimed the unexamined life: not worth living.

At my trial in the early 1990's, I proclaimed the over-examined life: just about jack.

Me and Socrates.

Childhood in the 40's, a teenager of the 50's, my class graduated from high school directly into the 60's so-called "Human Potential Movement". That peristaltic slog through twenty years of nincompoopism, when every psychic-whim got so overly examined, I saw the: "best minds of my generation" finally crawl up their own butts and disappear.

It was awful.

Later a few of them crawled out again and opened hip restaurants, gardening centers, trendy surplus stores, and ice cream franchises.

I, myself, and --- me, ME, me --- in fact, represent one of the last standing members of what "ME's" have come to think of as the, "Invisible Generation," although you won't hear that term anywhere else probably. I made it up. But it's true, our ME-shirt reads, "Your Problem Is Obvious".

Let's see: Adele Davis' megavitamin therapy (she died of cancer), hypnosis, individual therapy, small group therapy, big group therapy, Gurdjieff, TM, Emmett Fox, fasting at the Religious School of Natural Hygiene, (the leader was later exposed on national television as, "Arthur, The Happy Starver Guy). Then there was Joseph Campbell (I followed my bliss, just never caught up), natural herbs, unnatural herbs, natural doctors, unnatural doctors, obsessive chiropractic, every test from the The Lucher Color, to the Minnesota Multiphasic, jogging, (right in there with Jim Fixx, "... you can stop running now Jim, you're dead" ... Nautilus, treadmilling, treadwalking, treadcrawling, treadgroping, Bonnie Pruden's Pain Erasure therapy to erase the pain of all that running, the McDougall Program, psychics, Loving Relationships Training: Rebirthing with Sondra, NLP, psychics, lucid dreaming, Tibetan mysticism, Tantra, Tarot, bodywork: including years of Swedish deep tissue, plus trigger point therapy, not to mention thirty years of barking like a bull elephant seal: art, Art. ART!

I even hugged Leo Buscaglia once.

Lucky for me, he was appearing on my television at the time, and I was drunker than a dead cow.

I reluctantly confess to catching the twilight's last gleaming of comet Terry Cole Whitaker as she slipped below the horizon, somewhere east of Maui, I think. Was she purty or what.

I skipped yuppie fire-walking, then in audio tapes alone, put at least one new set of tires on Tony Robbins' Rolls Royce, including a spare.

Somewhere along in there Marianne Williamson met her Matronly Miracle, which I somehow missed completely. Well, it was her Matronly Miracle after all, not mine. Then too, my higher power at the time --- The Dark Overlords --- insisted I not go near that woman with a wiggly stick, and you don't mess with TDO.

I don't know how I managed but I actually skipped Erhard Seminar Training altogether. Man. Whew! Good break too. A lot of my friends went through EST and it not only made them worse, it made them a lot worse.

After a John Bradshaw lecture once, I left wondering if breathing was an addiction. (note: it is, but only in yoga). Later, I saw Bradshaw appearing on Public television, wearing a particularly inexcusable sweater --- a dark brown, high-pile carpet affair, perhaps knitted by one of his Vermont granny groupies, which made his head look the size of a bearded soft ball. His "outer adult" stood at the podium pontificating on how ninety nine percent of the population of the world was addicted to everything from sex, to Hostess Ding Dongs --- to sex, with Hostess Ding Dongs.

The camera occasionally panned to an audience of middle-aged "adult children" holding Teddy bears in their laps, gazing up at Bradshaw as if they simply could not believe DADDY TEDDY stayed home from work just for them --- somehow, having forgotten evidently, they had paid hundreds of dollars for taped series', videos, books, seminars, hotel rooms, car fares, air trips, and restaurants. Then the National Public Eyeball would move back to Bradshaw and there would be that little bearded head on top of that brown mountain again, and --- freeze frame --- Bradshaw was addicted too. That is, to the celebrity of appearing on television as Papa Bear mainlining his own endorphin releases while being an author of lots of books and tapes.

Wouldn't you know it ... Bradshaw was the only guy, ever, to describe exactly the shame I was going through.

I couldn't Bear it.

I tried a twelve step program once called, Sex - Love - Addiction. It was in a church basement in Marin County. I got there a little early. Three men sat in a semicircle, each in the exact center of a separate full sized couch, like they were waiting for a porno to start. A fourth empty couch completed the circle.

The room reeked of mildew.

Like a trained doorman, I checked all three instantly --- Corte Madera inbreds for sure. Smut "brothers," if you will. Sagging lips, red cheeks, large flat knuckles. All three couches were ripped in places, as if the last meeting had ended in a knife fight --- upholstery cotton erupting from the wounds, cascading to the floor in white ponytails.

"Excuse me, ah ... the men's room?," I asked?

Spawn of Swamp Thing and Squeaky Fromme, pointed toward a dark hallway. The back of his hand was covered with orange fur. This was the only church I'd ever been in where telephone numbers were scrawled on the restroom walls. I left.

Endless philosophical conversations with friends finally brought me to a way of thinking that was so refined it was useless. Was I truly happy for your success or were my "good feelings" for you just another, even more subtle mask of jealousy?

All this soul searching finally brought me to my knees beneath the Golden Arches on the Miracle Mile near San Anselmo, California, gorging on double fat-burgers and reading Chronicle stories about the alleged tiger spots on Michael Jackson's alleged scrotum.

I squirrel-caged. Innocent children at the next table coloring Ronald McDonald pictures with crayons were just "new fools" to me, and after thirty years, my paintings seemed less important than theirs.

It was the early 90's. I had "issssssues". They hung around me in McDonald's like heifer farts as I pondered the social implications of John Bobbitt's space-walking-weenie. In North Beach in the sixties, issues were called "hang-ups". In the thirties they were "defects of character". In the original thirteen colonies they were evidence of Satan and could get you pilloried and splattered with lettuce and tomato --- come to think of it, not unlike a hard yellow bench at McDonald's.

I felt trapped in the tourist gallery art scene and longed to be out of it altogether. Supplying salespeople --- mostly college dropouts, lately elevated to "Art Consultants" --- with paintings from the heart --- hurt, physically. Muscle aches ran through every part of my body. My back kept going out. Pulling rent together every month on a 4,800 square foot studio, while selling my work as "Klingon couch paintings" had become a grinding stress.

In the early 60's, the first gallery to show my work (not glass paintings, I didn't start glass painting until 1970) was owned by a Greek in his forties named Harry. It was two doors down from where I worked in San Francisco, at The Fox and the Hound coffeehouse on upper Grant Avenue in North Beach. I would take Harry a couple of paintings at a time and he would sell them and try to steal the money.

Charlie Ware, Mark Rainsley and several other of my artist friends had paintings there too. Harry's place was what in those days we called a "picture gallery". That is, he didn't have special shows or openings for individual artists. Harry hung anything, from a framed dumpster trash (cigar-box lids) to "Rembrandt" etchings. He even made his own paintings in the basement. Dreadful night scenes of city skylines. Using small pieces of cardboard Harry would daub "skyscrapers" onto a Masonite boards he had previously painted black. These "impressionistic" works were signed: "Reggilo" or "Tuffio" --- or anything, as long as the name had three syllables and ended in "o," like Picasso.

And, "o" brother, this was bad: whenever a woman entered Harry's lair, the man could be merciless. Any woman, alone, that is, when the gallery was devoid of other customers.

Any adult woman, any style of dress. It didn't matter.

Over the years you see, Harry had developed his own personal version of Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festival, which we artists, huddling in the back of the gallery, pretended not to notice. First Harry would greet his new customer, visiting for awhile, discussing various works, staying "with her" until she had drifted into beholding some particular piece, transfixed by the Great Spirit of Art Collecting. "Crossed over," so to speak, into the state James Joyce described as "aesthetic arrest," also known to sales folk as the infamous STOP".

Harry's sideshow act then --- dangerous as walking a slack-rope over an alligator pit --- evoked the same hush over his audience.

The man (or unutterable slime mold if you will) possessed the considerable carnival talent of being able to drop to his knees quickly, silently and without disturbing a wink of peripheral vision --- or the slightest current of air in the room --- while simultaneously unreeling a Godzilla tongue to retire Gene Simmons. A real Ripley's ripper if ever there was one. And then of course, being the sort of guy Harry was, he would air-lick her bottom, missing her skirt by microns. Up and down, up and down. And then, using the same unholy gift in reverse, retract his tongue, while rising once again to a full upright position, relaxed and ready to speak. And then AMAZINGLY, ever the maestro of Elysian composure, actually sell a painting to the woman, while we stumbled down the basement stairs choking on mildewed air.

Life in the big city. What can I say.

Tourist galleries are where "wannabeat" painters (how can anybody be pitious enough to be a 'failed' Beat?) go when they're ready to jump, yet need rent for six months, to wrap up details. True, when I was getting started in the seventies, about the only "galleries" left selling paintings were Scandinavian furniture stores. Harry had long since retired. Museums were showing cinderblocks on cinderblocks. Naked cinderblocks.

Cinderblocks in review.

Cinderblocks with fur.

Cinderblocks in lines, rows, piles, in pyramids and broken in pieces on the floor, and with eggs and butter and dust bunnies and postage stamps stuck on them.

I missed my calling for sure. See, you could still get a huge Art Grant from the government or some foundation, even today, for cinderblocks. Just be sure you make them cross-cultural cinderblocks, with an environmental twist on global industrialzation ... you know:

THIS: pyramid is built with three hundred cinderblocks, the average number used in the third world for human habitation for sixteen families, sleeping in shifts.

Like I had a choice.

Tourist galleries at least presented your paintings for sale, year round, whereas, elegant galleries with connections to society collectors, museums and heavy hitter corporate collections, offered shows only once a year, usually for one month only --- plus, they had waiting lists of artists booked years in advance. And of course, they loathed space paintings on glass more than they loathed Thomas Kinkade, and he wasn't even around yet. More often than not, just walking through their door, sent them scuttling off to the coffee closet like Armani lobsters.

Typical comment from an "elegant" art dealer: "Have you tried selling in the street? I should think you might do well there. Oh, by the way, on your way out, here, take this copy of: 'Think And Grow Rich'. Some bum dropped it in here last week, with his sketches, when we were having him kicked around on the floor by security".

Typical comment from a tourist gallery owner: "Got any more red one's Dave? We need red ones".

Red ones are good.

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