Jack Tuttle yelled at me that night, "... here Goldie, here!," as if I were his Labrador retriever.

And there stood the chief enemy of my life, San Luis Tiger's varsity football coach, thirty feet away, bending toward me, motioning with a stick, some scrap of board he must have scavenged off the ground --- or ripped off the bleachers with his teeth.

The next moment, Tuttle was handing the splintery thing to me, barking in my face, "When I say GO! you get your Twinkling ass out there fast, and scrape the mud out'a Varner's cleats! ... he can't run in this f....n' mud!"

Today, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would ram that stake through Tuttle's heart.

I was no Buffy.

This was 1959.

We were in Barstow, California, in the last half of a miserable football game in pouring rain when I heard, Tuttle calling. The team had driven the hundred miles or so to Barstow High in a yellow bus through a serious storm. Now, Vorpal sword in hand, I stood next to Nemesis, quaking like an adolescent aspen.

The S&M undertones of scraping cleated boots would only occur to me decades later. "Running" out with baskets of glass water jugs was bad enough. Put it this way. The job never evoked any noticeable envy.

But this!

This was public execution.

And "run fast?"

Egads.

I was a terrible runner.

Tuttle not only called me "Goldie" and "Twinkles," he taunted me every day as: "the physical moron".

Simply, Jack "Semper Fi" Tuttle was the guy you got if you wanted a winning football team, and, our school Principal, Frank Holt, had an actual pigskin head, with a pointed brain to match, so he went out and hired himself a full-blown psycho. Yes, old "Smiley," hired himself one gen-u-ine: "soldier of football". This was all about Frank after all. He would have hired Haggar the Horrible.

Heck ... he did.

Holt and Tuttle taught me that when it comes to separating character assassination from football, it's such a stretch I don't have to feel bad about telling on them.

Look Frank, I forgive you.

But not because the San Luis Tigers won. They sure did. And good for them.

With collateral.

That, would be me, sir.

The walking Steve Martin movie.

At least as water-boy I could fool myself into thinking I was pulling off some sort of "team" scenario. It wasn't easy but I could.

But scraping boots with a stick!

I was known in sports for tripping over my own Converses, spraining my ankle, and stuff like that. I was a good looking dork, which tricked people, but never in team sports.

I could swim. Talk about water boy.

The coach even used me as the class demonstrator. I was a pool and beach lifeguard, avid swimmer / scuba diver with a perfect Australian crawl. I mean perrrrfect, mate! Hey, water is swishy, what can I say. If a ball came flying anywhere near me though, I cringed. I was afraid of getting hurt.

See, considering how much life hurt already, I believed "playing a game," that guaranteed getting hurt even more, was just stupid.

I just wanted beer.

The inevitable "time-out" lay before me wider than Satan's own butt crack, and that's the truth of the situation right there. Think of this story as cowboy poetry. Pretend we're on a nice porch in rocking chairs.

"Run!," Tuttle yelled ... and off I thundered ...

... "faster! ... oh s..t!" ... trailing off behind ...

I prayed everybody in the stands was looking at cheerleader chests instead of me. It was raining, so only some school mates were there, a scraggly group of frigid, wet, pimple poppers. This was the 50's. We invented pimples. Really, think about it. There were no pimples before us. I can prove it. I also wore blue suede shoes to school, and carried a little suede buffer in my pocket, in case anybody stepped on them.

San Luis High Class of 1959 just had their 45th Reunion, (February '04) and God Bless Them --- I love them all.

Kiss My Class!

I wish I could have made it to Sunny Acres there with them. I hear they enjoyed Tuscan meat loaf, with lima beans and rolls. The last time I saw my classmates I was being carried out of the Graduation Dance on a stretcher. Well, they saw me actually, I didn't see them. Every ten years I've shuddered and stayed away. But hey, who's to say. Maybe we can get Tuttle to give a speech. Let's see, he'd be 88 then ... hum.

Man, that night in Barstow, running out on the field, in my heart I tried to be my big brother's hero in the Sunday Funnies, "Prince Valiant" saving the San Luis Tigers from a mud dragon. And that's all I'll ever say, or write about that.

Some things are too personal to share. Ha!

This story though, I have to tell.

Dang ... wish I didn't.

Then too: Good Richard "The Brilliant" Able, is gone, and I'm sad about that. Richard helped me so much, all through high school. He had a queen's tongue driven by intellectual jet fuel that kept me laughing. Very important. He was football manager in my junior year, getting me on as his assistant manager. I "graduated" then, directly from Richard, into the: Lair Of The White Worm, for my senior year. In other words, it was Richard who trained me for the job of inventorying uniforms, etc., then got me on with Tuttle, so I could "keep my enemy close," as he explained.

Richard and I bonded as sophomores, over Tuttle. That year, the "coach" yanked my guts out every morning. He never missed a chance. In roll-call he would call our names, we'd answer "here" of course. Tuttle always skipped over my name, saved it for last, then said, "oh yea, is the physical moron here?" Then, stood there and made me say "here" before he would excuse the class.

This was so humiliating it was killing me inside.

Richard helped, using his considerable power with a certain Mrs. Cooley, a mysterious woman who hovered about the halls, tending a flock of the brightest students who treated her as if they were Royal Courtiers to Queen Mary. I never knew Cooley's actual school title. You didn't see the woman, unless you were gifted in some way. Otherwise, Mrs. Cooley had a way of looking through you. When I won a scholarship to art school, just before graduation, suddenly I was "in" with Mrs. Cooley. She gushed all over me. Richard was her favorite. She got him on as football manager, because he needed protection like I did. Intellectually, Richard was the most brilliant guy in ten counties.

Being "Football Manager" also came with an "A" in P.E. on every report card.

My friend also, put up with "piles of Tuttle," so to speak, so this piece is for Richard too.

Man, that kid was brighter than Halogen.

He actually ran circles around Tuttle. Richard was so mercurial, so far ahead of the coach, so "in control" of where every uniform, key, football, ankle wrap, unguent, order form, postage stamp, petty cash, mimeograph machine, actually WAS, etc., that Tuttle couldn't run the office without him. Able taught me his secrets in private whispering sessions. How to keep Tuttle guessing, and needing me after Richard was gone and the job was mine, so Tuttle would lighten up. That was the important thing, getting Tuttle to lighten up.

And Richard taught me well.

I couldn't pull it off .

I just took pictures, and painted pictures, and looked at pictures. Life was all about pictures for me, somehow. Weird, huh.

Anyway, in Barstow that night, Varner looked at me like I'd run into the team with a Luger, not a picture.

"What do you WANT?" Mike shouted like a quarterback. I told him.

He shrugged and lifted a ponderous boot toward me showing a slab of adobe inches thick. I fell to my knees and began attacking it. I remember giving it my all. I really wanted to show some brilliant mud scraping. I mean, I wanted to take that stick and have that mud peel away in one big chunk, maybe two, and Varner would be loosed, running free again, and we'd win the game and everybody would slap me on the back and say, "Wow, David ... you know, we won the game tonight because of you really. If you hadn't made it out there and got that mud out'a Varner's cleats using such a fantastic scraping technique, Mike wouldn't have won the game, and we wouldn't be sharing our beer and girls with you, and giving you an honorary Letterman "A" for Art, because, see, by winning that game in Barstow, we went on to become the All Conference Team that year, and YOU helped. We love you David!"

The next memory is tattooed on my brain like a dripping dagger.

Somehow, while shifting body weight from one knee to the other, my right kneecap just sort of shifted out of place, and took a hike over to the side of my leg, causing me to fall over on the field squealing like a sow.

Take it from me, scraping mud from a quarterback's cleats in front of your classmates --- rainstorm or not --- is just about the most unfortunate place on earth to be in the first place, let alone, discover a trick-knee.

I'd never even heard: "trick-knee," before.

Also take it from me, you never want to be a water boy rolling around in the mud in the middle of a football game waving a stick in the air squealing like a sow.

Later, some French intellectual even wrote a one-act about it. I saw the play myself, once, funded by the NEA, in a warehouse theater in San Francisco's Fort Mason Cultural Center, from the back row of course, wearing sun glasses, drunk, but still. It looked pretty good. Understanding neither French, nor mime, however, I missed a lot. Quite a lot actually. What I did get was about this puppet I think, with a stick, who falls through a football game into Satan's butt crack, and then he can't get out, something like that.

Helmeted schoolmates milled, looming, quite bewildered.

I can still see the coach through their legs, like this distorted puppet figure escaped from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, complete with a red bird-beak, yellow claws and part of a step ladder sticking out of his ass, jumping up and down on the fifty yard line, waving his arms, making weird, murderous, semaphore signs.

Even viewing him through tears and field grass, I clearly read ..."Get ... up ... you ... f...in' ... fag ... idiot!"

I sucked it up, pulled up trying to stand, couldn't quite make it, grabbed my knee, pain knifing in horrific stabs. Man it was bad! I fell again, crying out. One player asked me, "what's wrong?"

There was a black and gold question mark on his helmet.

Likely Varner.

Mike always was a fair minded sort who never belittled me, even choosing sides, which I know was hard. Thank you Mike. I saw his picture on the Class of '59 website and he looks like he's still okay. A lot of my schoolmates were good. They just wanted to play ball. Mike would say "hi" in the hallway when a lot of others looked away.

Anyway, here comes daddy-gong-legs: Ignoramus J. Tuttle, stomping straight toward me through the rain, using his most ridiculous John Wayne pin-fart walk --- pounding heel holes in the turf and shrugging his shoulders, in the: international sign for: Impending Cadaver Dismemberment.

ICD.

And yelling all the way, "What in the f.... is wrong with you!?"

"My knee ...," I'm shrieking back ...

Tuttle stomped up, dropped down, grabbed my knee with both hands, and ...

"Squeeeeeeel!," I yelled.

"Trick knee huh! Straighten your leg!," he commanded.

Why, it's another job for: "EL Tigre!"

Tuttle grabbed my ankle in one hand and forced my leg straight while ramming the kneecap roughly back in place with a crunch, causing a horrific pain, EXPEDITING the football game right through my sorry kneecap, as if I were a THING.

Tuttle took my forearms, leaned back and forcefully yanked me to my feet barking, "Now get off MY field!"

I took a step, cried out, and fell.

If only on my sword.

Look Jack, I forgive you, finally, after 45 years. AND, I've got to tell the story, so screw your cap down tight, and brake your wheelchair on both sides because we're coming up on Devil's Curve.

He yelled, "It's a trick knee for C....t's sake, get up and walk!"

The coach then lifted my arm, pulling up hard, then over his head and shoulder for support. Then, leaning on the one man in life I truly hated from eyeballs to liver, we "walked" off the field looking like some three-legged sideshow freak with two heads: one biting down tears, the other yelling at me to walk like a MAN!

For about nine lurching steps an eerie hush fell over the field.

Then booing, jeering and laughter rose from the stands. For decades I remembered that awful sound as a roaring sound, and even wrote about it that way, but you know, it wasn't. It was worse, more like a sustained smattering of pitiful jeering. There weren't that many people there.

Mercifully, I cannot remember one second of the ride home in the bus, as THAT must be locked away somewhere deep in my "dorkest" dungeon.

I was the only injury of the game.

Well, unless it was the same game where: "Jack in the Crotch," had our player break the leg of the other team's KEY player.

Compared to what kid's "know" today, we were naive from the top's of our flattops, to the bottom's of our rolled-under Levis. Tuttle's blarney was unlike anything we'd ever heard or seen before. At home we were watching Ozzie and Harriet, not Ozzy and Sharon.

Tuttle played loud fight music in the locker room before games. Fine. I even liked it.

He also gave half-time "speeches," that in retrospect, were like something right out of BIZARRO Magazine. Tuttle was combination of Father Flanagan suffering from mercury poisoning, and Pat O'Brien playing a criminal Kanute Rockne as a lion trainer. He "loved his boys" as he put it. If HIS Tiger's were losing HE was capable of agonizingly raw admissions of "brotherhood" and "Semper-Fi-Simpering". I saw Tuttle blubber great gushes of tears down his face to motivate the team. Jack Tuttle could turn medieval at times --- downright shamanic at others.

Like Jimmy Swaggart, I think Tuttle was another histrionic trapped in a man's body.

At half-time, I was also the artist with whatever "detachment" I could muster, sitting on the front steps of the bus, or on top of the lockers with a Yashika 635 camera, taking pictures, and listening to Tuttle's hullaballoo, which is why I remember it so well. Those great football photos in the '59 Annual that got no credit? I took those.

Tuttle was: 1/3 drill sergeant, 1/3 Frank Capra B-movie actor, and: 1/3 stew of psychobilly character flaws, technically, another mongrel Norse / Gael, including more than one sprig of Carson McCuller's "Reflections In A Golden Eye," as in, Brando's infamous candy wrapper scene.

King Tut ... ("Tut" for short) ... that's what we "boys" called him. Ha!

After my mangling in the mud, I was pretty sure nothing could ever belittle me to that depth again. That I could be caught poisoning the three-legged seeing eye dog of some elderly football coach --- piece of cake.

I was wrong.

Tut had other plans.

I am pictured in the 1959 "Tiger Tales" year book as one of four football "managers" for the varsity team, and in the photo I look pretty good for a kid who is dying inside.

Ah youth.

Egore's twisted psyche was potty-mouthed in more ways than one.

Forgive me the following paragraph. Truth heals, they say. You may want to skip it, if you're already healed.

In my senior year, as part of my "managerial duties" the coach had me working in his office with him, (releasing me from sports participation in exchange) handing out towels to showered students through a window, while, just a few feet away (hidden from the view of others by a half open door) "our hero" sat on his office toilet "releasing" just for me --- most school days of my senior year. He couldn't wait to sit , always, everyday, just when I started handing out towels. Lewd to the core, this cur made more "noise" than an R. Crumb wino, while grunting this awful sissy-talking, saying, "What's that David? Those mice again? Here comes that smell you like Goldie. Um good, huh, I know what you like Twinkles. I know what you're looking at Goldie boy".

Evil is an action.

That this low-life Lestat was sucking at my soul every day, simply had to have been sensed by the other coaches there, and not one out of four cared.

Tuttle couldn't even appreciate the Christmas Windows I designed for school. That's sad. Yet, he got actual "kicks" from hurting me. I know he did, from the inflections in his voice when he was taunting me from the toilet like some David Lynch character you want to squash like a bug.

There, I said it. I didn't ever do one thing to him and he did that to me. My teacher.

I won't give their names here. And I don't blame our player at all. Tuttle was like a cult leader with "his boys". I hope the kid whose leg "Tuttle broke," didn't end up limping for the rest of his life.

I mean, this "man" taught our kid, instructed him, on how to fall on the leg of another kid in such a way as to break it, period. He put the game on our kid. I was there. I witnessed it along with the rest of the team. And the kid went out and broke another kid's leg for Tuttle, and the "team". Our wonderful role model of sportsmanship said, and I quote: "... you are going to have to go out there and break the leg of that son of a bitch and get him out of the game and you are the only one that can do it, or we're gonna lose. Here's what you have to do to save the San Luis Tigers and keep us: All FOR All" ... bla, bla ...

The coach lost his job for making a gifted junior college student the star of the high school team. He thought he could get away with it because the kid was black, and nobody would say anything, and our junior college was part of the school. That's another truth right there.

"Varner, Pierce, Lietner, Bullock ... choose up and play ball!"

In sports they wanted me less than the fat kid, the petty thief, the two FLAMING queens, or the booger eater. There is no more gut wrenching place to stand, for a virgin Viking, than wilting beneath the gaze of gifted warrior captains choosing between you, and some other potential perv, as if between horse pucky and a cow pie.

"... you again ... oh s..t, look, just stay out of the way, will ya!"

Or: "David's up ... easy out!"

Which is why Sam Kenison was one of my favorite comics.

I want two medals.

TWO.

I want a "Purple Fart" for being wounded in action in Barstow, plus, I think I actually deserve the "Congressional Medal of Fodder" okay, for not killing anyone else, or myself, or even sticking up a bank, and making GOOD, EXPENSIVE, "pain"tings in a capitalist society.

Jeeze, do I have to explain everything.

An ex-Marine, coach Tuttle was hired in 1955 and let go at the end of 1959, in a hushed scandal, the same year I was football manager under him and also the year I graduated. I suppose, for many people he was handsome enough, with a broad Irish face and a full head of curly brown hair. Ted Bundy looked good too. At thirty three, Tuttle wasn't all that much older than us students, only by teen standards, elderly.

Daffy waddles because, like most ducks, his legs are short for his body.

Tuttle waddled like a duck who IMPRINTED around cowboys and blacksmiths, then later crystalized-out in boot camp.

Every good caricature artist understands the power of "slightly understating the exaggeration".

Tuttle didn't.

Him?

Imagine, "Jack the Pirate," with two wooden legs, that is: two roughhewn, hand carved, very BOWED, wooden legs, striding over the football field letting off a string of pin-farts like some Star Wars stomper venting nitrous oxide, each stomp shouting: "Nothing funny about me! Nothing funny about me!"

Talk about funny.

Physical Education indeed.

"Phueeeeet!" ,,, "Phueeeeet!" ... "Phueeeeet!"

Just because we "boys" were fairly clueless didn't mean we spared fools. We had special permission (from Cooley) to meet in private dish-sessions around the piano (where Alva entertained us with Broadway show tunes) in the auditorium sometimes at lunch hour, mocking Tuttle's walk and laughing like girls. In my senior year there were four of us birds, myself, Richard, John, and Alva, along with one dove with a broken wing, a musician named Mike. We read our poems to each other, wrote songs together, painted sets, were on "stage crew," pulled curtain for a touring Maria Tallchief, prima ballerina of the Paris Grand Opera, and even produced a review by Alva called, "Straw Hat". If we'd lived in L.A. we would have gone to Hollywood High.

"Football Manager" is nerd slavery, the opposite of any sort of character building youth experience. For one thing it required hanging reeking uniforms in special, forced-air, sweat drying cabinets, then the next morning, pushing up each cabinet door, for a gas-blast guaranteed to gag a county coroner.

And "spit-boy" is a more apt term for "water-boy," any day, because the trick was collecting the empty jugs off the ground, while dodging spit hurls from every direction. Winded players don't drink, they slosh and gargle and hock and spit all over the place, then toss half the bottles on the turf for the flunky to pick up.

Water Boy is a "service sector" job.

They ought to pay registered nurses to do it.

With the sort of information dogs pick up sniffing boys, the coach knew I was swishy before I did, and started calling me "Goldie" and "Twinkles". Whenever Tuttle saw Richard Able and I walking together he always lisped for us, acting nelly, just a little, he'd say, "Hi boys ... and how are my Gold Dust Twins today!" Sometimes he would ask us if we knew who the Gold Dust Twins were? We didn't. And believe it or not, we weren't even sure what he meant by swishing at us. We never discussed it. It was unspoken that Richard was effeminate, but as pals, that was just Richard. There was nothing sexual, ever. This was a different time. We were not sure what Tuttle meant. If anyone had called us homo's we would have laughed at them as stupid. If Richard had touched me sexually, I would have jumped forty feet and visa versa. Everything was unspoken, and unconscious. Nobody used that word. This was 50's high school in small town California, in other words: Nerd Circus, U.S.A.

Forty years later I find myself on Magazine Street, in New Orleans, looking in the window of this antique store, and I am rocketed back to Tuttle. For there sits a box of Gold Dust Twins soap powder, with two black "children" in dresses on the label.

Tuttle of course, had no idea that I'd been molested since eight years of age and was in dire need of professional help. Nor might he have cared. At any rate, he was making it all much worse for me. And there was no professional help.

If I had killed myself not one person in the entire town would have known why, including me.

Hey, I could'a' been a Teen Angel.

So, let us now lift our lattés to the 50's we claim to miss, um ... glub, glub ...

And ... it's true too, isn't it?

Just weird.

Because San Luis Obispo is: Pleasantville, even today.

A wonderful Peyton.

It's gorgeous. A setup for "City Confidential" if ever there was one. I bet they've already done the show there, and I missed it. I grew up with miles of Pacific shoreline nearby, and a mountain in my backyard.

It was superb!

And, my hometown also shared that screwy Golden State dark side reserved only for west coast natives. That is, I grew up in a town of near hydraulically compressed shadow material straining to burst. Most folks there were simply decent to the point of ignorance really, but not in the sense of "stupid," but in: "ignoring"... that is, looking without seeing, and, seeing and looking away. We were master shadow stashers because our parents had been even better at it and taught us well. So, we were getting awfully full of shadow material by then. It was 1959 and something was about to give.

And we didn't, "see, and look away," for cruel reasons at all, but out of a common cultural revulsion for "show offism" or "stirring things up," because you never know where something like that might lead, and we San Luis Obispians like it quiet around here because we are clever folk who love commerce and recreation and that's that, so if you don't like it, lump it. Go somewhere else, we don't need you here, that's for sure. Oh, and take your ashes with you.

In San Luis Obispo, even the Catholics are Protestant.

Back then, reporting an authority figure was unheard of.

It's why things finally exploded one year later, after decades of living this way. Suddenly all these young people who had been molested, or grown up with alcoholic parents, or been verbally abused and smacked around with nowhere to turn, reached critical mass in SoHo, the Village, and North Beach, with music, and said to each other, "there's gotta be something better ..." and all hell broke loose.

When I arrived in North Beach in 1961, most of the artists, musicians, poets, and painters were the kids who got dumped on in high school. Janis Joplin arrived in North Beach right after me. In high school kids used to "oink" at her. In college she was voted: Ugly Man of the Year" which cut her to the core.

My antidote to Tuttle's poison was the art department on the second floor of the school. And that is how I became a painter.

My art teacher, Alice Dowd, let me use the room alone for painting during lunch hour. She saved my life when she said, "This is the good watercolor paper David, the Arches, from France, a dollar fifty a sheet".

Then she held a sheet up to an overhead light, showing me the watermark. I was thrilled. I'd never seen watermarked art paper before.

"Be sparing," she said, "but use it".

Then raising her index finger to her lips, Alice snickered a little, and added, "don't tell other students though, because they'll all want it and I can only get so much a year ... let it be our secret".

Thank you Alice Dowd, for that fine paper, and for so much more.

I spent most lunch hours of my senior year alone in that room, after enduring Tuttle from 11:00 to noon.

My magical aerie scented with turps and tempera, hoof-paste and chalk.

My cliff-dweller hermit sanctuary.

After lunch hour, I had Alice Dowd's art class from 1:00 to 2:00, then one more hour, a junior college art class with Margaret Maxwell. Three hours a day of art. And at the very same time, I did not want to be there in that room for lunch. It was lonely. I didn't really want to be an artist in a sense. It was like, I HAD to be an artist, and that bothered me some.

I remember long moments spent at the art-room windows watching dozens of students on the lawn below, eating together, talking, laughing, horse-playing, trading food, and I remember separating inside myself, noticing my own pondering, and somehow knowing that seeing this about "myself," likely meant I was more of an artist than not. I wasn't sure I liked that.

In retrospect, I was separating myself to gain essential survival power. I didn't know that. I could not have told anyone that. I had no more of a clue than anyone else. Something innate kicked in: for the better. Ha! Looking back, I was actively scouting a path OUT. Good boy!

Because I was a nice kid really, unless I drank, then I could be quite belligerent, not violent, but the type of drunk who offensively provokes people into hating them to the point being thrown out or even clobbered. I'm an implosion drunk, never "social," no matter what I may have once longed for. Back then, after six small cans of Country Club Malt Liquor, I blacked out.

Then Katie: "stay inside the perimeter", because here comes: "Forbidden Planet".

My: Krell Id, would show up at the party and instead of killing people, decide to kiss every one of them, or something like that, or sit on a guitar, fall into a box of kittens. Think John Belushi, only tall and thin with blond hair and blue eyes wearing beige Desert Boots barfing in the umbrella stand in the corner.

My first sense of self-awareness really came in that art room. In the subtle shift of consciousness that makes one wretched bugger into a spoiler sticking up a chain of liquor stores --- while another gets DRIVEN into "serial creating," if you will.

A word about space.

Because, making art needs one.

A SPACE.

Artists need inviolable space in order to be able to do what they need to do apart from the judgment of others. It's the opposite of sports.

Self judgment is bad enough.

It's why artists drape paintings on easels, and sculptures on tables.

In the 1950's my favorite artists were Pollock, Dali, and Picasso.

Comedians made jokes about Picasso and Pollock. So did people in my neighborhood.

I couldn't defend artists, let alone art.

Art was instinctual for me.

I just did it.

I only knew about my favorite art and artists from what I saw and read in Life Magazine.

In my high school art room, setting up to paint each noon, collecting materials, stretching watercolor paper onto drawing boards: this was complete absorption for me.

A freedom of sorts, oddly.

The first few drops of ink vortexing over wet paper actually saved my life, sustained me, eventually even gave me: A LIFE.

Public schools are famous for cutting their art room budgets, let alone entire art rooms.

For the love of God, STOP!

Kids need a place to work!

Just stop.

Look, ART ain't no hobby and a lot of people know it. Even some football fanatics.

After food and "shelter," art making is the single most essential human activity of all, forming an unbroken chain all the way back to primordial cave art, (just like hunting and football). When we reach into clay, we are reaching into prerecorded history.

So why is this good?

Louis Armstrong said, if you have to ask you'll never know.

Trust us on this one.

It's what people do after they get in out of the rain and eat.

A public ritual war / hunt / dominator game like football is great too, but it's not Art. It's the opposite of art. Football is pagan tribal religion, celebrating the violent downing of large food mammals and the acquiring of slave women, while protecting your own.

The tribe that kills the other tribe, gets not only the PIG, but their women too. This is so ancient it is encoded in our DNA.

Glory to football!

Art is the balance for it, that's all.

Glory to art!

Food, shelter, art.

Long live the San Luis Tigers!

Long live the San Luis High Art Department!

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