Shoe Horned

I rolled out from under my newspapers and cardboard tent thinking maybe today I could paint the changes into my life that I’d been dreaming of for the past fifteen years. I saw it all in my mind, but that’s about as far as it went. Under a little ray of sunlight that shone down into the alley I called home, ugly blotches and swirls or ink ran out onto the paper. I was trying to capture the change I wanted in my life, but I couldn’t get the picture to slide from my head down through my scabby arm and out of the pen onto the paper. It just wouldn’t come. Knowing my life as well as my art was at a stand still at least for today, I put my pens away and stepped out of the alley and into the street to make my living.

Street art is mostly survival art. Out here I’ve got the pictures I draw and my empty pencil cup for handouts and sometimes a sale, but not much else. The setup’s the same every day. I come out from the alley, put my back against the wall of Johnson’s Grocery Store facing the busy sidewalk, lay out my newest pictures and all the ones that haven’t sold yet, put out my pencil cup and wait.

People out here on the street running from their business appointments and hair salons are mostly dreamers. All my pictures of the celebrity faces showing them the lives they wish they could live are like a stop sign in the middle of their busy day. They pause in their steps, look at the pencil drawn sports stars, rock stars, movie stars, and political leaders and for a second they’re out of they’re complicated little lives for a while; then they see me.