KIMBERLY'S CUPCAKES: THE REAL MEANING OF LIFE

Today is drizzmal. 

  

Since there is no practical sense for the packing of a wet pencil to an agrarian market, even though the moisture makes the veggies glisten, the soggy sketches are not worth the trip.   

There will be no busking today, neither sketching nor strumming, and for an abecedarian such as myself, today definitely shouts Plan W – a simple plan of woolgathering. 

Woolgathering gives excuse for me writing more bildungsroman blog entries, such as the one you are right now reading.  Capricious as this may seem, I do spend considerable time contemplating the perfect snappy title for each of my blog entries.

KIMBERLY’S CUPCAKES:  THE REAL MEANING OF LIFE jumped at me on Friday, whilst we (Darren, from Phantom Tide, and self) were grilling pork kabobs for our colleagues, one of my favorite, favorite colleagues, Kimberly, brought some home-baked cupcakes for the occasion.  And I speaketh for everyone when I proclaim that I love Kimberly and I love her cupcakes! EVERYONE LOVES KIMBERLY and EVERYONE LOVES HER CUPCAKES!

Woolgathering, I’ve decided I need to be more than just a dilettante in the art of Buskology.  I need to be more than a faux busker.  I need to put myself, a vulnerable creature, in a dangerous situation.  I need to sell everything; my soul and Acura ILX included, and hit the street as a bona fide busker.

Hmmm … how could this happen? How could I survive such a cheeseparing and cockamamy circumstance?  What would I do for money?  Where would I do for shelter?

Hmmm … I will tell you how this could happen.  I would do well on the busk.  My consumers tend to be munificent, especially on windless and sun-shiny days.  Easily, in a six hour sketch or strum day, I could take in a hundred or more dollars.

Hmmm … I will tell you how this could happen.  I do not fancy myself as being a troglodyte cowering in a cave or sleeping under a bridge, but rather one who could reside in a broom closet.  I only need a place to shower and make a cup of tea, with storage suffice only for a guitar and a pencil.  (Really, how much space does a pencil take up?)

Hmmm … I will tell you how this could happen.  Simply I would evanesce alone into the sunset, slinging only my guitar and harp, my pencil and sketchpad, and a duffel of clothes and toiletries.  I would travel light and in solitude.

Hmmm … I will tell you how this could happen.  It must happen.  I’ve been a professional and certified BUSKOLOGIST for a long time, always writing and philosophizing, never doing.   

DAMN!  IT IS TIME!

I have the credentials!  I have a cache of original songs to strum and sing;  I’ve a stash of pencil portraits from real life characters.  I am a recognized guitar slinger and, as of late, a recognized pencil pusher of life-like portraitures.  

I am more than a strikingly handsome goldbrick.  I have a history of busking success! 

Hmmm … I will tell you how this could happen.  I shall leave my three viewbicles, my regular full-time counselling and my regular part-time university teaching and my private practice.  I shall leave my hausfrau, and I shall leave my amigos.  I shall leave, leave, leave and later reckon with, I’m sure, my zero-sum experience.

Hmmm … I will tell you how this could happen.  The very notion of busking on the streets of Canada and America and Western Europe, and breaking only for the sipping of  American decafs (with just a dram of cream) on the curbs of Canada and America and Western Europe, eating daily lunches fresh from the farmers’ markets of Canada and America and Europe, never again wearing that Windsor-knot tie that symbolizes my used-to-be workaday world from 8 until 5, never again having to keep up with the Joneses, never again having to plan and budget for vacations (because the rest of my life would be a vacation, a buskation, a laissez-faire end-of-life adventure, that would fructify things meaningful for me).

Hmmm … I will tell you how this could happen.  I would relish the cornucopia of people encounters, the coffee shops, the curbs lunches, and the girls, the enchantresses, the femme fatales, the houris.

Hmmm … this is a lifestyle decision to leave my money for the real meaning in life.

Hmmm … such a go takes mettle.

Hmmm … though I know in my heart that my competence as a busker will prevail, and that my life as busker will never be narrow like my macedoine middle class misadventures to date, I’m having second thoughts!

Hmmm … I am ever so slowly learning the game of life, the meaning of life.

Hmmm … really, all I want to be in life is a trustworthy person who plays nice with others.

(And speaking of playing nice, here some of the characters (actual colleagues) in my CHAUCERIAN PARADE this week:)

JENN

RENEE

RONA

Hmmm … as I wake from my woolgathering all my boustrophedon notions are, in realty, just braggadocio bluster.  I’ll not be leaving my lady.  I’ll not be leaving my lecturn.  I’ll not be leaving my profession.  I’ll not be leaving my penthouse.

Hmmm … life is really about building relationships.

Hmmm … life is never better than when I am eating KIMBERLY’S CUPCAPES! 

Hmmm … the meaning of life is simple!

Hmmm … Ah ... Kimberly’s cupcakes – the real meaning of life.

Kimberly’s cupcakes are morsels delicious, delicious, delicious … and Kimberly herself in the flesh ... 
is even moreso delicious, delicious, delicious.

KIMBERLY IN THE FLESH!

THE UNFORESEEN: LIFE IS A TALE OF SURPRISE!

HMMM...

Have you ever met someone with whom you were smitten, someone you thought you could never distaste?  Have you ever met someone you found to be bewitching, who later proved to be a vexation?   

Have you ever met someone you thought was cool, then whose interests you realized never rose above workaday and pedestrian?  Or ... have you ever met someone who would make you laugh, then by malicious design make your heart ache?  Or ... have you ever met someone who made you feel absolutely wonderful then abhorrently unworthy?

Fact:  Life is not abecedarian, but a happenchance series of surprise.

Fact:  All thoughts in life can neither be anticipated nor predicted with certainty. 

Fact:  Life is UNFORESEEN, and all thoughts and all things (especially including interpersonal relationships) in life are UNFORESEEN.

THE UNFORESEEN title of this blog is taken from THE UNFORESEEN, a television weekly drama of the late 50’s and early 60’s.  THE UNFORESEEN was a type of suspense drama, a weekly thirty minute story always with a twist in conclusion.  THE UNFORESEEN was, like real life, always filled with surprise.

Generally, we can anticipate and predict our day-to-day trudging events with considerable accuracy, but all such predictions are just really good guesses, imaginings based upon the empirical evidence in our lives at the time.  In any contest, games of sport for example, we never really know what is going to be the outcome, and the outcome of any event in our lives is just as uncertain.

Forgive me, dear reader, for such a negative opening paragraph, but most of the surprises in our lives weigh down, rather than uplift.  In our Yin and Yang existence, this probably isn’t true, but are brains seemed to be more programmed for pain than for pleasure.  Pain we remember forever, pleasure we remember only for a season.

The examples in the opening paragraph, generally speaking, seem not to work well in reverse.  Have you met someone you loathed at first, but now love?  Have you met someone your eye found repulsive but now you deem strikingly attractive?  Have you met someone you felt was caustic, and then determined to be cool?  Have you met malicious people that make you laugh?  Life does not seem to work from negative to positive.  If ever it does, this is truly surprise, surprise!

Life is, according to your metaphor of choice, mostly a highway, a path, or a river.  Our uncertain lives are filled with detours, forks, and rapids.  Always, these detours lead on to more detours (hence our shaggy-dog tales), more bends and turns, and more roundabouts. Whilst we breathe, we are forever navigating rage after raging river, sometimes wading, sometimes treading.  Every road, every trail, and every river takes us somewhere, and that somewhere is always unforeseen and filled with surprise.

Let us go to busking down at the market.  On any given day I can with considerable accuracy predict, in a very general way, how my buskapade will unfold.  I will arrive and pick my buskspot somewhere between 9 o’clock and 9:30 a.m.  (It will likely be near my best vendor neighbour friends, Greg and Valerie Asher of ASHER DESIGN LANDSCAPING.)  This is my comfort zone for busking with either my guitar and harmonica, or my pencil and sketchbook.

I know I will meet several people during the four-hour busk, some friends, some colleagues, some strangers, both familiar and unfamiliar.  Strumming or sketching I will make approximately one hundred dollars.  Generally, this is how my busking at the market will typically unfold.   

Specifically, I shall describe how my morning at the market did unfold.

I did not arrive between 9 o’clock and 9:30 a.m.  I had to retrieve my car from the parkade beneath the hotel across the street (long story), then I had drive over to my son’s apartment for a quick emergency (an even longer story).  Finally, I arrived at the market and set up just minutes before 10 o’clock a.m.

I did set up across from ASHER DESIGN LANDSCAPING, but Greg was a no-show.  Valerie was operating alone.

I took only my pencil and sketchbook.  I find that strumming my guitar and blowing my harpoon for a four-hour market to be wearisome, humdrum, and colorless.  Sketching pencil portraits, on the other hand, I find to be animated, stimulating, and bright. 

My morning at the market went generally as I had anticipated; specifically though, my morning was filled with surprise.  And here are just a few examples of some awesome people that came my way:

CINDY

 

BRANDON

LINDA

My unforeseen CHAUCERIAN PARADE this week includes:

• Allen is a Financial Studies university student, who happens also to be taking a camera class.  Allen approached me the week previous seeking my permission for him to take a picture of me while sketching a pencil portrait.  If it was okay with the consumer, it was okay for me, I told him.  Allen did take some pictures, and did quick interviews of Linda (pictured above) and myself for his camera class project.

• Ponziano Aluma is the author of WE’RE HERE!  NOW WHAT? (This is a non-fiction book about newcomer misadventures).  For his next book, he wants me to be the illustrator!

• Gordon asked me if I drew dogs, and if I would draw one from a picture.  I told him I could but it would cost him a lot of money.  I told him if he brought the dog to market, I would do the pencil portrait for the usual $10.  Gordon said he’d be bringing his dog for a sitting next Saturday.

When I return to work tomorrow I can generally predict that I shall have a morning chat and chuckle with my friend and band mate, Darren (pictured below), and an afternoon chat with my imaginary Rubicon, Kimberly (pictured below).  Darren and I always have a philosophy-to-go type of chat; whereas with Kimberly, I’m always sadly reminded of my senescence.  What will actually happen between Darren and me and Kimberly and me has yet to be really determined.  My day at work tomorrow is right now unforeseen.

DARREN OF PHANTOM TIDE

  

KIMBERLY

     

To close, we humans (according to Sam Keen, 1973) are featherless, gregarious and storytelling creatures just wanting to get along with one another, oftentimes needing moral support from one another.  This could mean a written letter, a personal phone call, a text, or at the very, very best, a vis-à-vis over a coffee.  Not so strangely, my unforeseen interactions at the market seem suffice to temporarily fill such a social deficiency in my particular make-up. 

No matter what we believe and think ... 

Our lives from beginning to end are a complicated series of eight-lane highways and dirt roads, happy and sad trails, raging rivers and still ponds --- ALL OF WHICH BEING UNFORESEEN TALES OF SURPRISE!    

RAGS TO RICHES: MY LIFE IS A COSTUME PARTY

This past Saturday began as most my Saturdays begin, with a five mile run around Wascana Lake.  But later on in the morning, taking my fat little pencil to Market, I felt a little bit different.  I felt different because it was my birthday!

All palmy Saturday I could not stop reminding me that I’m a long ways from my world debut in a birthday suit.  Now I have threads! I’ve fifteen black shirts long-sleeved with collars, eleven white shirts long-sleeved with collars, five pairs of blue jeans for work, four pairs of blue jeans for busking, three pairs of boots, one cowboy, one working, one hiking, and two pairs of sandals.

Research has confirmed that the raiment in which we wrap ourselves, our garment our apparel our attire, actually primes our brain to function and operate accordingly.  In a line, we become what we wear.

In the 90’s Barbara Fredrickson found that women who were given math tests performed worse when wearing a swimsuit rather than a sweater.  Research suggests that a person’s mental agility improves when wearing a white coat.  Adam Galinsky referred to this phenomenon as Enclothed Cognition.  Galinsky found that when research participants wore a medical doctor’s coat, their mental capacities sharpened; whereas, their performance was not significantly altered when they thought they were wearing a painter’s coat.

Professor Karen Pine had students don Superman t-shirts.  And when they did, Professor Pine noted that their self-impressions had been boosted, and they actually thought themselves stronger than those in the control groups.  Pine was convinced that clothing can change minds.  In her latest book, Mind What You Wear:  The Psychology of Fashion, she describes the link between women’s moods and their choice of clothes.  Women are more likely to wear jeans when feeling low.  Clothing can reinforce negative moods – when we are stressed our world narrows and we dress simpler.

And I remember simpler.

My earliest memory of being in costume was, at six years of age, wearing a coonskin Davy Crockett hat and a leather-fringed Davy Crockett jacket.

At seven years of age a friend, Randy Corbin, wore pink pants to school. Within a week, there were several of us wearing our new pink pants to school.

As an early adolescent my grandma allowed me the luxury one pair of pants and two shirts per week to wear to school.  We did not have indoor plumbing at the time.

And I can remember one September, driving into Swift Current and buying several new shirts and jeans and two dickeys, one black and one white.  Dickeys were the rage in 1966.

At one time in our town (Vanguard, Saskatchewan), all the guys had BRYLCREEM hair, madras shirts, blue laminate jackets, tight jeans with a rat tail comb in the back pocket, and pointed leather shoes.

Then, by the time I had graduated from high school, grease was out and the dry look was in – no more BRYLCREEM.  And my girlfriend had bought for me in the latest of fashion, three Alpaca sweaters, an Ebony, an Ivory, and a Midnight Blue.

My university garb was always a Canadian tuxedo, t-shirt and jeans, and hiking boots, except when I did my teaching practicum.  During this four month internship, I sold my International half-ton truck, and bought some sports jackets and dress pants to teach alongside my mentors. (I’ll mention that immediately following this period, I was hired as a high school English teacher, then ditched the dress shirts and dress pants, and reverted back to t-shirts and jeans and hiking boots, but kept wrapped in the sports jackets.)

The notion of Enclothed Cognition demonstrates the importance of symbolic association of garments as being the mechanism for altered cognitions.  Clothes change the way we think and feel.  I feel much different when dressed up for teaching at the university than when dressed down for busking.

Whilst standing in front of a university class, my attire cap-a-pie, is hatless, with either a black or white dress shirt, a sports jacket overtop, jeans for pants and brown-polished dress shoes for wheels. 

Whilst guitar busking, I often wear a Brixton hat, a tight white t-shirt, worn-out faded blue jeans, and polished-black work boots. 

My new gig, sketching pencil portraits, I cover my noggin with a black and white checked bowler, my shirt is always white, long-sleeved, and with a collar.  And I wear grey cargo short pants and brown leather sandals.

Enclothed Cognition works for me.  If I want to feel happier and more confident --- I wear the right clothes. The garb I choose does make a difference.  My raiment doth have that ability to advert my attention to the things I am doing. My attire is akin to an Aesopian fable, conveying innocence to an outsider, but a hidden meaning to me.  As a busker, I never want to present my image as being a clochard or cadger.  With my guitar I like to present windswept and breezy; while with pencil I like to present a bit more polish.

My CHAUCERIAN PARADE this week has got to begin with the voluptuous cowgirl who pulled up alongside me in her black Dodge Ram as I was guitar busking at VALUE VILLAGE.

“Do you know any Janis Joplin?” she asked.

As I thrummed one out, twisting in her knee-high cowboy boots, she gyrated and grinded against me in her tight satin blouse and skin-tight jeans, while singing her unique version of Me and Bobby McGee. I must confess I was mildly aroused … I mean amused (Freudian slip)!

And I must include some pictures of some of my consumers and their portraitures at the FARMERS’ MARKET:

WYATT BUCKLEY

AUDREY

NICOLE

JULIA

SMURF

From birthday suit to swaddling clothes to work-a-day duds ... 

Last Saturday at the MARKET was just another day in my costume party life!  In fact, by midnight, with my brand new leather barbeque gloves, I had transmogrified from busker to boxer!

THE BOXER