Keith's 34th Year on God's Green Earth

2006 Birthday. A bullshit Retrospective.

I have advanced by one year to the date of my death. YEAH! It’s been an interesting ride thus far, like the old Kools cigarette advertisements used to exclaim, “baby you’ve come a long way.”

The A&D gang still riding strong. We were the breakfast club. We’d all survived the Eighties. Brian got rid of the flock of seagulls, Yamil discarded the muffin, Russell tried to shrug off the Dark Knight. James, well he hadn’t gotten rid of the Hair Metal look and gut until ’98. Me., well not much has changed I still alternate between no hair and too much hair and not combing it either way. [I call it the black Christopher Walken look]. We’d stretched the gaming limits with some of the most advance computer systems. [Remember when 16 bit was the shit?]. Come on…, we owned at least an Atari 2600 or Coleco-vision.[Notice no jpegs of the Coleco system so you know where I camped my tent.]

Remember the serious discussion on the origin of Snake-eyes and the groundbreaking realization that Storm Shadow was his brother? Or how about the clever ways in which Mad Murdock always figured out a way to get BA Barrackus on the plane. Or the fact that Face Man’s AK-47 never managed to kill anyone? What about Bruce LeRoy, remember him? Now that was HOT! But not as hot as Shonuff! No to be confused with Shogosuki Rememeber how we all owned a pair of foam rubber nunchucks [pronounced nunchookas. whatever!].

Then something special happened… the discovery of porn. We moved from one form of geekness to another. You had your regular print and then the ever-coveted glossy coated. Talk about being consumed. Then of course the real thing surfaced, we dropped our brushes and began chasing after the craziness that is woman. Monster had it right… the Internet is for porn. It’s a good thing we didn’t have the Internet in High School or else we’d never get any artwork done. Thankfully, were all a little more mature.

Fast forward to 1990? That was a year of angst, impatience, expectation and extreme optimism for the future. We’d all broken off to attend F.I.T., SVA, Purchase, N.Y.U., and a lucky few… Cooper Union, Parsons and last but not least Brooklyn’s own Pratt University. We were going to revolutionize our respective chosen art fields in comics, illustration, film, fashion, graphic and package design, oh… and anthropology.

Despite our different schools, studies, our fucked up lives still intersected. We’ve all developed our houses, created families and moved on. Some of us stayed the course and live enriched creative lives; others have gone astray and trying to find our way back to creativity. Whether we’re doing asst. super-ing, super security-ing, supposedly teaching, porter-ing, permalancing, teddy bear drawing when you wanna be X-Men drawing, or just plain doing nothing. the only constant has been our continued interaction and support. Does it matter that we only see one another two or three times a year? it's a given if anyone needs anything from anyone of us then they got it. No questions asked. [Unless it's 3o'clock in the morning, you're dripping blood on the welcome mat and we can hear muffled whimpering sounds coming from your trunk.]

I’m one of those morons searching for creativity again. I think I lost it somewhere between law school and Bronx Housing Court.It's hard to get back into that framework; to try and capture 15 years and to fight the opposite desire to stop the creative work because your hands can't draft your mental image. I’ve picked up my brush again. And I’m back at the keyboards trying to craft interesting yet FUCKED-UP stories.