Dimensional Guitars

It was Friday night. Mike and I met up and were going to go to a bar to hang out. We got there, and I met some guy… who I took back to my apartment to hang out with. He saw the guitar in my room, one that Jasper had let me borrow. The guy I brought back said he was going to show me something interesting. He grabbed my hand and sort-of jumped down the neck of the guitar along the strings then into the sound hole. Suddenly, I was in this other world that was an alternate dimension and existed alongside ours but without any NYC buildings. The guy that jumped in with me had changed. He was a tall, skinny, female alien. S/he told me that I was brought there to be impregnated so I could continue their alien race. She was the only female alien left and all the thousands of others there were male. I started freaking out and tried to get back out the way I came, but I couldn’t leave the alternate dimension through the guitar… so I started wandering around and avoiding the aliens. I walked up on a hill, and suddenly felt this breeze around my knees that felt like really cold February air. I bent down and found that there was an invisible hole that led back into my dimension. I could also feel an invisible door that could shut it too, but it didn’t have a handle. Once it was shut it could never be opened. I escaped through the tiny doorway, which was about the size of an eave doorway in an attic. I ended up coming out of a small cellar door onto a side of a hill with my apartment building to it’s left. I called Mike over and explained to him what happened. He asked me to show him how to get into the guitar, and I did. We crossed over into the other dimension, which caused Mike to turn into a solid navy-blue alien because he’s male. The others were all variants of many colors, so I could tell Mike apart from the crowds. I couldn’t get him through the invisible door for some reason so I had to leave him there to find more help. I noticed that it was snowing in NYC, and the snow was entering the invisible doorway and collecting near the entrance. I thought that maybe the alien that tricked me into coming there would find the invisible door outlined with snow and shut it, that way Mike and I could be stuck there forever. I left him to guard it and went back into our dimension. Jasper came over and I tried to explain to him how Mike was stuck in the other world and how we got there through the guitar. He didn’t believe me, so I told him to look out the apartment window and watch the cellar on the hill. I put my arm into the guitar’s sound hole and it appeared as though it was coming out the cellar door. I waved my hand frantically to prove my point. Jasper still didn’t believe me and thought I was messing with him. He thought my trick was amazing and wanted to know who was hiding in the cellar and synchronizing their arm movements with mine. I explained again how the guitar and cellar worked and showed him by throwing a pill bottle into the guitar’s sound hole. The pill bottle flew out of the cellar door and landed on the hillside. He still thought it was an amazing trick and still didn’t believe me. I asked him what I could possibly put through the hole that would convince him. He happened to have a different guitar and told me that he would believe me if I could get the neck of the guitar he brought to come out of the cellar. I did just that and he was finally convinced.



**the photo is Lauren Chester's from: http://artemer.wordpress.com/

St. Felicity - the Flamenco Dancer Saint

April, 17th 2009

I was attending Dan G.’s BFA thesis, which was located in a church instead of at CIA (Cleveland Institute of Art) or somewhere in University Circle. This church was an extremely large Roman Catholic Church, and filled with golden statues and crazy gold church things. Dan was standing, with his work, near the altar. Everyone that came to his thesis presentation/critique were all situated in the pews, except for the front right pew. The front right pew was reserved for his family (much like a wedding/funeral set up in church) and had two half-sized caskets set up vertically. They were the recently dug up bodies of his mother and aunt, who had (somehow) died in the 1920s. They were both buried with bouquets of golden flowers with yellow dresses and golden floral pattern casket lining. Instead of being propped up toward Dan, his artwork, and his presentation, they were propped up facing the crowd. I was sitting in the pew directly behind them, and, since I was so close to them, I could see that they were really dusty because they were buried for so long – but somehow they looked like the just died yesterday – very preserved. After his presentation, there was a food reception in the back of the church. I walked through the buffet and out into this half – open hallway (open into the main part of the church) filled with gigantic statues of saints with votive lighting set ups. The last one on the left was a saint dressed in a black Spanish dancing costume. I walked toward Dan in the main part of the church and pointed to the saint in a Spanish/ latin American dancing costume and asked: “Why is there a Carmen Miranda statue here?” He explained that it wasn’t a statue of Carmen Miranda but a statue of St. Felicity, who was a Flamenco Dancer. I went back and inspected it to make sure he was right, which he was.
I ended up taking a lot of the food from the buffet and leaving. I was going on some sort of hiking trip, hiking from one city to another. I came across an abandoned house and was in it’s cellar heating up my food by steaming them in a bamboo box on a set of shelves that happened to be there. A girl came in and stole my food from me.

Notes:

• Although I went to Catholic schools for K – 12 grade levels, I am definitely not a Catholic, or Christian and do not identify with any specific religion. I am probably slightly more ‘religious’ than someone who is agnostic (neither denies nor accepts that there is a God/ higher power) since I believe that there is a ‘higher power’.
• Carmen Miranda is one of my favorite famous people.