As I mentioned briefly in the ending segment of my last blog post, The Mid-November, Early-December Dal Report, I’ve been missing a lot of people lately. Mostly family who’ve passed away, but in these melancholic times I miss other people as well. Friends I used to have, people I almost dated, and acquaintances I barely knew. All of which, for one reason or another, have left some kind of mark on myself. I’ve heard before that our personalities are a lot like tapestries, or mosaics, where we take pieces of others and stitch them into ourselves. I think that’s really true. In order to celebrate the people I used to know, dead or alive, I want to talk about those small pieces of me that I’ve found from them. This might get sad and bittersweet, but I hope it rings more sweet than not. At the end of the day, this is a love letter to the spaces these people have taken up in my life and I hope it reads as gratitude.

The first people I want to talk about were two underclassman from college I had a lot of art classes with. These were people who I didn’t really know personally, but who I’d make polite conversation with during class, or when we were working after hours on the weekends to meet deadlines. Their names were Ian and Joseph, and I really wish I took more care in fostering proper friendships with them because they’re two shining examples of what I miss most about being in school. Going to university in this day and age is honestly optional, even moreso for anyone interested in the arts. There’s nothing I learned in college I couldn’t have learned using Google or YouTube, but the real difference was the sheer number of creative, interesting people I met. Never was it so easy for me to gain inspiration just by having a passing conversation, and Joseph and Ian were the two best people to go to to attempt catching lightning in a bottle.

Joseph was softspoken, but he always had something to say. He picked his words carefully, causing him to sometimes speak slowly, but you knew that everything he said was perfectly crafted to the best of his abilities to be as accurate and expressive as possible. He had some kind of accent, I’m not sure what. The kind of accent you get when you move a lot, a weird mish-mash of things I’ve vaguely heard before, but not quite. Enough of an accent I knew he wasn’t from Middle-Of-Nowhere Kentucky, where we went to college. He was a traditional artist, focusing mainly on inks and watercolors. He had this loose style where everything flowed like water, and while his organic shapes weren’t accurate, they were expressive like no one else’s. He was the kind of classmate that made me so angry, because the places where I struggled he seemed to excel flawlessly. Though, it was hard to stay mad at him given how open and warm he was, especially when it came to feedback. What I think is an underrepresented, but crucial aspect to being an artist is having an eye for other people’s art and being able to vocalize what you see, which is a harder skill to master than it seems initially. But if any 20 year old could get close to mastering any skill, I would say Joseph got pretty damn close to this one. He was often times more reliable and and descriptive in his critique than even our professor was. Whenever crit day would come around, he would often get banned from speaking to encourage other classmates to speak up more. There are small little mannerisms of his that live in my brain, the way when he really, really liked something beyond words and would simply call it “delicious candy”. There’s a little Joseph that lives in my head that whenever I execute something well in art, he kisses his fingers like an Italian chef and says “Candy! Delicious!” with flair and pizzazz.

Ian was in many ways Joseph’s equal and opposite, he was loud and bombastic, usually without realizing. He was one of those people who quite literally walked with a pep in their step and with a beaming wide tooth smile on their face. He - and I don’t mean this as an insult - would talk a lot like Mr. Beast in the mornings when he would come in an hour early with me to our 8am studio class. He would legitimately say “Hey, what’s up you guys?!” whenever he saw a group of us together and had this sort of flat affect that was just a few decibels above normal speaking volume. It never seemed like it was something on purpose, he just seemed legitimately excited about life and art. He wasn’t the best artist, to put it bluntly. A lot of his art appeared more juvenile and heavy handed, with bold and often unappealing color combinations. But the man was a pure fountain for ideas and creative expression. A lot of artists lament that the unearned confidence from childhood to create whatever comes to mind without caring for others opinions has turned into adult cynicism, but that never happened to Ian. The switch from fearless creativity to insecure never happened to him, and he would confidently dive head first into ideas he maybe didn’t execute well. But it meant he was risky, and when things went well, it went well. And no matter what anyone could say about his technical abilities, it was hard to be harsh on his pieces when he would explain the hours of thought that went behind them - even if he made the “wrong” choices, he never did them without reason. But best of all, he was the best person to bounce ideas off of. He was a master of “yes and” in the most brilliant way, something could never be one thing. He always knew how to double down on an idea, or how to make it more complex. It was something so intuitive to him that should be cherished deeply. He said that his dream was to teach art to kids and to help them facilitate the same creative spirit he had, and I could not think of a more perfect teacher.

A piece of Dal lore I’m not sure people who know me now know about, is I used to work as a pizza delivery driver at a local chain a few years ago. It was a franchised location thing, so the main business was family owned and operated by a family of Greek-Americans, but the store I worked at was franchised out to a family of Mexican-Americans. At a point, they actually owned two locations, but one of them ended up being closed down. It was sad, that location was much closer to my house, but the area wasn’t as sparsely populated and there was way less foot traffic, so it was a long time coming. Anyway, there were several people from here who have a special place in my heart, but one of the loudest was Maria. Technically she didn’t own the location, it was some other jackass who’s name isn’t even worth mentioning because I hate him. I’m not sure if they were related, they looked similar enough so cousins perhaps? Maybe he was a nephew or something? But Jackass was honestly never in the store long enough for me to learn literally anything about him, other than the reason that my weekly checks would bounce because he needed to lease his Audi. Anyway. Still not bitter.

Maria was an old woman a great deal shorter than 5ft tall. She is such an eccentric woman. I first had a job interview with her son, Alfredo, but after he told me I had the job, he said Maria wanted to interview me as well. Not knowing what to expect, I came into the store ready for some questions, but instead she sat me down and for about 15 minutes told me she was “crazy” and I had to be ready to deal with that. Now, my brother worked at the same restaurant, so I knew kind of what she meant. She wasn’t crazy, just a 4 foot tall cyclone of an elder who wanted things done her way or the highway. Which often meant she was prone to yelling, whether it was on the phone to customers, or directly in your face. She was fiery, but that didn’t necessarily translate to being mean. She had a very thick accent, for the first few shifts I worked with her I had a hard time understanding what she would say to me. She would often show me how to do something, either by saying “Watch me” and slowly play a game of charades or sometimes using Google translate. But as the shift would wear on and orders would pick up, we just didn’t have time to deal with these modes of communication. Instead, she would yell “PHONE!” when the phone would ring, signaling for me to answer it. If I told her I didn’t understand how the POS machine worked quite well enough, she would shake her head and say “Don’t be scary! This you!” and give me two big thumbs up and a wide toothed grin. Then she’d immediately turn back around to preparing the pizzas. Honestly I think the trial by fire approach helped push me into getting over the social anxiety I had speaking to customers over the phone. I worked with her often, until I got my job at my university making motion graphics and animations. I quit at the pizza place then, but just before that we found out Maria had cancer.

She had just started going through the chemotherapy treatments and had lost her hair. She always wore this cute blue floral cap that had strings on the side to pull it tight. I think the idea was that the pressure would help keep the hair. Fueled by her love for her work, she would still come in on days she really shouldn’t, but the entire staff would come together and help her any way we could. She was not allowed to lift anything, no matter how light. There would be several guys who’d watch her carefully, in case she started getting ideas of moving around the industrial sized buckets of pizza sauce we kept in the walk in cooler. Some days it wouldn’t be enough and she would go home early, but others her taking care of the more menial housekeeping tasks around the kitchen was more than enough. She would often sit at our bar (We had a bar, though we never had a bartender. I really don’t know what the bar was for, we only served 3 beers on tap.) and help the waitress that night wrap the utensils in the napkins. Or she would make herself busy cleaning menus. But, as my two weeks notice began reaching its end, she had started showing up less and less to work.

I never really knew what happened to her. I had obviously hoped for the best, but we didn’t have each other’s phone numbers and lost contact. That was, until I happened to walk into a random Chipotle in the afternoon, just before a concert Cass and I were heading to with some friends. I was picking up our orders, when I saw Maria, with a full head of hair and with color back in her face. She yelped with excitement when she saw me, and ran to give me a hug. I hugged her for what felt like forever. We both began getting teary eyed when she told me she beat cancer, and I told her I graduated college. We talked for several minutes after that, but I don’t remember what about anymore. Until she went back to eating dinner with her family, and I grabbed the, now slightly cold, pickup order for our group. We went on to the concert after and ended up having a great time, but talking with Maria in that Chipotle was the most memorable part of that night for me.

The last person I want to talk about for now was from an even more distant, far off Dal lore era than my pizza delivery days. This was when I did Tae Kwon Do as a kid. I sometimes tell people I got up to be a black belt after about 3, maybe 4 years of training with my dad and brother. But in reality, we only made to to temporary black belts, a rank just below the highest. Our YMCA who hosted the classes cut them off after poor attendance for a few months. For anther kid it would’ve been sad, but I had been dragged against my will to these practices every week, three days a week for about 3 years by that point, so I was thrilled that chapter would finally be closed. I was 12 at this point, so I had plenty of other more important things to do, like Club Penguin and Sims 2 on the Nintendo DS. I was happy to forget all about Tae Kwon Do, and I largely did. Until I was 17 or so? I can’t quite remember how old I was, just that at this point I had my own Spotify account, which will make sense later. Our instructors, a hardass wife and goofball husband, had invited everyone from the Tae Kwon Do days to their house for a big party and reunion.

My dad dragged my brother and I to this party. At this point, I was in the final months of my hating everyone and everything phase of being a teenager, while my brother was just getting started with it. So we both came with the intentions of not having a good time and staying glued to our phones. Which did happen, a lot of the participants we were close in age with didn’t end up showing (probably in their hating things phase) and we were stuck with the adults too old to “get” us, and with the kids too young to not annoy us. So we stuck to ourselves and more or less followed our dad around as he social butterfly’d his way through the party. That was until the sun set, and they lit a bonfire. I don’t know what it is about us, but me, my brother and dad are all truly like moths to flame. Whenever I have a free weekend, I miss the freedom of just burning shit whenever I wanted - the HOA isn’t cool with that where I live now. But we had immediately gathered around, and for the first time that night I took an earbud out.

There was a guy playing guitar. His name was Vincent, and he was always the cooler, slightly older kid that I kinda had a crush on when I was little. He could do backflips, and what more did 11 year old me need? Anyway, I hadn’t seen him since then and he had grown a lot. He had a moustache now, an actually good one to boot. He had filled into his height, no longer appearing like the skinny beanpole I knew before. He looked like an adult, like a real adult. His hands were rougher now, he had gone into welding after high school and even in the dim light you could see the callouses and burns on his hands and arms. There’s something very ironic to me now, describing this, because I know there is no way he was older than I am now. But, to a 17 year old, 23 really seems adult. He was playing guitar and singing, and doing it actually well. He wasn’t singing Wonderwall, or any song I knew actually. I at first thought they were originals, but he would sometimes clarify the names of the artists he was singing, even if he didn’t say the names of the songs. It was such an interesting campfire experience. Not because there was a white guy with a guitar there, but because the bulk of the party was surrounding the fire and watching him perform. I don’t know when the 50 odd group of people made their way over, I wish I could’ve taken my nose out of my phone. Pure magic, to see a guitar guy actually being good at guitar, and people actually noticing. At a point, I started looking up these artists on Spotify, writing down the lyrics to the songs I liked as quickly as I could so I could find them later. In a roundabout way, he showed me people who ended up being some of my favorite artists to date. Harley Poe and Hoyt Axton were introduced to me via this guitar guy I did martial arts with as a kid. Two artists who I think have defined me as I am now. My favorite songs of theirs are Saturday’s Child by Axton, and Ticks by Poe. Listen to them, if you get the chance. Put on some fireside ambiance while you’re at it, and you’ll feel how I did then, years ago.

This is probably the fastest a blog post has come together for me. I don’t know, today I was being wracked by the most indescribably large feeling of loneliness and grief. It’s hard to put a name to the face of emotions, something in the direction of guilt and dread lay in there too, but the feeling of grief was the largest. Grief is one of the harder emotions to deal with. Very few emotions ever go away, but I feel like grief has really been hanging over me like nothing else. I needed to put an action to the grief, to do something to make it seem worth it. To remember why I grieve, and not to just think of the things that are now absent from me. When I miss strangers, friends, or family, it heals something in me to look at my tapestry and find the squares of cloth I know belong to the people I miss. It’s powerful, it makes me feel like I’m cheating death for them - or, in the cases of the stories I’ve told here, cheated the social conventions that make it awkward to reach out to a “school friend” or a “work friend” who never got the chance to metamorphize into just “a friend”. In the age of technology we live in now, I know I could reach out any time. But I don’t think it’s just the social conventions that prevent me from doing so. I think it’s okay to call a relationship dead and to let it rest. I don’t know what I’d gain from reconnecting with people, beyond a fleeting conversation and reminiscing. Sometimes, a memory is only a small part of a larger story that doesn’t need to be read.