I wake up at 6am, fill my travel mug with black coffee, throw some leftovers into a yellow Dewalt© cooler and drive an hour and a half to an old high school where I have to wear a hard hat, dust mask and steal-toed boots. There is this young schoolteacher who is spending his summer working for a construction company. He has spent the last week stripping lead paint off the stair railings. You can tell that this guy is just visiting this life of hard, physical labor where the music choices fluctuate between ACDC and Lincoln Park and conversations are attempts to discredit the masculinity of the other workers. He laughs when the other men curse about their girls and bitch about their boss. I spend my days sanding walls and making sure the 65-year-old man (not my father) I work with isn’t fucking up my precious walls.
The past month I have been back and forth between New York City and West Glennville, Ny where I have been painting a school and staying with my brother and his family. Micah, my older brother, is a volunteer fire fighter and a recruiter for the Army. Most of the men in West Glenville are volunteers at the fire hall. Its a kind of men’s only club where they practice setting houses on fire, drinking beer and cutting the rooftops off of cars. It’s been fun being a guest to this All-American lifestyle. There is only one man in the neighborhood that doesn’t have a gun in his house. He is a lesser man. I’m the strange visiting artist brother who wears tight jeans and walks to the cemetery to make phone calls. (and then I have to explain what kind of work I do). To them, I’m some sort of exotic creature that knows some other existence outside the green hills of Upstate, Ny.
The Army gives Micah money to buy a few old cars to race in a demolition derby each year. The men at the fire hall spend a week stripping the cars down and finishing off the cage of beer left over from the firemen’s picnic the previous weekend. The day of the derby was cold and rainy. We all stood there waiting for our group to begin so we could get it over with and go home.





































































