What do you see? Squares, circles, highways - myriads of roads and trails - all manifestations of manifest destiny.

America never considered two major obstacles in our modernization efforts, Native Americans, or the first nations who were here prior to European Colonization and the indigenous species who roamed every facet of every piece of land in North America.

I take that back - we killed, raped, enslaved, or hid most of them. We still do.

We broke 370 treaties to Native peoples, promised legislation in the Constitution, killed off most of anything with value in the wildlife arena and our current fur-trade era regulations continue to reflect it.

Wildlife? WILD-LIFE? There’s no wild left.

Today what’s left of our very unique and millions years old relatives, yeah they’re mostly urbanized and live in rural makeshift dens. Humans - in opportunistic and immigrant mode - backed by industrialists, aristocrats, corporatists, businesses, and land developers, destroyed their habitats. That cute little home you have or sprawling estate - was theirs.

We still do! At record pace, causing record destruction.

Today what’s left of our amazing and special North American gems have to eat mostly scrounging from human waste. You, your waste, is way more abundant than their habitats and native food and water sources.

Many times as licensed home-based rehabilitation specialists we see these gems badly injured, disabled or orphaned. You and your domestic animals are to blame!

There are literally 400 million feral domestic animals and agricultural stock free roaming the lands of the United States. Add to that 370 million people and their pets.

Along with feral domestic animals, none of which were native to America, your open-door policy dog and cats kill, maim, injure, and destroy our indigenous animals.

People enjoy feeding wildlife, seeing wildlife and attracting them to their suburbia nightmares. I totally get it. Humans put out food in order to attract and see them from the safety of their morning window or sunset feeder. I get it. Feeding animals from home is a staggering 12 Billion dollar per year business. This doesn’t include baiting game to blow away because REAL MEN don’t track anymore. You and yours create a battleship full of waste daily. Modern humans have large footprints. Loosed feral animals and your dogs and cats, even more.

Meet Bella, tell her you love her! I do all the time.

She’s a non-releasable Opossum gem. Your dogs and cats, sheep, cattle all have rights! Bella has none. Domestic animals and livestock are considered by law to be protected as your private property.

Woodland critters are considered pests, unwanted, overlooked, vestiges of things simply in the way. Non game animals have no rights. Non domestic or agricultural species have no rights.

You took their wild away and didn’t even accord them places to simply exist.

Look for my future articles on how I am writing a piece of legislation called The ISPA. The Indigenous Species Protection Act.

Together, we might be able to insure your grandchildren and mine - and their future generations - may see a “wild” lifeform on the next visit somewhere in the out doors.

I thought it appropriate for my FIRST Substack article to tell you a bit about me, display a great image of my Fine Art, and detail why I exist here and at all gratefully. You see, the ARC is something we all walk and share; most of us don’t know or see our own ARC but I assure you you’re creating it now and will tread upon it in your forever. I’ll refer to it often. It’s the title of my legacy work.

I can throw the deep ball or pick up the 3 yard first down.

I’ll be posting articles, blurbs, field notes, sketches, thoughts, and snippets on art. I’ll reveal how, why, and when I paint and shortcuts from 45 years of doing it in most mediums. From airbrush and oils to charcoal and acrylic. I’ll share thoughts about art and creativity in general, like why “Disney and Imagineering” didn’t hire me when they had the chance back in 94! Their loss… And other goodies too. Unfocused? Yup. That’s me!

You need to buy art! Original art!

Technology has destroyed most of the creativity in America. Guilds, studio jobs, apprenticeship programs, master crafters and art in general have been wiped away. America was founded by the best talent Europe had to offer. What the hell happened? Yet, our passion and need for art remains. Expression is everything. “It’s the humanities, stupid!”

You’ll pay your lawyer $500 dollars to shake hands, your doctor $750 bucks for a 12 minute look-over, and $80,000 dollars over 7 years of financing at 8% interest for a new truck. But you won’t drop a few grand (prices we were charging in the 80s) for someone who has spent years learning, practicing and refining their technique? They’ve poured their souls into long hours tickling the canvas with thousands of brushstrokes or hand carving and polishing stone and you can’t bear the thought of it costing a tenth of what you spend per year dining in fast casual restaurants?

Shame on you!

Which will tell you more about yourself and likely enrich and outlive YOU? Do you have that $5 Walmart print mentality?

Technology is working hard to do replace traditional art and crafters on the rest of the globe too! This isn’t an “America Proud” moment, this is “capitalism gone wild,” and all that New World Order crap. However, Recent trips to Bali, Borneo, Komodo, Malaysia, and Peru have reinvigorated my hope for humankind. Sort of. You need to travel! I’ll share why and my perspectives as an artist as to how other countries keep what we’ve lost - tradition in arts and crafts and originality!

Is tradition important to you?

My ARC? Yeah, “it’s complicated,” - that’s why I’m here and why you need to keep in touch.

I’m a husband, father, grandfather, have an amazing sister and my brother was born with cerebral palsy. Mom and Dad are gone now as are many friends and acquaintances. Getting old is painful! Disabled people and women are my heroes. Wildlife and Opossum mamas - the wind beneath my wings. Whiny, needy, boastful, bloated personality-weak folk, hell - I chew them up and spit them out for breakfast!

Bring it on!

I’m graced to have cool cousins, don’t believe in religion but believe in prophets and prophecy, love Kristofferson, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Jon Bon Jovi and most 70s and 80s bands. Rodney Crowell is a treasure. The Eagles, John Prine, Guy Clark, and the Avett Brothers too. Good music can be found but sorry, you’ll never match what we had through the 60s to the 90s.

Paul Robeson never got the fame he deserved nor did Lou Rawls. Sam Cooke was unmistakably one of America’s best. I play guitar and sing too. So did my dad and his dad. My youngest is a trumpet playing badass! You cannot create without music. It’s a life essential. Music is the most sensory important catalyser in creativity and life. “Rim-shot, mic drop!”

I’m an artist. We see and think differently. Without us life for you would SUCK!

An artist is likely behind anything you see, touch, hear, or sense. You just don’t know it. And though art and the creatives field has become void of originality, full of copycats, and lost in a malaise of recreating what we had when I grew up, there is good art out there. You have to look for it and want it. And, you really need to leave the security blanket of technology. Art of all types.

I like to fish, shoot guns and pool, dance, fly around the globe (but fear flying itself), RV like a banshee, LOVE on everything, am a child of the 60s and 70s (Sex, Drugs, Rock &Roll Baby!) and eat mostly vegetables. I invented the Opossum Diet, explosives from vitamins (wait until you hear this story), life in THREES, and can fix or repair about anything.

Are you still with me? I…

• Have been shot at and robbed more than once

• Am a product of the housing projects, but…

• Survived 13 car wrecks, a broken neck, exploded appendix, and ruptured gallbladder

• Am a Martial Artist

• Have been in jail 6 times

• Have had over 16,000 orgasms - average?

• Build decks and remodel things

• Have been bitten over 100 times by wild animals

• Love outdoors and the natural world - it’s my therapy

• Ran for MAYOR in 2009

• Am a caregiver - not careTAKER

• Love to swim and workout

• Am damn good to have around in a bar fight

• Don’t mind being naked

• Am old as dinosaur crap, but…

• Can outthink you most assuredly - maybe

Been at this a long time.

See what I mean? Scary, eh? And this is just a smidge. I have 65 years of images and ideas. Still here?

My ARC will take you through my everyday ADD Artist processes. How I think and what acts to become my “prompts!” Yep! I’ll talk about AI and Technology too - it’s potential or not and it’s abilities as I see them. I have much to say about this!

Did I mention I talk a lot? I hear voices? Hope that doesn’t frighten you because you do as well, you just may not be as aware as I am and most people don’t know how to tap into this amazing talent. Mine have created stories I want to share.

I’ll try hard not to be verbose, but I already have and I really don’t have a writers voice or technique. I want to discuss socio-economic and issues of biology? Do you? I like writing but never had much time to jot down more than a few pages. I have many, many notes. You can help me here!

Voices in my head? What the…

Okay so mostly the dialogue remains in my head - it’s an artist thing and I will explain later. I don’t stammer around fingering my lips and make buzzing sounds. Well maybe on the rare occasion. And, I like to BOLD text too much. That’s gonna stay - my apologies to teachers and literary professionals. It’s who I am and helps me write, it may help skimmers like me who see life in patterns and pictures and aren’t the fastest readers in the pack. I think much faster than I write. How about you?

I see life in patterns. Remember this thought.

Those field sketches, doodles, notes of texts, and inky blurbs are important.

Buuuuuut, not as important as most lead on. Visualization is the most valuable resource you have. Patterns and Pictures. We sense, sort, decide, then usually hit “save.” Usually. We do this without thinking. Autonomic and automatic. Retention and calculation. You do millions of calculations and saves per second. Science likely has a fancy term for it. I have no idea what that is. But it’s real, useful, and my best tool next to my 30-inch Snap-On breaker-bar I got when I worked at Pasternack’s Pawn Shop in Denver, Colorado at the age of 18. That’s where I was shot at for the second time. It was during a robbery by bad guys, one of whom shot at me with both barrels of his sawed off 12 gauge double barrel shotgun. Every shot from that day remains burned into my brain.

Most of the time I have no time. So I paint and write in my head - that’s why I’m here. Remember?

I do this while I work, drive, swim, watch movies, hold and feed babies - human and untamed; hell, I’m doing it now as I type! Multi-tasking? Compartmentalizing? I hate the “buzzwords du jour" scene. I don’t know what to call what to call it. Does it need a title?

I can teach you how to draw what you cannot see. Ready?

Field sketches and snapshot blurbs you may find on the Substack Notes Feature - if I can figure this damn thing out!

Likely and I’ll try, I’ll really try - Oh PTOOM! If you see this term my brain had a ricochet moment in memory recall. It’s an image of an old mural I painted of a childhood hero that JUST POPPED IN MY BRAIN! I’ll share it. Billy Jack, the movies (four in all) from the incredible actor Tom Laughlin - a formative movie for me (1972) - from the original “Billy Jack” movie had some great lines, this one went off like a double 007 James Bond getaway explosion! (I apologize for these interruptions in advance but they will happen):

“Bernard, I want you to know... that I try, I really try, (there’s lots more) but when I think of the savagery of this idiotic moment of yours... I just go BERSERK!”

My life in a nutshell. Does your brain correlate words to images, songs, quotes, randomness?

If so, you’re alive. The alternative isn’t good. That’s your inner self, inward awareness and curator. It’s awkward and sort of where dream world meets lucidity. One day I’ll reveal when I first noticed it and how I use it.

I hear animal voices in my head. Honest.

One of the things that led me into Wildlife Rehabilitation and being an advocate for the UNTAMED was this uncanny ability to sense words from them. It’s communication and the oldest of languages - instinct - quiet instinct, calmness of spirits, melding of understandings. It creates words.

Patterns + Pictures = Voice.

It all started at age 7 with a squirrel named Georgy. Soon I’ll elaborate on wildlife rehab, why we insane people do it, why it’s needed and most importantly How it needs changing! My wife “Possum Pat” (how’s that for a wildlife rehabber’s name) is the queen bee of opossum rehabbing! But it’s life changing, a sinkhole for time and resources, educational, sapping and restorative, but the stories…..ah, the stories, irreplaceable, informing, ancient, transcendental, and a a form of completeness of the natural world and what it hides and offers.

If I toss in too many opossum pictures or reference them too often, well, “Enjoy the Zen.”

As a veteran artist of now 45 plus years, wildlife have played an integral part of my art and thinking ideas, my childhood, and life in general. We learned everything we are throughout our evolution from THEM. And I will discuss evolution too; its ongoing now - this reshaping of things as they were - and the critters and planet as a whole are losing out. The philosophical and physical treatment of life in our natural world - the world we came from, is pathetic. Weak. Piss poor stewardship.

Natural selection is mostly dead. It died long ago. I’ll tell why later. The untamed world offers untapped therapies to humans that can still the mind, reduce pain, and ease suffering. It can throttle down addiction, grow desire for living, and moderate the great dysfunction in our concrete jungles. Theirs and ours. Understanding this is important to you and future generations.

They are better at empathy than we are and reveal it with sensory skills we’ve just begun to understand. It’s sensory input and output in the old language. Now this I really can do and do well! It’s there, it’s restorative, has resonance, and it resets. It humbles and springs forth hope. It relaxes and it enlightens.

I’ll help you remember this untamed DNA archive and use it!

A veteran chef too? NAW… Well yeah! And I may write down some awesome recipes. From cooking bison and the New World indigenous flora and fauna goods to plain old fashioned cowboy style one-pot wonders, like stews and chili. The best you’ve ever had - I promise! We can cook together as well and I can gravel out some kick ass stories and ideas that those “reality chef boneheads” on TV never knew, have forgotten, or just never tell you. Good cooking is easy - even on a large scale!

I’ll give you something most writers don’t, SOLUTIONS

Even on the complexities of life, socio-geographical policies, environmental issues and creativity? Well Maybe! One thing I pride myself in being is a problem solver. Again, an artist thing. You may not like it, may think of other solutions, might think it’s less strategic or a variation you deem unusable. However, I’ll present them anyway and try to do so on every post or article. If useful, all the better. If not, you get to see how I think.

I ran for Mayor of Hendersonville North, Carolina in 2009 and have been an active and armchair politician for most of my life - PTOOM! See, I just heard the voice in your head say “Don’t Go There!” Sorry, this is my unfocused place to create. Politics and the current and past climate of them remain an intrinsic part of me. I’ll definitely be discussing politics.

Well here it is. If you made it this far that’s awesome! I epitomize the confluence between Renaissance man and Jack of all - master of none. My grammar and vocabulary aren’t the best, my writing will likely suck, I dislike spell check, cliche’ and kitsch. Corporate and capitalistic abuse, billionaires for the most part and weak, needy, whiners that always feel entitled; yeah I don’t have much appreciation for them. Did I said that a thousand words ago? People. I’ll go into it later. If you hit a woman or abuse an animal - I don’t like you. You’re an asshole. That’s the biggest indicator of weakness in my book. I don’t feel sorry for you. No excuses. You’re an asshole plain and simple.

So join me on the downswing of my own ARC.

Who knows how long we have? Help me help you - and I will - I promise. You’re stronger than you think and have way more talents to tap into in art, creativity, life and living. I’ll ramble and change topics often. If you can hang with that, I’d sure love to have you around!

Today is a day you’ll never get back. Aim for the stars but never be afraid to settle for the moon! Glad to meet you! And if you love original art and wildlife art especially, opossums, raccoons, cougars, lions, bears, you know those ones that used to have a “wild,” then jump over to my website or find me on your favorite search engine and peruse my original works. They were here long before you, before this, before whatever comes. They had first!

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