Individuality
In Shoes Of Blood

By Jim Kirwan
2-25-14

When I was recovering from a savage infection I did this rather large ink drawing to describe just how large a part actual Individuality” plays in the lives of everyone. If you know how wide a railroad track is, that will give some idea of just how tall this bare-foot individual has to be.

At the time I was just beginning to work full time as an artist in Oklahoma City after the military and upon retuning from a year in Montreal. It was during that time that I got a chapter-two version of what we have today in the Police-State that this place has become.

I was living in a transient hotel, and working around the clock on some pastels which I was showing and selling in some Broadway diners and some of the more prominent restaurants in the city. Whenever I went out, usually dusted with pastels, to get some coffee or just a breath of fresh air I was treated to what we now call Police-State tactics. The cops in OKC rode three to a car, two-to-three hundred pounders, no screen or cage, which made it easier to beat the passengers; between the front and back seats and there was a black flag that flew from the top of each car. The city said that was there to remind the public about pubic-safety. It only reminded me of the criminal-JUST-US system that was hounding the unimportant part of the population of which I was definitely a part.

This was the kind of work I was doing at the time. This was a bandit I met in a dark alley in Seoul while on R&R from Guam. This is a pastel.

I kept copious notes. I was small and wiry, but not yet mouthy. I took the insults and the occasional pistol whipping, along with multiple interrogations through the week. My crime was an anemic beard and mustache which was a crime in Oklahoma City in the early 1960s: It seemed that the cops thought that whatever the young had was contagious, so they routinely disappeared a number of people and used the rest of us for kicks & giggles. Many died and were conspicuously discovered in fountains or public parks, some by the roads, but all of them had been beaten, and no questions were asked. That is when I began to form my rather hostile opinion of some of the major flaws in the System.

One of my part time jobs was as a pin-setter in a bowling alley, in the Black Belt. I got off at 2 am and had to walk back to the hovel I shared which was about an hour from the Bowling Alley. One particular night three uniformed thugs snatched me up and drove me around for an hour, before they casually beat the hell out of me and left me for dead in a vacant lot. They should have made certain.

That time I got results and they disappeared as this time it was they that lost their jobs. There was a very active underside to the city then and I had friends who took care of stuff that was beyond my ability to fix. It was about that time that I decided to try to figure out how to end this for me. Later on I got involved with various Departments of Justice to try and help others end it for themselves. Today those solutions no longer work because the entire society has become terrified of the thugs that are just criminals with an IQ that matches the room temperature in a cooler.

I started early in life, having my majority declared by the time I was fifteen and from then on I made my own decisions: Something that too few even remotely grasp, even today. I thought I wanted to be a pilot. To that end I ended up being given an appointment to the Air Academy in 1959. After I figured out that the trade-off for getting a government college education at the Academy was 22 years of service, with only a year of that time that I would be able to fly ­ I passed on even taking the tests. That and throwing a captain up against a wall, got me sent to Guam. Not serious enough to be thrown out (There was a draft on at the time) but most people just got chewed up by the military instead of being tossed out.

In the Air Force I tried three times to attend college, but there was no way I was going to be allowed to get an education. I was allowed, even encouraged to play football for various squadrons, but school was definitely out. Instead I ended up talking to others on Guam all of whom had interesting lives. We drank a lot, and after too much coffee pretty much destroyed us we switched to booze— not to get drunk but to facilitate the moments that so many of us shared.

There were four of us to a room when that started, but daily we had from twenty to thirty people who joined in the conversations that went on non-stop, around the clock, about everything in life. About ten to fifteen percent of the squadron went insane while there, the rest of us got smarter. I was a radar operator and the squadron worked a twelve day series of shifts. Three days, three swings, three midnights, then 3 days off, and no one got much sleep, but that totally destroyed anything like an interior clock, for most of us.

I had begun life as a rebel from about the age of eleven. I fought with the schools, teachers, the church, the system, the city, and finally with the military. Academically and athletically I was good student, but my attitude raised too many red-flags. From the ninth grade on I was sent to Catholic School which turned out to be amazingly innovative and I loved the school: But not the religion.

In journalism class I suggested that Central Catholic High needed to have a Student Council, just like the public schools. The principal said NO. So I wrote an article for the Oklahoma City Times, outlining the prejudice that not being allowed to have a student-council would create—given the fact that the administration refused to grant us the same privileges that ordinary highschool students had. The next time my Journalism instructor and I were called in to explain my continuing editorials ­ I gave the principal a copy of the story that I was ready to submit to the paper if I was going to be denied. We got the Student-Council and from that day forward I began to understand how real politics actually works.

I went on to do the same kind of things later on in the military when I needed to change things that needed to be changed. I decided what to do and how that could be accomplished and I have been doing that pretty much my entire life, until now, when everything that either you or I think or say or do is now forbidden: We need to begin to take matters into our own hands and deny these bastards the fake-powers they say they have by ignoring them on the one hand and by tracking them down on the other, to let them know that we know who they are and that they are no safer than we are: Now that the thread-bare gloves have been removed from the blood-stained fists of this phony-authority for all the world to see.

Nothing ever changes by itself. Those of us that can see the real need for actual changes simply have to continue to do things for ourselves until we can collectively succeed in shutting down this nightmare one outlaw and one government at a time.

This is what became of the initial image in later years. Here it has become EXPERIENCE ~ ODESSEY and it seems to have served yet another purpose after all…

The point of this rambling scrap of the past is that each of us must make our own decisions in life. I tried for many years to shape my future. In the end the profession chose me and not the other way around.

Over the years I have known a great many people that this has happened to in a wide range of occupational skills and various professions. Of course that was back when people actually could chose whatever they wanted to do rather than having to do whatever the state the corporation or the company dictates to each of us now.

But I have also noticed something very odd that if more people began to notice it too, just might begin to change things for the better.

Have you ever noticed that most people actually work for whoever they work for ­ one hundred and sixty-eight hours a week, instead of whatever the company decides to pay them for? When any government or corporation or just a business makes rules that directly affect what you can do with your life: They are in reality demanding that you give them your entire life or more precisely 168 hours a week!

This happens whenever you are ordered to change your habits, your dress, or your attitude on or off the job. It happens when the company demands that you stop enjoying certain aspects of your life because the company (for insurance purposes) has decided that your behavior might cost the company needless expenses because you are not living in the most secure way possible to please those in charge of the actuarial tables that determine the companies risk-factor assessments? The same thing applies to what you eat or drink or ingest, in many cases this involves your appearance, and in some cases it comes down to how you choose to get around… yet the company offers you nothing by way of compensation for any of these physical changes or time spent in your life!

If you hire out your creative skills then you are only paid for the actual number of hours that you are at work, and that does not cover all the supposedly free-time you have in theory, or when you actually get the idea which the company says it was seeking?

If in the course of thinking you come up with a totally different idea, which has nothing to do with the company ­ the company wants to claim the copyright for themselves ­ if they find out about it - because you obviously had your breakthrough thoughts while you were on company time and therefore your creation magically becomes theirs ­ or so far too many of them continue to demand that everything you do belongs totally to them!

Have you or any of your friends any idea of how much different your take-home pay would be if that shitty job actually paid you what they actually owe YOU! There are lots of ways to take back what they owe you if you’re indeed creative, just think about it and one day soon it will come to you. This thought will account for that subtle-smile that I guarantee you will brighten your days, even now, as all of us are thinking about tomorrow and whether or not it will still show up, given just how greedy the business world has become in 2014…

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net