“A Bar Is a Bar, but a Tavern, That's History”—New York Times

Turning the cold metal door knob into the bar, you enter into a vaporous, shady tavern. The sounds of frosted beer mugs clanging together and the clacking of the billiard balls could be heard resonating throughout. The quiet conversing among the players and the bar sitters created a dull hum. Men laughed while holding their cigars with index fingers hooked over the top as the smoke lingered around their faces. Various forms of cackling laughs could be heard from distant, but loyal men, who were sometimes called ‘devil dogs’ or ‘freedom fighters.’ The soft swooning recorded voice of Sinatra could be heard drifting around the room. The light is dimmed to a low orange; a soft yellow glow from the jukebox casts an ominous shadow across the floor. An old Budweiser stained glass fixture which hung by two chains above the pool table provided a form of lighting reminiscent of a 1930’s boxing arena. Elsewhere around the room, to the left of the pool table, was the bar. The slick polished oak wood, crafted to perfection was used for sliding beer refills down the line to the veteran regulars who came to the bar on a daily basis. Those veteran faces were sometimes hard to see since they always seemed to be sulked over the bar, slowly nursing their medium sized whisky glasses, while conversing with the bartender about the simple life.

© Garrett L. Knott, 2008

It's A Kind of Magic

I’m dizzy from all this spinning, now I’m thinking that you did all you could when you said ‘my love, take it slowly.’ --“So Damn Lucky” by Dave Matthews

With our digital age, we don’t always know what to expect. When our identities will be stolen or when our faces will be posted all over the web to be blackmailed later on by a third party. Everyday people meet other people, both in person and online. You’ll be pretty damn lucky to find that one person who just clicks with you on a wide array of topics, both personal and with hobbies.
Let me tell you my story of a kind of love, not sexual love, but a type of “storgē” love. It all started with a ‘friend request’ on MySpace one day, this girl has obviously checked out my page and decided to add me as a friend, the reason why, I’ll get into later. So I check out this girl’s profile page. Oddly enough, I could have sworn up and down my late grandmother’s grave that I’ve seen this girl before; she looked so familiar, and so beautiful. Those big green eyes, those fucking beautiful green eyes, drew me in like a bee to honey. This girl had a form of seductive hypnosis about her in her photos. It was like a piece of art that you couldn’t really get fed up over looking at, and it never ceased to grow old.
So I started writing comments to this girl on MySpace, and she replied. I started asking if she knew me, I also told her that she looked really familiar; she said the same to me. Eventually finding out that she lived in Zanesville, only about thirty miles from me in Cambridge, and I didn’t complain. Luckily we both had Windows Messenger and we exchanged email addresses and talked on there for a good while. I soon realized how quick the scroll bar became only a couple millimeters thick, due to all the text being sent back and forth.
The theory of evolution had started, from flirtatious “little nothings” to sharing our own forms of inspiration with each other. To me, this girl was an urban, indie, earthy chic, and one to gain more than a handful of inspiration and reasons to want and walk through a field of wildflowers on a warm, sunny, Sunday afternoon, living in the fisheye lens, with a cool breeze of about seventy degrees and no humidity, and a lot of humility. The humility I had for this girl was that of unrelenting fascination. I wanted to know more, more about what made this girl tick. Some could say at this time, my mind was blooming as much as those who created the monster called admiration. I actually admired this girl for who she was, along with what she offered. I loved this girl for that same reason; she was great, and one of a kind.
That theory of evolution hasn’t ended either.

© Garrett L. Knott, 2007

Gunslingers (part 2 of ‘Black Friday’)

Modern day bad asses or just old school vigilantes? You make the call. You sometimes can cross paths with them at an intersection, or on the highway. The highway gunslingers are the ones that stay at a constant speed in the left lane in your blind spot, and causes you to not be able to pass a semi that would be going about 50 mph. I use to get this a lot on the highway. Nowadays, I get people who think they can get away with being the first person to turn left at a green light, not knowing (or not even caring) that when you turn left, you have to wait for everyone to clear out from in front of you and check for any pedestrians that could be crossing the street. The drivers in Pittsburgh don’t give a shit about letting pedestrians have the right of way. Then again, the “Don’t walk/Walk” signs are pretty jacked up too. They only stay on “Walk” for maybe five seconds. Since this entry is a part 2 of my Black Friday entry, I brought up the topic of senseless driving because it always seems to happen during Black Friday. The streets should have posted signs marked, “no-man’s land.”
Those ‘other’ types of gunslingers are the ones who you don’t dare talk to at the mall, the ones that look like they are destined and on a mission. You don’t talk to those people unless you want to be left scrabbling around on the ground in search of a better reason why you’re at the mall in the first place. Those types of gunslingers are fucking nuts. Dane cook could probably state it better.[1]

© Garrett L. Knott


[1] Inspired by Dane Cook’s “The Wall” skit.

11-23-07 a.k.a. “Black Friday”

Black Friday, it’s clearly the biggest shopping day of the year. For those of you who are hermits, cave dwellers ECT, Black Friday is the Friday after thanksgiving, and where almost every soccer mom is out shopping for Christmas. Ah hah, again the impenetrable women’s liberation front hard at work. Personally I don’t go out shopping until a couple weeks before Christmas. I wouldn’t be caught dead scrabbling around in the fortification of middle-aged people trying to jump over each other in hot pursuit of the checkout counter. Honestly, I think its fun watching them scrabble about, it’s like watching the Spaniards letting the bulls loose through the village and chasing everyone down the street.
I’ve been resorting to online shopping lately. I like browsing around on a store’s website a little more than actually traveling out to the store to try and find something that isn’t always there, you can also save on gas. It seems to me that the reason why almost everyone that is out on black Friday is trying to attain some steely resolve before the year is over. More times than not, it’s not needed. It’s all fun and games until someone gets their eye gouged out by a cornucopia from the day before.

© Garrett L. Knott, 2007

“Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind” --John F. Kennedy

It seems that when you think of a veteran, the sensory image that pops into your head is someone older and who has been around for a good while. You swine have it all wrong! Nowadays a veteran can well easily be an 18-year old right out of high school with his/her diploma and their significant other right there at the graduation snapping photos for MySpace and Facebook. More times than not, the student at the ceremony is where they would last see their significant other before being sent off to boot camp and squeezed through the ringer, chewed up, digested, and thrown out like a wet loose shit across the pavement.
While I was at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, a friend of mine, who was also majoring in photography was a recent combat Vet in Iraq. I still remember him telling me how one-sided the television news is. I could agree that it was obvious that news channels like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News strive to tell the public that our soldiers are just fine and fighting “the good fight for freedom.” Do me a favor and catch the next flight that’s going to the Middle East and report back to me on what you see. Photos would also be greatly appreciated. First, you might want to make sure you have a strong stomach to handle all the blood and guts that might be lying around caked in sand and being pecked at by vultures and swine.

©Garrett L. Knott, 2007

Entry for 11/6/07 a.k.a. “Election Day”

The great American political pastime, voting. Yeah sure it’s all fair and just, unless if you’re in Florida. Sometimes I think if the population from Florida was taken advantage of back in 2000 for being from the South. God forbid call them unintelligent, but you sometimes can’t help but wonder why the re-counts and manual hand counts were so prominent. When I voted today, I came to find out that even in Cambridge-this small-ass hick town-had switched over to all electronic voting machines. Personally I thought it was really convenient to insert a card, the same size as a credit card, and tap through the instructions on the screen. Let’s also not forget about the ladies working the sign-in book, nobody could get past them unless they made sure they saw your I.D., thanks to the impenetrable women’s liberation front hard at work.
I also wonder what happens to the candidates that don’t win. For example, if Bush wouldn’t have won the re-election in 2004, then what would he be doing now? The same would also go for the upcoming presidential hopefuls. Let’s say Barack Obama wins the election, then what would Hillary Clinton do? Or Rudy Giuliani? Or John Edwards? Yeah, I guess a few of them would still be in Congress. I guess we’ll have to find out after next year.
©Garrett L. Knott, 2007