Saturday, July 11, 2009

Procession

A police escort
7 bikes of marines
Us 8 in the limo
And at least 50 cars follow
Goodbye uncle mike.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Four bronze stars, one golden heart. RIP uncle mike.


PEABODY — Mr. Michael Kehoe, 67, a longtime resident of Peabody, passed away peacefully Wednesday, July 8, 2009 after a brief illness. He was born April 11, 1942 in Brooklyn, N.Y., son of the late Michael Leo and Margaret (Mooney) Kehoe.

A former Marine Corps Sergeant, from 1960 to 1968, he was a Drill Instructor at Parris Island, S.C. He was a disabled veteran who served faithfully with the Thundering Third Battalion Fourth Regiment of Marines Company "I" in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He was the recipient of the Vietnam Service Medal with four bronze stars, the Meritorious Unit Commendation Ribbon with one bronze star, Republic of Vietnam Meritorious Unit Citation, and the Gallantry Cross Medal. Following his military career, he entered law enforcement and retired in 1993 from the Swampscott Police Department as Sergeant after a 23 year career.

He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Carol-Lee (Armstrong) Kehoe; a daughter Patricia Elaine (Kehoe) and son-in-law Michael Peturrson of Leicester; a son Sean Michael and daughter-in-law Tanya (Anderson) Kehoe of Kensington, N.H.; a granddaughter Lee-Ann Pereira and great-grandson Adam Pereira of Peabody; two step-grandchildren Hayden and Elizabeth Petursson. He also leaves behind three sisters, Patricia Cannon and her husband Bernard of Long Island, NY, Margaret Massa and her husband Lawrence of Brooklyn, NY and Ann-Marie Stone and her husband Bruce of Port Monmouth, NJ, one brother James Kehoe and his wife Maureen of Middletown, N.J.; a sister-in-law Robin Talbot Thebodeau of Dublin, N.H. as well as many nieces and nephews.

He was an Honorary Life Member of the American Legion Post 227 in Middleton where he served as Commander for several years, life member of Marine Corps League in Peabody, member of US Marine Corps Drill Instructors Association, Member of VFW Post 1240 in Peabody, life member of AMVETS Post 6 in Lynn, member of Disabled American Veterans Chapter 100 in Peabody, and former member of the Blue Knights of Topsfield.

ARRANGEMENTS:- His funeral service will be held in the Peterson-O'Donnell Funeral Home, 167 Maple St. (Route 62), Danvers, Saturday, at 10 a.m. Relatives and friends invited. Visiting hours Friday 4 to 7 p.m. Interment in Puritan Lawn Memorial Park, Peabody. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the America's Vet Dog Program, in Memory of Michael Kehoe, 371 East Jericho Turnpike, Smithtown, NY 11787 Or American Legion Post 227 Scholarship Fund, P.O. Box 227, Middleton, MA 01949. For more information inquire at 978-774-6600. Online guest book at www.legacy.com.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Week 1

The first Thursday was beautiful and warm
My hands shook as I parked the car
And I knew
That most likely the black bean and corn thing
That I choose for you from ellwoods
Would be my melancholy Friday lunch
But for the first time in my life
I can see clearly
That there are some things worth waiting for.

Monday, June 29, 2009

jackie has entered text.

Having no faith, I don't lift my eyes in times of sorrow. I wish I believed in Jesus, and so in times of trouble I think about him like I would a fairytale, and try to extract the homily behind the stories. I've found:

Be Kind.
Think of others before yourself.
Show unconditional love.
Right your wrongs.
Honor your family.
Forgive.
Sacrifice whatever it takes for the people you love.

During my greatest test, I did none of these things.

There's something in fiction that gives us hope for our own non-fiction. If the stories can build tension, crescendo, collapse on themselves and still end with someone alive at the end, then perhaps there's hope for us real life folks, too.

Stand up, Lazarus. This is not the end.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

You are the better broken half.



Oh no malice does exist in these words I am now writing
Although one might catch the faintest glance at sorrow
I'm but trying hard to grasp all these fragments as they're passing
Piece the puzzle now before the trail grows cold

And I'm not asking for the answers in mathematical equations to be coldly calculated
By unbiased hands
For at truth I am so stricken
And I dare only to forever dance
Which proves I am the better broken half
Oh and I am but the bitter better half

In my callous speculations
They leave no room for calm or reason
I have placed myself in altars that are hollow
So adept at finding weakness
I smell fear and close my fists
Unaware the stench I'm smelling is my own
So yeah, you left me and I'm bitter
And my pride is shocked and raw
For I believe I will be changing roads no more
I know that life is full of dead ends
But I saw us as a highway
Ever stretching on from coast to golden coast
Oh, but now instead I'm singin'

Go west, Emily
Grab your boots and find yourself somewhere
I'll find another lover in the east
I said go west, Emily
Yeah you know you've got my blessing
But you can't expect these eyes of mine to watch you leave

So with no malice I'll begin just once more to tell our story
Though the ending I may never hope to know
You were a sweet and sound companion
Though our paths led us apart
And I may never sleep so soundly as I did while in your arms
Now all I ask is you remember who you loved and who you lost
Please don't bury me in silence
Or blackest shroud of thought
Don't pretend that what we had was any less than what it was
For I will not soon be forgetting the reasons why we fought so hard to make it work

But go west, Emily
Grab your boots and find yourself somewhere
I'll find another lover in the east
I said go west, Emily
You know you've got my blessing
But you can't expect these eyes of mine to watch you

Go west, Emily
Grab your boots and find yourself somewhere
I'll find another lover in the east
I said go west, Emily
You know you've got my blessing
But you can't expect these eyes of mine to watch you leave

Sunday, June 21, 2009

for the highest.

Yellow daisy behind her right ear
Black pen in mouth, blank pages in her lap,
Her only power now is her words.

If she could, she would camp out on the steep roof of that old brick house
Hold a vigil for hope, prove herself to be new
On this, the first day of summer
She would lift her eyes to the sun and let it blind her
Wash away the past two months, the ones that broke her down.

She can't, she knows that.
What she can do is wash color across page
Draw and draw and draw and wait. Rip out the page. nail it to the smudged, white door.
A record of wrongs.

All we can do in this life
Is do what we do well, do it earnestly and prolifically.
And those things we don't do well?
Those things are puzzles that we are challenged to solve, to better ourselves.
All we can do is be kind and open, hope for the highest.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

the river james.

If I had a sunflower scepter
Skeletal and black
I could change this all, I think.

If it were possible to deliver a sermon
To my own soul
And to Jack's soul-- to anyone else who would listen
I think I could just float
Up above the slippery, hazy grime of these early summer days
That are slowly breaking me down.

I went to the river to submerge, to go completely under, break the heat
But having never swam in the river, I didn't understand.
That in this River City, the swimmers don't mean swimming --
They mean standing, wading, the water isn't safe.
Nothing here is completely safe.

We sat on the shore, four of us sharing one beer, tall as it was
The herons stared from across the water, and they looked frozen
I wanted to stand up and shout --
"We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive..."

...But i'm always the one who looks crazy, so I gave it a rest.
Smoked a cigarette, drank the dregs
Walked the pipeline home.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

What they say

They say
That once you release your toes' grip on the edge
that once you do a swan dive
Off of a bridge into dark water
You realize it was wrong

That it wasn't the answer you hoped it would be
That falling, fleeing, is never the end of the sentence.
It's the confusing punctuation, the semicolon.
What now?

When you hit water
When bones shatter
They say you don't know which way is up.

Maybe if I just float here
If I just am still
I will drift to the surface.

Monday, May 18, 2009

filling in the gaps.

There's nothing poetic about endings.

There is only the twisting, grinding, ear-scraping noise of
Unraveling rusted steel cable, wound tightly. Not meant to come apart.
It was never meant to come apart.
There is only the flat smell of hastily packed cardboard boxes
the strangeness of new, empty beds.
The dark, where unfamiliar.

There's nothing easy about the telling.
About watching the eyes of people who know you
Realize that they know you less, with cables now unraveled.

There is only a pair of eyes, set northward.
And hands, unwaivering, gripping the wheel.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

pretty!


We bought our house in June last year, so we had no idea that all of these flowers existed...
What an awesome surprise!

Monday, April 13, 2009

Saturday night


A drunk neck shaving party.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Not bad for a sick day

Stockin up, three shows in a row coming up!

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Byo pony

Ponies will not be provided.

Holy hell

Youngest in the room.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

i've never completed a sketchbook.

It is so hard for me to do one thing
More than a handful of times
When there are so many things to do
So very many types of things and actions and sounds I can make, ways to speak, books to draw in...
It's hard to excuse repeating.

It is clear to me that this is a fault as much as it is a strength.

After 17 hours of traveling west through the night, the sun rose in my rearview mirror for the first time in my life, passing through Santa Claus, Indiana. I love the first times of my life.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

from the archives. which is archies, but with a v .

She is floating, it seems.

The distance between the soles of her shoes
and the cracked asphalt is so small really that
even ants detour around her flip-flops,
seeing no hope of continuing
forward in their original direction.

So no one can tell, but she is floating.
And the days are flying by
while she laughs them off as temporal things
With a linger aftertaste of salt
and ink.

For all of the times she has stood,
black-mouthed in front of a press and laughing
For late night faulterings that deposit ink or paint into the mouth
When two hands weren't enough to hold everything
and the wrong end of the brush was held between the teeth.

For all of those times, the taste was stronger today,
As she locked her studio door and her eyes lingered
over her own clean hands
Busy with other things, and the worse for it.

--

I wrote this in 2006, as my time as a professional art student was coming to an end, and I remember so clearly the fear that I was about to end my life as an artist out of necessity: entering the real world, having bills to pay and no time to be what i pretended during college years I could be.

As I clean and pack up my workspace at my art center job and prepare to travel to St. Louis to sell the things I make to people, making a living at being a creative person and an artist, I am so amazed and thankful.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

NY Times on facebook


Growing Up on Facebook
Published: March 15, 2009
Can you forge your future self when you never leave the present?

Read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15wwln-lede-t.html

I posted this obnoxiously long comment on Michael's facebook when he posted this article, and then realized I'd like to see what other people think so I am posting it here, too, with some added stuff at the end:

Here's what I think: The lady who wrote this article is a mom, and the moms in our life got on Facebook with a different understanding of what it's purpose was. When I first started on Facebook, the only people I was friends with on it were friends from my current life, college. It was an umbrella communication tool. Back then it was like, once every couple of months someone you remembered from somewhere else would friend you, and it was a huge surprise and a little weird.

Once my mom's generation got on it, they had to understand it in the context of their life, a much less digital existence, and so the shape it took was not social networking, but connecting with the past. I sort of think it probably had a lot to do with the constant pop-up ads for years that everyone got from classmates.com, telling you to reconnect with people you went to high school with. That was way more palatable to someone who didn't grow up on AIM chat.

So while I don't disagree that Facebook may change the way people reminisce, I also think that it's not necessary to be lonely to grow, and it's not necessarily healthy reinforce the old idea that you need to keep growing and changing into different versions of yourself while no one is watching...Wouldn't it actually be refreshing if we just evolved in front of each other and learned to understand each other as self-improving humans? Or no?

I just feel like every generation we fall into this same trap of looking at the younger generation as "doing it wrong" or messing up growing up, or whatever. All I know is, I'm in the group they are talking about but I am happy, thoughtful, and feel like I'm doing it right. Even updated my Facebook status with mangled syntax such as "Jackie is indie craft show."

What do you think?

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Mmmmhm.

Got a new hairdo.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Spring is here!

Last year the softening of skin, and this one the loosening of ground.

Pete made those cedar boxes for me, and now the rest is up to me.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Whaddya know!

Snow in the dirty south!

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Lunch with Joyce Scott


Oh, my job gets better and weirder every day.


Wednesday, February 4, 2009

There are worse ways to spend a Wednesday night

Even though I am sitting at deep run highschool at a camp fair until
8:30 tonight, I ain't mad atcha, life. At least my table is covered
in nonsense, and I have a giant rag horse as my...main...display?
Everyone here is looking at me like I am crazy because I don't have a
booth made out of a kayak or a Jesus fish in my logo. I don't think
this is my demographic, per se.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Saturday fires.


Pictured: my mother (and me, in carriage) in 1984 on the Brooklyn Bridge, she was 31 years old.

I made the frame from burned kitchen matches, which Alice and I spent the better part of an hour outside lighting (8 at a time) and yelling more than necessary. The yelling was due in part to the whiskey-- but mostly just proximity to each other.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Puppies have work to do.



Gramps is at work with me today. Beat that, cute-overload!

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Thankful

Every week I help run a mentorship program for preteen girls called SOHO, which stands for space of her own. The girls come every week for a year and eat dinner together and then spend the evening working on projects geared towards a year-end renovation of their room, a la trading spaces. Tonight we had a dinner talk about friends + what makes a good friend. We took pieces of paper and wrote words that described a good friends, which also turned out to be words that we all hoped would describe us too. Earlier in the evening I had put tape on everyone's foreheads, and after we all shared our words and then got to work sewing pillows for their rooms, I walked around and put the words on each girl's forehead.

Amidst the exhaustion and the lack of free time...The piles of unfinished things all over my house and my life, I can tell you one thing for sure. I am thankful.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

What a day

I am so excited for the future!

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Pretty silly...rings?

The beginnings of a new line!

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

A Rickety day.



As a Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn baby, Astroland wasn't an amusement park to me, but rather a daily part of life. If we went anywhere, we surely passed the park, and Saturdays were often spent on the boardwalk of Coney Island. It is strange, to be a beach-community child in the biggest, loudest city in America. It doesn't make sense, that I grew up in Brooklyn, but most times in a bathing suit, body caked in sand like a veal cutlet, feet slapping as I ran across the boardwalk's storm-worn wooden planks.

My first hot dog was a Nathan's hot dog. My grandfather, now deceased, helped to build the Parachute Jump when he was young, living in a colorful and exciting New York that makes me jealous to imagine. Whenever traveling on the Belt Parkway I see the parachute jump from the road and laugh at what a powerful mark my family seems to leave on everything it touches, on the landscape of the world itself. The good and the bad.


The Wonder Wheel, I was sure was the center of the universe. When I sat on the rickety old, colorful metal seats, soaring above the beach next to mom or as the case may be, Dad, I imagined that it was the place where my divorced family by some miracle might be able to mend itself. It was there, high above Brooklyn that I felt my world connected. Mom and Dad were both allowed on the Wonder Wheel.
Goodbye, Astroland.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Why I could only ever love a northern boy

My boyfriend knows how to make bagels from scratch. And yes, he boils
them first.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Success!


IMG_0692
Originally uploaded by Pretty Silly Things
The Handmade Holiday was a total success! This is what my booth looked like!

I broke into 4 digits for the first time, ever!

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Waiting to be on tv

This is ridiculous. What is my life???

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Monday, November 24, 2008

6 years and 1 day, this morning

Yesterday there was no time for posting, because Pete and I were too busy celebrating 6 years of being together, and things have never been better.

In honor of only doing things that we like, we went to Coppola's for lunch and sat around taking pictures of each other with MY NEW DIGITAL SLR!!! (Anniversary present?!?)

Here are the best two:



Good day.


Sunday, November 16, 2008

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Thursday, October 30, 2008

My job is awesome.


I get paid to pretend I'm Michel Gondry, basically.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Friday, October 17, 2008

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Monday, October 13, 2008

Oh Jesus

I don't know why I thought going to the palin rally would be funny. It
wasn't. It was just depressing. Yes. the bottom left button says "Hottest VP."

Hank Williams Jr played a song about the left wing liberal media and how Barack is evil. There were SO MANY old men in cowboy hats nodding along and yelling "that's right!"

I left 10 minutes into Palin's speech, both because I wanted to beat the thousands of cars out of there (I was on my scooter) and because all she had talked about was nascar and sled racing. Seriously.

On the way out I saw a lady pick up a credit card off of the ground and ask this hippie guy if he had dropped his card. "Rebecca? No right?" she said. Obviously he was not Rebecca. "No, not mine" he says. She leaves it on the bumper of the car she found it near and walks away, and I watch him double back and go to pick it up, so I yell "Hey, I thought it wasn't yours?" and he stumbles "Oh uh...I was gonna give it to someone...y'know...find them..." and just then the person who drops it says "Over here, it's mine!" I start to walk away and this woman is walking next to me and says "good job, he was totally going to steal that...And anyway, he's not...what's he doing here, he's obviously...you know, a Barack supporter."

"Aw geez...So am I, lady." I smirk at her.
"OH! Well, you don't look it!"
"I wish I did!"

I walk back to my scooter and putt-putt away from the raceway, pumping my fist upon exit and yelling "BARACK THE VOTE" to the unsuspecting parking attendant who jumps, and then pumps his fist back. On my way home all I could think about was what a Barack supporter looks like through a McCain supporter's eyes. I'm sort of disappointed that even in a blue dress on a blue scooter with tattoos and a dissaproving glare I still couldn't be spotted.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Honestly

This embroidery is going to take me the rest of my life.

Lit up

Yes we carve!

Barack-o-lantern:

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Don't tread on me

The good news is:

I've got a new job at Visarts as the Program Coordinator!

I'm in the Craft Mafia and it's fun and we all did Crafty Bastards together and it was amazing!

Pete and I are really happy!

It's fall and crisp and beautiful!

We saw David Sedaris last night and this morning my sides ache from laughter!

We've decided to just grill everything from now on. Yum. Slurp.

SOHO starts this week and I couldn't be more ready!

My dad and his girlfriend are America bound this Friday, and Richmond bound mid-next week!

The bad news is: I never have any downtime, ever. EVER. AHHHHH.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Skirt Magazine



kettleseeingred: A rising star of the burgeoning Richmond art scene, Mancini has her roots as a mickey-mouse-t-shirted summercamp outsider, sometimes mistaken as a lesbian because her mom made her get a short haircut. Today, her reputation is vast and fans legion and dudes totally hit on her all the time. Also, the environment. - Chris Cooke.