^{This year for Christmas I made my wife a sculpture of a man dancing on top of a Pink Floyd album entirely out of old records. It was kind of a spur of the moment decision that resulted from a combination of cold temperatures and a well-documented recession/depression that forced my hand to a gift that was thoughtful and could have been free if I’d remembered I already owned PVC adhesive.}

It all started when I was cleaning our bedroom in an unrelated attempt to please me wife. I was dusting near her dresser and knocked 13 pairs of jeans from their neat pile alongside 27 other pairs and into the abyss behind. I moved the bureau slightly to retrieve the jeans and exposed a large box of records such as The Best of Bread, Adam Ant, and the Roger Daltry album where he has a curly blond mullet and is depicted as a man/horse combination.

The albums were put there by my wife, who last Christmas, discovered that in addition to making our house smell like a tire factory, she could make bowls out of records if she heated them in our oven. She got so excited about this hobby that at one point in the months that followed I intentionally purchased a heavily-scratched John Denver album.

The notion that I would make a sculpture would surprise anyone who has ever seen me write my name or do art of any kind. But there have been times in my life that I thought seriously about a career in professional art making, such as all of first grade and most of second grade. My dreams ended abruptly, however, in April of 2^{nd grade when Mrs. Barrett, my pointy-nosed teacher with broken capillaries asked us to make "realistic" sharks using two sheets of paper stapled together and crumpled up paper which we would put into the middle of the shark to give it its life-like appearance. The instructions were to use only pencil to color the shark which Mrs. Barrett said was the only way to draw a realistic shark, but only if we colored all in the same direction. In my earliest memory of the "I have no idea what someone is asking me to do so I’m just going to take a guess" dynamic, I spent approximately three hours dragging my pencil in one direction across the shark and then lifting my hand and dragging it all the way down the body again because I didn’t realize I could go back and forth along the same plane which would have allowed me to finish the project in about 10 minutes.}

My teacher saw that I was far behind and instead of watching my technique, made an often-accurate assumption that I was wasting time and told me hurry up, which I did by scribbling feverishly in all directions.  The final product was a shark that even I didn’t think was realistic. At the end of the year my teacher assigned me to go into a 3rd grade class with a bunch of weird kids that I didn’t know and allowed several of my friends to stay together as a "team" for the next year.  Though I never demanded a formal inquiry into the matter, I assume it had something to do with the shark, or the fact that the guys who got to stay together were the son of the superintendent and the high school basketball coach or possibly, the fact that they weren’t really my friends.

Even with my painful art making history I went after my dream of building something beautiful. This time, my only audience was my two dogs, who think everything I do is amazing and who conveniently liked chewing vinyl as much as they like chewing pens and dragging them all over our khaki colored chaise lounge. Since I had drawn a sketch of my design on the back of an envelope, the process of cutting limbs, hair strands and body sections was not terribly difficult, if you regard as easy, the placing 6 vinyl albums in a preheated oven and then cutting them with scissors once they are on the verge of turning into liquid. Once I had it all laid out, I began the difficult process of affixing the different body parts together, which began with my walking more than a mile to a plumbing supply store in the aforementioned bitter cold to buy PVC adhesive which for reasons not worth explaining, I already own but had forgotten was in my basement.

After 6 or 7 hours of work, I had a creation that I actually thought was objectively "cool" though admittedly unrealistic. I was so proud of the final product that I couldn’t wait for my wife to open it on Christmas. But after it was wrapped I had flashbacks to Mrs. Barrett and had second thoughts about having her open it in front of other people.  The risks were just too high. Third grade was awful, and I can’t stand the thought of going back there, even for a moment, especially without my wife.