An upbringing that could bring tears to a cold stoic Nordic spinster who darned socks, picked corn, shod horses, and subsisted on salt herring, blood sausage, sauerkraut, root vegetables, and stewed peaches. Couldn’t even call it a childhood, this upbringing that could have made Helga from Hibbing by way Stavanger sob silently.

Dissolute, abrasive, eruptions of mental and physical abuse, as a clean terrifying break from the sulky silent disappointment that permeated every floorboard and floated through the paper thin walls like a dim-witted ghoul. Absences (from electroshocks or escapist benders) unexplained but steady every few months or so, with perpetually empty cupboards and the talking horse on the television set the only respite from that cold desultory slurry of unhappy self-destruction.

But then art, as release, but weird clammy absurdist art, and release as further evidence of an irrevocable alienating break from other people, which didn’t matter because not making it was no more an option than being out of step and singularly visible at the wrong times and invisible all the others. With pimples and sour BO, dirty clothes and oily hair, obsessive tics and the ever present goofy half-smile, a kinked and involuted affect like a stupid cymbal clapping monkey had been bred with a degenerate pink-gummed carnie, with no one ever wanting to be close enough for long enough to have a conversation.

More living in that dissolute grain, but so also more art, granular termite art that made a form of glossy entertainment into a new aesthetic, pregnant and groping for some solace, laid out in sequential frames like a succinct prayer, imbued with shadowed irrational hope that something soon would change so radically that not even a dim echo of this horrible feeling would ever rattle around in this heart ever again. Bleary morning ambivalence and insomniac’s patience, all the while assembling an instrument to fashion out a life as a crumb that was more than detritus.