The State Of The Art

The Husband would like to have a cleaner palette, I am quite sure. The Post Apocalyptic Bohemian style came about from the husband's willingness to deal with my collections juxtapositioned against his desire to strip things down to the basics, like walls, ceilings, & floors, & then leaving them unfinished as he considers his options... for years.


Our little working class bungalow from the early 1940s, was designed with a short hall way that led to the 2 small bedrooms. One original bedroom is my workspace & the other is the Husband's studio/office. The Husband recently walled up the original doorway to his space & knocked out the wall between our 2 spaces, with idea of using 2 lovely old doors fixed to a barndoor track that will divide our spaces. This may happen in the teens, but I am hoping it will be done by 2020.

This is the view from where I sit at my worktable. The Husband cut the slit that opens my space up to the kitchen with a view all way through to the tiny dining room.

After the wall came down, this became the view from my worktable through to the Husband's Studio. The strange looking device mid-picture is one of the many exercise devices that the Husband spotted on an infomercial, & just had to have.

The view from the Husband's studio to my work space.

This is the new wall where the door to the original bedroom always existed. The Wolf Head, made of archival cardboard, glue & screws, is by Seattle artist Scott Fife, who along with his talented architect wife- Susan, were our neighbors & good friends in Seattle for 20 years. Here is another link to Scott's Work. The Husband added a bare Manzanita branch that he has hung with crystals & placed it with a piece of salvaged iron work. All the components have been in other parts of the house, but I really like this grouping. It looks very winter & vaguely Russian somehow. A Chekhovian Christmas scene?

I feel that the Husband indulges my need to join the practice of posting bits of ephemera on the stainless steel refrigerator. Millions of households stick soccer schedules, post cards & shopping lists on their fridges, mine is just, well... Gayer. Some of the scraps of paper are phrases that I have had on the appliance for decades. Some of them have become tattoos. One side has vintage photographs from my Men With Men Photo Collection. I once finished the NY Times Sunday Crossword, in ink, with no errors. It was on my fridge until it turned yellow, brittle & crumbled away. Do you have flotsam & jetsam stuck to your fridge?

 This is a reverse shot through the slit, looking to the back of the house. Can you spot our Christmas Tree in the very far background?  Our Christmas tree is always outside, not in.

Some of these images have been on 3 refrigerators, in different houses, & 2 cities going back decades.

This is Baby Butch playing the Baby Jesus, a long time Post Apocalyptic Bohemian tradition.

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Attend The Tale Of Baby Butch

As a gift to each other, we stopped giving each other Christmas presents about 20 years ago. After all, we have the same tastes in music & books. We buy each other gifts throughout the year, often for no reason at all. We do our birthdays & Valentines Day. It just seemed a nice thing to take it easy when most people are at their craziest. It is a very modest holiday at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, but we do have our traditions.

More than 29 years ago, the Husband & I raided my parent’s storage cabinets in the basement of their beautiful Spanish style home on the South Hill neighborhood of Spokane. I knew there were treasures to be had & I was sure that they had not looked at their storage in at least 10 years & they were sitting on some treasures that should be mine. We took a few choice items that I was sure the folks would never miss, the coolest of which was my father’s doll from his early childhood- Baby Butch. Baby Butch was missing an arm & he was in pieces, but he was a very great looking guy from the early 1930s & I loved him because he was my dad’s, & I liked the fact that my very butch father had a doll in his childhood that he loved so much that he carried him around for decades & several moves. It was an unusual choice, I actually hate dolls, but I was very drawn to Baby Butch. So, he came to live with me & the Husband.


I knew that my parents had not looked at the things in storage for a very long time; I was surprised when the phone call came a few days after the abduction of the doll. My mother wanted to know if I had taken the beloved Baby Butch. I admitted that I had & I was incredulous that they would have taken note of him gone missing, when they hadn’t looked at him for a decade. I also stated that he was living with us now, & that my father could have visitation rights. For 29 Christmases, Baby Butch has played the Baby Jesus in our annual crèche. The set up changes from year to year, but Baby Butch is always the star of our Christmas pageant. I never got to play Baby Jesus, or even Joseph or even a wise man. At church, in the 2nd grade, I did get to play 3rd ass to the left. The Story of My Life.