Owen's interview with the preeminent artist of the time.

Questioner: "Let's discuss inspiration. What inspires you to create your art?"

Artist: "Well, Owen, I think that art should elucidate life – that is its primary function. And so I try to create pieces that invoke in the viewer an understanding of their own life, that they might not achieve otherwise."

Q: "How do you do this? Many of your works are not depictions of quote, unquote real life, are they?"

A: "No, but they don't have to be. Take, for instance, The Cultivation of Connectivity, one of the pieces in my exhibition. There is a man in a suit, looking forlorn, playing the banjo with a sunflower growing out of his shoulder. Now, that was inspired by a real man who was forlorn, but he wasn't actually playing the banjo. Perhaps instead he was playing the tuba, but a tuba would conceal his forlorn face, so I changed it to the banjo. Or, perhaps, in real life it was a happy man playing the banjo, but that can't teach us anything. And maybe the sunflower, in actuality, was behind the man – or woman, it could be a woman – in a field, but has been moved to the shoulder to better represent his or her loss. You see, not all of the elements are pulled directly from the real world, but together they do a better job of opening our eyes to that world. The world of losing things."

Q: "Do you like to jump?"

A: "I adore jumping."

Q: "Well, thank you very much for joining us."

A: "Thanks for having me, Owen."

Something I'd never seen until today.

A cat starting with a meow and ending with a yawn.

Kaiser

"Okay... so that's a $25 co-pay... and I just need to see your I.D."

"Sure, no problem. Though I can't think why a person would want to impersonate me to pay twenty-five dollars and get their asshole poked at."

I had my first adult-type doctor's appointment today. Hoo. ray. It was a bit weird — I hope I didn't break his finger when I clenched (involuntarily, of course).

The weirdest thing, though, was that I felt almost an identical nervousness today before my appointment as yesterday before my date. Two very different experiences, though. I'd say completely different, I would.