JOHNKARLSEN

The Fugs had a song, a line went "I once was young but now I'm ugly." Maybe that's me, I don't know. I've been in love now and again, and those times have been the only times I've been really alive. My last love died, I'm still here, what to do but find someone to love I grew up in the US midwest, a Norwegian-American kid, not satisfied with the closed-in cultue (this was the '50s) but not knowing what was out there. So I started out as a rebellious high school boy, but still college seemed like the only way to go. A college affiliated with my family's church awarded me a sizable scholarship for the time, so I went there despite the fact that the school had been founded as a presminary college. It was enough, it was a window for me, it started me wandering the US, mostly the northeast and southeast. At the moment I'm lodged in the rustbelt, I guess the oldest iron mining area of the country, in fact. I live just on the edge of what used to be the Cornwall Ore Bank, which is now a deep lake home to water birds--several kinds of ducks and geese, and swans. Deer come to the lake in the evening, and I can watch and listen to the geese leaving the lake in the morning and returning in the evening. I have a dog for a companion, an English mastiff named Clive

I don't know who you are or where, but I know there's someone who somehow needs me, as I need him, or her, to love, hang out with, talk endlessly or maybe be silent with, someone who will find me and my life good for their art, and whose pleasure will in turn nourish me and awaken me from what seems like an overlong fallow period that I've been in since the death of my wife