Happy Birthday, Patrick Bisconti!
From time to time, Bri and I will stay with Grampa Pat down in Aptos. Bri was very eager to introduce me to him when we first started dating, probably because she saw a very large parallel in personal and vocational trajectories between the two of us.
She's correct, for the most part, except maybe for the giant clan of children he pro-created. He "was there" when art, culture and rebellion were at a crucial nexus point in Bay Area history. Kind of kooky and definitely a Santa Cruz surfer at heart, Pat loves a good alien conspiracy as much as he loves carving exotic sculptures out of driftwood or wrought iron.
He'll chat the earwax right out of you if you let him.
One terrible Santa Cruz weekend afternoon, I was feeling rather awash in a sea of my own emotional filth. Bri was off taking a nap and I had walked downstairs to try and clear my mind. Pat greeted me with the usual half-cheery mutter, and could see right away that something was bugging me. So rather than just pry away, which actually would have been just as acceptable, he took me upstairs. He began to show me books that he had drawn, essays that his friends had written in collections self-published volumes, wrought with grammar errors and sexually explicit acid trips (before self publishing was even a thing). He took me on a grand tour of his younger years, when he would play his custom-made octopus "DINGULATOR" guitars with his band Charlie Nothing®.
I began to open up to Pat about how frustrating it was to be an artist currently, now not only in the ashed over wasteland of Silicon Valley, but San Fran Fucking Cisco nonetheless, where creativity has been put in a chokehold by both greedy politicians and the arcade button penis billionaires who love them so. I often squint my eyes and indulge in visions of cartoonishly evil startup CEOs dressed in flannel and boating shoes, kicking dirt in the faces of minorities, handing them eviction notices and then burning them alive in houses they've lived in their entire lives when they refuse to leave.
I lamented to him that I was tired of grinding out shit job after shit job. I was tired of being a slave to the rich, seeing douchebags shop for Nest Cams in corporate t shirts and $500 haircuts. (yo Nest cam, hook me up with free SHIIIIIIIT)
I was tired of being marginalized like the rest of my creative class, and I confessed to him how badly I just wanted to sell out and feel "secure" and be "one of them"..... But that every waking free moment I still asked myself if I wanted to keep making art even though I will probably never truly feel like I'd "made it". The answer is rhetorical, because the answer was, and still always is, FUCK yeah.
Pat took this all in, chuckled, and looked me square in the eye, with a twinkle and a lifetime of paid dues, and warmly assured me.....
