Aaron McElroy: One of These RED Days

“You felt perhaps as though you could finally move that leaden ass sack of yours through the last ten feet of ticker tape parade to come out the other side in a low-tar lifestyle and you did just that”.

Where the fuck did you go, my man? You were last seen pushing your body through the drainpipe of a fetid existence, crushing yourself with inept force into the world around you like a rusty and serrated tuna fish can waiting for the ass to indeed preclude the angel as so advertised by coiffed hawkers and rotten-toothed grins. Your youth had spent its days screaming in a funny Asian accent “Cover your heart, Indy, COVER your heartttttt” and when the last carton was crushed and your lungs wheezed emphatically for you to let go of that pulsing simian grip, you tore yourself in two and left us with the ghosts-the small red stain on the mattress in which the sieve of the checkered and coagulated sheet caught up to you when you pulled it clean with minor ripping sound one morning when there was a strange hope tethered to the throb in your veins. Dust floated like confused particles through the light of day creeping in through the window in which the vase of wilting flowers lodged, not placed in front of, showed their true character. You felt perhaps as though you could finally move that leaden ass sack of yours through the last ten feet of ticker tape parade to come out the other side in a low-tar lifestyle and you did just that.

 

 

Through the glare of night and the eminent darkness swallowed by the day, you kept moving, kept shaking, kept leaping through unnatural and pre-determined fires to come out the other side a little greyer in the beard, a little less feared and all the while guilt hung over you like a thin veil, a spider web of spittle desperately clinging to the end of a tan stub of an abused cigarette. And fuck it, why not? There is no point in mollycoddling the obvious. We all have to exercise our guilt muscle while were able, but these paths have diverged and out the end of a the meat grinder comes a re-constitution of might, aggregate sinews reforming with the gristle and whirl of the crank; a hum and din in which no greener pastures confuse your existence. Well done, my man. Lets fucking keep it this way. Solitude is a diseased angel left flapping and flaying in the field of plenty.

 

 

I want to gift to you one more thing before we return the picture to focus…

 

One of these days Mr. Opportunity gonna be knocking on my door
One of these days I’ll read the writing on the wall
One of these days I’ll be a spectator in an audience of whores
One of these days I’m gonna run until I fall
One of these days I’ll win the lottery and wake up a millionaire
One of these days I’m gonna get myself a job
One of these days They’re gonna stop the world and I won’t even care
One of these days I’m gonna finally believe in God
One of these days I’m gonna grow up to become the President
One of these days I’ll find the woman of my dreams
One of these days I’m gonna find these truths to be self evident
One of these days I’ll blow my brains out on T.V.

One of these days
One of these days

One of these days I’m gonna get in shape, become an astronaut
One of these days My fears are gonna fall down the stairs
One of these days I’ll sell my soul and let them find out what they bought
One of these days I’m gonna shave off all my hair
One of these days I’m gonna learn to play and write myself a song
One of these days I’ll take my conscience out to lunch
One of these days I’m gonna buy the plans and build the atom bomb
One of these days I’ll have the guts to play my hunch

One of these days
One of these days
Any day now
Any day now…

 

-Todd A, Any Day Now Cop Shoot Cop

 

 

I have a friend that fights his limitless boredom of life by complaining about his limitless boredom of life to me, who does not have time to be bored with life. He has no reason to be bored outside of his comfortable, if not well-off existence. Having conspired with a mutual friend, rather having an inadvertent bitch session about his tired ass, we came to the conclusion that what one lacks in life usually creates a drain in which he or she places all manner of complaint to be aired out like a dirty nappy to exorcise if possible, by feat of annoyance the very problem at the root of it all. We cling. We drive. We die. And in advance dying, we create an unsympathetic boredom if we wallow in the idea thereof.

 

 

We cling to the never-ending determinate solution to this boredom in any way possible. Sex, Drugs, rock ‘n’ roll- anything that will moor our dwindling hours to a post of confusion, which keeps us from asking “Why” and “What is the point”. The disease of living is counting the time lost. Or the time left as if it were calculable. And that sentiment, so base in description is the drive for many of our woes. Without clinging, longing, and desire we would have only death to hold our attention and what fun is that? One could even postulate that this would be…boring.

 

 

“One of these days I’m gonna get in shape, become an astronaut
One of these days My fears are gonna fall down the stairs
One of these days I’ll sell my soul and let them find out what they bought”-Todd A

 

 

 

Aaron McElroy went missing a few years back. I’m not here to lament those missing years. I am suggesting only that the missing years were felt by his colleagues and friends alike, but also understood. He has returned with a new book with Sun Editions and though it is positively McElroy, it has hints of an oncoming shift in vision-pages of photographs devoted to the color red are inclined to the sensual, but within the book we begin to see McElroy’s usual urge-oriented imagery give way to still life, abstraction and a slower more methodical way of seeing. I’m pretty sure I know how Aaron is arriving at this point and it is not to suggest that there is any loss of magic or major change in direction. I am nowhere near bored and I am fucking jealous of that Marlboro photograph. There is still the pop and flash cum photograph cum cum images of a sexual nature- the truncated images of panties, hints of pussy, hints of heroin fingers and the occasional odd end of leather within. The color red takes over and though it professes to be a book of “love, sex and death”, I suspect the latter theme is beginning to creep in a bit more, creating a much more mature McElroy in which the crutch of corpus is demeaned in so much as it is becoming overshadowed by the loftier images within that have several possibilities and not just one cum one. I hate to say it aloud, but the work is much more mature (what a strange word, it causes condemnation and admiration alike), and considered and although I do not suspect Aaron’s drive towards sex will evaporate, I suggest that what will define his progress will not be “erotic”.  Highly recommended.

 

 

Aaron McElroy

REDS

SUN

(All Rights Reserved. Text @ Brad Feuerhelm. Images @ Aaron McElroy.)

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