In later years, he was never able to explain how it happened. It had all seemed terribly logical at the time, one thing leading to another in series, and after Cairo, it was simply inevitable that he'd be scaling a cliff with a pear, a voodoo doll, and of course, the goldfish. (Always the goldfish. The goldfish was the crux of the matter, after all, even if he hadn't known it at the time.) But when he tried to explain this to other people, it began to sound increasingly crazy, until finally he gave up completely. After that, whenever anybody asked, he said he'd been in a cult, but was feeling much better now, and that seemed to satisfy everybody and didn't lead to nearly as many awkward questions.

Acrylic on cradled clayboard, 16 x 20. The photos of this one didn't come out as well as I'd like--they bleached out the whites something fierce, and the detail gets lost--but after multiple attempts, I gave it up and went with this one. It's likely no one will buy it who hasn't seen it at a show, but I'm okay with that (and the sort of person who wants this particular scene on their wall would be a rare individual anyhow!) But it IS for sale! E-mail if you're that individual!

And no, I don't know the story either. I think it's sort of a self-portrait--I don't always know what the heck I'm doing, or why I have to have these particular things with me, but it all seems to make sense at the time, and it's only afterwards that people go "No, really. How did you get THERE?" and I realize "Okay, dude, maybe putting horns on fruit is weird, but it seemed so logical while I was doing it!"