Ink, watercolor and acrylic on Moleskine Japanese album sketchbook, 5 1/2 x 109in

I’ve descended this escalator at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia several hundred times over the past fourteen years. And it’s true what they say: You never descend the same escalator twice.

Same thing with the games we play: Run it back a million times over and over and over again and you’ll always or at least very often be surprised by the result.

If you squint, that tedious everyday world can be a door or a window, on the other side of which is a universe that up until now you never even knew existed

and it will flood into you until it feels familiar like family and you get off at your same old usual stop a changed individual,

still swinging, though,

with hysterical laughter at the odds of it all.

Once I made a drawing of the woods across the road from my in-law’s home in Georgia. Last week they sold their home in Georgia.

Last summer I made a drawing from the banks of the Missouri River on the Bismarck side, near where my parents now live.

They haven’t sold their home on Cottonwood Lane.

Yet.