Swan song

Arnie could have been a really excellent graphic designer, but instead he wanted to be a rock star, which was sad because he couldn't play guitar worth a damn. No matter. He wasn't the sort of person to take direction from anyone, and couldn't handle criticism so he never bothered with lessons.

Instead he dropped three grand into a titanium alloy guitar. He and that metal monster of a thing moved up to Tofino, because naturally, if you want to attract the attention of the majors, you move away from the city, not towards. This was his logic.

The beautiful thing about titanium is that it has a fairly high melting point so when his shack in the woods burned to the ground three years later, we assumed with suppressed giggles that the guitar had survived, though we never asked.

One time he bought a large sheet of red glass - about a metre square - and set about painting a pair of black swans on it with India ink, shaded completely with Led Zeppelin lyrics. He spent hours on it and it was beautiful. I wish I had a picture. It wasn't the first time he'd done something like that, but that one was the best.

After he was finished, he packed it up carefully and paid a horrendous amount to ship it to Jimmy Page in England, because apparently he keeps black swans on his estate, or at least, he did at the time. I don't know what happened to it after that, but I'm sure that it was definitely a change of pace from the regular, run-of-the-mill fanmail.

Red glass is the most expensive glass, because it has gold in it. I know because I designed a window almost exclusively of red glass once, red and sky blue glass and lead and black ink, but through the tiniest bit of carelessness and a large amount of bad luck, it ended up shattered on the basement floor, and cleaning it up felt a lot like mopping up the blood of a loved one. At the time, at least.

I went to Smith's Glass in Victoria and spent about $200 to replace the glass, but my motivation was gone and now it sits out in my parents garage, underneath the silversmithing bench. I never finish anything anyways.