While attending The ART ACADEMY of CIncinnati, I helped manage a greenhouse in Mt. Healthy, my home town in Ohio. My grandparents had died a few years earlier... the patriarch and matriarch of the florist company where I worked were my surrogate grandparents... I'd never experienced that, but I knew it was so. One time Grandma wuest called me to her home for a private meeting, she tossed an envelope of money in my lap and cried, telling me she was grateful for all the work I did there... she knew I would inherit nothing, I was simply a laborer... but hse also knew that she felt like I was the grandsone she wished she had. That 800 dollar gift translated into me learning TM, buying backpacking gear, and skydiving to face my own death urges one on one. She told me "don't tell anyone about this, they will think I am crazy and take it back" ...So , I promised, and that 800 dollars saved my life. My two bosses were her son-in-laws. One was more a mentor than a boss, but I'd never heard the word back then.... He gave me this van. the other son-in-law also gave me his van a few years before. I ran them both into the ground (the vans... that is). In any case, after I left the greenhouse business, they closed the place down... couldn't afford my kind of worker for 2.75 han hour before... I suppose they all felt they owed me for the years we squeezed out of the business all together. I put myself through Art School on the money I earned selling flowers out of this van on Farmer's Market in cincinnati. Here I am riding the beast while launching my future as musician, artist, song-writer and vagabond. One of these trucks I road to Cincinnati with Joel and Kenny to visit my folks. While parked at the Art Academy of Cincinnati late one night, I painted zebra stripes with very liquid paint that dripped and created an "echo" all around the space where I'd parked. Some folks would call this vandalism. I call it performance art. They probably wondered which of their Alumni had painted those drips to dry overnite. This is the world of true artist... the instigator of joy and sweetness disquised as performance art. To me, it was a sacred ceremony. I did that there, because I was launching my life with that van... and I wanted to thank the Academy that I have a sense of my value for being true as artist in this world of non-risk-deception.