Publication Date: January 19, 2022
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Shadow Men is from a short biographical narrative I wrote, called Tumbleweeds (or The Best Penny Candy Store on Earth). It’s about a defining moment in my childhood where I learned the valuable lesson of not “watching people watch me” (i.e. to be myself and dispense with impressions). The Shadow Men were real in that they were building construction surveyors who tried and succeeded to hijack a tumbleweed field where my friends and I played baseball when my family lived in Anaheim, CA. They plied us with ice cream vouchers at Ralph’s Ice Cream and then they stole our bats–a warning to “clear out,” as big commerce was on the way. This was 1957. Indeed, big buildings were on the way. The book is punctuated with my first attempts at digital collaging attempting various narrative levels and clarity.