But late last year, I received an email from a friend’s fiancé:

Hey – I realize we haven’t met, but I wanted to see if you could help me with a project for [my husband-to-be]. He really wants this painting of a typewriter that’s way outside our budget – in the mean time, I saw a rather lovely picture of a typewriter in one of your [Facebook] albums. So basically, I was going to see if I could have your permission to use the photo.

Satisfied customer with his canvassed typewriter.

While traveling together in China, my friend told me that he and his then-girlfriend liked to decorate their walls with “personal art.” Since returning to the States, I began making birthday cards, illustrations, staged photos, etc. out of scrap material lying around the house for friends. This allowed me to keep my sanity during the long months of unemployment I’ve had to endure. I collected these gifts in Facebook albums called “Detritus,” which was the impetus for this blog.

Anyway, long story short, my friend’s wife-to-be had the photograph of my typewriter canvassed. It became a Christmas present for my friend. (Photo evidence to the left.)

I still have yet to sign the artwork and see it displayed in their apartment.

“I… said… ‘Girl Power!’” Just watch "Spaced" already.

I also dedicated most of my afternoons and evenings to the college newspaper. With no time to cook, my diet boiled down to alternating nights of pizza and frozen dinners. Too exhausted to get any plates, napkins, etc. I would sometimes sprawl across the couch and eat the pizza straight from its box, as it rested on my belly.  And I would watch “Clueless” while doing this. Needless to say, two or three pizza boxes would accumulate in my room or the kitchen by the time it was Garbage Day.

So my entry (below) for The New Yorker Eustace Tilley contest is a juxtaposition of my roommate and I’s mutual love for The New Yorker and my lazy eating habits. That’s classy for this magazine, right?

"Pizza Box Tilley" by Joshua Barajas

Materials: Pizza box cardboard, newspaper, red sticker dots, thread, bread tie, Reese’s cup papers, toothpick, paper towel, soap box card stock, pastels, artificial leaf and other miscellanea.

Also sift through the gallery of submissions; there’s a bunch of dexterity on display.

Photo by Courtney Sevener

I also mentioned my love for comic books, techno and dinosaurs.

I joined the FCP roster of artists late last year. When the founding members of the website were asked to define “crappy” in an interview, I think RJ put it best:

We bill it as crappy so expectations are as low as possible regarding the artistic quality. If they do fall in love with it and even go so far as to display it, then they either have the same sense of humor as us, or there is possibly something wrong with them.

I made a paper dragon (above) that’s essentially a straw topper. Full disclosure: I drank through the dragon’s tongue/straw when I finished the little craft.

Materials: construction paper, card stock, tissue paper and a red straw.

Photo by Joshua Barajas

So, embarrassing or not, it’s worth taking a look once again.

And “Chelsea” was the very first. The assignment was to camera edit a short story using a Canon XL1. With the help of friend and ex-suitemate Jared Zeizel, I shot a silent, black-and-white short on dumb love. It was shot at Broom Street, one of NYU’s dorms. The 2005 video’s also a reminder of how much I adore DV tape or even Hi8, back when insanely shallow depth of field wasn’t so prevalent.

A lot could be discussed about my music consumption, but there are already excellent posts about the topic. The effects of my musical gluttony have been tinnitus, missed social connections and an impractical amount of CDs, vinyl and external hard drives.

But my Last.fm profile fails to reveal my true “Top Tracks,” the impetuses for my obsession. Last.fm stopped scrobbling my iPod plays years ago, despite being my most used device. And these tracks‘ absences are glaring.

But one artist’s track managed to squeeze through — twice. Whether it’s the original or the remix, the vocals on Shackleton’s “Blood On My Hands” have remained the centerpiece.

“It’s the language of the earth,
It is the language of the beasts.”

"Language," collage by Joshua Barajas

Shackleton’s brooding meditation on 9/11 (“When I see the towers fall … fall … fall …”) has lasting gravitas. The naughts, for me, were marked early on with death, something that would continue throughout the decade with all the funerals I would attend. And despite all the dread the track oozes, it has too much nervous energy to be passive. Ricardo Villalobos’ 18-minute remix, too, has an insistent, if airy, groove that refuses to stand still. Those tracks’ sense of movement have been vital since first hearing them.

When my family and I decided to visit my father’s grave a few months after his death, we rented a vehicle for the long drive from North Texas to Southern California. But I forgot all my CDs in my car save one: a burned disc with three Shackleton-related tracks:

1. Shackleton — Breezeblock Radio 1 Mix

2. Ricardo Villalobos — “Minimoonstar (Shackleton Remix)”

3. Shackleton — “Blood On My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos’ Apocalypso Now Mix)”

Whenever I drove, I popped the disc in to avoid listening to local stations. It wasn’t the best mood music and the rest of my family didn’t approve at first, but that didn’t mean Shackleton’s tracks weren’t appropriate. After our bittersweet time in Los Angeles, we made our way back through the desert. During nighttime driving duty, I play the “Blood On My Hands” remix on repeat. The lyrics and delivery were too perfect:

“There’s no point to look behind us,
We left the corpse behind,
Because flesh is weak and forms break down.
They cannot last forever.”

While I listened, I looked to the horizon. I treated the light pollution of every city in the distance as a semblance of hope. I would recite the lyrics as I would a Bible verse, finding comfort in its Zen-like terror. The rest of the family settled deeper into their seats to sleep, leaving me to my strangely private moment. “Blood On My Hands” easily became an anthem.

Further reading: Music journalist Philip Sherburne’s review of the classic track.

“100,000 Plays,” materials include newspaper, phone book pages, construction paper, pen, watercolors, tissue paper, part of an envelope and stamp.

“Language,” materials include newspaper, watercolors and pen.

My stepfather recently unearthed a Burroughs adding machine from his father’s garage (above). We’ve looked at several photos and websites for reference, but the closest we got to honing in on the date was deciding that it was awfully similar to the 1931 model. We also can’t locate a serial number.

Can someone help us verify the model and date?

I would like to clean up the typewriter and get it to a semi-functional state. After interviewing on-the-spot poet Jena Kirkpatrick earlier this year, I would like a functioning typewriter of my own for design work.

Drawing by Ngan Ho

With so many versions of me out there, I decided to make a self-portrait out of newspaper, specifically from The Dallas Morning News Sports section. My “hair” is made out of lakes and airport fields from a map used in a car lot ad.

"Self-Portrait," collage by Joshua Barajas

For my mother, sister and me, our reactions were immediate. Mom morphed into a drunken, karaoke barfly. Despite a stormy relationship, my sister now recalls my father as “a good man, father, husband and friend” and praises him in conversation. I would drive to a nearby park at night to cry as I walked one of its trails. Eventually we all reached a level of stasis years later to where our memories didn’t haunt us as much.

While us three had very public, and sometimes, irrational reactions to grief, my brother remained relatively functional. During the wake, my mother’s face was drained of blood. My sister sat next to the body the whole time, sobbing and kissing my father’s forehead. My grandmother looked like she was imagining a life now without her only son. An old coworker of my father’s proved a welcome distraction, asking me questions about my time in New York. Yet, my brother remained stoic throughout the whole affair, to the point that distant relatives and friends of my father didn’t recognize him as a grieving son.

Then it suddenly came. It wasn’t a sudden burst of emotions, a teary breakdown or a full conversation dedicated to discussing Dad. It was one sentence. Somehow our conversation steered toward TAKS tests, statewide examinations that high schools have to pass in order to graduate. He said he received a perfect score on the writing portion.

“What was the prompt?”
“Write about someone who inspired you.”
“…and who was that?”

He answered in a dull way that didn’t invite further questioning. Then again, I always forget that my brother has a photo collage of the family on his wall.

A photo collage my sister made years ago for Christmas.

For Day of the Dead this year, I made my first oferta in honor of my father, Victor Manuel Barajas,  who died in 2007. Instead of being buried at sea as requested, he was buried inside a wall. This is me giving him the burial he actually wanted.

Te amo, padre.

Mom is now a Morrow and my sister’s a Gutierrez. But my brother reminds us that there will always be traces of you left.

…y a otra cosa, mariposa.

Collage by Joshua Barajas