As of today, it is officially two weeks until my show, Relative Strangers. Am I ready? Well, yes, totally. Wait, sort of.

In less than two weeks, I’m driving out to LA with a couple of dozen paintings, both for my show and a bunch to have professionally scanned at CyberCopy. These pieces are for the amazing company I’m working with, called Artlifting. They help artists with disabilities by placing their art in corporate businesses, an opportunity I’ve been looking forward to for many months. They’ve been onboarding me for a while now, but it takes time to dot the ‘I’s and cross the ‘T’s.

Before scanning the works, I’ve been taking condition photos of a few of them—the ones they plan to sell as originals. The rest of them will be available as prints, but they all need scanning.

Artlifting selected twelve paintings, but only 4 as originals. However, I discovered yesterday that 2 of those 4 paintings are fucking missing! How can that be? Exactly! How can that be?

I spent several hours yesterday looking for them in my storage. While my garage has been somewhat of a mess lately, the storage shelves are, as usual, neat, tidy, and organized, with each painting labeled and wrapped in plastic or bubble wrap, or stored in a cardboard box.

How on earth can any be missing, let alone two?

I used to work with several galleries, once upon a time, but now I work with two. Neither painting is in either space. I already made sure of that. I even have a pretty fancy database that indicates each painting’s location at any given time. Both of these paintings say they are in my garage, but no, they are not!

I spent another three hours this morning looking for them. I ripped open every single box, even though each is labeled with what’s inside. Did that matter? Nope! The paintings are GONE!

Now, this has happened before. If any of you read this blog, you may remember me complaining about missing art before. Well, maybe I didn’t announce it, but I eventually found those. Well, all but one, which wasn’t a painting. It’s an artist’s book (Houses #3), still never found. That one, I can kind of understand missing, since most of those have been shipped to several book sellers and galleries.

But these paintings? I never shipped either of those anywhere. They are not at Craig Krull Gallery either, which was the last place they exhibited… in 2015!

Yet, I have the rest of that series (one that I haven’t sold) right here in my garage. But correction, no, I don’t.

One of these is a favorite of mine. There are only a few from that body of work that I truly love. This one was one of those.

And how does one lose a 20 x 20-inch painting on a cradled wooden panel? It’s not like you can steal something like that down your pants. The other one is 12 x 12 inches.

If you can’t tell from me going on and on, I’m fucking stumped beyond belief. I told myself to just give up now. There’s literally nothing I can do about it. I only hope Artlifting can pick two others out to sell as originals. I emailed them a message about all this, but I’m not sure what they’ll do.

In other news, I put in a new revised order for another Bad Cricket, Hurty Brain book. I found typos in the last one that came. That’s what happens when you’re the only person proofreading your own writing. After writing a giant memoir, I discovered that the hard way—over and over again. I paid several professionals to copyedit that thing, and I still find little fuckups in there. My next book will probably be just the same, as far as mistakes go.

Now, have I mentioned that the Kickstarter reached its goal? No? Well, it did. The best news I had this week for sure.