PDX Art: "Everything around me is free" by Richard Schemmerer

"Get It"
photography
dimensions variable


Everything around me is free
Or
The Watermelon syndrome

The only time which is every time I go to Whole Foods is to graze like a motherless sheep in different food sections. My favorite are the cheese displays where you can nibble on aged cubed goodies that otherwise cost $17.99 a pound; usually they are accompanied by fancy crackers with harvest fresh seedy sprinkles that burst in your mouth like land mines or Chinese fire crackers and have exotic names like earth brittle and are from the bread basket of the Tuscan sun.
Cherries are in season and they pop with valley sweetness taste like an old high school girl friends lip stick.
I always feel watched there and I am looking for cameras but there are none and nobody is watching how many cherries I am eating or knows that I am a regular at this free buffet of organic appetizers.
On the surface I seem like an ordinary costumer but I am the sinister nibble snatcher, a free loader of the table of the affluencual. I am the future in motion, the I want it for free debutant, the cheater that feels he deserves free transportation, free music, free sex and the freedom to express this behavior in public and the freedom to take nature by her legs bend her over to have it my way because I am from the my way or no way throw it away generation and I am one of their top ten.

No I am not a competitor but a revelator, I am des-involved but I am everywhere at the same time being the one that tells how it is or how it is taught or ought to be but don’t know a goat skin about how it came to be. I am guessing my way through life to chronograph my stages of advancement in “sancto sacrecy”. I am the entitlement in person I am the one that reads free papers and complains about the content I browse through the magazine stand and feel there is nothing of value in there, I borrow knowledge from others and bitch that it is not the truth while I am sampling my 12 cup of free coffee and much and bits of pieces of way to crumbly cake they serve with it to entice me to buy the whole crumbly mess.
I look like the desired demographic but the only thing graphic about me is my sex life which happens on free download tapping into sites on my neighbors wireless internet connection. No I feel not guilty because guilt is not free it comes with shame attached besides I am against the consumer society and I don’t consume I steal. I steal glorious moments of delirious purposelessness from the shelf’s Life and from a stale population that runs after the status quo like the Free Masons after the Holy Grail.

Yes Vienna was nice. I got to on an arts grant to produce an installation of some kind dealing with something like America and its ways. So I got Cheetos to sponsor it and Coors to underwrite it and that’s what I did I gave away samples of free food deemed to represent the American way of life; first its free and before you know it you are addicted to it.
It was a time based event with audience participation and the Austrians loved it they usually get nothing for free but I am worried now if that sets a president I might get lots of competition on the freeby tables of the world.
Freedom is good but freedom for free is better. I stayed at the Grand Hotel at the town square with free view and free cable and filled my suitcase with free Viennese shampoos and lotions, got a free news paper every day and a free massage from a licensed and certified masseuse who had also done Al Gore for free. I hitched free rides on public transportation and got invited to many parties with drinks on the house. I based my Artist statement on “Let Freedom Ring” which I had stolen from a song and a speech by one of Bush’s speech writers which nobody listened too or remembers anyway.
Welcome to my World it’s a fake world with fake status updates on free internet services and free links to the best in free entertainment. Nothing tastes sweeter that freebie’s as I am munching on free water melon samples handed out at a farmers market stand, as I contemplate my syndrome the enjoyment of things for free of things I didn’t have to do anything for. I realize that when I consume free things I feel not guilty for consuming them as I waste none of my money to do so and actually mostly I am not aware what and how much I consume as long as it’s free. It counts neither as calories nor as expenditure.

I think I found my calling, I am a free loader so why don’t you hate me which usually also comes for free.
I am the future I am the careless ghost of leisure gambling for free with the planet's assets. I am a high roller on the all you can eat stations and on the all you can get philosophies of life. I believe that I deserve to be famous for something or nothing either way because true fame is priceless and doesn’t that mean free.