RIP Tom Tipton

I just found out this morning that Out of The Blue Gallery co-founder Tom Tipton passed away. I heard he had a heart attack and was in the hospital but never got the chance to notify others.

Ah, fucking Tom, fellow patron saint of lost causes. Despite the horrible people he got too close to, despite the bridges burnt, he never gave up. 

Never giving up on your dreams is as dangerous as any human addiction. You live and die by it. 

I speak as a fellow person who is too stubborn, too stupid, too crazy to give up.  

There are those artists who just double down on the alcohol after a while and drugs but keep the poetry under control. 

Then there are people like me and Tom. The ones who can't quit no matter how much discomfort it brings to ourselves and people around us. We're like Jerry Lundegaard from Fargo with fewer kidnapping plots.

And among us, there are those who double down even more, who go all in. 

That's how you get places like the Out of The Blue Art Gallery. I was introduced to it when it was still on 106 Prospect Street. One week when advertising Janaka Stucky at Stone Soup, the Weekly Dig calendar mentioned how the gallery smelled of "cat urine and schizophrenia." 

The gallery moved around a lot, but they lasted longer as a physical entity than the damn Dig. 

Any asshole can gather people online nowadays and call themselves a host (Hi...*cough*...). It takes a special kind of delusion to create a physical space for artists, poets, musicians, crackpots and all of the above.

Unfortunately, it takes a miracle for that space to last. 

Other poets gave me a chance to be in front of an audience. Tom Tipton, along with Deb Priestly and a host of others, gave me and so many others. a place to practice. 

The Out of The Blue Art Gallery cannot be duplicated. No one would be crazy enough to try. 

Ask me over an Arizona Arnold Palmer Lite how that works with any other place hosting open mics in the real world. 

I'm drinking one now, so I'll tell you. 

The director of the last gallery I hosted Stone Soup in announced that they were cancelling all poetry gatherings for monetary reasons and then chewed me out for an hour because I...told people what they announced? 

If it wasn't for my life choices, I would have still been trying to gather Stone Soupers in Alston, in Somerville, wherever I heard the Out of the Blue Gallery was currently gathering.

For every "holy shit" moment, there was a "Oh, Jesus Christ not again" moment at the Out of The Blue. 

Another like-minded individual who I know was as irritated by me as I was by him. 

Farewell, fellow insane son of a bitch.