Painting by a Mental Patient, Weaverville City Jail, California, 1922

—displayed in the Weaverville Museum It is the picture of a man who dreams at night, his dreams a cartoon color he can’t forget in his blue cell: a fork chases a hard-boiled egg across the smooth paper, cheered on by an angry alarm clock. The clock rings and the artist knows it is morning even though the iron cell is in a basement with no windows. In the center of the painting the devil blows a whistle and his pitchfork drips blood. Above in the night a man has taken off in a Buck Rogers spaceship heading for a yellow one-eyed moon. He grips the steering wheel in the open cockpit and doesn’t look back. In a lower corner under a naked tree a satyr sits and plays his pan-flute. The notes weave all around the painting, twist around a girl dancing in veils. The man who dreams all this pulls at his covers, drowses at the bottom of the painting. The man who painted this died in his dreams.