I had no idea, when I began this project d'amour, of just what a task it would present itself to be.... and I haven't even begun.. haven't screened picture one, or written any text - save for this late night drivel.

But somewhere around the fifth or sixth plastic sackful of reet correspondence and envelopes and books and magazines and just plain memorabilia it dawned on me that I'm trying to push a rubber sausage (kosher of course) through a keyhole.

There are too many facets... too fine a filigree to the web.

We've all known a different reet.. and yet we all know the same person.

When it's all over and the images and words and sounds are somehow wrestled into cybersubmission for all the world to see, there will still be almost as much left unsaid.. left in the nether.

As the geek who came up with this stupid idea in the first place, it befalls me to attempt to validate my presence within it... if only to myself.

What compelled this strange attempt to delineate an image.. to capture a reflection of all of our lives so ably illuminated in the complex but yet simple character of one man?

hellifIknow.

But I do know that it began as irresistible and became rapidly mandatory.

And now, all these years down the cart track, it falls on such a gentile to try to tell the tale.

I have the sense that it will shortly take on the vagaries of exploring one's own family tree, only by gossip and innuendo and hastily scribbled notes. I welcome and dread the idea that I shall just finally finish scanning this mountain of artistic trash treasures when a new mound will arrive via the mail... and then another.

It came to me, when I got the latest reetpic at the Sparks signing party.. (it's here somewhere, you'll come across it - except of course, he probably already sent it to ya)

I know the identity of the reet...his true and deserved alter-ago.. his real inner self..

the reet is.....

Jeremy Boob - that philosophical figure of tragedy so wistfully created in Yellow Submarine - to be the repository of all worthless temporary knowledge and yet to be so imperative to the plot that Pepperland would be forever lost to the Blue Meanies were it not for his timely, if strange and indecipherable, assistance.

In the great and grand rollercoaster of life, where most of us can only hang on and hope that we don't throw up on the ride...he's the one in the front car with both arms in the air - even though he knows that it has a loose wheel. And yet, for all the wrong and hopeless reasons, he envies us. We with the constraints of normalcy and the rigours of social structure and acceptable behaviour. He is too close to the forest to see the trees that he has planted and too far from the dream inside him to bathe in its majesty - as we have been privileged to do.

When all is said and done, he is as irritating an individual as it is possible to even imagine...and yet I owe him my life (on at least one occasion... ) and my sanity (on several occasions.. ) and my perspective and inner giggle from day one...

for me, it began in a record shop in Kenmore Square in Boston.

I needed someone who knew rock music inside out - as wide a range as possible.. someone who could easily pass from classical customer to carolking queenie... someone to be my right hand man in the record store that I grew to manage...

He listened to nothing except Zappa, Beefheart, Fugs, Allmans and the Dead - anything else was dismissed loudly and with a bucholic sneer. He didn't want a job. He sounded ill.. all the time and dressed with the Phyllis Diller sense of fashion. He never ate, didn't drink or smoke tobacco.. and he didn't like me much either.

What choice did I have... I hired him...

He began to tell me of his life.... and it goes something like this...