These are the good times, aren’t they? In fact, years from now, you’ll look back at the early 1990s as one of the golden eras of your entire life—and at 1992 in particular as the golden moment in your art career. You are—right now—in a groove like never before, and I know you love it.

The print series you’ve been working on, capturing images of a largely vanished Milwaukee, has been so well received by fellow Milwaukeeans that you can barely keep up with the orders. More importantly, the process of creating them is proving to be the catharsis you needed after losing Mom and barely limping across the finish line of the manic 1980s.

Between the research for upcoming prints, designing the pieces, preparing the finished art, supervising the printing, making sales calls and follow-up deliveries, and sending out press releases, there seems to be not enough hours in a day to accomplish it all. But, at the moment, the pace is more exhilarating than anything else. You are truly livin’ the dream, kiddo, livin’ the dream.

But today you’re ticked off, aren’t you?

While making a number of deliveries today you were stopped on a downtown street by a City of Milwaukee police officer who loudly read you the riot act for committing the crime—that’s right, he referred to it as a crime—of jaywalking. Miraculously he didn’t cite you for this grievous offense, but for a second there you thought he might not only ticket you but also resort to deadly force. He was that angry. You were trying to hit as many galleries as you could in as short amount of time as possible. And when you saw that the street was completely clear of traffic (I mean, it was as if the street had been blocked off for a parade or something!) you decided to just cross in the middle. You were posing precisely no threat to yourself or anyone else. But I guess a crime is a crime…in Milwaukee at least.

What is this thing with Milwaukee and jaywalking? It’s a well-known phenomenon, and everyone who’s ever worked, shopped or even visited downtown is aware of it. Scholarly dissertations have even been written on the topic, for God’s sake! Some say it stems from the large population of German Americans and their high regard for discipline and order. Others insist it was the particular bugaboo of retired police chief, Harold Breier, who according to some theories used the ordinance to target Civil Rights protestors, hippies and all the other undesirables of the 1960s. Whatever the reason, Milwaukee is probably the only northern city in the world where one can witness shivering groups of people waiting—despite the absence of traffic—for the light to change at crosswalks in the dead of a typically brutal winter.

Of course, you’re happy that you didn’t get a ticket, but the tongue-lashing was so over-the-top that you can’t quite shake it, can you? And the more you think about it the angrier it makes you. All the way home you were fuming, and right out loud! “Jaywalking! jaywalking!?! Come on guys, don’t you have anything more important to do? I mean it wasn’t all that long ago when a psychotic killer/necrophiliac/cannibal was running loose in Milwaukee and you didn’t catch him until it was way too late! But I bet you nabbed a bunch of jaywalkers during his reign of terror, didn’t ya?”

Well, you know what you have to do, right? You have to process this outrage the way artists do. By turning it into art. It doesn’t fit into your production schedule and will throw off your timing a bit, but you simply have to go for it. You’ll regret it if you don’t. You don’t have to worry about it being a masterpiece either. It doesn’t have to rise to the standard of your Hometown Series, just make it something down and dirty to get it out of your system. And who knows, maybe you’ll find a way to fit it into your series after all. Just be creative, and be sarcastic too. Show them how silly they are about the whole thing and how much they exaggerate the danger.

And do it with love, too, because it’s just one more thing that is unique and weird and endearing about your hometown, and years from now, when you live in another city where jaywalking isn’t an issue, you’ll surprise yourself by wishing that it was.

He Jaywalked!   1992   John T. McCarthy, Jr. 3-color lithograph print