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Who is Tom and what is his hidden Agenda?

Writer, painter, climber of rocks big and small, lover of women big and small, Tom's lust for adventure and art is not unlike Don Juan's unquenchable thirst for romance. And like the junky's daily requisite for junk, Tom must regularly channel his creative passions or his body will quake and his mind will derail from withdrawals. The following is an attempt to explain why the hell he can't just get along living like normal people.  
My desire to start Third Hand is fueled by my growing disgust with man's propensity for waste and is driven by a sense of urgency to reconsider the ways in which we value used materials. Of lesser importance is my use of the site to promote my own art works and creative writings. So if you get tired of sifting through work that I have posted, post some of your own, become a contributor, and make some pocket money in the process! 
 
My Artistic process is one of thoughtful forgetting. It is amnesic but there is always an awareness of the tangible, creative space that I inhabit. There is the smell of its musky perfumes and the steady condensation of its humidity. The order of materials is considered and tended to in an obsessive way. There is a creative instinct propelled by an accumulation of practice and training. A creative muscle memory that cannot be harnessed or manipulated by the conscious mind alone. It is always present. It moves perpetually. Its influence is always recognizable in the amnesia. And so, I am always a knowing participant in this amnesic state. I am participant in my own forgetting.
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My writing process begins with personal chaos—insomnia, hunger, heartache, heartburn and so on—and culminates in a pastiche of diverse styles, genres and forms. Perhaps it’s my feeling suffocated by some trivial aspect of life that hurls me toward this creative space. That desperate urgency to break free, that scraping for something new. Masochism is not my mode of creativity, but when a burden rears its gnarled and ugly head, I’ve found that it is best subdued and harnessed through writing.
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Once the tag-value is stripped from a certain material it is tossed to the mounds of materials neither defunct nor inoperable, but with an outmoded fashion, with a fashion-value of zero, a value that fluctuates daily with the very particular desires of hugely influential conspicuous consumerists or "fast fashion” fashionistas. And all around us these piles, these mounds, these material mountains will rise from the immaterial earth until they obscure the sun, the great life source.
 
This is a bit of poetry, an image exaggerated to magnify a truth. No politician will see this because this is not a website for politics. This is one man’s-and hopefully many more's-effort to reassign a value to materials discarded and forgotten. If I cannot wear it or use it, I am going to throw it in my studio and use it for a piece of art later on. I have pulled scrap art materials off the side of I-65. I have dug a bitchin’ shirt out of dumpster. This is not some hipster neo-grunge fashion I am promoting. This is anti-waste; this is never buying a new piece of clothing again. It is a more conscious lifestyle than most of us are currently living, and it can be an extremely creative way of life as well, if that’s your bag baby.
 
You can reach me by email at ttaylo29@gmail.com or through my various social media pages linked to this site. Please do not be shy!
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