My friend, Suzy the Floozie, would bring me bags of toys. 50 gallon Hefty bags filled with Happy Meal toys, tiny spacemen and alien creatures, Disney tchotchke, gaudy trinkets and horrific gee-gaws, gllttery beads and king- cake babies, little army men and cowboys and Indians and batgirls, small jack-o-lanterns and skulls, Christmas novelties, diminutive dinosaurs and sea-serpents, baubles, curios, trinkets and robots.

At first I glued and nailed them onto frames, wrapped them in barbed-wire and ball chain and slathered them with acrylic paste and gel. I'd paint them gold to mimic antique-gilt picture frames. Or paint them glossy red so they'd resemble viscera. Or paint them white like bleached bones. Or cover them in glitter.

Then things got out of hand.

I started to collage, snipping and cutting paper and configuring new and often disturbing images. I began combining the 3-D and 2-D into new-D. It became very organic, alive and viral.

In my studio I had a steel locker that I used to store art supplies. While working on other projects -- if there was a lull or I needed a break -- I started gluing stuff on to the cabinet. After about six years of applying crap to the locker during my downtime it was completely covered, teeming with images. All surfaces were covered.

Initially, when it became obvious that the locker had ceased to be a locker and had become an Object D'art, I called it "Mi Vida" because a great deal of it was personal; family photos, reproductions of my art, my half-burned Selective Service card, my passport photo from 1973...that kind of stuff. But then "Mi Vida" began to take on a life of its own. I added grass from the grassy knoll, a dollar bill autographed by David Allen Coe, strands of Charles Manson's hair. And, of course, toys. The piece was no longer "Mi Vida". It became simply, "Vida".

But enough palavering. Time to assault your eyeballs.