Mothers Against Mothers M.A.M.

C2AR=0 "Klimt"

2011-05-25T20:17:00.008-09:00

It has been a long time since I have participated in this endeavor. I just spent what it costs to deliver a baby to have my computer repaired after spilling wine on it a couple of months ago... The first night back with me, I have already had a bath with the thing and now I am attempting to listen to Daniel's recent postings and write a post for the NAP... before the music dies. Currently, King Crimson is playing, and I recognized the song at the first note... and I gotta say- I can't stand this song. It reminds me of when I prank called someone on a landline at 13 and they told me they liked YES. I thought they were exciting until I sought ought an education about YES (at the time a joke without technology, I know) and realized that I had probably prank called the most boring person with the sexiest voice in the entire RedNeck swamps of Magnolia Texas... Before Kingwood featured a Gondola at their Mall... I mean, Universe.

I am aware that I have poor grammar. Moving onto the second song.

"Coming down from a rock show music..." Yes. I can see how this would be a good choice. I like that tinny/guitar high end fuzz that doesn't get drowned out by the horns. Ahhh, yes. It really is all about the singing on this one. It's one of those songs that never feels dated even though there is a ridiculous kind of over production that pegs it's time stamp square on it's head. Socially, I think about the way color television of the era was pretty much like a cloudy day on every station. Was it the clothing? Is it the years later? Is it that, television now totally lies to us and feeds us ultra saturation and contrast? Is Hollywood lighting how an apartment complex sells you their shithole, because they have tricked the eye by making you look more saturated than you actually do when natural sunlight hits your factory outlet smile? Ending with the strings in this song really makes me feel like an asshole for ending up thinking about balding denim and pocket conveniences instead of following Curtis into the woods and being there for him from beginning to end.

Song Three.

I like the song starting at about 2:43. That's when they finally caught me up in it. I listened to it more than once to be sure. At 2:43- it just worked for me. The bass, the rhythm, the snare... the phrasing is perfect. Made me want to hear it again. Then at 3:52- smoky, confident, and flowing. The chorus bores me to death to be perfectly honest though.

FOUR ( first GZA track)

I am not looking into any of the music I am hearing for the first time as I listen to these. I miss what it was like to listen to radio, before video came along. I could actually HEAR music then. Much like my daughter. She can hear a song twice and know the chorus and the melody and switch gears right into the song as soon as she hears a couple of beats. I liked the way this song started, but I just feel like the artists are privileged. The poetry comes across as forced. The song structure has no surprises. Maybe it's a great song. It started that way with the static and samples and melancholic piano. They lost me with the spoken stuff. All I could picture was some kids with buffed nails treating their girlfriends like crap because they had made this song. Disclaimer: I said I wouldn't educate myself about the music before listening.

Five. GZA SECOND CHANCE

I see poets reading from a piece of paper and one of them hits the same key on a keyboard over and over again. The greatest accomplishment is the hand off from one vocal to another. The rest is totally unforgettable for me.

Dirty Projectors track:

The mistake I have made with this one is that I can see some of the video. But, I think even if I hadn't seen the video, I would have the same reaction to this song. It makes me uncomfortable. Hearing every nuance is not always a good thing. I have some recordings of myself singing and playing guitar with a friend a century ago in Austin. How painful it is to listen to it now and it would be horrifying if there were a video to accompany it today. It's like having a psychic imprint of a depression clinic's group hug. There's talent in the room in so much that they all get behind some patterns and melodies... but for the most part, all I can think about is how it must be a total pain to talk to the male singer about shit basic like... stop staging the coffee table with books you want people to think you have read or worse than that- books you HAVE read.

Sleeping People song. I am tired, so maybe this will wake me up. This music is just not committed enough for me. The interesting time signature work almost halfway in is good, but there is a tightness in the room sort of sound to this work and it isn't exactly one that is absorbable. It's the kind of music I would try furniture polish out to. It would keep me interested and going and I wouldn't be emotionally attached enough to sit down and think about anything that mattered to me. Maybe when the vocals kicked in I'd actually dust and beat the rugs on the patio. This song is called "Stay Up" and they'll have to do better than that mellow and tone tight Crimson sound.

Pinback:

Like the vocal phrasing. Why do bands have to film themselves? Shit... If you have a decent song, why screw it up by boring me with footage of you staging a performance where you probably aren't even hooked in to actual sound for the video. This music is dormitory peaceful and uncomfortable to watch. You miss me, Touch & Go, because I left your ass.

Crap... another Pinback song. I was just outside on the patio, trying to understand why I just can't like any kind of music. This band and this song in particular don't do anything necessarily to make me dislike it STRONGLY, I just do. I feel like I am in the middle of a pharmaceutical love scene on set and this music is being played out of the Buffet stand, and the drug company funding the infomercial/video put up a 30 something couple coloring in an insurance policy in a tightly manicured back yard with everything to lose and no chance of losing it. Just not buying the plan.

That completes my first post on this site in a million years. I would like to rate this piece on how it makes me feel or how the music inspires me to paint, by giving it an C2AR "Create 2 Ability-rating". I would not paint to this music very easily. It is distracting and does not flow in the kind of direction that frees me to lose myself in the music enough to want to respond to it by reflecting and working at my own craft without changing the dial. The CTAR rating on this one is kind of KLIMT-ish, which is just above mediocre in influence. Successful in standing out, but really just makes me uncomfortable looking at it- trying to act like it's amazing.

C2AR= 0 if 0= Mediocre Effect.

The C2AR assessment is just something that I pulled out of my ass. It represents my reaction to my environment as a whole. When listening to music, I find myself wanting to learn or create or break things. There is rarely a tuning out or neutral zone. The forces in nature that drive me to learn or create in a way that is meaningful to me have been the same my whole life, I think, and I find comfort in knowing that regardless of any new music I hear, I am still touched by the same type of sounds. This post made me want to learn about music and also break things.

The song you loved the most

2009-11-19T08:49:00.001-10:00

Your body is probably being cleaned by someone right now, or it's laying on cold aluminum with a white blanket tucking you in for looks. It's only called bathing when you are still breathing. If a medical examiner wasn't in the same village, then maybe your jaw was tied shut when it locked up 2 minutes after you passed. Your face was strangely no longer yours- losing waves of microscopic patina in a tsunami of violence and saying goodbye in a way that I don't think you would have approved of.

They are scrubbing you with loofahs and alcohol, and then they are drying you off with hospital blue- tight woven towels which they have used on body after body before you- which will be laundered and thrown back into the circuit tomorrow after your hard skin has been released to family.

Maybe they are being gentle with you since your death. Maybe they aren't. If they liked you, I imagine a lengthy and beautiful ceremony- where they gingerly turn you and treat your genitals with dignity and sponge them with some kind of rich bitch salve, as if your now dead eyes could still see and your heart could still pump blood into your brain hard enough to make you shame them for taking short cuts with the final shower of your life- and only using 99 cent store vaseline to slick your unkempt hair back.

With a spirit squinting dead-like through eyes that shine no more, let me ask you... would using old roses from someone else's sad goodbye offend you after all you have been or would you laugh and thank us in death for treating you to your own funeral with limited funds?

Does it matter how they handle your flesh when you are dead?

I didn't wait hungrily for you, grandfather, to come home to us from my makeshift backwoods crib, bored and wanting to learn- like my father did. I didn't watch you scrub the kangaroo blood from your elbows in a gasoline tub out back. I didn't smell the whiskey on your breath when you threw me up in the air and telepathically conveyed that you loved me in some way. I never heard you sing the song you loved the most.

I took a nap today. I stopped by a party and saw old friends and strangers who looked like old friends doing the same shit that old friends did, but they were stand-ins in a dream. It was raining and I was fucking around with some umbrellas in a mud room, trying to figure out if I should even be at the party. The juke box had this one song that I had to play though, even if I knew I should be getting the hell out of there... Everyone was an asshole. Everyone was wasted. Everyone was on their own path. I became frustrated and left after making sure there would be no violence because of me. I left there with one regret. I never made it to the song.

You were there though, in monumental fashion for the first time, and I rowed you out into a night tide with my daughter. You made me leave you both there in the waves, and I had to find the strength in my despair to make it back to land without dying in my grief.

I assume that I made it back in a pitching midnight madness.

I wish you could have heard the song that I loved the most, before you had died.

2009-09-25T23:34:00.001-09:00

A couple of weeks ago, I watched about 5 episodes of the documentary series "Hoarders." First I watched it alone, and then one morning, Electra hung out with me and we watched it together. I was a little hesitant about her seeing it, because she is so young and because the content of the show is actually very disturbing. At least to me.

Hoarders takes you into a world of 3 million people in the United States who suffer from the obsession and mental illness of hoarding. They are people that you bump into at the grocery store or flea market, who seem to be HAPPY about the fact that they are shopping and finding deals and accumulating things that they may or may not ever use. In most cases, they never use what they buy. Sometimes they buy several cases of perishable items and put them somewhere handy- for when they need it. They also save garbage, afraid that if they were to throw anything away, it will somehow curse them. To throw away the pie your mother gave you two years ago is very much like stepping on your mother's back.

Small pathways are cut through the debris piles of their homes in a horrific representation of what they do every day. What they do everyday, is try to reason away all of their problems by collecting everything that falls into their path. Good as prey you are if you live with them.

One woman explained it like this. One reason why she was a hoarder, was because when she was a little girl, her father was the garbage man. She was ridiculed and harassed in grade school by other children because her father was the garbage man. She would go home after a long day of torture in the learning of all things worldly- to discover her father loading more found objects onto their plot. She went from one to the other, day in and day out for about ten years at least...

Who wouldn't be a hoarder after that?

The alternative is to be someone who is obsessive compulsive.

Have you ever seen this behavior? Do you know anyone who can't leave their house, because it takes them 3 hours to complete the ritual they are committed to by mental illness.. Their goal? To take a shit without getting feces on their hand while they wipe their ass. If all goes well, they can leave their house within the next two hours, if they didn't get shit on their hand. Sometimes, their houses are so sterile and clinical that no life should be allowed to exist there at all if they had their way. The most insane example of a sterile and completely whitewashed home I saw, belonged to a gay man who had been the victim of some kind of unspeakable abuse as a child. You wouldn't just think he was clean and worthy if you went into his home. You would be looking for the exit and denying your thoughts.

Ironically, both hoarders and OCD people suffered the same affliction. They were never made to feel worthy, an eternity after they themselves had been victims.

I can be both. I can find sentiment in every scrap of every crappy inch of my day- just to hold on to something. I can also over-analyze every stain on the muddied ragged pulse of the "sinless" Universe around me... and SO discard it in fear, awe or ignorance... and repeat - by either throwing away or saving ALL I ever do. Balance is as balance can measure. You follow?

Today, Electra climbed in bed to wake me up, and asked me if she could look at the shoe box under my bed of my grandmother's possessions. She is a grandmother I met once as a baby, and that was the last time we met. My daughter knows her as I do, from this box of trinkets, of depressingly personal and average artifacts that you have tried to draw the energy of a matriarchal bloodline's soul from... who's voice once rang clearly through your skull.

I think Electra took something magnetic from her great grandmother's box today. I don't know what it was, because even though this box is so important to me that I keep it, and I keep it in the original condition that I received it in.. I let her take it.

I don't have every object memorized that she could have run with, because I am afraid to disturb this box of artifacts and equally afraid to keep the box under my bed and take no risk with airing and scattering it's contents. It means so much to me and equally so little that I cannot face either sentence.

What does this box mean to my daughter?

We all live under a microscope, regardless of how it pays off.

I read to my daughter- the fairy tales that my mother read to me. I saved or recollected them and she and I repeat them together. Sometimes, she brings home the capture of one I have forgotten or a new one, which I fully embrace.. and sometimes I choke it trying to memorialize it.

And so we hoard.

dear cousin. fight season is on hold... you're bored....

2009-09-06T23:08:00.000-09:00

How about... get wasted, jerk off into a puddle and then cap it off with a torrent of self reflective tears in the back seat of your hot rod?

hahaha. just kidding.

Careful

2009-05-10T23:32:00.002-09:00

Your tread is as delicate as a factory needle and your wise guidance is as bloodless as every other man's attempt at conquering his dreams without ego.

Careful.

2009-04-12T21:31:00.002-09:00

I am over fathers. Fathers are all the same.

Dear Child

2009-03-31T22:25:00.003-09:00

I am afraid to write. The tapping of these keys will surely wake you.

Tomorrow I will see my daughter.

I have been like a prisoner that no one cares to hear the pains of.

I am a bad mother to allow separation at all.

I am the Earth and the depression of the sky is my dutifully accepted failure
while the night is my scrambling apology.

Microwave your puppies in my dream time.
Destroy lives with the flip of a wrist and have your heart broken over endless knees.

Love.

Just let me love you as your mother and all will be right.

I have destroyed myself in every way, on every night since you said goodbye

And tomorrow, I get to make it right.

Charred lemons and Vented gas cans

2008-09-22T21:39:00.003-09:00

My second stepfather accelerates carefully from a stopped position and makes a relaxed dumb face as he doo wops notes and echoes the sentiment with his thumb on the steering wheel. "Boy, I'll tell you... the Moody Blues were underrated... "

My first stepfather would roll down his window at an intersection and tell the guy next to us that he was a jackass. There wasn't any music playing, because it was an older vehicle and the radio was never needed.

My mother may have played the radio when we took the car. We only took the car so that we could buy groceries. We drove from the country to Kleins grocer and sometimes we had two carts, and I always felt strange about that. Like, why are we buying so much food? We bought so much food because we were only allowed to go into town once every two weeks with my stepfather's permission. I would be rewarded with little debbie star crunches. Not a box of 12 to last 2 days... A box of 12 to last two weeks for all three or four of us.

My escape was scooping a bottle of powdered gatorade and licking it slowly out of the scoop in front of the television afterschool. There were 7 channels. Scooby Doo was the real deal.

Stepfathers have nothing to do with the struggle I am facing right now. I only mention them because.. they do matter in the scheme of processing wtf is going down here.

My younger brother is .. well... my little brother is very ill. I don't like to say ill. I don't even like to say what his affliction is, because if I say it... then no one knows wtf I am talking about and even if they do-- they have no fucking idea what its like to deal with a loved one who suffers it, let alone try to relate in any real terms....

I am a mother.

I am a ripped apart mother.

I replay images of my daughter touching me with practiced reassurance to let me know that she is my only daughter and I am her only mother. She is miles away, with her father as we institute this visitation for the first time with me losing since a dissolution.

She is amazing.

I know that I have done the right thing to be here. I cannot imagine being without what I have gained, but every day that passes seems to bring with it haystacks of loss that needle me with incredible guilt.

I maintain at a job where boys a decade younger than I exercise their "superior" fine dining talons and humiliating me is par for the course. It's not an easy surge for them, because I will scrape the walls of any sewer if everyone can breathe easier and I will pretend that a beet is a radish if it means someone else will feel bigger for just one second in a day, because I know what it means to feel as if you have lost.

I received a fortune today when I ate. "Your love of Life can Carry you Through any circumstance."

What will my hate do for me?

With a daughter thousands of miles away, and a young brother who depends on me because the entire Universe is trying to capture and torture him.. (and I do mean the entire universe).. it's hard to swallow a bite.

I can though. I can swallow, and I continue to bite, because I have you.

Tomorrow.. Anger and the usual, until I talk to you or see you.

Do what you will with my memory. Everyone will know it was yours to do with whatever you wanted by the time it matters.

Handsome Thoughts

2008-08-20T19:07:00.002-09:00

I think that one of my favorite things to learn about a new friend, is that they don't have children... because their dogs are their children. You know. Because having a dog is the same as having a child.

Leonidas

2008-06-12T19:40:00.004-09:00

A thunderous applause leads our hero down.

like a wrestler with harder drives than the road allows
take my love--raw edges and all, with romantic abandon,
into the catacombs.

I will not only allow him to hate you, but I encourage him to destroy you .

and not an invalid swallow inside his throat, could scratch it like I will.

I advised you. Just then.

I can't put my finger on it.

2008-05-23T23:40:00.010-09:00

The people who say certain other people shouldn't write, are fucking dumb-as-shit A Holes.

Topic change.

Next, you'll be mowing down whole tribes, but first you hunt the community.
That's original and you can eat your own proud shit over it, all fucking day.

Topic change.

You'll roll over and play dead. And I will revel in that fantasy with you.

Am I angry? Is that poetry? Is it news? Is it, I'm sick to fucking death of being the cause of every inch of pain around me for miles on end? Bet on it... and what would you bet on it, by the way?

You want to drive me to a reaction?

I would die in torture before throwing out a fraction of the bile you did yesterday in the name of loving him, but I'm not you.

And you sure as fuck ain't me, Sugar.

Cry over that. Its all you'll get.

Make your way.

2008-05-23T23:23:00.003-09:00

Sometimes you have to be beaten within an inch of your life, to appreciate the days when you just get your face kicked in.

gulls

2008-05-03T23:39:00.006-09:00

It takes forever for the sun to set.

There are no street lamps. No stars. No moon. Just blackness. In the distance I can see a red light and a green light at the entrance to the harbor set out for navigation. I catch glimmers off of the water when a cloud ends, until the one right behind it takes that glimmer away.

It would be peaceful were it not for the sounds of a riot taking place out in the blackness. Hundreds of birds from different families are talking to each other. Fighting over resources, fighting for dominance, fighting for a mate, fighting with their babies… Fighting. Their intensity is so strong, that I wonder if they couldn't just kill me if I crashed their tribal council this evening. If I just walked up the beach, with my pupils fully dilated and me still stumbling through the ebony, then out into the frigid sea-- right into the thick of them, what would they do to me? What would I allow? Would I have any control at all?

I heard wolves the other night. No chance of seeing them because it was so dark. A wolf howl seems to come from no one direction and limits itself to no harmony. It goes right through you and you feel it as much as you hear it. Every howl has a visual story accompanying it. The sound immediately arrests you and you want to hear more. The hungry choir stabs at your illuminated shadow in the doorway and you can make out nothing before you. So beautiful. So eerie.

When I turn to go back inside, I am like a child again. Chilled when I turn my back, I close the door quickly--as the heart races. It seems an eternity with the Unknown screaming rapidly toward my defiance, and I leave the night to work its potent magic without me, before the sun comes to radiate resolutions and exchange pains.

AAOx4

2008-05-01T00:47:00.011-09:00

I bought a house on an Aleutian Island, on the first island if heading south down the chain from the mainland. I bought that motherfucking house.

Midnight and Dusk along with Tonight, crash delivered to me, a pitch black entry way. I peered out into the heaviest of ebonies..

I war intensely for keeping the glow within me going steady but still I find myself rapidly growing dim.

Drowning out the thud of an exposed and defeated tell-tale heart... I sacrificed my turn at Oblivian, under that blackness and I reluctantly headed out into that chill, because I was not prepared to be grateful if I had to wait around another 8 million eons and play cozy.

Voices coming from the cave behind me were swallowed into the fog as I listened and wished them each an eternal well.

I delicately fingered my way along that poorly illuminated razor wire into the safety of night. I didn't care who had sights or illumination on me. I do constantly imagine that I am in your salvage yard, and that's all I am willing to give on it right now.

Rust was my favorite color and navy blue.

I like the way light could always break through corrosion, and how the blues appear to be never overtaken unless by their own.

There is no love and no shade as volatile.

Now, every color and every silence drags behind it a Universal army of
Embers from you.

Embers of you.

You.

sea monster I

2008-04-19T22:31:00.025-09:00

There are things about me that I have yet to discover.

In the past year I feel as though I have been all around the planet
swathed in clear & gauzy duct tape
treading muddy waters with heavy salt on the lips
keeping me and holding me hard against riding the waves
deaf to the rush of violence around me
every action peeled out is a thunderous sound-off
of richly technical eye witness.

Not quite drowning but sickeningly sure of the meter of every inhalation.
Seeing but not hearing the tentacles of enormously brave and destitute creatures beating
and battering static blue hued and vacant civilizations beneath a storm of torrid tides
just off of the shoreline... the jagged edges that smoothly outline my stabbingly desperate embrace, mean nothing-even if beautiful. Though my perimeter could be cried out as horrible when activated, at least it is certainly fragile. Inside, I am not truly terrible. I am soft. I am comfortable. I am sitting at the fire of my will. I am sure.

The creatures, their battle and their targets... are all my own. My very own. I call them.

Every exhalation is a drawn out pain that threatens each peace and me as it strokes into slumber the paranoid beast--with careful and crude tenderness... sleep. forget. die. and never return.

My God, My hope, My Word... and their dashed and peppered muscular atrophy grow imaginary limbs and pierce the sky with red red arms... in my head.

In pieces and eternally restless.. regretfully weakest...

I move with the sway. I step aside against the tide and it still goes right through me. I scan the horizon for landmarks. I prepare to die in my sleep, (though not from flooding) so that tomorrow I will be reborn-- after a night of battle in nightmares.

Fuck the ride. I lived to drown in this. I die with every dive but for every night that I have to sleep without you tucked deeply into my side

I rage and I kill and I fly heavy handed on heartbreaking rewind

into wall after wall after wall after wall believing that time will for once be kind and find me again, forever in your grace. Wrapped up in your perfect pulse and enveloped in your divine skeleton, I am forced alive and to wretching a distinct perfume from every pore. All the seconds I am given to convince your every cell, I run from, afraid of the last moments we will share. I am a factory for you.

Here I sit around the bonfire and dank comfort--fearing the blade of invaders--holding hand wrought spoons to the salty lips of our babes... swallowed by cottonwood smoke, and waiting for you under the weight of every last universal disaster.

I will take bullets and faithfully return to your chamber.

You are the roots in my clouded sky.

Demolition

2008-01-16T22:32:00.001-10:00

The salt in the air has corroded every vehicle here. Each house sinks into the Earth at alarming speeds that the eye can see. Each year an inch or two of drenched and wind battered wood is swallowed into the ground. The owners of all these eyes who stand in front of all of these houses just watch the mud grow up the wall. Further away from the sky and working into a grave, they sleep at night.

For the years that I have lived here, I have struggled with the depression of the villagers. I have held my head up high and tried to bring light and warmth and generosity and humor into their homes. I gave what I could here. People say that they can't read me. Say that I always appeared to be content. How they can say this is easy, if they had no fucking clue who I was at all. I was despairing in my own home and behind my own eyes and under the same sky.. again.

I have never in my life made a decision or a move that carried with it such a gigantic fucking swell of effect, with the exception maybe of creating a life.

What I do here now, what I move forward to accomplish, run fast to receive, tear through years of memories and toss aside to capture IS something that I refuse to let escape me. I risk everything, but that everything in perspective-held against this amazing love is nothing at all. I do feel out of control and out of my mind at times. If I can just last long enough to fall into pieces in your arms, then I have done what I needed to do. What I always needed to do.

I have been taking pathetic swings to carve my way through a solid mass of greedy and selfish fuckers for a long time now. So long that I do it without thinking or recognizing that I have remained on the frontlines of this war for far too long. Now that I can communicate, can feel what I need to feel, can give what I need to give and be held completely captivated and in awe of a man I could never let go of... I'm not swinging any more, I am kicking that shit down. And as the bodies throw themselves around before me in a display of feigned loss and conceit, I will step over them and keep my eyes on you. Moving faster and closer to nights in our bed, in our house, in our city, in our love and allowing nothing to stop me from being yours.

Not functional

2008-01-15T19:04:00.000-10:00

The end the end the end the end.

I am staring at this screen. Wanting to vent. Wanting to spill my black frothy guts all over the fucking 2 dimensional gulf that stares back at me with no dimension at all. I want to rip every chord out of every wall attached to every piece of hard and inhuman technology and cut it into thousands of pieces with my teeth until I have decapitated myself in agonizing.... ineptitude.

I swim in a sea that makes no bones when I am at "home". I flatly deliver goods and sentiments. I comb hair and clean up chocolate milk. I revamp a piece of paper that terminates 10 years of life with someone, and then I make noodles and pick up crayons, and cut off 4 inches of her hair... Her first hair cut, and I just bunch it all up in a ponytail and cut it off. I pictured her first hair cut to be so much different than that. I could have stopped myself. Could have built it all up high on
ceremony. Could have taken pictures. Could have had a scrap book ready with easter colored ribbons on the edge of a clean table. Not a table covered in things to distract her as I drag myself through this hell of divide and conquer bullshit that no one should have to endure.

But now, away, I can imagine laying beside a fire in the rain. Listening to each drop sizzle and evaporate, watching each drop steam and disappear, and the fire never dies and it never stops raining.

Until about ten seconds ago.

sweet

2008-01-14T23:35:00.000-10:00

I just ate an after dinner mint.
I wondered what it would be like to have you feed it to me
with your mouth.

The Water

2008-01-14T19:36:00.000-10:00

I have spent my life on a shoreline.

Creeks, rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans... standing at the edge of the bath. Each time I am with the water, I am filled with a sort of peace and sadness. I am always putting my hands in. Sometimes seeing my reflection when the water is calm. Sometimes just looking into it and seeing all of the tiny residents of life float with stagnant or wild currents.

I have been looking for you in the water forever.
I am a desert without you.

notes

2008-01-14T19:08:00.000-10:00

… I will go in any door with you and I won’t leave the room until you do.…

How could I have let myself go so badly? Out in every direction, I went, but truly in no direction at all… Unless, “down” is on the compass, and it was.

I’m still down here, but my legs grew back, my arms returned to me, and someone up “there” is shining the brightest light through the thickest layers of debris…( keeping you from me. )

We started digging our way to each other, many times over the years, and here we are. Finally. Battered from our private hells, we are elated to know the other. Like none and beyond all others. Now we are one puzzle. And we handle each others pieces like we have handled our own all these years, except now we do it with loving and instantly expert extra hands…
a steady heart beat…
and

eyes that give me the fucking Universe.

If we read our love letters in fifty years, will we laugh about concepts like “email” and “planes” and other shit? We might, I concluded. And then we would hold hands and kiss

Life is so much easier when you never change your mind and can live perfectly high in the meaningless wing span of a falling jetliner…and look down on all the places you would rather be as you crash at my feet.

And that’s pretty much what I have to say about judging me to anyone who would be bored and crazy enough to even give a fuck about anything that I do or believe.

Let me just SHOW you what I fucking believe.

Fuck this house.

2008-01-08T22:09:00.000-10:00

So angry so angry so angry.
Wipe the face of the Earth with me.
Drag my blood through the streets after
they have carried me away
from the heavy control of your pounded out demands
to spare the street cleaners from scraping
my flesh and my choices from cobbles with spoons
they beg you to stop
to spare them the labor of cleaning up
As it stands, they could haul me with invisible shovels
Into invisible carts pulled by invisible hands
to invisible ends.

I'm fucking sorry.

Subterranean

2008-01-07T23:48:00.000-10:00

Though flowers do not readily fossilize
Two children turned to stone
Slipping from mothers' birthing grip
Covered over time
found wandering, malnourished, and alone
when the rocks broke into flight.

In the black black blackness
Amidst silent screaming and heavy footsteps
We conjure a calm breeze to sweep the mine fields around us
We glow electric on the horizon
And though nothing can be seen by any living creature
The dawn is clear to us
We stand on the horizon.

Allowing for no lights, save for one to pass through
The brightest, the most glorious, most penetrating rays and waves
lapping over every ditch.
every forest
every thing
and washing this temple
This altar in an unforgiving tide
We stand holding the other and laughing in a torrential pour of stunned acceptance
our arms, our endless branches
to hold ourselves above water
and close.

You flew across the channels and brought me to my knees
You wrapped me up in endless palettes of midnight
rested me on the stalks of the strongest flowers
and with power performed
Affection of a latticed ball held within and outside of me
One textile. One surface. One Purpose.

Ribbons of blood
Clusters of stars
Endless Altars
Highways of arteries
stopping at every intersection
to connect.

Through a riotous underbrush with a rushing in our ears
the madness slips further away
and we find a cool dry place
to cover everything night after night
Emerging, never.
Lined up in your gaze
is a battalion of saints
that elevates my brigade and shares your fire

In these sticks
stream billions of threadlike hairs
soaked through and served with gold
Laying quiet like thousands of nights before
but this time, with our bridge to bridge
we will live
for thousands here on and cross between each other
10 million crossings
until every last ounce of time is gone

A trembling ground
A severed sky
A flood and a fire
moved rock to rock
across a cracked and bleeding landscape to
rest against you
exhale
and move no more.

Sailing Stones and Mutant Love and children in a forest... The same forest?

2008-01-07T23:30:00.000-10:00

So I have really been visualizing these sailing stones lately. I thought it would be cool to start putting them in my art somehow. Maybe even a series of sailing stones. So, I drew this sketch. It shows various sailing stone paths... Of course my perspective is total crap, but I think you see. And also... I kind of like the idea as a tattoo... I also drew the two mutants with inner children looking through holes in a tree that joins them all.. or out of a window... But I still like the idea of the two mutants, and the two children. I fucked up and made it dark between the larger one's heads and covered up the leaves or tree that was implied there.

blah blah blah...more blinding blizzards

2008-01-07T08:46:00.001-10:00

I don't want to fight anymore. Sometimes I feel like I am walking in a daze. Totally confused. Not knowing what is coming. Lost in this gigantic shitstorm. AT the mercy of the most impossible emotional upheaval that I have ever suffered. In love and tortured. Completely tortured. And through all of this, I am trying to say goodbye to people. Trying to make them understand me, but everytime I open the door, I get a knife to the chest. Every invitation to dialogue sees me taking jabs. So I sit and look at the face. Look at the painful look in the eyes, and I have to shut down. I can't talk if we are going to talk about how I am leaving and how it is the most fucked up thing on the planet that has ever been done. Talk about how we have a daughter and we won't be living in the same town. Won't be able to just drive over and pick her up some weekend or whenever we feel like. She will be growing without one of us, forever now. And that is entirely my doing. Because, everyone else would have been just fine to live out this existence here. And to get through it, I have to be monumentally devoid of fucking emotion, and then everyone thinks I am a total cocksmoker. Seems like, here, that if I am maintaining then I must not be feeling anything, so it's time to poush buttons and make me cry. Because apparantly when I cry, that means I am feeling something, and then someone gets the opportunity to try and make me feel better by trying to hold me and tell me it's okay to cry. IT makes me sick. It all makes me so sick.

Slowly the house is emptying itself of my property.

She came to me in the kitchen and said, "Mama, Daddy's heart is broken."

He swears he didn't teach her that. Says he doesn't know where she learned it.

And I am so sick of hearing about how he is really worried about me. That is a fucked up head game sort of thing to say. Worried? Like all the years I was turning to shit before your eyes and you just kept on keeping on because you were getting everything you fucking wanted out of me? Worried like that?

And then there is my love.

Swollen and battered lost in this sea. Desperate to find its way home in this epic storm and sometimes the light is on, and sometimes it is off. But I will track ice in pitch black to make it there. Count on it.

Golden Death Ray

2008-01-05T23:36:00.000-10:00

Today I woke up, and checked the house for him. Wondered if I should get in the car and go check the snowbanks for him. Decided to lay down with my daughter but I couldn't sleep. I wake up at the same time every day, regardless of whether or not I have had enough sleep, because I am 3 hours behind my future and every second matters. Sometimes I wake up feeling fine. Sometimes I wake up feeling like shit, and I don't want to live another day like this, in this life.. this new and totally fucked up reality that there is no planning for. No defense of.

I can handle it most mornings, I think. At least that's how it starts. The days start with me handling it, and then slowly... the cars pile up, the bodies present themselves all over again, and survivors wander the wreckage barely alive and completely devastated like they do for days on end in my head...

And once again, realizing what has happened here, the smoke clears and these zombies fashion torches out of the sea of lost loved limbs around their battered feet, raise their dead souls high and set them alight with the fires of Hell that I have flash flooded their homes with... and they scream at me to freeze!

And they come after me not knowing what they will do to me when they find me, but knowing that when they do find me... They will make it hurt and they will make me pay. I will owe until I have bled and bruised my way back to the top again, where everyone wins but me. Today is like yesterday.

"I worry about you. I really worry about you."

"Don't you have any guilt?"

"I hope you know what you are doing..."

"I hope you know what you are doing..." (You have a daughter version)

"Will you one day explain to me, what happened here?"

"What are you going to do for money?"

"I don't want the sole responsibility."

"I could make this go nicely, or I could make this go badly."

"So, you have it all going on?" (falling apart? enjoying it?)

"I know how you are. You are a nurturer. Will you get what you need?" (Suddenly it matters Mix)

"We always said, if we ever left here, that it would cost a fortune to ship our lives out of here." (I think that what it costs you to leave me, is fucking hysterical... save the receipts, baby. )

"I hate to see you this way.. " (with the brick wall in front of your eyes.)

"I mean, you don't even know this guy."

"How do you know he's okay?"

I was scared to leave Civilization and come here to this fucking state. I am a grown woman now. I know what I need to do, and I know what I am capable of creating, surviving and now, finally... having, and I have no fucking delusions or illusions about what is going on around me as I clear the field to get to myself.. buried under the debris of failed garden on top of failed garden... torched by drowning villagers out of their fucking minds and trying to pull me under.

I don't wish things had gone differently, because every day I honestly come upon the definition of who the fuck I am amidst an unhealthy and crazy kind of forest fire where everyone escapes but and because of me. And if that's the worst thing that can happen to me in a day, then I am doing okay, and everyone else was lucky. As usual I am only in the way.

I do know who I am. I pretend that I don't. I pretend that I don't to protect people. When people tell me that they don't understand me, I say, "No shit. Join the club." (Chuckles.) This doesn't mean that I am not dying for them to come back to me and fucking relate...

But I know who the fuck I am. I know that I have been dying a slow spiritual death since the day I was fucking born. It was my fate to end up however the fuck I will end up and however the fuck I have found myself here... today, a day just like yesterday... But full of a hope... the likes I never had access to.

I have been looking for some kind of golden death ray to bathe me in a warmth of understanding and deliver me from the fucking pain I have endured living on this Earth as the person that I am.. with the heart that I have and the guts that I am at least fucking willing to show, and take the fucking load of laundry for the whole village upon my shoulders, to the river- to wash the blood and detritus from their slices of hardly perfect-critical of me-lives, and I still fucking apologize when I drop their heavy cargo from exhaustion on the way to their far-out homes.

Where is the love that spares me? Illuminate my path again. I am forever lost in finding you. Please don't hide anymore. Show yourself and trust me. I put everything on the line to be yours. Everything, and if that's too much... too bad. You won't be rid of me so easily, and you shouldn't keep me from you.

I am not the only thing that can save you, but I fight all night.

Jericho in a cage with jesus around his neck

2008-01-04T00:19:00.000-10:00

A sculpture I started and Never finished

2008-01-04T00:00:00.001-10:00

Gavin (Austin)

2008-01-03T23:59:00.000-10:00

My mother

2008-01-03T23:58:00.000-10:00

Cover of Mother's Album

2008-01-03T23:57:00.000-10:00

Gavin and Me

2008-01-03T23:56:00.001-10:00

Album pages

2008-01-03T23:50:00.000-10:00

Pages from an album my mother made. She is on the right with me in the bottom, and her twin is on the left bottom with me. I am holding the plastic and wire sculpture child I named jericho.... I once threw him out the window of the Axiom onto the ground below... and then I went and got him.

The top photo was a passport photo from I don't remember when. Not sure why my hat is allowed... The picture where I am pretty sick looking was when I was laid up with my broken leg.

Kindergarten

2008-01-03T23:47:00.001-10:00

Killing deer

2008-01-03T00:00:00.000-10:00

I don't have much fucking left here. I can't listen to the music without crying.

I do remember a day when my mother and I were driving some 1980's model silver station wagon.. or maybe it was the orange honda civic, nonetheless, we were driving through the heavily wooded back roads where I grew up. It's funny how I remember the trees being thicker than they really are.. always. I wish they were thicker. A lush green mountain is not so lush up close. It is rough and jagged. When I last returned to my childhood home and drove the winding back road so that I could be enveloped in that velvety tunnel... there was no tunnel. The trees were thinned out and it felt barren.

A deer jumped out from my side of the car and we smashed into it.

It flew up and hit the windshield, busting it, just like I did when I was hit by an older model station wagon a decade later.

I don't remember too much about it after we hit it. I was that same little girl who woke up for the animals.

I imagine that I saw it's heart racing. It's eyes wild. Broken, mangled, out of it's depth and knowing it was going to die.

I can't truly guess what it was thinking laying there, under our human gaze and hysteria, stepping from our hideous death dealer to really elevate the terror in this creature's last moments.

But, honestly, I always imagine that it was on it's way to meet another deer. And that the other deer waited in a cool place by a creek, dreaming, dozing, worrying and despairing in that one spot in a grove between freeways and swamp and that they died there waiting for the other deer to return to them.

Lyrics_pressure 1995

2008-01-02T23:38:00.000-10:00

She lays on the table squirming
With doctors standing around.

With pressure like that
You'll need machines to pull it out.
To see the head
The whole family's been talking about.
Will it be catholic and everything we've dreamed about.

Nothing is working and nothing is sound.
In this or any town.

Who wears the pants, who's in command
Of a sinking ship
Where slaves are in demand.

With a home life like that you'll need
A wrecking ball to knock it down.
To bury the birthday parties
And the relatives dressed as clowns.
With a home life like that you'll need
a concussion to get it out.
Start the recovery early and thrash your head about.

Nothing is working and nothing is sound
In this or any town.

Horrible things and friends
You've known for half your life...

With an attitude like that, you'll need
imaginary friends
The kind who will ride through Hell
on your dream called "the end".
With an attitude like that, you'll need
A new improved shell
The kind that survives heat when you're
visiting Hell.

Nothing is working and nothing is sound
In this or any town.

Nothing is perfect and it's sucking you dry.

With a brain like that, you'll need
a van to haul it around.
Through the countryside, the mountains
and downtown.
With a brain like that, you'll need
a van to haul it around.
If you can make it float,
push it off to sea and do it now.

With a birthright like this, you'll need
a miracle to smooth things out.
The kind that makes you insane
So everythings alright.
With a birthright like this you'll need
And army to toe the line.
The kind that works for free and
has no concept of time.

Tugging on a Tendril

2008-01-02T22:58:00.000-10:00

I was trying to think of something that I know about myself right now, and I couldn't come up with a fucking thing. Not one thing. Total blank. I did think of one thing though. I sure know how to fuck something up in nuclear fucking proportions when I put my feeble mind to it.

I'm not anything fucking special here. I was stupid and shy as a little girl and I lived in my head. My friends were animals. My friends were the heroes in books. I didn't need to have tea parties where I would pull out dainty saucers and a teapot, going around a cardboard box for a table... serving toys and invisible visitors... I was constantly at a tea party in my head. My imagination was wild and jumped with abandon from topic to topic and equally from emotion to emotion.

I couldn't stand up for myself without crying or getting red faced. I liked being who I was when it slowly started to come to me, but I hated being looked at, and I have to be the one controlling the depth of my encounters, but I never went too far down. Never found myself here in this position that I am in. Completely at someone's fucking mercy. Crushed with the weight of my emotions and physically ill with loss and confusion and sickness. Complete love sickness.

I never had alot of friends. I just knew alot of people. Maybe for the reason I mentioned at the beginning. They can't think of one thing about me that means fuck all.

What am I feeling?

It doesn't matter at this point. I am feeling every fucking piece of pain on the planet right now. Every piece of pain that this horrordome has ever fucking bred and breast-fed and created in it's never ending legacy to produce nothing but said fucking pain... is what I feel right now.

I have not for one second yet, really inspected what I feel about my daughter in all of this. I haven't been able to address it.
And I won't start addressing it tonight. Don't get me wrong. Her existence motivates me and blesses me, and so I have to be strong to face that pummeling. Something I don't see myself being right now. I am losing my fucking mind... So to focus on the shit that truly fucking matters... is actually really hard.

I feel like this disgusting sea monster come to the shore, and throwing itself into the sun to feel warmth only to be stoned and pelted by beautiful but violent people from every direction. Driven back into the murk, staring at the lights of night time fiestas, tears make tracers of all the life I am missing. All of you that I am missing. I can't take it. I will float back to shore when everyone is passed out from revelry and warm myself on the sand near a neglected fire, careful to sleep lightly so that I may protect myself in the murk to live another... sad fucking day.

Dominion

2008-01-02T22:20:00.000-10:00

I am shattered into thousands of pieces, scattered across a dark and despairing lake.

My ghost is tearing through the damp and thick brush- illuminated in moonlight, I scramble and pant my way through the edges of the wild. Brambles and dead branches cut at my neo-ethereal flesh.

Separated from my soul, what's left of me climbs up the embankment and falls face -first into the lake, surrounded by cooling waters and a sweet
honeysuckle scent.

Lilly pads roll and sway with my treading. Everything flows through me and I have no skin. I have no organs. I have no bones.
My mouth hangs open in the water and a million organisms swig around inside.

I try not to afffect or disturb the surface of the water, so I can find my one thousand pieces that were scattered here.

Through sheet after sheet of light playing as far down as my toes, I see a shape far deeper that immediately fires at my heart and hits it every time.

And I begin to make out the edges around the shape and realize through bodies of perch and ferns, that all of my pieces lay scattered at your glowing golden feet. And you are carefully, picking them up, looking at each piece cautiously and gently making me whole again, occasionally resting to look up at me treading your waters and trying to breathe without you.

I have never been so terrified.

Vomit

2008-01-02T20:03:00.000-10:00

It's pretty difficult for me to vomit. I remember when I was maybe 17 or 18, some friends I was in a band with and I were trying to make fucked up videos to put to our "Industrial" music. We poured gasoline into the shape of a pentagram on the ground of some out of the way cul-de-sac out near Jersey Village and set it on fire. Of course. How original. We slowed the footage down and made the flames blue, and it was high contrast like lightning. It was beautiful but the production was shit. Incidentally the music was shit too. And those friendships turned to shit. And that whole decade was shit, just like this one is starting to be. But my point is that it's hard for me to vomit. Back in those days, I drank one or two bottles of ipecac syrup to make myself throw up so we could film it, and I couldn't do it, and then we had no ipecac left, and no one else could even try. Oh yeah, and I just vomited, but the amazing thing is that I don't care.

I am getting the fuck out of this life I have been living. A prisoner and a victim of my own doing. Always of my own doing. I want to rip out the whites of my eyes, and shove them onto the tallest fucking spear and wave the flag of my bloody surrender, while blood runs from my eyes as my heart pumps harder and harder, threatening to deafen me in my blindness. .. An I hope to fuck that I don't become deaf or that my ears are somehow damaged, which could throw my balance into a fucking unrecoverable Abyss and then I wouldn't be able to hold up the flag. And the other side would not see that I meant to stop fighting, and instead they would launch air, sea and ground attacks. And when the guys in space suits would come to check out the damage, and comb the radiated wasteland I was last standing on, they wouldn't find a scrap of me left, and the flag of my eyes would far be gone in the thick black hate of the war that had killed me.

I hate, but still I donate.

2008-01-01T20:29:00.000-10:00

Rolling Meadows. I have seen them. When the grasses roll like waves on a contained ocean, and somewhere in the picture there is a young woman with long black hair blowing across her face, and maybe behind her you can see the blur of a wild horse prancing with burning nostrils to reach the barbed wire that lines the perimeter. What I choose to identify with changes constantly. The rolling grass, the wind that threatens to rip it up and transplant it, the human involved, and the trapped wild animal.. happy in it's domesticated knowledge to see the fence-line as a goal... as a reward... as a boundary that protects and controls the destiny of this beast, and when it gets so far, it stops and worries about food. Worries about hiding from lightning. Worries about how the eyes are on the side of the head and how the future is a complex compilation of defensive side-winding grips.

I miss lightning.

I don't need to eat.

My eyes are as they have always been.

A sea of rolling landscape will always be before me.

Will I ever eat horse head soup? Not unless I am dying and cannot live another day to know you, without it.
To live another day to know you, I will eat anything. I will eat myself slowly from fingertip to tongue, to see you breathe another day in my presence. I am already an organ donor, and baby, you have no idea how far I will go to give you my life.

2007-12-24T12:58:00.000-10:00

weather

2007-12-23T07:51:00.000-10:00

uhhhh

2007-12-20T22:35:00.000-10:00

How did the night go?

I was fairly cold this evening. Cold. Until pushed to express once again that my actions don't stem from some kind of hatred. I am told over and over again that my body language makes people who are close to me feel that I hate them when I don't show emotion. i mean, fuck.. I am severing limbs from arteries who never even saw a bruise, who always believed I would be as soft and generous as I was, without.... a trade. And here we are at the market on the darkest and most brilliant of days, as I approach the merchant with my wad of an exterior life's work just looking to unload it all and walk away with my freedom... and the wings fill with tears. That has always been difficult to deal with. Throughout my life, I generally don't convey or exude much emotion other than those slight or exaggerated expressions that are created and expressed to give someone else ease. I do appear to be hyper animated, because i AM hyper animated. I meant every last thought I ever shared, but this does not mean that you will like me tomorrow.

WWB

2007-12-13T20:35:00.001-10:00

The original painting below was done and completed about 13 years ago. The alteration was done in the past 24 hours.

More than one monkey

2007-12-10T08:34:00.000-10:00

My camera skills suck ass, so I have posted a light and dark version of the painting to help you make out details without the glare.

Also note the addition of other rocket ships as well as a flaming Earth.

SG commission... the monkey is back

2007-12-09T11:39:00.000-10:00

SG commission... the monkey is gone.

2007-12-08T15:11:00.000-10:00

SG commission

2007-12-07T11:19:00.000-10:00

I enjoyed practically no sleep last night and then I went to the dentist. They injected me about 2000 times on the left side of my mouth. I went to the groecery store after that. An elderly man was sacking my groceries and he walked with me to my car. I tried to make small talk with him. He was hearing impaired and was trying to read my lips. My Sly Stallone half dead and hanging lips on the left side.... I must have repeated the word "pistol" to him 3000 times....

Here is what happened to the moneky/rocket/sweets commission last night. Alot of work is still needed. I am still not satisfied with the direction the monkey's facial expression is going. I just need to keep working on it.

Buyer, if you have any requests or issues with any elements of this piece, please feel free to speak up. I can likely only fit in another 10 hours on it at the most before delivering it.

Long time no seek.

2007-12-06T10:42:00.000-10:00

So I am in Wichita right now with my daughter. She sat on Satan's lap at the mall yesterday.

I worked some on the monkey painting last night. See it below.

When I first went to Alaska, I left a shitload of artwork with my parents. I didn't really store it properly. It was in their garage and rats ate my stuff up. There were two paintings salvaged from this time period. I wish I had all of that artwork, but it was an important stage for me as far as the development of my style. I do have pictures of much of the work that was lost. Anyways, the two painting below are the only two that were spared from the rats.

They are larger than I remember them. "Whites Will Bleed" is 5 feet wide.
"Knife and Cuddle" is 5 feet tall.

Here they are.

"WHITES WILL BLEED"

"KNIFE AND CUDDLE"

SG5

2007-11-23T13:25:00.000-10:00

I made a couple of quick adjustments on this last night. Still has a long way to go. I don't like how much space the rocket is taking up, but we'll see how it works out. I am trying to have this finished for you by the time I leave next Thursday. I could always travel with it and work on it until I see you, but I am already traveling with a three year old and would prefer not to deal with it. Like I said, we'll see how it works out. I want you to be happy with the final product.

I was having a hard time making the monkey look happy, because I felt like he was going into space to die. But as someone pointed out, "Does the monkey know that?" I changed the monkey obviously. No details there yet. Also, you will notice... the planet cookie.

A sixteen year old girl in the UK contacted me through my gallery, and wanted to do kind of an interview. She was doing an essay for an art program and the theme was "wraps". She came upon an old crappy painting I did of russian nesting dolls. She thought she could work it into the theme. It was interesting to answer questions. I like interviews. Of course, I am not being stalked by people asking me the same questions and having my privacy totally shredded. Not likely I will ever let that happen.

I have been reading poetry too, and getting ready to leave.

Amy Lowell

2007-11-18T23:32:00.000-10:00

Amy Lowell poems

GC1107 Stages 3 & 4

2007-11-18T23:02:00.000-10:00

okay. Let's see what is going on now with this piece. It's initial stage was posted a couple days back. Monkey, Weird looking lady. Then I made some changes to it tonight, which you can see. I tried to incorporate the "lady" a little, and even though she was a freak I could have worked with, I opted to lose her which you see in this second image.
So now, we have our monkey in the rocket ship, and the lady is gone forever. She is never coming back. That was it, her five seconds of fame... anyways, I was thinking that it would be cool to add some monkeys in the background dropping from parachutes, only the parachutes were cupcakes. There's work yet to be done on this one for sure. Thought you might want to see, buyer.

I was reading some things by Amy Lowell tonight. And, let's see what else did I do? Oh yeah.. I keep getting into these arguments with these born again vampires in an Anchorage newspaper. Been listening to Baroness, Sunn O))), Tortoise, and a bunch of weird shit I downloaded out of curiosity, and most of it blows. I watched some of When Worlds Collide the other night. Humans in on a lottery for who will be saved and sent into space when other planets fly into Earth's atmosphere and destroy it. Sometimes the older movies have great dialogues and sometimes they are better enjoyed muted. This one jumped back and forth for me, but I always enjoy sci-fi props from the past. No doubt our future will laugh at our present.

Fucking Mondays.

Madonna stage 3 -5X5 & GC Stage 2- 2.5' X 2.5'

2007-11-17T02:41:00.000-10:00

I took a photo of these two pieces I worked on tonight, side by side... Obviously.
I am not tired yet.

Madonna stage 3 -5X5 acrylic on canvas

2007-11-17T02:02:00.000-10:00

I warned you about this, buyer.

2007-11-17T00:02:00.000-10:00

This piece started off with a big fucked up bang. I just want to remind you that it will change alot before I am finished with it. You can change it with me. Don't get too attached to any of it though. If you do become attached to something specific about it, and want me to leave that element in the piece. Please, by all means tell me. I will do my best to honor your request. If I have a problem with execution... I will likely have to scrap it though.

I honestly have no idea where this piece is going. I will know more when I work on it and think on it some more.

2.5 X 2.5

I am notorious around here, for breaking into people's houses or I will trick them so I can take a painting back and change something in it. I tell people, if you don't want me to steal my shit back to work on it, then you better remove it from my scrutinizing eye if I come visit. Because I will take that shit, especially if I gave it to you and it wasn't a sale.

I'll give it back though, with the exception of ONE to date that I refuse to return it is so fucking bad.

Madonna stage 2 -5X5 acrylic on canvas

2007-11-15T22:36:00.000-10:00

Madonna and other things.

2007-11-13T12:38:00.000-10:00

This is a 5'X5' madonna that I started over the weekend. First layer. Acrylic on canvas.

I have been commissioned to do two more pieces. One is a smaller more whimsical piece incorporating some interesting things like apes, moses, cakes, ballerinas and rocket ships. The second piece I have been commissioned to do will be a mammoth in size. The buyer wants the largest canvas I can feasibly work on. I won't be able to start it until I have the supplies. Maybe 7x18 feet. And its a dismal sort of work, but energetic. I look forward to starting on it. I haven't posted anything for the first commissioned piece yet, because I don't want the buyer to be freaked out by the first stage. I will post it later.

Not too much else to say here. Life is fucked up. We have gotten alot of snowfall here on the island.

Tuesday's been Obliterated. I am not just one day.

2007-11-05T21:03:00.000-10:00

I remember riding my bike, as a little girl down a shadowy lane. I remember riding my bike because I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to hear my stepfather talk to my mother. He worked all day in downtown Houston at some computer place and would come home and expect dinner. One of those deals. I didn't want to look at my mother's face when she looked at me. She looked at me with love, but there was something else in her face. Something sad. When you're a child, you don't think people are sad because of their environment. You think people are just sad. Kind of like how people are just clowns or people are just policemen or ballerinas or teachers.

Maybe as a child you lived in a house that had no tools to protect you from the grief of life. You were knocked around. Meals weren't regular. You pushed the chair over to the cabinet and you ate raw noodles from the macaroni and cheese box, because no one gave a fuck about what a toddler needed beyond candy to keep them out of your face. Maybe you lived that life.

Maybe you experienced sex for the first time when you were 8 because the people around you were so unhappy that they would have drunken one night stands on your mother's couch, without giving a single thought to the fact that you were watching your mother be molested by something so ugly.. so impersonal.. and even as a child, you never called her name to reel her in... you just watched and felt bad and hated the mess of flesh on top of her.. and wanted her to be happy and not scream at you when you pushed the chair up to the cabinet to help yourself... while everyone else took more than their share.

I never wondered what she wanted out of life. You don't tend to wonder what your mother needs when you are so young.

My mother used to grow a garden in front of our Texas trailer home. It was a double wide mobile home, and I don't think that my stepfather thought there was anything more to be had out of life. His mother and father lived on the next acre and he must have been a secure dude. All that stress of punching keys for interesting people that my mother and I could only brush against by chance as we cashed in shitty fucking coupons at a shitty ass country store that treated us like foreigners years after we had spent every dollar we had. My mother would buy one Little Debbie snack pack to last a month. So fuck you.

But my mother used to grow a garden in the front of the house, while I would raise rabbits in the back. She grew elephant ears. And when they were abundant, she took her wares to the roadside, as if someone wasted from the roadhouse 1/2 a mile away, would stop and pay 5 bucks for a bulb. But they were huge. And flying squirrels and tiny frog legions appreciated them.

In the back of the house.. I tended to decapitated baby rabbits. Babies, whose crazy black mother had chomped them to pieces in her neurotic insanity to keep the rest alive... So I tell myself. I was 9. I removed their headless bodies. I tried to talk to the mother. Ask her why. But she scared me. She hated her life.

Why do I love elephants? There's a lot of reasons.

Why do I love the man I love now?

I don't want to grow a garden alone. I don't want to be that child staring at meaningless sex on the couch. I don't want to remove bodies from cages. I don't want to suffer if dinner isn't ready on time. I don't want to be everything that has damaged me. I want to be my own future, and for once, I see it clearly. Fuck you if you don't accept it, I'm not using your shit coupons today, and I sure as fuck ain't shopping at your establishment for things I need anyway. What you have to offer is more of the same.. that I have seen.. from planet earth in general and her stores... so thanks, but I'll fight for my love instead of settle again.

Word to MY mother.

Darkest birds take me home.

2007-11-04T20:51:00.000-10:00

I listen to the sounds of my house.

I hear the clock, whose hands I have yet to change, knocking seconds off of my life and it doesn't care. Doesn't care about me at all. If time cared about me, I would be hunted and dead already for how I have wasted years.

I am careful to choose my words now. I don't like it that way.

I prefer to unroll my tongue like a burning ribbon.

I tolerate my censorship. I throw up my own walls. I am digging into my own for this newest haul.

I feel like Poe.

And I crawl.

Not cornered.

2007-10-29T21:45:00.000-09:00

Oktober file layer I

2007-10-28T23:48:00.000-09:00

paint

2007-10-28T20:30:00.000-09:00

I don't know what to say here, except that I should be putting a ground layer on some canvas. Most of my canvas is already primed with painting efforts, some with figures and concepts already complete, but the work itself is lacking and so I don't care too much for it.

I have a room in my house where it's wall to wall paintings. Older stuff that's okay really, just not anything that ever sold or really... that I have any amount of affection for.

How do I become affectionate toward a painting I have done? That's a tough question. I have done things that tooke me half an hour to complete that I would never touch again, because in some way it is technically a point I need to remember or duplicate. So, I like it maybe in the sense that it is a marker for me. These paintings tend to be ones that people comment on liking, and I am pleased that they have found something I created that they like... but truly, those pieces are just reference material, and pretty much bug me because i have no passion invested in them.

How do I find myself passionate about a painting I am working on? This is more complicated.. maybe it's not. I don't know.
The pieces I have that I am defensive about. Not necessarily if someone criticizes them, because criticism doesn't bother me. It amuses me. But, back to the point, where does my affection grow for something I have made? Typically it doesn't start with something clear cut like the sort mentioned above. It starts as a mess. It offends me in it's juvenile ability. I hate to see the canvas through the paint. I hate to see the brush strokes in the paint. I hate for myself to make figures that make me look mentally challenged especially if they don't even have enough going on to make you feel anything. Even the colors are rushed and uninspired. That's how my shit starts.

Then, in my anger and frustration I will continue to add things. How long does this anger last? The pieces I have done (a handful over my years) that I am passionate about, usually have me angry and frustrated for no less than a few months. This is a problem because months is an eternity when your frustration creatively bleeds over into a world of non-artists. Not to go against my theory that everyone is an artist.. I'm just saying that on this island.. I'm not having coffee with anyone who understands.

I intended to write something poetic.. but I am beating myself up about putting off starting a piece tonight. I am torn on concepts. I know I should just go use all of my black on one half of some canvas and dump all of my colors on the other... But paint is expensive. I really should be using sand, but I know it will smell like seaweed.

What will I paint? dancers in a cage? an explosion off a pier as two people embrace? a monster child at at tea party? a dark shoreline? a piano? a broken blade of grass? a tuft of hair on a tree? a lonely boy in prison? a man crushed by books? a garden crushed by a truck from a tornado? a manatee? a stingray? a wood plank with a rusty nail.

Last Night I dreamt....

2007-10-28T19:26:00.001-09:00

8 Stories tall.
This tower is 8 stories tall.
I know that, because I created it floor by floor as I ran from the 8th floor down, in flight.
The man chasing me from the top floor wants to destroy me.
He was sleeping at first.
And I told him nothing.
He heard me outside the room.
He flung his legs out of bed. He stood up and seeing me through the wall outside of his room, he took a breath in and he grew to where his lower lumbar was flush against the ceiling. He brought plaster with him as he navigated the efficiency to fly open the door. Roaring, I heard him coming, could somehow see him through the walls, and I bolted. Flinging my things down the stairwell beneath me.
The electricity flashes off and on, and I catch my arms, ribs, knees and head on the wet mortar walls and the rocky pathway trying to see, tripping on moss, slipping on decayed earth.
I hear the beating of wings, only I know it's his eyes.
I think I must be at least 3 floors ahead of him.
My heart breaks for him but I cannot allow him to catch me.
When I crash into the exit
The sun has gone and I run through the wet grass, dodging moonlight, heading for trees and then I hear screaming. Constant screaming.

For dinner every night I eat.

2007-10-28T19:16:00.000-09:00

Steamed Cauliflower Florets

Mashed Russet Potatoes (Peeled)

White Flour Pasta

And an Atomic bomb of BLACK PEPPER that I never actually employ.

The slide

2007-10-27T00:33:00.000-09:00

If you have no Faith, can you be called Unfaithful?

In the moonlight, the scaffolding that supports the magnificent slide is jagged and wooden and something that shouldn't be trusted... though it wants to be. So I do. Trust it.

The slide is terrific. Looming. A luminous silver blade cut at an angle too steep to grip on and bearing too shallow an incline to kill the average man.

And, I support it all. I hold it up when the park is closed and children stay hiding in their awake states all around me, waiting for my gates to open. I wait for them to open too. I ache for a grand opening. My back is killing me, and I want to serve some purpose that will make all this pain seem worth it, in ways that don't destroy my nuclear wet dreams... if that were possible. Just hold it in for the presentation portion, and then I will collapse into you, and if you can manage me- you can have me. Have my shell. Have my ghost. Have my corrosive passion. Have the true fat of my vulnerability in your arms which is your mouth and the nightmare never really ends... now that I have you to lose.

Dew is my welcome sweater.

I eat through it with my alloys, hushing my allies for now, trying to connect with the official light of the sun. Shake off my chill. Flex my stiff compound. Activate my command. Start digging a grave. Start digging a grave. Start digging a grave. I want to be the hardest one crying at yours. I want you to be the hardest one crying at mine. I know I'm not really human, but all those creatures having fun on me... are dusted flowers in my hair. Honey.

Bodies careen down my slippery slope. Behind what they call my Back, and I give them their cheap thrills. I give them freedom in exposed deformity. I give them radiation to kill all the poison. I give them some bullshit serum to fight the curse.... I give them nothing but a slingshot into a sky with no stars really, because all I think about is you. And you are nothing like them. Nothing. I am dying for more nothing.

The itch is scratched all the way to the bottom beneath their exposed art and then I launch them into Space, and with their precious eyes closed, they are swallowed by the wave pool that keeps me afloat.

The wind knocked out of us, we do it again. And again. And the only thing I fear is that maybe you'll grow older faster than me, and that one day you would look at my ride and not remember.

This ride is yours.

One project ends.

2007-10-25T14:21:00.000-09:00

I know that the quality of these photos suck. Maybe the buyer would be kind to have nice pictures of them taken once mounted in his office?

Finally finished. Packaged and ready to go.

1-25-2004 "Every Horizon is 97% Fog"

2007-10-23T14:03:00.001-09:00

Every horizon is 97 percent fog.
silent and tired, lit far out there, cutting through a menacing message from the gods.
indestructible having beaten the odds and dominated violent wills.

I looked out the window towards the graveyard and half of my vision was obscured by a large sheet of snow curling under the eaves facing me, through it's thinnest edges it was ice blue. ragged like the upper maw of some wild thing.

I couldn't hear it as if outside under it, but somehow the imagery was something sort of immaculate in nature, so when I bore witness to it bearing down on me, entrenched in my limited sensory war zone, it's effect on me was.... poetic. And I hate to use that word. It makes you think you have a grip on my perversions when I use basics.

Resounded like a sheet of icy snow, curling and three feet thick sliding easily off of your lips with a recorder lying prone under your tongue, received directly in my head, catching every atom racing over your chin with chapters of worlds beating alongside it in seconds ... a translucent river of accomplice to stroke with.... pressing up against the pane reconciling it''s differences with dirt.

slipping further down, with a roar of friction, and landing, haunted and resolute below the sill, illuminated by my encased shadow.

on the side of the wall where no one walks the talk.

Old journal entries. "How does a bull sneak up on you?"

2007-10-23T13:50:00.000-09:00

Someone reminded me recently of a live journal I used to keep almost 4 years ago. I haven't looked at it since then. In fact, I didn't even remember my user name.

I may cut and paste some of my entries into this blog. I will date them though.

This one below is one I liked.

The golden hour...

"How does a bull sneak up on you and shove it's horns through your back?"

Raised that bull since it was a baby. Bottle-fed and nursed it into it's nubs. Complimented it's entry into adulthood and waxed his horns. Marvelled at nature while watching it eat the green grass found, slain and relocated for him.

trained for the stage since she was five. She underwent the knife awake with the lights off under religous eyes. Her milk shook around warmed by the fire under her ribcage, her ass smiled over her head and she was always there to cut to ribbons the red flags clutched in determined fists, even when her day found her inside out in the trashcan under more trash.

ring ring.
ring ring
ring

"hello."

"hello."

"what's going on?"

"nothing."

clicks and buzzes enhance the experience of describing whats outside the window. nothing enhances the experience of trying to describe what's inside.

Alive.... Ask me when the horns are in my back again and milk is gushing through my chest, and you can see the veins in my heart at the bottom of a glass, with your beacon of light and your xray specs slapping fat fingers down like a fag on the new tongue and feeling light headed... because you have an opinion.

learn a new language.

triptychs.

2007-10-19T10:40:00.000-09:00

Go here to see large view.

TT2 Terror

2007-10-18T21:48:00.000-09:00

After speaking with the buyer, I made some changes.

Please help.

2007-10-17T22:51:00.000-09:00

I need a new assignment. I don't care how big.

Triptychs 7?

2007-10-17T19:45:00.001-09:00

OKay, so there's an internet technician on the island right now. I made him a burrito. But the important thing is that I can post the triptych progress I went on and on about in the previous post. Don't even bother reading it. It's all skim milk.

The first three are from one series and the second three are from the other. Still not finished, but getting closer. Copies are larger for inspection.. Sorry about the glare at the bases. Working on that.

THE POSSESSION

THE ARMOR

THE WOMAN DRESSED

THE AMBUSH

THE EXPOSURE

THE MAGNETIC FORCES

Hopefully this will post.

Etcetera with no art.

2007-10-16T21:06:00.000-09:00

Here are the Triptychs photographed individually, and unfinished STILL.

Three of them are very bold and the other three are more tame. Since seeing photos of the office space where they will hang, I have been trying to avoid excessive use of the same hue that the wall is painted. From what I could tell, the wall is like a bright mustard color. Could be wrong about that. Okay, maybe the wall is French's mustard versus a Grey Poupon mustard. Whatever.

If you scroll down this blog, you will see the beginning stages of this effort. I don't think I posted the stage where I had made three dark aged individuals with blue feathers as some of their features. I really didn't like that stage, as it was taking me to a place I wasn't comfortable to be. I wasn't comfortable with the symbolism. I wasn't comfortable with the literal imagery. I wasn't comfortable with what the images might mean to me, and I wasn't comfortable pursuing all of those thoughts when the final product is ultimately a commissioned group of pieces for someone's business, even if that person is a dear friend.

I am not entirely satisfied with the results I have been getting with these pieces yet. I am stretched pretty thin with the amount of time and energy I have to put into them. I know that if I do not trudge along, that I will never get what I want out of them. Sometimes I get what I want from a painting with the a very simple approach. I felt like if I went at these paintings with that attitude that I would be cheating the buyer. It may end up that I have cheated the buyer by my convoluted evolutionarily devolved execution of an excessive lack of focus. I will work and rework the paintings until I start to have feelings for them. Sometimes this can take a shitload of time and an assload of paint and a shameful amount of staring at ugly.

I am only going into this long winded description of the process because my internet sucks and I am waiting for the images to upload to a photo hosting site. Normally I would just dump them in your lap and say, "there."

What I did salvage from the bird fiasco.. (or over self involvement) was the third panel in the TT2 triptych series. It is half a woman in a large dress, and her face has been shot over the page with alot of splash technique. Meaning, I couldn't bear looking into her ONE eye and so I destroyed it, with pretty much the emotion I felt coming from it. Details, I guess. Intentions too.

In the same Triptych series is the second (b) panel titled "armor". You might find it interesting to note, that I don't like this character. Maybe that's why his head is the color of a dogs erect dick. None of these "characters" necessarily represent people I intend to portray. With my stuff, one figure can take on the disorders of many, and so also, suffer the brunt of my distaste.. even though I created it, and some would say that I am somehow that thing myself. Whatever. When I die, you can say that kind of shit and people will be amazed at how well the critic figured me out. And that critic will die too.

Fuck these pictures are taking forever to upload.

The three panels that have the least detail have a long way to go. I am not totally unsatisfied with them, but I do want to knock them around some more. Maybe they will come out to me. I liked the idea of doing half of each of them in monochrome, but decided that monochrome will come from me, when it should, and not in a forced process like this... and likely not in acrylic either. Who can say how monochrome will come from me and when? I can't. Even if it's how I really feel. Monochrome stabilizes my emotions, and the wildly horrific color grafting I do with these types of painting are almost like a purge of everything that makes me insane. Just a theory. I'm sure I could argue the opposite. It's hard to really pin down how I feel about monochrome works. I have only recently been actually thinking on it. If I could do a self portrait, would I do it in monochrome. I think I would. And that answer is what has had me chasing my tail on the issue. I'm a pretty expressive person really, but I don't think that's how I feel the most comfortable. I am the most comfortable when I can just be, I guess. And "just being" doesn't want to involve the crazy conflicts and explosive color that I force from myself to cooperate with planet Earth literally and figuratively. I want peace, and I see peace and acceptance nowhere near my art. By acceptance I don't mean recognition and approval. By acceptance I mean... I accept this life.

Jesus christ this upload is dragging on. Maybe I'll just use blogger.

I think I will need to post the paintings when my internet isn't like christianity dragging me to the light.

Triptych Series order. Stage 5.5 and 6 of #II

2007-10-15T00:01:00.000-09:00

Imposter!

2007-10-11T00:01:00.000-09:00

Sometimes hunger is thirst in disguise.

Triptych Bind 1

2007-10-10T01:20:00.000-09:00

I am finished for today. I do have to work and all... It's not always playing in the garden, this life. I am not finished with these pieces, and will return to mutilate the emotionless parts.

Working the Cat's Paw.

2007-10-09T23:44:00.000-09:00

This is the point in my painting, where I have to be very careful. I know how I feel about these pieces individually and together. Getting my feelings across is not the hard part. Not destroying my feelings is the hard part.
And I want the viewer to get whatever they get out of it. If they get nothing. Okay. If they get more than I intended, that's okay. But I still have to give them something from me. Something that only I can give. I have to be careful not to make anything predictable. I want the viewer to own this painting with me. I want them to see new things in it every day, and for years to come. If they want to turn the pieces upside down or mix the triptychs.. I'm prepared for that too. And that is the challenge here. To truly give.

Maybe a couple more stages to go if I can keep my control and my vision in tact.

This is a cradle I found under the house I have been helping to renovate. Is it creepy?

What's going on.

2007-10-09T15:06:00.000-09:00

I'm pretty tired I guess. I'm burning both ends. I'm not eating very much. I have no pride in my job because the recent management overhaul blows. I finished the memorial painting of PJ the dog for a friend. I worked on the triptychs some last night. Have at least another round to go before I would feel okay about sending them out of here.
Have been doing alot of work on the property we purchased. I will take some pictures (maybe tonight as I rip up floors) and share.

Are there animals who have internal organs on the outside so to speak? Like creatures who function inside out? Because that's how I feel.

Below is a picture of our superstore on the island.

red carpet

2007-10-09T13:46:00.000-09:00

TT 1 and 2 VERT

2007-10-03T11:01:00.000-09:00

There will need to be some muting and texturizing still. I think another three or four hours on them should do it. Plan to be finished by Monday.

Nemesis..... Emesis

2007-10-03T00:41:00.000-09:00

All of the things that I think uncontrollably and involuntarily and don't share..
things that no one anywhere knows that I feel
are more important to me than you think they are.

I'm not gonna say, "It doesn't take anything to crack the case."
I'm not going to threaten you if you discover my fear.
I will say, that there is no case a man can make against me... that I have not already feared, if you follow me at all.

Here is Triptych I stage 3.

I will flip them all to a vertical position soon and also show a before and after process with each set.

Dear Buyer,

I haven't abandoned the assignment YET. You know how these things go by now.

Triptych Series order. Stage 3 of II

2007-10-02T20:57:00.000-09:00

Inspirational Poster

2007-10-01T00:49:00.001-09:00

Lately, I have been feeling... exposed.

But I have also been pretty productive.

Productive to me is:

killing mice and spiders.
feeding starving dogs.
slapping layers of neutral colors over the fluorescent insanity that bleeds from me like oxygen.

Productive to me is:

Keeping my tongue flat for longer than my hands are busy.
Hunting art and being compassionate about it.
Getting through a chapter before going to the next book.

Productive to me is:

Checking in on who the fuck it is that I think I am
and finding someone home who isn't fucking crazy or an invalid or angry, and raising them up to advance and never retreat.

For now, and then we work.

Triptych Series order. Stage two/ 2 sets.

2007-09-30T22:21:00.000-09:00

I'm having issues with the assignment.

Triptych Series order. Stage one 2 sets.

2007-09-30T09:23:00.000-09:00

Global Demolition

2007-09-25T20:27:00.000-09:00

Demolition is so much fun.

Update, Bitches.

2007-09-21T22:47:00.000-09:00

Where am I at right now?

For all of my masked indifference, I feel like all of my successful relationships with creatures and noncreatures on Earth are 100% the effect of being obsessively accommodating.

Recently, I awarded myself with a basic need. Interaction with people that I need.

On the off time from the physical demands of a Hell Shack renovation on the Bering Sea.... in the smallest village rounded out heavily with full blown "villagers" on the edge of the planet, I try to find music and art and philosophy that cranks my rusty chain. I feel it yanked alot, but it's nothing I can't handle. I still swim with the fish.

My family... my loved ones.. are all battling deep personal tragedy, and I am the finger tips of their current. I fuck the sky blindly when no one is watching, when no one that matters can bust me.

Lately, I think... I like the Commodores.

And my recent freak out with my ability to process Mark Rothko's work... Resolved. When I leave this seat, I will "express" my feelings for Disco as if I was endlessly terrified of my own politics.

There's more to me right now I suppose.

But I am dissolving the worst of it, and will return when I have something solid enough, yet soft enough to process, and I will seek one of your wise wise wise medicinal quips, that will no doubt set me straight, right, and thrust me back into the same fucking place in line that I curse out all of my verses from... at you... constantly oblivious... and I will sustain my hunger by eating my heart to spare my soul.

Shiver me timbers.

Fire is come. Fire is gone.

Number one.
Number fucking one.

Tonight's Photos

2007-09-21T21:20:00.000-09:00

My Disclaimer. My First Aid Skills. Mona Lisa

2007-09-14T23:32:00.001-09:00

I am going to use you. I am going to use you more than you may have ever been used. I am going to take and take and take.

And what I give in return may live in the shadows of your sacrifice to me until the end of days, but you should know that I can't breathe without you. I'll make it up one day. But for now, I hope you can swim with me in a panic.

A psycho personal tornado shreds the thousand thoughts that blink my eyes.

What keeps me calm is knowing that your turn to batter me within inches of my life... to keep your head above water... may be coming. And I wouldn't miss that for anything. That's real gold, and everything else called gold is ash.

grave

2007-09-14T20:59:00.000-09:00

Let me preface this entry by saying that sometimes I come across harshly. As if I didn't care about the people I talk about. Recently, I told a friend that I was too self involved to really care.. IN retrospect that was venting to someone I think understood me. And understanding me, you would also understand that I probably don't mean it. But the truth is, I don't know what I mean. WHen trying to personally process pain or grief (which this village has been drowned by) I have removed myself from telling anyone who asks what I think about our dreary summer. Our summer of death. What I have ultimately realized is that it doesnt matter at all what I think about all this death. The person asking (usually an outsider) is just waiting to tell me what they think. Some gram of wisdom meant to sooth me. Meant to prop me up. Meant to turn my frown upside down. I am not saying I don't like interaction with the human race. In this case, I am saying... Just shut the fuck up. Just listen. Just watch. Don't replay your own personal tragedy from ten years ago to make mine look less dismal. And don't wrap it up in a fucking pat on the hand and a sympathetic practiced flash in your eye.

Today we had another funeral. It was Russian Orthodox in nature like all the rest. You don't get buried in the cemetery here if you aren't Russian Orthodox. That's right. You get buried outside of the gate. Even if you choked to death. Even if you were one of the 30 graves of unmarked victims from the Flu Epidemic in the 20's. Even if you hadn't even learned to walk yet. Anyways.

I didn't go to the funeral. I did prepare the space today though, like I always do.. alone.. for some reason... I cover all the children's art with cheap white sheets and a stapler. I take down signs that say "no running". I pull out the podium and the skinny white candles. I line up enough chairs for the immediate family, because everyone else has to stand for the service.

The service is done by a priest or lesser who is flown out to the village. He typically wears a long black dress, is unshaven... looks like Nick Nolte and seems giddy when you hand him cash for his efforts... A donation. The same guy has been coming for the past few services.

After some words about life and all that, everyone is invited to kiss the corpse. So, I stay home. Some people go just for that... I truly believe that. Not many... But even three drama queens in an island population of 25 is enough to make you sick. So.. I stayed home and children came to be with me instead of the services. We made three pizzas that I had prepped the dough for the night before, just like Alton Brown.

There is always a feast after the body has been lowered into the ground. You can see the grave from the window as we line up to take food from all the families who prepared it. A 15 foot long countertop usually holds it all. 5 fold out tables, 30 chairs...

I give my hugs. Show my respect. Put spoons in everyone's dish. Make coffee. Make jokes. Make myself up in presentation. Terrified that I will have to say something I couldn't plan and just fuck it up lousy, in the face of someone who lost their mother. Lost their grandmother. Someone I knew too, but not enough to want to invade their goodbye.

I look over during the meal, and see the priest chug a coca cola and the whole prop of religion just fell through the floor and I laughed out loud. It was probably listening to "We Care Alot" as I mopped the floor before the memorial that got me through the day. Now... I am looking for songs I haven't heard to get me through tomorrow.

I think I tried to say initially, that I am not cold even though I present events like a newscaster sometimes. That's my way. If you really did know me, you would read my candid and flip comments as they were truly inspired.

I AM devastated but the recovery is instant when I have to take care of you.

How old do you have to be

2007-09-12T22:58:00.000-09:00

I feel like I understand something now.

I have the same pain in my heart. I have the same obstacle in my speech. I have the same monster in my dreams.
I have the same cramp in my style.
The same flinch in my response.
The same anger in my compassion.

I have the same hunger in my rage.
The same sadness in my resignation.
The same confusion in my seeking.
The same aggression in my judgement.
The same weakness in my flexibility.
The same fucking alphabet to give license to my terror on worlds.

You tell me. I've already told you. But I'll rephrase it until my every inch is destroyed by the antagonists we run from.

new shit... only, its old after seconds.

2007-09-10T20:19:00.000-09:00

dave matthews slits his pasty throat.

2007-09-09T02:34:00.000-09:00

..I feel like sometimes, I am
this machine that bashes and fillets wildlife. Every screw and cable
and beltway of me is embedded with sinew and the guts of each minute
launches into this judgmental and shallow header, that hangs
like a hole at my gate, my unholy entrance, and it doesn't stand a chance in my whiz of a meat grinder... I try to shove aside and save every piece of soul before it enters me. I am a mess of my own job at being me.

I drank whiskey tonight. If I had drank Vodka, I wouldn't be sitting at a computer. I would be off punching elders and stabbing delinquents. True stories. Doctor me.

There's something wrong with me. It's not obvious. I mean, yeah... there's obvious shit wrong with me, but here's what isn't wrong with me...

I hate Hootie and the Blowfish.
I hate The Dave Matthews band.
I hate Blind Melon.
I hate Creed.
There's a shitload of other music I hate, but there isn't enough invisible paper to house the listing. That's what I get for being too lazy to change satellite stations while vomiting up 9 midnight paintings.

Back to what's wrong with me.

Where do I begin?

I must be obsessive.
I must be compulsive.

True. You got me. I've faced it. Nurse me.

But I wasn't those things before I melted down. Before I melted down, I was stable, and I could want things whenever it fell into my every day function. I am no longer functioning. I am careening. I am back to bouncing off of the walls of my own stable. I feel fine. I can mother my child. I can answer phones. I can make a 5 star dinner with cabbage and will. I am stressed. I am working my hands like mad to fill in for my mind. It can only last so long, and I fear my heart.

Maybe it isn't fair to say I was stable. I was resting. And I don't fear my heart. I re-introduce myself.

Never saw the lightning.

2007-08-30T21:00:00.000-09:00

.
.
.
.
I have got to strike a balance or I will go fucking crazy.
.
.
.
.

blow out

2007-08-28T21:11:00.000-09:00

One time I was riding along a Texas highway with my boyfriend. I have an incredibly selective memory, so the fact that I bring this up, means that recalling the moment is significant especially if I was then able to find a file for it in my dusty ten story internal library... for means of referencing it now.

I wasn't driving the car. I didn't have a car. I had a motorcycle, and that doesn't make for too many cross country conversations with a partner. If Ihad been driving... we would have stopped the car.

It was a boring and typical stretch of Texas highway. We were high on each other's company. Listening to music. Waiting for the next ridiculous billboard to insult. Thankful that we weren't toothless, proud of our intellect. Maybe even satisfied that we hadn't died by 20. Whatever.

I look out my window and I see cotton growing in fields as we cruise along. As soon as I see it, I say, "Stop. It's cotton." My boyfriend laughs and we continue at the same speed. I say, "Seriously. Stop." He keeps his foot metered on the pedal and says "Why?" I say, "I want to pick some." He laughs again and we continue to move at the same pace. I think I start to panic. I can tell that the fields will end soon and I will have blown my chance. I say, "I never picked cotton before." It was true. I had only bought balls of it to wipe off my grease paint and had filled my guilty soul with stories of slaves destroying their fingers from picking it. I had to do it, you understand?

My boyfriend thinks I am kidding, then realizes I am probably serious, only my kind of serious is more insinuation without anger. But once that insinuation has been ignored (since I rarely push people) there is no telling how I will retaliate.

He did not stop. And I was actually really upset about it. I think he was afraid to "lose time" or be caught trespassing. Trespassing? The cotton was growing through the fenceline. I was one girl wanting to feel it in my hands. How could anyone have cared? If anyone had cared, I would have paid that price gladly.

I haven't forgotten about that, and I knew at the time, I should have thrown a fucking fit.

That's one story I want to share.

This other thing, isn't really a story.

I have very light colored eyes. I hate flourescent lights. Can't handle bright lights at all, but I hate talking to people with sunglasses on because I think it is self engrossing. So half the time I wish I could hide my eyes and shoot out the streetlights.

I was telling my sister in law about how people with lighter colored eyes are more affected by light than others. It was something I had read. I was convinced. Then she told me that she had read something about huskys. She said that they had such blue or whitish irises because of the intense amount of light that was let in while enduring long days and snow in the northern regions. I don't know about this. I need to know about this, but opted to make my notes about my sad cotton picking story instead of research.

Cotton... light eyes... the world is full of thoughts and blown out the sides with needs.

mechanical dissent

2007-08-26T21:09:00.000-09:00

I was told that there was a scorpion in the driveway this morning and a ladybug hanging upside down in the kitchen window.

My Kurdish friend is going to do my hair tomorrow. I put off carving into my haystack until here because I wanted herto do it. She's a Paul Mitchell big wig who is tired of event planning and wants to get back into the creative aspects of hair. I'm the perfect candidate because I have a shitload of hair and apparently my natural shade is one step removed from the lightest shade possible.. except Albinos I guess.

This house I am staying in is large. 3,000 square feet or so. There is a neighborhood committee that requires that you tell them if you are going to build a deck, soften your water, or do anything funky with the landscaping. Funky might mean something like put a strange bush too close to the curb.

The neighbors on one side are referred to as the Taliban, because they didn't bring a cake when these guys moved in and they didn't wave back. The response? Dress in a burkah and trickor treat and then put a large crucifix in the yard at Xmas time.... Yeah... Not a Metropolis. Apparently these guys have a green beret friend that informed them that "They don't wave becasuse you are the Infidel and they want to kill you." If you could only see this neighborhood... A sleeper cell? How fucking absurd.

I am not saying that I want a purple house. I want the option to paint my house purple. I am not saying that having a zealot for a neighbor bothers me, but I would prefer Muslim to Christian. I would really prefer nothing to everything else. Nothing to everything else.

I am tired of bared teeth and gutted glimpses of little nuclear families... set in their fashion. Set in their diabolical and safe communities in the middle of nowhere. The only additive being fear and consumer comfort and stale renditions of atypical fight songs to ward off the unknown.

How could you sit in a small stadium watcing Junior score a point if everyone on the bleachers next to you were closet fags and openly prickish? How could that be progress? How could that be where you want to go? Tennis? Are you kidding? Do you file that under Athletics or Down Syndrome? (My apologies to Down Syndrome.)

I guess I don't miss it here. I felt like an alien looking at new products on the shelf at the most basic grocery store. Still I was trapped in some ADD like haze as I tried to figure out what the fuck I needed. None of it was to live. I wasn't stealing tortillas and cheese anymore to live an extra day. I have credit cards I was ashamed to display.

I am moving back to pen and paper. Screw this mechanical dissent.

dreamsicle.

2007-08-23T20:56:00.000-09:00

I have been tormented with dreams probably no stranger than those visited upon the depressed and beaten upon savages of any era.

Still...

There is a girl who appears in my dreams in the same fashion.

She starts out having fun and partying with the natives... Any natives in Any Nation, and after a spell... I see her start to get out of control. I see the giant rubber mask start to slip off of her head. I don't pay attention too much because my mind is elsewhere at the gathering, but her head gear is most intriguing.

There is a man in a corner along a fenceline out of sight. He occasionally draws the attention of the party goers because he is making some kind of art. They accept him. He seems interesting. I get closer, more out of trying to find a corner to be comfortable because I am not so comfortable here. I feel like every one in the crowd is operating on a different time piece. I feel like they are wolves waiting for a reason to cut my throat... In some ways I welcome it, but it's a dream and I know that if I want to get somewhere I have to be willing to be the victim... and I have to appear as if I can't fight.

I move around the muddy swimming pool and dodge drunkards having the good time I kind of wish I was in on... Kind of, except I hate them. I hate them and I can't tell you why in any way that seems sensitive or giving. I dodge them and I am not afraid at the same time.

As I come upon the artist at the fenceline, I see that he has strung before him several canvasses suspended from a wire. They hold portraits. He has flipped them and is painting from the guides of shadows from the portrait's other side. They are mine. I made those original portraits. I left them amongst friends and strangers and they must have been uncovered as easily as some dumb teen crime novel.. if they were even hiding... He has them now. But I am not angry. I am hungry. I am looking for a comrade in this backyard Poltergeist.

I am fascinated. I don't tell him who I am. I don't tell him that they were mine. I only watch and wait for the wolves to lunge at me when they are too drunk to masturbate and seek violence for pleasure, as they splash and spit from the muddy pool at anything that seems ill fitting. IN this corner with this thief, I feel safe... But I feel like my escape plan lacks space for an unsure brush.

From the corner of my eye I see the girl. I see the girl I have seen before. She wears a rubber mask that covers her head. She jumps into the pool. Her Osiris Horsehead mask starts to slide off and I realize that her skull has been cracked and half of her brain is hanging out.

I move to her and beg her to sit while I check out her skull. She acts happy as if she knows and it isn't a big deal. Her friends are oblivious to the danger and start to harrass me for giving her shit about swimming with a fractured skull and brain exposed. They start to push me around and I can see her laughing with no cares as they move me from the shallow end. I see the artist at the fenceline covering my paintings, stopping only to watch and memorize our expressions...and I go down without a fight.

Because I know they have a 30 second attention span.. ALL OF THEM.

Ruffage.

2007-08-21T22:35:00.000-09:00

My brain is a mess. I can't sleep. My mother says it is the time change and the stress of travelling with a toddler. It could be. I prefer not to think literally right now. Literally is a kind of front door "honesty" that doesn't cover everything.

I have been missing something. I am kind of a moron and I guess in a lot of ways I am always missing something. I'm slow to the take on fancy jokes but I can pick up on the unholy ones before the slumlord even knows he was trying to make me laugh. I laugh when people say horrible things that I think are supposed to be funny. They were only meant to be a horrible thing. I knew that. I knew it before I smiled.

I do miss my muse. Don't I have a right to one? If freedom wasn't my right would I fall in line?

I am in line. I have always been in line. Even when I am scraping friends off of the shoulder. I have been lost. I knew I was in the woods. The woods are beautiful, but I am not the wood. I am not the ruffage. I am not the wet earth. I am not the bugs with sharp teeth who burrow into flesh. I am not flowers after rains. I am not a sun scratched upon by highest branches.

I am a desert with a boom box. And I am too hot to stay here.

Poke A Haunt Us.

2007-08-04T00:52:00.000-09:00

Essentially I have been making the same entry into a "daily" diary/blog for a few years now. Everytime I start typing, I want to say the same thing, but I always say everything else to avoid saying that thing. And, to be honest, I am not sure I totally know what that thing would be. It would have to be a pretty significant statement wouldn't it? I'm not a philosopher though.

A friend of mine told me one night on a late night village booze cruise that he was astounded by my thought processes.. my art for "critical thinking". He held his head close to his lap to keep the porch light out of his eyes, and I just looked at the back of his head knowing what was truly going on there. I had just told him that all I had gotten out of my primary education was a general education diploma. After the stunning 5 second silence that followed what he thought was my admission, he picked up without hesitating... a rather... thoughtful and missionary tone with me... a sincere and reflective kind of courtesy that generally makes me gag... and I just wanted to start up my tank and go home and finish my beer and listen to my one dimensional "prog-rock" and forget about anyone's needs but my own.

It isn't a matter of feeling insufficient. It's about finding friends. I haven't really been finding them, but you know, Just leave it there. Dropped off. Delivered. Done. Now, bring on the next tomorrow of swimming in a sea of self obsessed and handicapped, base, human interactions and let me act like a retard again who has no goals.. no dreams... no Nobel Prize winning drafts flooding My every cell. And I'll sum it all up with another fucking " Hello. How you doin? ... Oh yeah... Ooooh Truly?? When is this shit going to end? Yeah. .. MMMM I know what you mean. It's insane. Hope you (insert appropriate dog day joke here." Profit from all the loss..... (Right on.).... Left on.

My brain has been on repeat for about 2 months now. I could go into why. I could erase your brain of anything worth remembering for the next 4 hours trying to help you understand the simplest conclusions that I have come up with here. I'm not saying I'm complicated. I am saying that this place is complicated. Each conclusion is like a brick wall and never like an open horizon. You'd think I would be up to the challenge, for all you know about me. And the thing is... I have been doing nothing BUT be up for this unreal challenge every moment of the day since I came here. My reputation is important to me, but more important to me than that, is being able to make people around me comfortable. You might say, "Yeah right. Every time we ever hung out you were so quiet. You would always keep to yourself mostly, or make jokes..." But I know every last one of you, my friends... who I feel slipping away... Have called me FIRST when shit was really fucking bad for you. I was just wondering if .. you know. I could want to call you for a change. I haven't felt like you were there in any way but to use me. Like I said, I could go into why.. Maybe I'll just go my own way.

I am writing all of this as if I expect someone to read it. I guess, because I am not some basket case diary writer who hits the privacy button and thinks that anyone cares more about your thoughts than your credit. I'm also not a novelist. .. Though I do have one story in my head that I have always wanted to write. I might as well share it, because even if the handful of you who came upon this blog "stole" it... I'd like to see what you would do with it, and it would always be more potent in my mind regardless of what you pulled out of your ass. But to address my trepidation with bearing all in this blog, I guess. .. I wonder if my employers read my thoughts... (as an aside). Wonder if my friends and if my enemies read my thoughts here, and truthfully it doesn't give me a boner to think they do. It kind of bothers me. I assume that who I am is obvious to everyone I deal with on a regular basis, but that doesn't mean they really know what they are getting.. and there's always something in me that wants to curse them with the back up black wings.....

I always assume that my ideas are too extreme for business. The strange thing that I am finding is that... the Earth is desperate. If you can form a sentence and ask a question, there is someone out there who wants to answer you. But there's no accounting for communication. Accounting for Taste is like Doing Roll call for Manners. The only people saying "present" are simply the bored assholes who showed up and not people you should ever really want to dine with let alone set your savage swine against.. to gain.

I know better than anyone that my ideas aren't really extreme. My character is extreme.

So, my idea is this. There's this small Alaskan village on the Bering Sea. The weather is wild. The population is 50 at the most any given time of the year. There's no law enforcement. There's no church . There's no grocery store. You look at the black night, devoid of city lit reflective skylines and think of the dark ages. You feel as if you are one step removed from the Dark Ages. IN fact, lately... there's been nothing but death and misery. Strangers are proudly telling you that they are praying for you. Soon people start seeing strange things. They start imagining things. They become far off. They choose their words carefully when they run into other villagers. They want to see if someone else has seen it too. They can't decide if they are seeing blurry and late night alcoholic hallucinations or ghosts or trickery with the lighting. They wonder if what they saw has anything to do with the stories they have all been told. Anything to do with how they talked to their grandchild today, or anything to do with how much fish were in the net. The stories they all heard by gaslight or moonlight.

The sick girl who was sent away to seek medical attention with the strange seaman during a terrible storm. (Terrible storms aren't cliche' here.) They never arrived at their destination and there was no evidence of wreckage.

I have it all layed out in my mind. Scenes. Conversations. Effects. Tension. All of it. But whatever. She's not a ghost, and the joke is on the Village. She's the ship wrecked child, grown, having really lived the subsistance and spiritual life of those "Here's How We Lived Without The World" true stories... creeping out residents who are simply losing their minds.

There's nothing complicated about any of this. Except maybe me in there, and you out there, wanting to help me, and that's not complicated. That's something else....

I keep saying how fucking crazy it is to live here. Is who I am changing?

Anne Lamott quote~Religion

2007-07-19T22:57:00.001-09:00

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Annie Dillard Quote

2007-07-19T22:21:00.001-09:00

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"