this is like a notebook

me too. and i am happy about it.

Seraphina Sleeping

i was writing and painting and i stopped writing and kept painting. Then working and painting and then i was just working so i started painting again. But work never goes away bc we are trapped into it. Made into it. Breaking out and Breaking a Sweat. Sitting. Writing.

My sacrum is a concrete block. I'm stretching toward my toes and my upper body, all bendy like willow branches in the wind, is cast in a block of concrete. Planted. Roots. Chakras. Pain. They measured my legs and said good luck. Listen, itisnotthatbad, on paper you look great. I look great on paper for things I don't care about. In reality it all goes willy nilly and I just go home. Up a tree or under a rock. Somewhere quiet, away from the lot of you. No offense. To contort into yoga poses..incorrectly.

I watched Snow Piercer last night. Americas Economy on a train going straight to hell. It was good. Really good. Accurate enough to make me feel sickly. Not totally new, same story. different setting. A Good One.

The days i hate the  city blur into the days that i love it. The days i paint or run blur into the days that i don't. i sleep too much and get drunk off my dreams. Bleary and swollen stumbling stretching.Wake up.

The thing no one tells about loving yourself is that when you figure it out and finally do it - you can't end up loving yourself too much to leave who are. Because you will keep changing. and you will leave yourself..the selves that you hate and even the selves that you love. You have to be brave because you can't stay.

July 22, 2014. My 36th Birthday. Bank of the Mississippi River

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embellished and unedited

In all the years I have maintained, or barely maintained, this blog, it has been a repository for unedited junk. I mean, more than that of course. Maybe I should say unedited guts. I hate to edit. It is like sifting through vomit, a mental regurgitation of the subconscious and bad grammar.

the thing about life, is that if you don't stop it, it just keeps going.  Really, time will fly and days and years and memories get distorted, but at times I just think, MY GOD IT IS STILL GOING. I am indeed still breathing and moving about. My best friends brother died ten months ago. My life with her now has the dividing line in it. the before and after the death.

If you stay alive, your life will become marked with deathstones. Markers. The first death I experienced, that I remember, was at age 6. The next at 12. The next at 14. The next at 20. then 26. The next at 32. Another at 32. These were close ones. We were not sheltered from death. I grew up in a very old rural community. People died all the time. They lived hard and loved hard and then when people die you put them in boxes in the ground. Down here the put them in houses above the ground. I like that. You live in a house with people and then as you die you are placed back in a smaller house-shaped structure to be together. forever. below the brick and mortar and then vines.

I feel as if I have lived too long. Stayed alive too long. Despite the misery and the intense despair I have endured and, well, let's be honest, embraced, I have had so much joy. so much intense overwhelming happiness and joy. Bliss. It is something I almost feel guilty about. The lives we fall into on this planet....hell, anything could happen. little circumstantial victims dancing around the planet, fighting and loving bloody murder. holy heartbeats. We are tacked to the earth like writhing roaches on pins, blooming petals and soft skin, flickering hope and cashed out. Its okay. We are more than skin but less than the humanity we envision, I imagine. We are embellished and unedited.

Modern Cacophony, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 2014, Shawna Atkins