" I might be a mess, but I sure can survive...'

I am tired of being well.  I am not sure this trade-off was worth it since my body feels horrible despite my best efforts at HEALTH. The world is poisoned, I have little faith in diet and exercise and all that jazz. All that jazz, all that jazzmine, gardenia, wysteria and hydrangea.  That is what I need, a sea of scents and soft light to carry me away. That is mostly what I think about lately...I am plotting an escape. Not sure how or what from or where to but I am. Something has to change. In a way that does not involve giving up.

Criterion

So I had this art show at a restaurant and it turned out pretty well. I sold things cheaper than I should have,but i needed to make room for more. Needed to clear some out. And all the people that go where I go are usually poor. Most of the people that I want to own my work are probably poor. Ha. Anyway i had to quickly finish some stuff and got kind of manic and crazy and it was great.

I'm drawing at work now. Little sticky note canvas. I see paintings in the woodgrain and the streaked windows. I stare and hings turn and morph into drippy paint. It is pretty fabulous. I neglected my precious pretend brain for so long it went to bed. That is how this city is. you have to pay attention to it. to the real world. In the small forest towns I  lived in before you can walk around in a dream world, half imagining you are something else all the time. Its not like that anymore. It is not like that here. It takes guts to live here. Like literally, the city may take your guts, or whatever it is about yourself that you love.

Things change. I do things the hard way. I learn things the hard way. It's okay. I am going to see my parents this weekend, to see Spring and the new puppies and the new calves and all the blooming things. And my lovely parents and their twinkling eyes and now wrinkling skin.  The extra hour of daylight plus longer days is just food for my spirit. Well, that and the Floradix Iron Supplement. Today is actually a good day, one of those days where i actually hope they do not explode the planet just yet.

The Criterion, 2012, acrylic on canvas

 

dreambaby

i think that if you can see someone in a really vulnerable state..even a reuplsive state and still love them or respect them even, then i think that is meaningful. i think it means something.

not sure what.

It may just mean you are dumb. It may not mean that i just am not sure what it means but i think it is indeed, important

They say ..you know,  they say love is blind and all. but obsession is a blind thing too.

and a fool in love is a fool indeed

so it may be obsession it may be naive it may be true love. dopamine.

i dunno. or it may be laziness. sometimes it easier to love someone than to not.

When i think of the past and people i loved...i don't know... sometimes I want to find them. dig them back up.

but..i dont know. when i am feeling reflective i want to ....write the story of myself i guess. tell myself the story of myself and how i got to wear I am so that i can reanalyze the present. make sure its real. or make sure that i quesiton the reality of it. and the people i knew, the people i loved...they were part of it. big, big part. I love hard.

and things that are important...events. They can not always be understood while they are happening.

And, well, even just the passage of time...adds wisdom. You become seperate from the person you used to be, you know. i am not the 24 yr old me - but now i feel like I understand the 24 year old me better and i want...i don't know what I want.. I want to apologize, i think..... or say thank you. or something. acknowledge it

But are you wanting to acknowledge/thank/apologize the person from then or the person now?

 

Well, both I suppose. Because to me, they are static. I mean,  if I dont know them anymore then they are still in my head how they were in the past.  So i suppose I would like to say it to whatever/whoever he/she is now. hmmmm..but maybe that is selfish of me? to bring up things to people from my distant past just to emotionally satisfy myself? like bringing something to someone..... give them something they don't even want. Who knows. Just realizing that staying alive means aging and aging means memories and dealing with the fact that these memories may drift up unexpectedly and they may shift and your understanding of who you were and who you are will/may shift slightly as well but in a way that solidifies, not loosens. the disintegration and fluidity makes it stronger. not weaker.

bear with me. I've never been 34 before.

 

december in a gray box

One day the December guy is going to seriously kill me. No, the December SKY. The fucking sky.
just going to SMOTHTER me.

The world is a bloodbath. I will say that living in one of the most violent and polluted cities in the US for two years has taken a toll on me and makes me even more incapable of dealing with the everyday reports of massacre that are heralded by death angels just by checking email.  Or is it making me stronger? Is it showing me something? i am being hard on myself? This a revelation. A damn revelation.

right now. in space and time.

I water my houseplants. I have accumulated quite a few and i just push other shit out on the street to make room. it is always gone in a few hours. i switched to decaf but i still shake and at my desk there is ripe orange that grew in my friends yard and riverwolves play in my ear and i type away clicking clicking clicking clicking covering the inescapable pounding and longing of my bizarre heart. It is an murmur. It has a murmur, the doctor said your heartbeat is irregular. My heartbeast. my beast heart.

there is not enough sunlight. we need more of it, its like soilent green in here. i water houseplants. that kid just went to war with everyone and killed every last one of them. He just murdered and murdered and murdered. and he did it last week. and the week before. and they'll do it again. In Detroit and in San Fransisco and on my street. But not like that. That kid hit the big time. He fucked us all up. He fucked up the president. I wonder what would happen if he knew. I wonder if he can feel sad. I wonder if he ever felt anything. I hate that i think about him. i do.. i see his fucking face when i close my eyes. Gaunt. gaunt. gaunt. death death death. America America America

we grew up and we got jobs or we didn't get jobs and moved out to the streets. we went to rehab and counseling and got divorced. no one was ever happy in the way a jack in the box can make you happy ever again.

sometimes nothing makes me prouder than being not pretty

Sometime nothing makes me prouder to be me than being "not pretty." These delicate lovely girls are trained in the trendy art of being trendy and denying it, "oh, this old thing?" and loosing weight to gain some ammunition in the girl war attention beast fist fest. I am lonely and I am often alone. I am most always alone but not always lonely. I am grateful for solitude and the absence of this mad female estrogen art girl competition flush race that seeps into my life via facebook and the occasional social outing.  Pretty is a commodity and they are taught to rebel against this idea of pretty but to also, by they way, look pretty doing this rebelling.

I was too sick and too sad and too rejected to take part in this bizzare girl-land in my teens and twenties. Now I usually feel like an old man. Brewing over paintings or chain smoking over my computer drinking coffee and watching birds. its better than watching women on facebook fall in love the newly projected image of themselves repeatedly and wondering how a digitally existence can affect your soul, if you have one. Which I doubt.

Being cool is being callous, being mean is irony and always fight for attention in the most happening outfit known to humanity. Or these are my observations from a bar stool. Except I am not on a barstool because I cant drink anymore. Not one drop. Not one sip. Another addition to list of reasons I feel like a senior citizen at 34.  Not that I ever actually felt any sort of connection with any of my peers anyway, but being sick every damn day adds to my fundamental disconnect. 

I have been sick for about 6 months of this year. A burning black hole of acid despair so deep in my stomach yet flourishes up to singe my esophagus. I can't eat. I eat anyway. I get sick. I can't drink. I drink anyway. I get sick. They do a gazillion tests and give me some medicine that doesn't work. And suggest that since i obviously have some issues  - my chart says i take antidepressants - possibly this pain is in my head or....something. I walk home from the doctor's office and toss the prescription....it already didnt work.

the pain leads to isolation which leads to depression usually but not so much this time. I am certainly not happy by any means, I just am not sure who I am. I know who I am NOT and who I do not want to be which is on of THEM. those. those frenemy attention women ...popular in this highschool of adulthood that comes with city lights and barstools and happy hours and men with jobs and hobbies and shit. Art, that is it. They all do art. "Oh, i am a photographer and i m working on this project".  I m sure you are. I miss the woods. I miss nature.  I need to shove my own face in dirt. Have a nice day.

I miss my old friends, who were all way older than me and didnt care about the coolest, no how.  Maybe the dissipation of vanity in relation to aging is what I am experiencing and my intolerance for the extended immature soul of our collective society is raging and waging.  Her death was like lilies pinned in your hair. The tragedy just high-lighting your natural beauty.  Meanwhile we don't hear clocks ticking anymore and if you can capture your image in enough self portraits with your phone camera then its like you don't exist and you don't have to feel reality and we can just post ourselves into oblivion. ill be here. alone. longing for a chunky old typewriter and 1976.

view

from my backyard

better never than late

I am sick. I've been sick for a long time and everyone, I imagine, is sick of hearing about it.  My stomach my stomach my stomach. I'm going to a specialist next month. They will do a scope, which means a tiny camera will go down my throat to my stomach and inspect it. WTF?  16 years. Really I've had stomach ache for sixteen years. This is not a romantic ailment. You know, how some people get those and become the tragedy girl for life. I'm not her. Maybe i envy her? To have these problems be something that people, you know, gather round and pet you and and make time for you and worry and care and cater..Those sick women that get a pass because they are mentally emotionally or physically ill and all tragic and lovely and then the martyred ghost of everyone's  past. No, no, nothing like that. I just have an incessant never ending stomach ache. I can't eat, I can't drink I am sick of being sick. I think this house is making me sick. It is a classic New Orleans house complete with 1910 floors no insulation, no ac, and 100 years of dust settled in so deep no Dyson sucking power vacuum machine can touch it. Oh and 100 years of roaches... and gaps and cracks that can never be sealed bc the house settles and shifts with the humidity and rain and heat. It's fine. It's tiring but its okay. Least i got a house...and The ceilings are high enough for hope to rise and the transom sheds light on my silvery existence. and pain. That is physical and not physical. If there is even a such thing as "not physical pain" bc i feel ever heartbreak and soul ache in my guts. Which, is possibly...part of the problem.
I was in rural North LA for a week and a half for work. I didn't miss the city not one bit, not one drop until the last 2 or 3 days. Then I come back and its just...reminders on every street of shit I thought was going to happen but didn't. I should move on, but god, i keep doing a GREAT JOB at this job I only like half the time. Really, I accidentally did such good work up in N. LA that i get to go back. And do more work. Its good, i suppose, and I am only slightly being sarcastic and I should be happy that my boss is happy but in reality i sort of don't want a boss, a job or a car or a body, even. Some very old sick part of me that rejected being alive is in there still. Kicking around. Kicking my in stomach, up the esophagus, caught in my throat. Words stuck.
I have a good life. In the sense of AMERICA and the world and history and humanity and the gadzillion pounds of human suffering that pervades us all ...I got a good deal.
I sort of roll my eyes at it though. Like, whatever, I just worked hard and got lucky.
Don't squander this...
My parents are going to die. I think that sometimes, like at a red light or at times when i am supposed to be paying attention and Then I am just like Well Fuck Everything then. Jesus. Humans have it sooooo great, we are all self aware and shit. When people tell me to be glad things happened, not sad they are over  and its better to love and lose then never love at all,  I want to spit. No, it ISN'T.

One time my little sister, (who is my hero and a very unlikely one seeing as how her mental issues have been misunderstood by everyone and she got slapped with the label BRAT before we even knew that she didn't have, like, ANY SEROTONIN) she said, people will tell you that time heals all wounds. They will tell you that, but don't believe them. Time doesn't heal anything you just get used to the pain. I wonder if its true. I guess it doesn't matter. I mean how do you even tell the difference?

One time, after this particularly tragic heartbreak (aren't they all sooooo tragic?) I went back home for a couple weeks. I was stunned, I think, that a break up could leave me reeling like that. Confused and shocked and feeling so  like, like i didn't know who i even WAS. My dad told me that most wounds eventually heal themselves if you leave them be. That is quite different that saying that time heals the wound. But i have a NEED to not leave it be. a physical sore, a mental one or whatever  - i peel it back off. I poke around, i get in. and under. I want to UNDERSTAND. I run my fingers over the ridges left by old scars and stars and i have rusty kit of old hurts with sharp points. I can open them back up. This is self defeating. This is selfish. This a pain junkie.

Biologically there is a reason. Like loving your own bullshit, you can get addicted to your own chemicals. Serotonin or epinephrine or wtf ever. The pain feels good. The pain lets you back close to that one person that you can't have. or whatever else it was you lost. innocence or heroin or starvation. It's like, I can't do that THING but i can get back close to the pain that caused me to do that THING and that will suffice when you are a fiend for it.

 

Sometimes I feel like this abandoned farmhouse. Everyone left or died or forgot to stay. I am all full of their remnants, reminders, just slowly turning to dust.  No one is coming back.

sick little birds

and their nonstop chirping

Of everything good

I walked briskly down the street and the smell of jasmine and sweet olive is so thick in the humid air its suffocating. No lie, when they write about New Orleans they always say something like, the "flowery essence of the still air was intoxicating" and that is one thing they say about this city that is not a lie. or even an exaggeration. The bad thing is the smell of vomit, beer, and piss can be equally as strong on a Saturday morning near a bar. and you are always near a bar in this city. Always.

It's not just jasmine, either. There are other ones but I don't know them by name. Crepe myrtles shaking down little tuffs of flower ...like cotton candy sticking in your hair. Some other big droopy bell shaped flower that smells like a sugar blossom should. It is everywhere and it smell so fragrant and rich and good it almost makes me sick.

It stormed today. A big gully washer they call them. Just rolled in off the gulf, big hard sharp thunder, lighting, dumped a couple inches of water and broke up. Blue skies by the evening.

I went for a walk then. Everyone lives in a shotgun house. A shotgun house is a house without privacy, they say. No joke. I can't even hide from myself in this house. I can't go on hiatus from my own life, like other people can. People just take a hiatus from you and your invisible crisis. To tend their own crisis like a withered garden.

I thought i could handle it but i can't. I am getting healthy anyway but the farther I reach out the more some hard little interior just collapses within itself. A dense little marble made of lead instead of glass. getting heavier and heavier as the months flow.

I watch forensic shows while i draw. The true story ones with cheezey dramatization and factual science. I like it bc they always get the bad guy. Always. A piece of skin, a stray hair, a partial fingerprint, zoom in and pick the invisible apart...Make it mean something. those tiny things...

someone else's tragedy becomes not real. But it is real. we are all real, just stuck here for now, waiting to see what happens next. We are always entertained by someone else's tragedy because it is all we have got and then soon it becomes your own.

one two three

I have hope and I have a torch

We went back to hell for you, but you were gone. The gates were locked and there was a just a small glass rabbit at the threshold. ..walked around but in the burning silence we gave up and piled back into ourselves and walked away. It was hard to leave you, but it will get easier. Sorry.

I went to see a new therapist person who also does cranial sacral work.  She walked me through some visual imagery therapy while she worked on me and it like...unleashed some bizarre illustrated sequence in my mind that has not completely stopped. How odd. My mind, when calmed and then prodded, gives me white lilies and then strings to tie up the pain in my stomach. A floating window pane with 5 rocks floating in a row before it.  A seashell. Okay nice, but IT DID NOT STOP. i couldn't sleep that night, the pictures just floated and morphed and kept coming. Too fast to even sketch them out, to write...so I just watched it. let if flow, it was like electricity..i don't remember any of it now.

gone.

From the occasional text and email and facebook I assume my sister is doing well in the midwest. Although we don't communicate a lot I can feel her always. all the time, right near me, right in the air around my heart. my chest, my breath. Everything we are and wont be and never will be. We aren't typical. sisterhood isn't not what they write on the mug or the hallmark card or show in HBO dramas where grown women bicker over husbands and...i don't know... whatever it is they bicker about. We measured ourselves by each other, but not in comparison. We were enclosed, encapsulated, growing, breaking, mending....losing each other. finding each other in unsuspecting places. All three of us. Artemis hunts. Athena thinks. Aphrodite muses.

It has recently occurred to me that all of the packaging for my food is poisonous. The cardboard, the thin plastic..leeching toxic...I eat. My weight is up, I don't even care, I have acne scars in the lines on my face. I am aging without sound. The 90s were brutal, what can I say. July and it is 34 years old for me. This party is wearing me out. My confetti is raining down like ashes near hell, and i hope to see you all there with love and ice and fire.

For Now is an Onion

One thing about E.D. and recovery is that it is like an onion and once you work through the top later of flesh and skin and weight and keep going you keep going, and keep going and start to find out all the things you are really terrified of and you don't just find it and work it out and then, Bam! Done!..you do it again and again and again and some days it gets easier then it gets really hard again and once you pass the point of going back to just engaging in symptoms you feel a terror and then a breeze and its the same trudging along a treacherous path within you and without you. Honestly I don't know what is scarier the inside or the outside but either way you are alone. People may love you and care about you but ultimately when the panic attacks begin or the silent black darkness of depression sinks down on you its just you and IT. Like being born but without your mother. The shock of the New. The terrible wonderful unknown except its not wonderful, i just threw that in there so as not to look like a negative creep or boring little sheep. I wish i believed more in the wonderful of going off into a void of UNKOWN and i am sure it is exhilarating for some of you with like, less cortisol and more dopamine but the best Wonder i find is in a leaf. and the little caterpillars that climb on it. Or those shells that dig back into the sand after the waves peel back. I am operating under Anxiety. I am operating under the house but near the roof. I am unpeeling an onion. I am crying and I am not stopping. Not yet. And people are coming and then they are going and I am sitting here unpeeling and then not sitting but running along beside you and then stopping. and then spinning and then unpeeling. Just wait, I will be right here. For Now.

 

This is no day at the beach, let me tell you

She is gettin worse.

She isn't doing well. She needs to go to the hospital. She isnt doing well. 
She won't talk to anyone, except the therapist whose methods we question with grave concern. This woman advocates the silence...its best if we don't say anything. It is? It is best to just let her slip farther and farther away from us? best? better than what?

She is always in my dreams. Little blonde head. I never knew her really.  I spent almost every second of my life with her until I moved out. Even then our dreams were always intertwined..the same neurtoic tendencies bursting out in visual subconcsious images...moving along the same sad lines.

Sometimes I think about who will be the one to tell me that she is gone. If it will be my dad or a strange policeman. A doctor or a therapist. I'm sure my moms hysteria will require hospitalizatin of some sort.

Its been over 5 years of this. Well, five years since the depression has rendered her literally unable to function. Before that she hid it carefully under....I don't know. a really cute smile. and haircut and a busy array of friends. Half of whom i am sure were the wicked mean girl types... but if i go back far enough I am sure that i inflicted more emotional damage on her than anyone. Me being closest in age, me hoverein over her in a bassinet, in a crib, learning to walk, holding hands at night growing, growing, changing, leaving, returning, leaving

She is always asleep. Her blonde hair sticking out of the covers. I nudge her, holding my breath, pleading with the universe that she is breathing. She mumbles and flutters those gorgeous blue eyes...so flat and empty with the sickness. I know that eventually I am going to hate myself for not barging into the doctors office, for not screaming and yelling and fighting for her. I feel frozen. I dont know that it will help, they tell me to trust them, to trust her. I don't. I've been to the some nasty depths of depression myself, the only reason those demons let you live is to torture you more. Its a hard fight.

I didn't even fight it, really i think i got a good med package. Her meds are sedatives. They make her worse. I want to call him up, Dr Celebrated Shrink, you are making her WORSE.

I imagine she will o.d. on the pills he prescribed. She is 30 years old, no one can deem her unfit to make her own decisions. yet. not until it is too late. Really, world, is this as far as we made it into treating mental illness? I don't know who I am even angry at anymore. Certainly not her, not my baby bird. My self I guess. Our bad chemistry. She feels like heavy lead in my heart that i love so desperately.  I can't fix it and I can't set her free

i was

"She thinks she can warn the stars." is one of my favorite lines from Anne Sexton's The Black Art.

december

its like christmas is kinda messin up my winter right now

new blades in the rain

Disappearing can be easier than you may imagine. Things are so wonderful it is like you are faking it. and you are, so its okay. Children getting shot in the street and in your careful boots and raincoat you walk home, 4blocks from chaos. We are changing inside finally, it took long enough. I am in disguise, I cut off my hair, I gained 30 pounds. They can't find me now, they cant feel me. I'm safe in the slums, no ghosts.
I found a bottle of pain pills in my bag. We went to drawing class and the model was so stunning. Familar in my hand, the pencil maybe... but no.... my movements were foreign.

skeleton key tattoo
an old friend mails me an early 80s broken alarm clock for xmas. It is like i can't stop laughing. We are all so imperfect.

I like night sky

“there was a star riding through clouds one night, and i said to the star, ‘consume me’.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

perhaps...

“All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. ... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”

“The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”

So these quotes are from Carlos Castaneda and even though he was full of shit in a lot of ways, especially when he got old and was kind of a dirty old man leading a cult and convincing chicks to die with him, i think that he had some pretty brilliant insight in his younger days even if it was brought on by peyote or whatever kind of astral projection power root his ass got a hold of.... i don't know about paths or whatever but we are certainly moving in some direction like it or not and well anyway it is something to think about bc I, for one, am both in terror and wonder of ...like, my own damn neighborhood....

what it takes

It feels so good to let go. Well, it is actually excruciating -  but it is like running, at some point in the pain, a euphoria from nowhere fills you up. The exhaustion accumulates in the realization that there is nowhere else to go, nothing else to do and you know what you must do and then it sort of blanks out. white screen. And you have a lot of sweat and some self doubt still, but you know the worst part is over. and that you won't be the same no more. and you glide.