Aging in the Land of Broken Televisions

 

Procreate Portrait

 Aging in a land of broken televisions

Boxes full of hissing demons

 turning hearts sour w hate.

A Box of hissing demons in the living room rotting yr parents brains….

A Box of hissing demons in yr pocket

 beckoning thru a screen: “follow me into the worst of u.” 

CrushingBoots. 

They’re coming.

Keep yr heart intact. Shield the vulnerable. 

Protect the weak. Venerate the meek. 

 Blessed are the peacemakers.

December 2024

 My dog died September 2023 and then my best friend died October 2024. Best friend mentor...teacher who became family. He was everything. Sometimes you need people to see you, not just anyone but a certain person and when they do you become something else, something better. 

The world isn't spinning its twisting. You can bargain your way out of time and you still lose everything. To die in your sleep in your home is the best way they say. With your pets around you. Devastation in your wake. I cleaned out the house. After my dog died I drove all night and buried her beneath the  moon in the ground beside her sister near the roots of a pear tree. My dad had dug the grave nice and square and deep and even cozy. it looked cozy i thought. They are together on the other side of death now, separated from me. I wanted to go too, especially with ellie my dog. I wanted to go with her. But its not time i guess because i know i can't. If it was time i think i would know.

How long does the shock last? He died in October and I've been cold since then. I can't get warm inside. It is December in the crescent city and it was 85 degrees yesterday. Everything is damp and the clouds are thick and pale gray. The shortest days the longest nights the least light. I try to maintain a sort of equilibrium between the horrors of this unjust world, delivered daily in the little screen. And the thing is,  I am not as angry as i used to be, but I still want to see it burn.

Snakes and Stars

I love my life.I love being alive. That occurred to me yesterday as I was drinking coffee. It was startling: i don't remember loving my life or living too often. tbh my life is not that great or remarkable and i think lots of people would hate to wake up in this life. i built it up this way haphazardly, its like that crooked house from the storybooks ramshackle and tacked together and may fall apart at any minute but I love it still and the the thing is - it is not that this thought startled me bc I used to HATE my life. it wasn't that. i actually just hated being alive. i didn't want to BE. and i don't know if that is depression or just the ongoing existential crisis that started when i was about 6 or 8 when i became hyper aware that we all die. i think it was like - if we die what is the point of doing this and it just grew bigger and bigger and i tried lots of ways to kill that awareness or even embrace it but idk nothing worked. it was like when my stomach was about bleeding and the doctor says you should cut back on coffee and i just quit coffee bc if i could not have as many pots as i wanted i didnt want any. that's the thing with life... i am supposed to walk through admiring, loving, experiencing, every fragment every moment slices and scraps and then just LET THEM GO? no i wanted to hang on to everything to everyone one shove it all inside filling every cell and joint and space....hold on forever to my childhood bedroom paneling, my rock collection, the one teacher i liked, the paint chips from the old house i lived in in college, Jacob's hair in a ceramic owl, anthonys skin in a bottle, the letters, the dried paint. my grandmother's house. 

But then what? take all the things that matter and put them together into some sort of acceptable-to -society-framework that will allow you to move toward a bank account and a home ownership? nothing i cared about was going to lead to that. And i didn't want to own anything except a dog and some dirt. not even very much dirt. somewhere to see the sunrise and not have to hear anyone else. I very quickly learned that this is not what most of the people around me, my peers, wanted to do so I could not even find a pattern to follow to survive the nightmare that the exterior world presented. that's the thing, i had demons maybe in my head and maybe i drank too much at some point and the nightmares and the series of nervous breakdowns where maybe your head would split open but all that seemed preferable to me than rows of McDonalds and Walmarts and tall financial buildings and meaningless chatter and sports and everyone naming their kid some combination of the same  names and going to church a lot. the boring gray mundane irritating energy that radiated off these very typical tasks- that many people loved and called a life- shook and sickened me to my core. I didn't despise this culture really - or the people in it -  i just knew i did not belong to it and i had to figure out how to exist adjacent to it and not die. clearly. bc i may have wanted to die a lot. but i knew i wouldn't. there was something i had to do even if i had to live through boring big box store terror and and an apocalypse.

 

So to look around at the culture i was in, that looked like a giant meat grinder to everything i loved, to the soul, with a conformity code that stamped you inside your bones - i had to hold on to everything that had any meaning to me, meaning that couldn't be commodified. things that spoke to my identity or soul or spirit or whatever it is in you that you know is you. that may actually not be you - it may just be the thing you have to let go of to know what you really are but whatever it is -from a very early age i knew it was SOMETHING that was greater than all the human constructed systems and physically built stuff around me. And i needed to feed it books or stars or sticks or the experience of watching a spider for 45 minutes.I fed it tears and screams and miles of running. I fed it sugar. i fed it a fast. I fed it working for hours to exhaustion and i fed it laying in bed for an entire day. It took forty years to realize that instead of feeding it maybe i needed to just let it go.

 

 the thing is. i slowly somehow began to understand that just bc you let go, does not mean that it is gone. and that moving through it all with awareness is literally the best case scenario.  we could sleepwalk ..always looking at some distant place or time like the proverbial carrot dangling....that seems more horrible to me that being curled up in a ball missing it all bc you have fallen into a dark hole inside yourself. but neither is going to change anything or open up the door to the sky.

Despite all the existential dread and obsessive compulsive behavior and anxiety i mean, i still had good time. that's the other thing. you can live deep in a state of not wanting to be alive and still do big hard things and fun things and love things and move to a new house and switch jobs and paint and volunteer and learn to identify snakes and stars and make a new friend and enjoy being alive while simultaneously NOT. this type of complexity is what makes me convinced that when physics people say how much we don't know about how the universe and stuff works i shudder. bc the complexity and literal contradiction of a single human beings mind observed in 2 minutes is staggering....and that mind was produced by all this space and carbon and whatever. a star exploded. my mind imploded. and here we are.

In Memoriam: Ever On and On

“The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say”

- J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

I had made a Ceramic Pot. It was lumpy and lopsided and I had worked on it so carefully. So carefully crooked, it was. I was 13 years old and it was the last month in my last year in Middle School. 8th grade. Though very young, I already felt broken apart and consumed with fear and sadness and a hatred for a strange new body and a bewildering world. She knew it. My art teacher was colorful and brilliant and messy and funny and I loved her so much. It was like she was the only one who could see the invisible children. She took my wonky slanted pot and with the end of paintbrush she carefully and purposely wrote that Tolkien poem in the soft clay. “The road goes ever on and on.....” She set the pot back down in front of me and I read it, smiling. I most certainly did not want to “go forever on and on.” I wanted to stop right there. Stop Everything. We fired the pots and mine, of course, chipped badly.

 

It was a hot and humid Louisiana May. I found a dead bird out side the art room window. I wanted to bury it, so she let me. During class, even. We went outside and I wrapped a frail winged body and dug a shallow grave. Petals, leaves, damp earth, and sticks. The little bird funeral was attended by maybe one other student. She said if burying it was important for me, I could do it. She said it was symbolic. I was a miniature performance artist. 

 

The school year ended and I left her class and guidance forever and went to the Dreadful High School. 25 years later, I still have that wonky slanted pot. I still touch the words, the beads of clay around the impressions. She taught me, at a very vulnerable and tender time, that it was okay to be imperfect, to be crooked in a level world. Not just me, either. All of us. 

 

She died while I was in college. I had a letter ready to mail to her but it was too late. She was gone from me forever this time. When I feel this life bearing down on me in a way I can’t understand, sometimes I reach back and I search the memory banks for those scraps of words and actions and books and poems and music that made sense. Searching for anyone who ever loved me, any version of me. Even 13 year old me. For what we said and what we did. It mattered. Matters. I love you, Fran Heath. Rest in Peace forever. 

 

 

N.O. Love (new orleans)

June has been movement and July is promising to be more of the same. From one end of the state to the other. to Georgia. I saw the Cure play in Atlanta last month and it was as good as ever. Crowded. But music is timeless and if it is good I can make the crowd disappear. Trance out to it.

Solstice. Now time for the heat. Nothing like New Orleans heat I swear to god. All the heat from all the summers before are stored in the concrete, the old wood walls and the brick. radiating outward in the thick damp and stagnant air. I moved to a house in the lower ninth ward that is better than the one I was living in and so the heat inside is more tolerable. I drive to work instead of walk now, though. And I still can't breathe. I am closer to the nearest refineries, but I can't smell them. I can almost see them. If new orleans is a bowl then the refineries line the upper edge of the bowl. Smoke stacks rising like burning stalks, machinery making irregular shapes out of the sky and smoke billowing up til it mixes with clouds and then you dont even know its poison. You may think how pretty. My eyes are swollen and burning every day. I think to myself that I need to move. Should move. The move to this other house was lateral, not upward and the dirt is lead and the sky is going to kill you.

Something is keeping me here though. There are a few more things i need to do. It is a complicated place. and not the violence and not the corruption nor collapsing infrastructure. The actual unspoken invisible social and historical outlines. Bc no one really belongs here but whoever has been here longest thinks that they do. And the new people keep coming and the deafening shouts of gentrification and poverty drown out any sense that could be made.  A couple years ago in this big art spectacle event that lasted months a well known and respected artist made a big light up signage and displayed it on the river that read something like "you belong here." Some weird reassurance or something but its not true.  No that it matters if it was true or not but we don't. Maybe some people belong here more than others. I don't, but its a port city and visitors are historically a big part of the population. the shifting foundation. The plantations didn't belong here and neither do the oil refineries that took their places. the prostitutes, the immigrants, the organ grinder, the dairy that was cited for health code violations and the street car rails that were laid down, pulled up and laid down again. That all came from the census. I used to read the 1880 -1940 censuses for work and stare wide eyed at the names and occupations and places of birth of hundreds of people that didn't belong here. Then came the artists and writers and poets and everyone said 'bohemian.' The housing projects and the police corruption and then the cop that massacred that family in the restaurant. and they just kept draining the swamps and spreading out and then an amusement park bc what could be more American that NONsustainability? They built a fucking tunnel. In a swamp. Still there -  though dilapidated and still cars zoom through it err' day. I feel like my job has given me a level of intimacy with this city that is reserved for lovers that stayed together so long they have turned to couples who have memorized each others vices and hardly recall the starry eyed heart flutters from the beginning. But you still know it must be there. or assume it is and move through the motions of life, confident the spark is there. the commitment may have obliterated it a little, but who cares. That is me and this god damn city.

 

 

shawna atkins acrylic on canvas 2016, crop

The house I live in belonged to lady who left for Katrina and never came back. I am aware of her displacement every day. It can't not define, at least partially, my place in this city.

skulls and layers of happiness

The city is so pretty in the spring. Before the intense oppressive hot wet blanket of summer envelopes us... i love it here. Like I just woke up and the days I hated it were a dream. Ridiculously expensive crowded crooked broken city. I do love you when you are kind. and when you aren't, even.

but i will never love anywhere as much as an isolated spot in a forest where the deer are.

Busy painting. I inherited old frames and a box of brushes from my great aunt... will be interesting to hold her brush..she was 94 when she died I think. a long life. I have the brushes and frames I inherited from Donna and I think... Oh, the things that after death still remain. tangible. in this realm.

The election has gotten into my brain. I care more than I want to. How can one not? vicious. I'm a berner -  as if there was any way I couldn't be.

I paint the world burning bc it already is, not bc I want to see it that way. I feel like the apocalypse has been happening my whole life. When I was a kid - like 15 or so -  This art lady told me that when I grew up, I should marry a rich man so I could make art all day. All the time. She laughed. She said "that is what i did." She did, too. She said she knew I would never! and I was horrified and amused simultaneously. I get it, though. I know what she meant. I live alone and I work alone and I work HARD. I sleep hard and paint hard and when I collapse, I do, but I resume. Bc that is the stuff of survival and the stuff of existence in a corporate controlled capitalist nation. And I got all I ever wanted. Until I decided I wanted something else. Blood in me is pumping toward oblivion.

When I was very young I was supposed to marry this guy. I think i was. Well, I could have. I didn't though bc it just all felt so wrong and smothering. His parents died. Both of them. It was so tumultuous and insane and just wild. I remember we laughed So much. and Cried so much. We broke up one time and then later we met somewhere in Lafayette in a parking lot in the middle of the night. I missed a year of college. I mean I attended and all but I didn't know what happened - like it just didn't count. We were together and then we broke up again and we met up again on the steps of the state capital building. I dont know what happened to him. I hope to god he is somewhere good and that he is very, very happy. I'm so thankful we didn't destroy each other. He showed up in a dream recently. people fade out and then reappear. I didn't know it happened that way as time pressed on.

I think I always wanted to rage against a system of oppression. i hated it since kindergarten. The nudges to conformity and boredom.  Away from truth and dirt. The obvious mistreatment of certain individuals by people in power and then the denial of it. Processing injustice. Life here is learning to process injustice and then deciding what you will do about it.

Dirt is the tangible unconsciousness, until I return my skull to the dirt I suppose I am here shedding skins and morphing and deciding the level of intensity with which to apply the next layer.

                                                                     Artemis Sees.....

Shadow Self

  "Shadow Self," mixed media on 4f tx 4ft canvas, 2015

How much of whats hidden down in the shadows is guiding this flesh ship? Waves from the unconscious sea lap tirelessly at our thoughts and actions. Tossing and slamming and churning below a barrier created by the only self you can truly know.

Written like a true 4 infp am i right?

Breathe deep

When i am old and ragged there will be love in my bones, wrapped and tied there with ribbons of sadness splattered with joy. I haven't lost anything by opening my heart even though all the words tumbled out and were away like wisps I held the blood in and I held all of you in til we were faded digital dreams on broken screens 💚🌙🕸

Speaking in Tongues ( love your life to death)

i speak to myself in my head and i suppose we all do
in this culture, anyway. but to exist entirely inside your
head must make some of them go mad
if you were to watch humans moving and see them
only as balls of energy bumping around in a pinball world of light
trees and buildings
the ones burning red and the ones burning green
or blue or purple
if you could see that ....
i dont know. that is how it all looks to me sometimes
i am elevated and apart -  watching it all move. from afar. witched.

I went to the west coast in the fall and then again in the new year
The first time I visited i was 16 and I think all of me did not come back
When i went back it was as though I may retrieve the part of me I left but
instead i brought back a part of the west coast inside my skull. I cant shake it out.

I visited the east coast in the summer and i loved it but not as much as the west coast
the redwoods can erase all the vile humanity from my mind and make me forget i
have a body or veins or that other people scuttle around admiring themselves incessantly
or beautifully even. touching. breathing. loving. filling the atmosphere with emotions and shit.

i have an amazing life. I did everything i wanted. I arrived and left when i meant to and nothing was ever so tragic.

But still there is. The nihil. a visitation or a vigil. for the unspeakable truth, the ever present death.
My blood sisters bound to me with time and sickness and large shady trees in the backyard. We ebbed. flowed away and returned.  When times goes by you get to see how your memories will age. will they fade? or vibrate or blend ? or become so vivid it is blinding to visit them.

My blonde baby girl Aphrodite was chosen by the devil to carry the darkness in her mind. She nearly died til they electro-shocked him out.  She was cured. It was real. I saw her change and then change back.

I texted my ex for a long time before I fell asleep. He wanted advice. I am a sage in a Misfits t shirt on a stack of pillows drenched in moisturizer and splattered paint from a failed art experiment. Okay, I will tell you who you are again -  but I ve been telling you for years. I know you better than you know yourself. But you can't know me. But you know I can help you. and that is good for now.

i dreamed by cousin called. she died in 1997. in the dream, on the dream phone, she sounded like she always sounded. It was her voice. I thought that I had forgotten what she sounded like. But no. it is still there.

I moved to a new house in the beginning of December.  Happily it is still close to the river.  I have to, have to live near the river.  The house was built around 1890 I think. I hope to god it is haunted.

Love your Life (Lie) to Death. 1.5 inches by 2 inches

The journey's Interior

Quite a while back ago, I completed a series of works on paper that illustrate, literally, the way the incessant and unnameable pain feels in my body.  My doctor, who suggested I have an auto immune disease that hasn't been identified yet (wtf), asked to see my art. He said he was interested in the creative ways patients cope with chronic pain.

Thermo Mandibular Joint Dysfunction by Shawna Atkins

He regularly compliments me for being thin. It is really bizarre. I'm not that thin: I am average, normal, adequate, and whatever.  I think maybe he sees a lot of people with complications that are related to obesity and my body presents a contrast to that which he has grown accustomed. I hope for his patients' sake that he doesn't disregard their issues due to their body shape and size. He can't know most of my issues stem, in fact, from being too thin for too long. or Probably So. Medical doctors sort of blow my mind sometimes. I have noticed that most of them add, 'this does not mean your pain is not real' after delivering test results. Like they all went to a seminar and were told to state that phrase... in order to be 'sensitive' or something....REMINDER: Do Not Invalidate Your Patient. It has happened with several different ones... men and women in lab coats, strangers you entrust with the secrets of the body..

Metamorph by Shawna Atkins

The thing was, I could not make the pain take the shape of words. As if I may look straight at this doctor of science and say,  "it feels as if the vines have wrapped tightly around clavicles, wound down around my vertebrae and now the thorns are sinking into the marrow. reaching up toward the shoulder socket." I gave up on the words on the form. Words like 'shooting, stretching, aching, pulling, burning' bc they did not do justice to the accompanying visions and colors that lit up behind my eyes in accordance with the internal pain path. So, I gave into those sights and spent some months of 2015 scrawling them out and filling them in, sitting crooked and hunched over paper amidst my old anatomy books and "Native Wildflowers of Louisiana"... "Insects of the World"...etc

Thoracic Spine Pain by Shawna Atkins

I wanted to spend some time with this idea -  these visionary coping mechanisms -  and then let them go. like beaten butterflies. To carefully caution myself against dwelling too long in psychic hot places that ensnare me. Imaginary palaces that allow mental comfort with a constant portrayal of physical discomfort. I was to explore only -  not to BECOME these images.

I learned a lot doing them. Just good practice. And I messed around with different materials so... also caught some lessons on how much graphite can be layered on top of watercolor  and vice versa and at what point it REFUSES. So yeah, there are things that bother me - things that I could go back and fix. Or hit another series later down the road. One thing that rings loudly is how important it is (pour moi) to feel more than one dimension. I need so much to hold a rib....in order to do this series correctly.  I have cow ribs. and I had a human skeleton (plastic) to visit but -  it wasn't the same. It was just a miniature model at the PT office. I am not eager to hang out with human remains or anything but even an accurate replica or something would help. I shall add that to the To Do Scroll, I suppose.

It is those long dark December days so gray and heavy and then the longest night. good god sweet solstice. Flare up my Mind. hiding in closets, minding the darkest. I send a reverberation to anyone in chronic invisible insatiable pain for whatever reason only bc i know how it feels. communion over having flesh simply, if nothing else. disjointed mind body and words is all i have to write this night, and  thoughts of some redeeming light. for both body and bone! xo

Ulnar Neuropathy (keep painting) Shawna Atkins

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

.

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

Crooked Growth

twisty spine like vine. Growing like you lean, move, walk. You are the operater? or the operated? I start physical therapy next week. The hip has not improved. I have put it off for six months but now I am like, okay, this needs to happen because I can't make it stop on my own.

I imagine my bones, but not as much as I used to. I am just not obsessed with them anymore, strangely. I would imagine them crooked and causing pain and now, I may still picture it, but the picture floats away and is replaced. Predictably, Flesh has become very enjoyable to paint. The stick souls still show up in my art, but painting layers of flesh has taken on a new life. a spark. We are a continuum, I reckon. Mind Body Brain Hand Canvas Soul. Sleep.

My dog is curled at my feet, a little piece of night sky, black and sweet.

I just imagine all thes butterflies fluttering around my head. While the wars wage and my work and bills pile up. It will all just be fine. Sometimes you have to make your own magic.

A timeless sleep

To have an obsessive personality is just one way to live. I acknowledge this and keep going, a slow walk, a jog. Sleeping for days. I am stunned by the sky. Pure awe. Again. The leaves aren't really changing here. It feels like high summer. Thick and hot and green and lush. A slightly different coolness in the rare breeze is the only natural indication that it is almost October.

Sometimes all the people look like zombies to me. All wretched and gone, lurching through their routine..bus stop, dollar store, school bus. But other days they are all so beautiful, all the people. They captivate. Like cracks in the sidewalk. Cracks in the facade.

There is so much power in vulnerability. It is all backwards. The weak are the strong and I am an animal. I am with them. on their side. I study the buildings, but I don't feel like they belong to me. Not the way the trees do. Not the way the earthworms do. Darkness is a sweet blanket for a long night. A timeless sleep.

the way home

August Again

There is a delight in writing that only comes after banging ones head against a wall for weeks prior.  Refusal to just do it while that grey lump of brain insists...do it. The same with painting. you can resist but eventually you give in. And you drink. And you smoke because it is all tangled up together.

The therapist suggests I make lists. So that I can survive in real life and, like, know what day it is and do my job and pay bills. I forget things. Some sort of anxious mania takes over. buzzing and moving about. I should set up a schedule she says. But the thing is...i like the energy. Bc i get it so rarely and when i do, it just feels so good to be alive.

I've started walking. Jogging. My hip is bad. No doctor can tell me why, it just hurts. I suppose f'ed it up when I was not eating and running a million miles a day. I dont know. Take it easy take it slow. It is just five pounds, but it is five pounds that need to go.

I am painting the city. I didn't mean too. At first I painted the live oaks. But now it is the city and the bridge and that weird tragic dome. All patched up with the light show and all.  I need to sell these paintings. My bank account has dwindled to nothing. I dont even know why, its so frusterating to keep up with money. Numbers floating around, they come and go. Not as pretty as insects or leaves. Seasons and dollars measuring it all.

I am older. You will be too. You think you know honesty but when you become invisible is when you know the truth. and when it knows you.

" 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.

We walked like trees that had escaped the ground.

"Well, he hates it when I smoke, so this won't last long."
"That was an abrupt and devious move."
"I hate your handwriting." and "If you were someone else, this would be easier."

There is a certain color of December sky that causes instant depression the second my eyes hit it.


We walked to the river and the beach is now gone because the water rose up. The river covered the sand. The place had changed considerably and so had I.
 

I explained it to her, and she said, "Well, is that something you want to change?"
My brow crinkled and I paused. "I...I don't know..."
"Oh yes! Yes, honey it is. That is something you want to change" was her reply.

"On the other hand, some people are just no good at being earnest."