this is getting old and so are you

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.

Jane Austen at least left behind some perfect jewels of novels about a world even smaller than my own, and all I have is some poetry, some fragments of novels, a corner of the internet of dubious quality and copious angst that started out with a processing of my feelings of city, homeland, place, and, like someone who starts reading Zinn after a diet of perpetual red-blooded Murkan jingoism, there is more out there than this rust belt town like so many others.

One of my good friends and neighbors was on a panel last night that was ostensibly meant to discuss writing in the context of region but mostly turned into an analysis of boosterism vs. coming to terms with the legitimate and deep problems of the city, which only peripherally has anything to do with writing at all, though maybe it was an understood subtext as I'm sure damn near everyone who has a blog remotely related to the region was in the bar that night and so much of what was said, my own voice added to the fray despite the shyness that almost kept me from going.

And I look around the room, and we're all products of a technocratic society, of multiple degrees, of time to read blogs at the office desk or coffeeshop, and probably have a degree in liberal arts or social sciences, because like me, everyone who talked was in the information fields to some degree, or writing a book, and the vast majority were white, don't have kids in the school system, and could choose what neighborhoods we live in rather than getting stuck somewhere, and are generally between the age of 18 and 35, forgetting that not everyone is in our position.

We can talk about innovation all we want, and being positive and seeing the good things, but blogging about the groovy things we do doesn't change the school system, the party machine and power structure that siphons away millions of taxpayer dollars to the pockets of millionaire cronies for stadiums and casinos and urban playgrounds for the well-heeled, tax breaks for "nonprofits" whose directors make six figures and token gestures to "the children." The innovation has not trickled down to the masses, and even something so world class as the Cleveland Clinic prefers to build swanky campuses in Dubai while closing the emergency room in East Cleveland because of the cost-benefit analysis.

When I muster up the guts and foolishness to bring this up, there are blank stares and someone in the back starts yelling that if I don't like it so much and if I'm so negative why don't I just move and in the noise of that I retreat to my seat to scrawl passive aggressively on a halfsheet of notebook paper and observe the drama that transpires as people not-so-subtly snipe at each other and we're not talking about writing anymore, and people are ranting and before it can get too crazy it's time for the bands to go onstage and I'm out of there.

I've made an effort here to put down the roots that were already growing, to build a life, because I don't believe I can change the world or even change the city but I can at least try to do something in my own small sphere, without attaching some kind of deep significance to it. I've attempted to understand every corner of this city from the lakefront mansions to the abandoned factories, learned about immigrant communities and housing projects, and listened to a lot of people talk who aren't from my age group, income bracket, or socioeconomic strata. With everything, it's way more complicated than black or white or political party or personal taste. There's legitimate celebrations and equally valid grievances that are damn near impossible to distill coherently.

It's hard to "give back" to the community when you're working a couple jobs and trying to stay afloat. It's hard to "innovate" when there's no loans or capital to start with, or the prerequisite palmgreasing and red tape. What I might want is not what my neighbor might need because we're at different places in life.

What I do in my world is not for Cleveland personified, I'd do this anywhere, this is just where I ended up. But I'm tired of boosterism and bitching and honestly regret that I've pigeonholed myself into this regional corner. I may still post here, but I came away feeling disconnected from both sides, like the microcosm of the "love it or leave it" bumper sticker slogan mentality that comes with most kinds of patriotism and provincialism that ultimately shuts down the conversation and chokes out the life.

We still sound like the desperate girlfriend whose tries to overcompensate with the insecurity by talking about how great and unique she is and how beautiful she is. Cleveland is not my Paris just like I'm not Megan Fox or whoever you dudes think is hot. Let the others do the talking and stop with the self-absorbed conversation because it's boring and old.

For those who want to continue to follow the musings and randomness, I'll continue it somewhere else with hopefully a wider scope. I'm really glad that this has enabled me to meet some really fabulous people but I just want to drop out of the conversation that brought me here at this point.

give it away now

The piles of boxes keep rising, more and more of life in compartments, inventorying the legacy of inheritance and consumption, as words of gospels and epistles of sharing with others come to mind, of he who has two of something giving to the one that has none, and the thing is there's not just two, there's three there's four there's six. I didn't realized the extent of possessions until it's all pulled out of closets and from under the bed and laid out in front. Most of it was given to me, but to whom much is given much is expected right? So what does one person need with all this?

And it's liberating to pile these things to send along, to let go, to hold what is in one's hands lightly.

I take a break from this because one of my good friends from way back, my partner in geekness and grunge calls me to hang out with him and what I assume to be the companionship of his girlfriend, but I think it's possible it was a blind date setup or something. Props to his smoothness I guess, for good conversation over coffee and punk rocking it up old punks style standing in the back and nodding along while the Kids pogoed away. Nothing will come of it but getting to be geeky with a new soul was nice for a change. I wonder if it's bad that I've gone so long without the sentimental and the romance that I can't feel it for anyone anymore.

navidad

The rituals continue cyclical, shifting with age, as we're no longer required to do cutesy little kid Christmasy things like sing "Away In A Manger" to bemused nursing home residents, or plays for the grownups involving costumes made of 1970's colored bath towels and faded bedsheets, until we retreated to the basement to run around and be ninja turtles or whatever, buzzed on sugar.

Most of us are older now, old enough to drink or vote. There's fifteen years between me and the youngest, skinny with glasses and bangs like I once was, her room pink and glittery, an island in a house of sports trophies and pennants. She's a sweet and awkward kid who seems somewhat younger than her tweenage cohort, whose girliness is still ballet slippers and fairies instead of celebrity crushes and lipgloss. She tells me about her dance classes, that she likes to draw, and that she built these fairy houses out of silk flowers and cinnamon sticks for her dolls but seems embarrassed that what she perceives to be her cool older cousin sees this part of her world.

I tell her it's really cool, and I mean it, though I wish her imagination had been stretched even further, that there were more books in the house to be absorbed by osmosis instead of videogames. I wish I had copies to give her of all the fantasy novels I read when I was her age, all the Robin McKinley and Lloyd Alexander paperbacks checked out countless times from the library and read over and over. I wish she had volumes of fairy tales (she'd never heard of Andrew Lang) with illustrations by Bilibin and Dulac and that she'd read the Lord of the Rings instead of just watching the movies. Maybe this will come with time.

I end up missing the vigil this year, because this time we're actually enjoying each other's company and talking about what's actually going on with us even though the ones my age take the cynicism further than I do into borderline paranoia, as we roll dice over a board of the world map and snark about imperialist stoogedom. There is choir music on the radio as I drive home and I commune with the Divine on Route 2 to the crystalline voices floating through the static under the dark skies.

I wake up with scratchy eyes and whisper through the microphone as the others sing, and tonight I find I enjoy the company of pretty much everyone, and as the wine bottles empty, no one's arguing about Iran, but we're talking about books and I don't even know what's on the bestseller list because I've been reading about the Balkans and medieval people and Herodotus so I end up cooing over the baby and trying to speak wisdom into the lives of The Kids who are still caught up in nascent hipsterdom or high school hierarchies remembering when I thought I knew it all.

The drive back to the soon-to-be neighbor's house is quiet, and there's more lonely souls than I remember wandering the street, empty buses, a solitary figure framed in the laundromat window, a pack of young punks scowling beneath the awning of a cell phone shop. The cats are hungry and the street is quiet. A week ahead of sleeping, friends' cats, and packing boxes, feeling like a wanderer with a pile of clothes and sundry in the trunk, grateful for the introversion.

little things

the ache in my jaw, the boxes in the front room, the social obligations of consumeristic holidays, the final exam in three days, all things will pass, and that week of slack is looking less and less like one, but being able to sleep in for a week straight will be a beautiful thing.

dulcet

I have yet to figure out if geekery is inevitable, as me and my youngest sister were raised in the same household and exposed to the same influences as children and I absorbed all the books and music that sent me plummeting down rabbit holes of history and subculture even further, yet none of this never quite caught on with her.

My mom likes pretty classical music: Bach and Vivaldi, and my sisters and I rollerskated around the basement to "Beethoven's Greatest Hits" scratched slowly to death on a plastic Fisher-Price turntable. Since part of my learning process involved home education, she'd take us to organ recitals at Trinity Lutheran or find cheap tickets for the orchestra or Apollo's Fire, and while I'm not so adept as to pick out a composer's work most of the time, it's something I still like, even if my tastes in the non-electrified realm tend to veer more towards the cathartic melancholy of Arvo Part or medieval polyphony.

But I love live music, and old churches, and things that are free so my parents and sister and her friend, and we sit there. My dad falls asleep because he's been up since 3am and prefers Zeppelin, and I soak in the golden glow of the light, the carved marble angels and the perfect mesh of strings, the intertwining baroque melodies, loving that it's not just the older folk enjoying the concertos, but crusty activist kids, and bandannaed bikers and those of us with peon jobs who can't afford the tickets to Severance but like to get our culture on nonetheless.



It makes me think of my old roommate and coming home to her playing Tchaikovsky on the viola, back before everything kind of imploded. I wonder how she's doing. I wish I could feel a sense of closure as the music concludes with carols about God and sinners reconciled. It's hard for me to believe in the brotherhood of man and world peace when it seems impossible to make amends with someone with whom there should theoretically be no grievance and maybe it's the sentimentality but I long to be the peace as much as I can, I've done what I can but it never seems to be enough.

unwitting

A paper in need of revision, books uncracked due to the winding down of the semester and the tiresomeness of digesting selective narratives. It's said I need to know these names and dates, but drained of all vitality, this process fails to ignite the spark.

In between the patronizing tone of the textbook, I've been reading Ryszard Kapuściński's 'Travels With Herodotus' and Herodotus, the "Father of Lies" himself. The writing of both is beautiful and captures the wildness of the world, and the stuff of legends and truth stranger than fiction.

We joke that one could make a fantastic doom metal concept album based on Herodotus's observations. "Fish-Eaters and the Crystal Coffin," "Snakes With Wings," "The Dead Are Buried in Honey." And I know not everything has to be literary, but I like the visceralness, the writing about people and the tales they tell, that make these distant times come alive in a way that didactic sermonizing and names and dates cannot.

But it's only one more week, and the skies grow darker, and I feel so detached from all this business of holidays and stripped of all real creativity. Here's hoping it comes back, and here's some sonic beauty for the meantime

winter sun

Cherishing the last days of hoodie weather while driving around the old haunts of Parmastan running sundry errands and listening to loud tuneage with the windows down while I still can, drinking massive quantities of coffee with my mom to compensate for the insomnia of loose siding clank and the unwanted company in the walls that kept waking me up at strange hours. In less than a month I'll be in a new place, and despite the stress of packing up and trekking to the next almost-hood over, the change is welcome. It's time to go.

unbalanced pieces

Awakening on a couch more comfortable than my bed to the cats running, it's cold outside, and maybe it's the artificial sweetener accidentally ingested making my head feel foggy, wondering how the brain processes all these things, the physical, the mental, the spiritual because sometimes the little clarity I have is blurred and I mumble and grumble incoherently to God as I sit up and realize the sun's already risen but it's not all that late.

I tried to play guitar last night, between the ringing of the phone, couldn't find it in me to be social to do anything functional as the Paper From Hell's day of reckoning gets closer, someone knocked on the door and scared me last night but it was just the kid across the street. I felt bad, but I didn't want to open the door either.

But the sun is out, and I will go in pursuit of coffee and relating and being, wondering how I let a little Lanegan/Patton jam pass me by the first time around.

nonstarters

Once upon a time there was a boy and a girl. They knew each other for a very long time, because when they were seven, the girl splashed him during a game of Marco Polo at a pool party and he dunked her most unchivalrously, which made her cry. But she kind of deserved it. He doesn't remember this at all.

Ten years later they meet again, part of a group of pretty good kids who did pretty good kid stuff like parent induced social activities for their betterment as good Christian kids although the girl smuggled in a tube of hair mascara and Alice in Chains cassettes and dyed everyone's hair green, and his best friend had a stash of Slayer CDs in his closet, despite his parents views on Lavey affiliated hard rockers the Eagles. Later their group of friends would do good kid things like laser tagging or ice cream at Friendly's and getting kicked out of the Southland strip mall by security for drinking half gallons of ghetto tea in the Giant Eagle parking lot or hang out in someone's basement or bedroom drinking pop and complaining about their parents.

They liked some of the same bands and didn't like some of the same bands and he was partially responsible for her transition from fledgling metalhead to the punkier side of things by loaning her lots of CDs. He also dated her best friend, broke up with her, and they lost touch.

Five years later, they meet once more, and find out they have a lot in common, and like to do similar things, but don't have anyone else to do them with. So they start hanging out, because he has a car and she doesn't, and they go see shows together on an almost weekly basis. His dad thinks they're dating, but they're not, because besides liking most of the same bands, they really have nothing else to talk about and he likes girls who are more girly. She's cynical but he's even moreso, neither for reasons that are terribly concrete besides being mad at "The System" and when not working he maintains a constant state of entertainment immersion that kind of freaks her out because while she finds Mystery Science Theater funny too, she doesn't want to watch it all the time and needs some time to be quiet and existential.

He moves away to another state, and she realizes she doesn't miss him all that much. There was nothing besides a love of good music, which only goes so far, despite what any hipster love song about mixtapes would say. She can talk about bands and guitars as good as any record store clerk, but finds herself less and less motivated to as she has less to prove. She gets a slot on college radio, still goes and sees her favorite bands and sings along to all the songs she knows, but it doesn't mean as much as it once did.

She doesn't want a compadre for the mosh pit anymore, because she's too old to mosh. She doesn't want someone who likes some obscure scene in some random town, she wants to talk about God and books and history without always coming up with concrete answers. The love of tuneage becomes a springboard to other things deeper rather than the end of the pool that seems deep compared to the baby pool, but is only maybe three feet or so.



And she still doesn't know what this all means.

minty

A cup of peppermint tea, and the apathetic revision of the Purgatorial Paper, glad that I cut class today to be outside in the October sun, that there was art making and art-walking. Looked at paintings so well-executed and generic. The conspicuous consumption innocuous status symbol, like cracker jazz but executed in oils and framed expensively instead of bloodless guitar and Kenny G saxophone. Still lifes of wineglasses and saxophones in luxurious settings, landscapes or seaside villages stripped of mystery and patina.

I find myself smirking at the artist descriptions, like oh you're so unique because you paint half naked women with a palette knife. Deep, man. I did that in my art major days. Everyone else is wearing suits except for me and my sister and her friend. They ignore us. He's snarking about "rich people" and itching to tag every street sign and lamppost before he moves away, she doesn't say much, because upstairs is the apartment of her friend who got murdered this summer. I try to pet the little foofoo dog and it shies away from me, afraid of my janitor keyring and leather jacket. We part ways.

And so I'm here in the corner, too brain-drained to write creatively, nothing to really say, because I've come home every night this week and gone to sleep. A birthday party for the bro-in-law tomorrow, Rival Schools on Sunday night. I haven't gone to a show every weekend since I was a grad student. I still don't know how to plan, but life seems to go on just fine.

I'm small, like a superball...

As I need the caffeine and want to check email, the coffeeshop up the street is a nice morning refuge, where I can sit in the corner and watch the world go by, thankful that despite the serious drama of the weekend, there are some things to look forward to, art-making and live music (hopefully with pictures to follow), beautiful fall weather outside. Sometimes the only thing one can do is keep on going.

the phone's off the hook but you're not

I can't untangle all this, and this isn't the place to do it. I'm pretty pissed for good reason I think.

into the grey

Another week is winding down, and the blur of time is finally starting to lead to a sense of clarity. I lost a great-uncle this week, someone who seemed larger than life, with stories handed down, and there's sundry other little dramas with no need to be spread about the Internet, but last night I took some much needed chill time to get annoyed with my history textbook's YAYCOMMUNISM slant (sure, Stalin killed people but the ones that didn't died were freed from their superstitions so yay Stalin and artistic propaganda posters were keeping it real).

The Randian kid on the other side of the room is absurd to the point of being way too amusing, the know-it-all wasn't there today, and all I can think of is Traktoristy. , the soundtrack to the Hoxha/Uncle Joe Bromance. Get a room comrades, in the name of Winged Eros.

My interest in history is decidedly more ephemeral. I like the weird tendrils that come off of the name and date generica. I'm also convinced that while our book talks about how it was so awesome for women in the Soviet Union as opposed to the Evil Capitalist West, it probably sucked all around everywhere especially for people like me with a big mouth.

But anyways, external drama and dadaesque classroom absurdity aside, I'm heading down to Killumbus to hopefully get a second dose of sweet and heavy tuneage. It's not every day I get to slay my eardrums in good company with the shoegazing metallurgy of Alcest and VikingVikeness like a good little berzerker. Pictures and epic tales hopefully shall follow.

I can't see you but I see what's in my way

Waiting for the bus, trying to navigate this whole insurance agent thing, driving through the rain to the east side sucking on cough drops, listening to Janelle Monae, zoned out, but still able to find my way, sitting in a room next to a dusty vending machine reading as the radio plays country music, coming home and turning on the radio to hear an Amber alert that breaks my heart as I drive down Harvard past boarded-up houses and steelyard bars and then coming down Denison to see the street blocked off and I find out that there was a shooting up there, and I just want to go home, so tired and wet.

But I haven't been to the art center in awhile, didn't get much done, but hung out with a fellow creative, puzzled over sheets and shapes of copper, jars of colored powders and chunks of glass and plotted future projects, deferring work on Paper From Hell Number 1 another day.

I just want to take a half day off and listen to Neil Young and watch the rain, shake the sleepiness, the sore throat and ennui, the discontentedness so unnecessary, sift through the halfhearted wants and incoherent thoughts. There are so many.

summations

I've staked out my corner at the coffeeshop where I sketch out this paper, thankful for the invention of Google Docs, answering the phone from my mom to find out my dad's in the hospital again (it's just precautionary like they always say, but there's the part of me that still worries), tapping my pen to a Bad Religion song that reminds me of senior year, pondering in a way that's not quite optimistic, but not really despairing either. My mom calls me to be sure I'm not dead, because I'm terrible at responding to text messages.

I've had a breakthrough in inspiration, a way around the problem, attempting to summarize the threads of globalization, my favorite mid 19th and early 20th century art movements and their expressions of geopolitical realities in 3-5 pages. I know I'm insane for trying this because it's more or less a dissertation, but it's better than parroting back what someone wants to hear or read. I know it doesn't matter because it's not for a degree or grade but it's a personal thing.

The couple at the table is talking about high school, about cheerleaders and jocks and freaks. The academics flash their credentials, the older women at the place of employment swap juicy details and complain about there not being enough rich men to have affairs with, the overlords obsess upon minutiae, and I wonder what the hell is wrong with people, because this all seems so stupid but then I'm sure the way I do things seems just as crazy if not moreso.

nothing to offer but confusion

Two extra hours of sleep mean the world, the moments of nerve-wracking, the strange feeling when one finds out someone of one's teenage acquaintance got arrested for murder, of peon ex machina from meetings of infinite awkwardness, of possibly being the 'missed connection in a Craigslist ad for the first time to my knowledge (I don't remember saying anything to him, and think I only looked back because I got that sixth sense of being looked at and wanted to see who was doing the looking), of strange characters that I need to be nice to as a civil servant though they give me the creeps and I can't tell if they're just socially awkward or if they're creepy, though it seems to be the latter more often than not when the age gap is bigger than half your age plus seven. I don't envy the awkward position of the male species, especially the non-Type-A's.

I do not hide my feelings well even when I say nothing. The perpetual smile inherited from my father is both a blessing and curse, though it's harder to hide my anger than my cynicism (because I hold almost nothing except God to be sacred and so everything is ripe for snark), and when I deal with the creeps and those who come on too strong, I have to force my cadence into monotone, avoid eye contact, detach out of risk of getting pulled in.

Every time I think of turning my string of non-degree kicks-and-giggles classes into something like a real piece of semi-worthless paper, I sit in a class where I am condescended to and my synapses are stimulated only the absurdity of immature undergrads and sycophantic adults, and the grad student tales of department politics that remind me exactly of why I used to call my mom up every other week and claim I was going to drop out of school, and why I didn't want to continue on to do an MFA or literary crit. I know I have the brains, but when the classes don't grab me, when it's theoretical or revisionist or regurgitating, I check out.

I like to read things that are written well, that make me want to learn more, filled with passion and brimming with brilliance, not the self-indulgence of academic deconstruction written for conferences and journals that no one reads, kind of like the ivory tower counterpart to Yngwie Malmsteen albums that are owned only by uber-musicians who subscribe to Guitar World to read John Petrucci's columns religiously. It's boring as hell for everyone else and there's nothing to capture one's inspiration.

And I've been so tensed up, as I always am when there is change and when I'm dealing with Powers That Be whom I distrust, but I caught the early bus home and made a joyful noise tonight practicing for Sunday's music with dear friends who are also fantastically fun musicians to play with, everything loud and loose, and I need to get back to my parents' house and find my distortion pedals to add to the reverb and tremolo waves from the amplifier, laughing and messing with harmonies and key changes, hanging out in the cool already-fall night talking about books and museums and weirdness.

A late night dinner that didn't turn out so well, another comfortingly cloudy day, a morning to drink coffee with the neighbor who's come by to fix the drain and with whom discourse of caffeination and good conversation was had. And now I'm here, and it's not so bad...

codas

The heat permeating, the inability to cool down, hair metal on the radio all weekend, no breeze to speak of and I end up spending the afternoon fleeing the heat and Getting Things Taken Care Of in strip malls and big box stores like a Real American because I need groceries and work clothes and art supplies. I've spent the night drinking tea and listening to 70's rock, swirling paint around to Skynyrd and Sabbath, relocating to the balcony because it finally feels good out here. I know it's the weekend of cookouts and revelry for the Peonage and their overlords, but I'm just not there right now.

We went to visit my great uncle this morning at the nursing home, and it's the first time I've seen him since he had a stroke a couple weeks ago. His words come slower, and he apologizes constantly for what he deems boring talk ("I just can't do the small talk anymore") but this is the best conversation I've ever had with him. Instead of sitting alone in his house listening to the radio where people keep talking about buying gold, he's found people there to talk to, a priest he likes (he's never liked organized religion because he thinks it's all about parting fools with their money, I understand this), a nice lady friend down the hall "Nothing romantic, we just talk about old times. I need an alliance now like I need a hole in my head..." He knows this will probably be where he spends his last days trying to learn how to walk again, how to speak the way he once did, but as strange as this is, it might be a good way to end, a place where there's people to talk to and take care of him so he won't die alone.

I hate nursing homes slightly less than funeral homes, but this place is beautiful and if I become unable to take care of myself I'd rather be there than a lot of places. Catholics do the nursing home thing well, that whole sanctity of life/having the funds to stay there I guess, and I'm relieved I no longer have to fear going to check on him at his house and hoping he's still alive because I don't know what I'd do otherwise.

The prayers I struggle most with are those involving the changing of souls, because it's just such an impossible thing for me to understand that divine calculus of how it all works, but between this time and the last time I saw him he's a different person or rather not different but alive in a way that he wasn't before even as he grows closer to shedding the mortal coil now after 90 years of life and disappointments, a childhood in poverty, the hell of the Pacific theater (which he still doesn't talk about), an unhappy marriage with a woman who couldn't see past her own issues("She wasn't all there, but I didn't treat her right. I supported her financially but not emotionally..."), a daughter in worse shape than he is, a house full of tchotchkes worth nothing, if this is the closest thing to heaven how tragic is that?

He used to always talk about money and a good job and being a decent person being the ultimate most important thing and for the first time in 92 years, he's finally started talking to God after being so bitter and so stubborn for so long. I've never heard him apologize for anything before. I've never heard him say that what you have doesn't matter. I've never seen him so peaceful, so ready to face a pending mortality, ready to let go of all the other things he clung to so desperately. I'm glad he can't see me crying because I just couldn't stop.

unwinding

Clocking out and driving to the east side to hang out with good people, wander through Coventry, converging to walk down the hill, Tangerine and the Marquess connecting quickly, me and Muk catching up since it's been a couple months and we've both had a lot going on. "It could be a little warmer," he says, nostalgic for warmer climes, but the weather is perfect for me, the perfect balance of sun and breeze, the crowds of people in the street below and despite the vast majority of whiteness, no hassle for our mixed company.

We get food and wander around, relaxed and a bit tired from long days of work, taking in the smells of grease and marinara, the guidos and bright young things, marveling at the imminent dangers of carnival rides near trees and power lines and laughing at the snarky casino runners and the sign for Holy Rosary Fried Dough, before walking up the hill past the cemetery joking about the free fill dirt and Coventry flash mob teenage zombie apocalypse, hanging out in the street watching the kids two doors down sing Lady Gaga songs on the front porch until their parents tell them to shut up, zoning out on the couch in his apartment talking, eating oranges, listening to Nine Inch Nails.

I cleaned off some of my acrylic transfers tonight and did mundane life stuff like grocery shopping and errand-running and making sense of the jumble of accumulation in the apartment.

But I did get a bike ride in, rode through the streets past condos and kids playing in the park to watch the sunset and slow down to take in at least some of the day that was mostly spent running.

refract and reflect

The drop in temperature is welcome, the rain picking up flecks of red light reflecting in puddles on the roof next door, the flickers of lightning, the thirsty garden watered.

I've been off-kilter the last couple days, a little more visibly cranky as opposed to the mercurial moodiness, brought on by the accumulation of small pet peeves and larger frustrations still minuscule in the great scheme of things. Tacky and catty women and pretentious wuss rockers are nothing compared to dealing with things that really suck, which is what the rest of the world has to deal with all the time.

But it's welcome to finally having a night of some degree of inspiration and time to execute after poring over piles of art books accumulating in the living room of gold covered icons and luminescent stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, architecture of Goa churches, and intricate jewelry from wilder parts of ancient Europe, not really sure why I've been inspired by the medieval and Arts and Crafts lately, maybe it's the abstraction and the richness in detail, the subject matter timeless, the intensity and translucence, the labors of love and sweat for patronage and devotion, great beauty made in dark and uncertain times.

Things have always been corrupt and lame and empires inevitably fall so I've checked out of the political debate, keeping up only enough to know what's going on but nothing more, because each side keeps blaming the other when both sides do the exact same thing especially when it comes to dealing with people on the other side of the world whose blood and lives are evidently considered less worthy than our own. My cousins are stocking up on silver and gold and I guess they have their reasons, but if the shit hits the fan, you can't eat it or wear it to stay warm or burn it for fuel. I don't know.

I've got three weeks left of enameling before the city moves that part of the arts center to the east side and the process of cleaning, scrubbing, filing off fire scale and sifting powders with names like 'flame' and 'wisteria' made of unknown quantities. After a few months of doing this, I can kind of figure out what I'm doing, but I don't do anything all that epic after the unsatisfying attempt at cloisonne, considering that beautiful and handmade Christmas gifts containing unknown amounts of lead and who knows what else may not be the best plan.

Theophilus in his 10th century text on the 'Divers Arts' describes the processes of metalworking, mixing paint, and constructing stained glass and enamelled pieces, and it was even more labor intensive, to keep the coals hot and the pieces melting at the right temperatures, making ones own bellows out of sheepskin and glue from the gooey bits of sturgeon and eel, pigments from mercury, sulphur, lead.

Being unvocationally trained and not affluent, I use canvases found in the closeout section of Marc's, Magic Markers to trace designs and fill in blank spaces. When mixed on gesso, spread by brush, they're forgiving and wonderful, especially when mixed with the wax of Prismacolor pencils. A late night tomorrow means finally getting to break out the acrylics. It's been too long.

dew points

Socializing is not nearly so stressful when strangers and loved ones mingle and I can both interact and observe the interactions of social spheres converging over ample alcohol. I don't drink in this kind of mixed company and drink cup after cup of strong coffee and start talking about absurdity of one kind or another. I'm already ridiculous under the influence of caffeine and fear the affects of anything stronger among a less forgiving populace.

Being out in the burbs, I felt justified in stopping on the way home to peruse at bookstores in hopes of finding out of print art books on obscure craftsmen but settling for dollar grunge CDs and the eternally inspiring art suppliers, because while most of my female peers prefer to shop for shoes, my kryptonite is luminescent acrylics the hues of stained glass, brilliant inks, virgin canvas and uncut squares of linoblock, and waxy prismacolor pencils, attempting to justify the luxury of high-end acrylic and ultimately frugality wins. Maybe someday when I'm really really good or get a pay raise, neither of which is likely.

The world is spiralling even more absurdly with crazed wackjobs with guns and bombs, the lack of change in the status quo regardless of revolution or elected official, and I grieve and yet am full of wonder at the beauty of summer nights of rain and light. I don't feel like I make any sense, that what I believe outside of the Nicene really has any grounding in practical application, and I ramble incoherently and hide behind words and the works of my hands, not knowing what I want out of the future, inconsistent always, hypocritical often, craving yet not knowing for what. Things I can't explain unless over a cup of coffee in person and even then...