The Battery Died

Because the battery died in my camera I am going to "verbalize" the photo I most wanted to take at the carnival last weekend. Kaper says everything is art, this is me making a mess of several kinds of mediums, I'm also making his point in saying "Everything is art, just not good art."

From nearly a story off the ground the view comes into focus. Lights flashing, spinning, winding, screaming, and shinning on all the peripherals. The left side of the page begins with lines forming the trashy wooden bench. Draw the lines back at a 37 degree angle. 37? Who knows. Back. Towards the center. Away from the game with the basketballs and the giant stuffed monkeys. Closer to the thing that looks like shed, blocking the bumper cars. The line goes there. Paint it green. It's not important now, later on an arm will be slung across the back of it. I'm getting ahead of myself. No, too detailed. Let's try again.

Sitting on stage right and center there's a couple. Backs to the audience. The bench is turned as to face the back right wings. We barely see their faces. Only the Hispanic man as he rubs his wifes shoulder while they eat and watch the people passing. They're only the background. This is just the set up. Meet my props, mom and dad.

Behind them I want to sculpt the little girl. She's our dream, goal, light. A little four year old stands there, unattended to, about five feet behind her parents. The shot from above shows her in a soft light. Soft! In a carnival where nothing is soft and gentle. But here's this little wisp of a girl all dect out in her yellow sun dress and white sandals. She's playing, standing, watching. A picture of innocences is there before us. Just to the left of the riot and noise, just under the screams and ballyhooing of the carnies; here is a soft innocence in a land of cons and wildness. Family and love painted right there in front of me. I mentioned the dress is yellow right? At her feet, at our angles feet, she is standing on six or seven empty water bottles, a small disarray of garbage that has managed to spill forth as collateral for the even mayhem.

I wanted to photograph it. There is something that has always appealed to me about innocence and damage. Destruction and beauty standing side by side fascinates me. I want to show you, this is how I feel about the world. My world isn't made up of everyday mediocre "good/bad" when I think of how things are I see flowers and trees growing in the wake of volcanic eruptions, I see lovers holding hands in war, I see children being born next to people dying at the hospital. The world needs to see both, both at the same time, in one fell swoop, because each image must be held in our head at the same time. Let us not forget either the great beauty, wonder, and glory that allows us to fly, or the devastation, destruction, damage, that occurs when we fall. This is what it means to be human. To look both square in the eye and live.

That's my shot. The one I couldn't take because the battery died. I wish I could show you.

More "Happy" Art

This is going to be better right?

Tonight, if all goes well, will be the last night I sleep in my apartment. Moving is an emotional experience for me. One residence to another represents on situation or phase of life transitioning into another. You pack your things, sort through what you hope will be useful in the next stage, discard what you fear has been holding you back, and you put faith in what's ahead.

Mostly over the years, moving has been a kind of running. Escaping from one bad situation to another, from one rough relationship smashing onto the rocks into a tiny lifeboat with only hope as my compass, one fear forcing me through the pain and into the next, these are my experiences in the fine art of a wandering life. This time it isn't like that. Choice marks this move in ways it hasn't the past. There's no fearful fleeing. I am moving in hope. I am moving in faith.

When I say that I am moving in hope and faith I ask that you realize two things. One I take neither of these concepts lightly. Two, I mean more than the physical move, I rarely do physical things for even primarily physical reasons. So, I'm scared. It's easier to move when you have to, when you have a cliff behind you and certain doom edging towards you, take your chance with the cliff and jump. Jumping for fun? Jumping just hoping that it will be better? Crazy talk.

I don't have much luck with cliffs. There are some major ones I've crashed off in the last two years. I'm not really remembering any flying going on, a few awkward flaps of wings on the way down maybe, no real flight though. With each chance and choice we write our stories, tonight, on the eve of another cliff, the beginning of another stage in life, I put what little faith and hope I have in the dream that my someday is coming, that there really are brighter days, fuller moments, and more love, in an increasingly closer future.

Tonight I don't want to be nostalgic, I really didn't have the best of times in my first home. It meant a lot to be here, it was a safe haven and a comfort, it was everything I needed, but it wasn't full of memories of love. Tonight is about hoping that my next home will incorporate that element. And with it a purpose will grow for my life.

Riping Out the Stitches

Remember all that happiness and nice talk from the previous posts? Let me tell you another story. Two in fact. They inter link. One for the image, one for the application.

When I was young, maybe seven or eight, my sister and I went outside to ride bikes before lunch. We were playing at my dads, going round and round in the driveway. Lisa took a turn too tight. She slipped, the bike lay flat on its side. She was bleeding from her head. I remember rushing to help, followed by the image of blood on a white washcloth, followed by endless hours watching the tv in the hospital waiting room. This was, to an extent, traumatic for me, however it has never carried as much weight for me as the follow up visit.

Two weeks later I went with my mom and sister to have the stitches that were sewn into her face removed. The doctor was running late, it was near lunch time, she was in a hurry. I think she wanted to push back the appointment but my mother was insistent that it be that day, after all she had dragged two young girls out of school and nearly an hour from home for this already terrifying appointment. So the doctor saw my sister. I watched her rip out each stitch. At no point up until the day they were removed did my sister appear to be in an unbearable amount of pain, but watching the doctor jerk each stitch out she looked like it was killing her.


That's what it feels like. That's how I feel today. I got hurt a while back, it took me a long time to go in and see a doctor to fix me. This is all metaphor of course. Time to realize that I didn't have to leave my wounds open, time to want to heal, time to want to be healthy and okay again even if I was scared. But after that time I started to sew myself together again. Recently I let someone else into my life. I tried to put some of the old pain and hurt away, tried to put some walls down, tried to do something that would force me to fail in a new way if I was to fail. I think I did everything that I could have done.

But the thing is, the same thing happened. And it ripped out my stitches. I was healing and now the same wound has been re opened.

It wasn't all that important maybe. Maybe it was. I had said I was happy. He implied he loved me. I opened up some. I let myself like him. Enjoy time spent. I believed in hope a little tiny bit. For the first time in a long time I let someone link themselves to that part of me. He was different from what I was used to, made nice gestures, said nice things, told me he didn't want to see my masks, he liked me for me. It was an idea I was just starting to come around to on my own before he arrived. I was just starting to imagine letting people in and seeing small parts of a maskless me. So I let him share a little bit, enough to let it hurt. Enough to risk something of me.

Now it does. He went back to his ex girlfriend. That makes 5 for those playing along at home. Five times that someone has walked away from me for someone else. Five times that I haven't been enough. Five. Five times that I wasn't chosen.

I'm proud of me. I did damn good. I accomplished things that I was struggling with, I let new things happen, I let go of some of the old. I made choices to help me. Still, it hurts. I'm proud, I'm happy that I can be happy, I am glad that I can be angry instead of just sad because I know I made progress in how I deal with people. Still, it does hurt to not be chosen. It does hurt to be left for someone else again. It does hurt to have someone rip out the new stitches to the old wound and let it bleed again.

I want to hide. Doing this whole "cliff jumping" thing hurts me again and again. Often times I feel uncomfortable and edgy, defensive and nervous, and scared. If I do hide though, I'll lose the only parts of this story that I'm proud of though. I'll lose the ability to say that I did the bold thing, that I overcame things in me and that I didn't let the risk of caring about something push me around. So I'm scared, and I want to hide, maybe I even will a little bit in some ways, but I can't really decide on that as the standard course of action. I'm only proud of me when I'm willing to do hard stuff. Like let people know me and reject me. So I have to do it again. Until maybe some day someone loves me and chooses me first. And as much as it hurts I have to choose that the hope for that is better than the safety of letting go of a dream I may have no business holding.

Saturday Morning

I know I haven't had as many updates as I should. Part of the reason for this is because I have failed to keep some of my "resolutions". Namely I had my dance class end and did not re-enroll. I haven't cooked something new for myself in a few weeks. I haven't tried excessively hard to meet new people.

However, I have been busy. Some of the structure of my original ideas has been laid to waste to make way for unplanned for new experiences and people. Instead of cooking something new for myself last week a very nice old/new friend came over and cooked something marvelous. Instead of dancing in class I go out with a friend and support her while she tries to brave new social contacts for the first time.

I've finished two books since my last update. Which seems sad to me because there was a time when I could read three a week. Still since I am no longer a college student with the hours that go with it and since there is no longer someone like Brian in my life to constantly chatter about books and ideas with me the slower pace is, for now acceptable. Maybe.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet- Salman Rushdie

Initially I was a little hesitant about reading this book. It was the first book in a while I had picked out for myself and I picked it based on a scholarly paper that referenced it on the topic of the Sleeping Beauty story. I had read part of Rushdie's Satanic Verses several years prior and found it uninteresting. The images and characters from India were difficult for me to relate to, the mythology that interplayed with so much of the story had been over my head, and the story itself was a little weirder than what I was looking for at the time.

The Ground however was the other side of the coin. In this story Rushdie brought his India characters out of that world, without leaving any of it behind, and into the western world, more specifically into America. In doing so he gave voice to interesting ideas on major topics of love, life, death, fear, fame, and rock and roll from a more universal approach. It's been a long time since I felt a deep desire to underline in books, or even to bookmark important pages but this book re-awoke some of those habits.

There were moments in the story when I felt bored, when I wished to just "get on with it", or I felt like the details were unimportant. Maybe this was a short coming with myself as the reader, failing to appreciate the moments in each characters life that built to the climax. Still I didn't always feel it "building" anything.

Overall, it was particular scenes and lines that truly drew me into the book. Little golden treasures of words stored in between an average book. I will probably never read it again, but I will probably find myself using lines or moments from this book to reflect on life for the rest of mine.

How I Became Stupid- Martin Page

It was a quick read, done in under two days. Maybe its wrong, but I've always like a book that feels like it's reading itself to me. I found it on a whim while straightening the store at the end of the night. Its a story about an over educated intellectual who has experienced the ecclesiastic problem of sorrow that comes with knowledge. He tries three was of letting go of all of his mind crushing ideas in three ways. First he tries to drink it away, then he tries to kill himself, and finally he tries to become stupid via pills called Happyzac.

Here again, I liked particular moments but overall I felt like the story was a moralizing, lecturing, cliche. Which it told me initially it would be but I still felt slightly cheated when it was. The commentary on society was nothing I hadn't heard before; the jokes, while funny failed to be original; and the characters were rather unimpressive. It may be the "International Cult Classic" as the cover claims because it relies on the same ideas that have been circulating among those "cults" for decades now.

It was an average story told in an average way.

Murphys Law

I believe in Murphy's law. It wasn't a choice I made one day, I didn't sit down and sort out all the rational reasons. I, like most cynical Americans, just sort of fell into counting on the bad things in life to appear. Part of my spiral (I won't say up or down) into this darker outlook on the world must of course be attributed to my parents. Those who constantly harp on subjects of never being used, never being bested, never giving when you could be taking, in short the American mottos were my words to live by growing up.

Still there is a time to put away childish protections. Murphy's Law has been built to keep me safe. Sort of like an emotional bubble wrap soaked in fecial matter. It stinks but it does the job. So what if I did put it away? What if once in a while I stepped beyond a few of my safety nets and brazenly admitted some things? What if I started saying:

Excuse me, I like you. (And prayed to God someone liked me back)
I am happy right now. (And stopped holding my breath waiting for the other shoe to drop)
Things seem to be going well. (And didn't expect a car to fly through my apartment door)

In other words, what if I let the good in my life? What if, not only did I let it in, but I didn't try to ignore it's presence while it was there and didn't try to protect myself by not enjoying it so it wouldn't hurt when I lost it? What might happen then?

I have no idea. I've never done it before. I was told that unless I learn to take risks (emotional risks) I am never going to get out of a stuck place. Okay, that reasoning makes sense to me. So, I am fulling entering into "the present" and I am intentionally leaving out all my fears and worries:

I am happy.
I have people I enjoy talking to.
I am excited about moving.
I have had dreams about a future which doesn't suck.
There can be more. And I can conqure that too.

Scary enough for you? It sure as hell is for me. But here we go, from a broken down, dysfunctional past, into a completely unknown future, I'm going to avoid the both of them for a bit and bite down until I see the present take shape. Because thats all I can know for right now.