these texts are an archive of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area from march 2007 - march 2015. it stands as a record of close to a decade of my life, charting the struggles i faced as an artist, daughter, and lover. messy and chaotic at times, eloquent and poetic at others, these texts are an index i am proud of. it was here in this electric box that i learned how to be honest about my experiences and the person i needed to become. it was here that i first learned the truism that words make the world and how to trust such a beautiful, rife, hard fact.

thank you for meeting me here in such tall grass.


my artist website is here.

Nov 20, 2012

the voodoo that you do so well

i am wiped out.  5 days in new york is a whirlwind experience.  especially when things like swizzels and pickle backs are involved.  good lord.  my liver must hate me...  but my diary sure loves me.  ;)  there are tons of things i will write about but i think they're better off confined to the nebulous curves of poetry and prose than a blog post.  at least for now. besides, i'm still trying to re-acclimate to being home.  this time around, i was actually ready to come back to oakland.  i wanted my own bed and my friends and my music.  i wanted more than two pairs of pants and two tshirts.   i wanted to sit for a minute and write.  i really have gotten to a place where if i go for more than a day or two without writing i begin to feel very anxious, very displaced.  i need the slip of ink to reel me back in to the Here and Now.  words hold me in place.  they hold me together.  it isn't enough to take pictures.  i need a deeper sort of record.  i need a place where i can roll around with my experiences.  i need the license of poetry, the lens of art and romance, the flex and freedom of language itself.  on my last night in new york i finally got to sit and write for a beautiful hour and a half inside a diner in the Bowery.  i had fish and chips and a pina colada for dinner but ordering food was really just a smoke screen for claiming a warm place to scribble.  it was so cold that night.  the air was frozen and it shot right through the front of my jeans to sting my thighs horribly.  i am not used to a little thing known as the wind-chill factor.  california doesn't have that shit.  not even close.  and that shit is real.  not just real, but really ridiculous.  it can basically make an otherwise pleasant evening feel like the 7th circle of hell.  several new yorkers laughed at me for my reaction to the cold.  apparently, it was warm there for this time of year.  hooooollllly moley!    it doesn't necessarily curb my desire to live there though, i'll just need a better wardrobe.  my leather jacket wasn't the best foil to such weather.  i was ill-prepared at best.  my return trip did work to cure me of my love-sickness for New York though and i am thankful for that.  i was so heart broken after coming home last time.  this time, i cruised the streets less frantically and with far less need to hunt down a reckoning.  i felt at ease this time.  i knew that i could come back and would come back.  i knew that it isn't as hard as people make it seem.  an inexplicable thing happened:  i ran in to a girl i went to art-school with in this tiny tiki bar called Otto's Shrunken Head in the Lower East Side.  she moved to Brooklyn a year ago and just so happened to shoot over to the city that night.  i walked in the bar and heard someone call my name and it wasn't my friend anne.  fucking wild!  she and i had studios right across the hall from each other in school!  small weird world!  and anne and i had just been stumbling around directionless in Brooklyn earlier than day!  we watched a musical tribute to Queen and drank pina coladas and ate voodoo chips at the bar.  in fact, it was these particular pina coladas that got me to order a pina colada at the diner in the Bowery.  i haven't had one in years but something about the chill in the air and being with a great friend in New York City and feeling completely at rest, completely free and festive made ordering such a drink make perfect sense.  as a child i used to always order virgin pina coladas whenever my family would go out to a restaurant for dinner.  it wasn't that often so the drink seemed so special to me.  it felt right to revisit that feeling in New York.

 pina coladas

 voodoo chips

drunken bathroom portrait photography


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

your long long tress. love it!

xoxo

angela simione said...

ha! i am a bit overdue for a trim!