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

oh, fucking hell...

i see stars... 

i've been drinking...

what else is new?

my pleasure becomes my primary concern and today my primary pleasures were writing in my diary and catching up on sleep.  i bought this tingly eucalyptus body wash that sends my skin into shivery convulsions and i took my time rub-a-dub-dubbing as a result.  it was nice.  now, at 11pm i begin to wonder the fuck i did with my day.  in a week i fly to new york and there are so many things to take care of between now and then.  it is  seriously long list and a jam packed schedule that i must contend with.  most of which is fun as fuck but, by nature, i am a dreamy and somewhat lazy human being who prefers to spend her time star-gazing and looking out the window day-dreaming with her chin resting solemnly on her palm. 

my mind turns to romance:
 
weren't we just talking about God?  weren't we just talking about how i wish i could believe unmistakably in Him?  weren't we just talking about warmth and sex and saliva and the diseases that live behind our knee caps? 

fuck it all. 

i'm in love with life and i have no answers.  my morality shrunk to the pathetic remains of a cat's maggot-ridden carcass by the side of the road in the wake of my mother's death.  mama, what am i to believe in now?  your soul doesn't just escape me, it escapes us all.  where did you go?  i do not feel you and i have not felt that you ascended to anything, anywhere. 

i see you in my dreams and sometimes they feel so fucking real...  what am i to do?  what am i to believe?  it only means that i miss you horribly and i wish i could talk to you.  i wish i could pick your brain.  who else can i be honest with and still be loved by? 

everyone else has too many superstitions and closed morals in the way.  all these other people hate me for having feelings and for having caught the short end of the stick.  i'm still standing, mama, but they don't know what harm they do when they espouse their beliefs...  such closeted, mean beliefs that leave no room for frailty and the normal bumps and bruises that come along simply from living.  seriously, mama, who are they to judge?  they have no idea what i've been subjected to.  they have no idea who you were.  they have no idea what i've endured.  and i never told you, mama, because i didn't want to hurt you and, what's more, i didn't want to complicate your religion.  we've all been taught such stupid shit.

i listened to the Lost Highway soundtrack over and over again today.  i painted and i crocheted.   i tortured myself with the ideas of Right and Wrong.  i have no clue what is best or what is good or what i owe other human beings.  i try my best not to hurt others but i know that i will inevitably fail.

we all will.

we should not make the stickiness of living a crime.

here

it is a sleepy monday. every one is in bed, warm and dreaming on their extra day off. the sun is up and bright. a good day for outdoor painting. but inga and i must go obey The Almighty Jog before getting wrapped up in anything else. lately, the canvas has held on to me for a straight 6 hours at a minimum. and once i start, i don't stop. today, we must go bounce through the green before anything else.

we didn't get out much this weekend and we both need the sweat. we were too busy hiding from the onslaught: our little town was chewed up by wine-hungry tourists this weekend. there is no doubt in my mind that a few new roadside memorials will be up soon. the sirens were going almost constantly for the past 3 days. this is where people come to drink and laugh and drive fast down the windy two-lane highways, pretending it's the french countryside, all fantasy and reverie. the reality of it is that this is the land of alcoholism and brutal car crashes, decapitations and mothers in mourning. not to mention the deep level of unnoticed (or shunned) poverty. there are small, white, handmade crosses around almost every bend in the road. little trinkets nestled at the base, signs, love letters, stuffed animals, and balloons. on big drinking weekends like memorial day and st. patrick's day, these crosses multiply. silently and in the middle of the night.

moving here has cured me of the everyday american alcoholism that tv promotes. i haven't had a drink in 9 months and i don't miss it. the allure is gone. i sleep better now than i have in years and i have such a high level of focus too. i have become a teetotaler. ha! much to the amazement of a great many friends.

maybe i should photograph them. the crosses. i always want to stop when i see them. to pay attention. to pay respect. these small shrines that mark a site of horrible loss have always caught my eye and heart. it makes me even sadder when they fall in to disrepair or are removed by whatever state agency is in charge of removing such things.