i made a shop, though nothing’s in it yet. a way to see if i can etch drawings into silver or turn drawings into fabric, or just to put the drawings themselves out into the world, and chapbooks and lulu books and such.
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i found a lucky penny at the food co-op and a lucky nickel in a neighborhood when i was out walking the dogs.
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today i am an introvert.
Rosie: I love you guys.
me: I love you more.
Rosie: If my love for you were a song, it would be John Mayer’s “I’m Yours.”
me: If my love for you were a bomb, it would be nuclear.
Rosie: If my love for you were a bomb, it would be atomic.
recent drawings. drawing old quilts which feel like maps. and cloth which maybe functions as a backdrop or as a way to have a bigger visual chunk next to all the small pieces. cloth is something that is big overall but its details are still small and lend themselves to abstraction. and those rotten oranges with their oblong shadows, i can’t draw them enough it seems. plus ribbon which becomes a snake and also becomes a way to tie the smaller pieces together.
(image from Maira Kalman’s NY Times Opinion piece, In Love with A. Lincoln)
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Last night Steve made sad sounds in his sleep and woke to tell me about his bad dream. We were in jail and we had to push wheelbarrows up a steep hill and the wheelbarrows were filled with heavy metal things. He made it to the top but I was struggling. People at the bottom of the hill were making fun of me and Steve got mad and started throwing heavy metal things at them. Then he came down the hill to help me push my wheelbarrow up.
I had a dream that my exboyfriend and his ex-wife were still together. She is beautiful in real life, and they were pregnant with triplets. Triplets! But one was dying inside of her. You could see the babies through her stomach somehow and they were so, so beautiful. My heart broke for the one who was dying. You could see its head falling away from its body. Then I was trying to wash clothes but I could not get them white enough. And there were stray cats pissing on our bed.
Sometimes dreams are boring. Most of the time in my dreams I’m trying on shoes all night long or something else monotonous. But with the stress and the sorrow and waking up a lot with my back pain from the stupid fertility drugs — and mostly because the hormones I’ve had to take make my dreams more vivid and colorful — I’ve had the most complex and gorgeous dreams. That is one good thing. Though we both awoke this morning in sorrow. The black dog crawled into bed halfway through the night and he was twitching and shivering in his sleep on one side of me as Steve was moaning in his sleep on the other side and I was awake in between them. The night lasted so long.
the stock markets are plunging. today steve’s brother went to jail, ash wednesday, a day for me for eating peanut butter m+m’s and drinking just a little wine because we are transformed, the test this morning was negative, 6:30 in the morning peeing on a stick before there is any light in the sky and the cat is batting at the stick, nocturnal and his bowl is empty. jack painted his face blue with stripes he said resembled a transformer in his room. we are dust, even embryos are dust. one dissolved. even before we are born we are starting to die, i’ve read that but it doesn’t feel that way. before i went to bed last night i wrote a lullaby of things i was grateful for just in case, and this morning i repeated them in my head in bed as the light filled the sky and my bladder was empty and womb empty. is it called a womb if nothing was ever inside of it, or if something was but never attached. i was attached.
“We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Born in Asheville, N.C., he moved from state to state with his mother, who was divorced, sickly and struggling to hold down work, he said. By his account, he spent his childhood in rabid pursuit of arbitrary goals. Whole days were given to throwing a tennis ball against a wall. Once he held his breath underwater until he blacked out. In high school a class schedule conflict deposited him on the cross-country team.
“I actually thought we were going to run across the country,” Carpenter said. “I thought we’d get out of school a lot.”
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He married a member, Yvonne Franceschini, in a ceremony on one of the group’s outings. The newlyweds tied cans to their backs and ran home.
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In August 2004, Carpenter entered the Leadville Trail 100, known as the Race Across the Sky. Partway through, his quadriceps gave out. Sometime after midnight, walking the last 30 miles with his knees locked up in the manner of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Carpenter finished in 14th place.
A year later, Carpenter returned to beat his own time by seven hours, win the race and break the course record by 93 minutes.
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“At this point, I like that fine line of balancing right between injury and not injury, seeing what I can get out of my body. Sometimes I lie in bed at night and wonder if I’ve done all I can, and if I haven’t, I go out at night and do more.”
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– At 44, a Running Career Again in Ascent (New York Times)
Morula blastocyst burrow.
Adapt and you change your name.
The body inside a body (Turducken / Humhumanan).
You grow you.
Bend don’t break, please bend don’t break. Once I broke. The air feels colder now.
The dog adapts to the Spring all over our floor.
Please for the dogs let me be strong if.
Comic cosmic (i.e., don’t trust anyone even a god who doesn’t laugh).
Then the catastrophe of birth / which reality to exist inside.
All those prayers that came in they were not wasted anyway.
Tulips are fragile but they come back so, see.
To the skeleton.
To the cat of the flesh.
The collection of honeycomb cells. Honey skin.
Dirt, acid, paint, fur under the fingernails. Minor bruises.
Snake skin shed.
To your blue veins coming out red.
To cuticles. Melanin. To sinews.
Your heart, which is comprised of twelve silk handmade flowers.
Your photoshopped heart here. Bone.
Cut you open: to the silk purse of your flesh, glossy on the inside.
jack sleeps over every saturday night, and we usually drop him off before we go to church on sunday morning. he used to go to church with us, but then he decided he didn’t want to, and we can’t force him so. but yesterday he said he wanted to come with us, and he brought his sketchbook (i gave it to him for his birthday two years ago and he treasures that paper, he really does) and i gave him a pen and pencil. he drew this drawing. steve looked at it later and thought that i had drawn it. jack said he had no idea what he was drawing when he was drawing it, though after we talked about it for a while he decided that it was a grenade. i couldn’t convince him that it was a flower or even an embryo (everything is an embryo these days, doesn’t he know). he drew it so carefully and it took him so long. he scribbled inside the black areas again and again to get them very dark i thought the paper would split open. sometimes it is hard to remember that people are beautiful, but he was beautiful in church, standing up and sitting down at all the right times, mouthing along to the songs, and drawing very quietly beside me.
