a very bad thing

This is not my trauma, I feel strange talking about it, but it happened right in front of us, so here it is. I might pare this down later, but dumping it out is helpful.

- - -

Yesterday, after school, the library was busy with families and children when a little girl came running in, panicked and screaming, "Someone was just hit by a car! A kid! A kid was run over right outside! It went right over him!" My co-worker ran outside, I ran for the phone. People froze, parents with young children picked them up and stayed inside, afraid of what they'd see in the road. I fumbled the buttons, and it was nightmarishly slow to get the phone to work, but it must have only been a few seconds. While talking to the dispatcher, one of the kids yelled, "It was P.*!" Our student worker was standing beside me, sorting books, looking confused. "P. who?" Her 9 year-old brother's name is P., but it was too terrible to connect. I told her to run. She dropped the books and ran.

P. was lying in the road, conscious and making noise, with bloody scrapes all down his arms and legs. The woman who had witnessed the accident had her hand on his arm and was talking on the phone with the police. I looked at his eyes, because head injury is the only thing I know really well. He had that wild, unfocused look of someone only seeing pain, and my memory held him up against my daughter with her pupils blown, blue and rigid and not breathing. He didn't seem to have a life-threatening head injury, at least. His hands were on his stomach, his lips were losing color. His sister was bent over him, murmuring in his ear and shaking.

"The tire went over his middle," the woman who had witnessed the accident said.
"Is the driver still here?"
"I'm here," said the beardy old man standing behind us. He used his shirt to wipe his face, he was crying, too. He had been backing up his vehicle after eating Thai food at the food truck across the street, and didn't see the small boy walk out from between parked cars.

An off-duty paramedic dropped in beside us and took charge. She checked his eyes and hips and stomach while the sirens approached. As the EMTs descended on him, we moved back, called their parents, rounded up the other siblings out of the crowd of crying kids and told them what was happening. The parents arrived just as our student worker was ready to climb into the ambulance, and their mother was able to go with him, instead. One of the siblings was still missing. I spotted the tween near the convenience store as it started to rain, and ran to get her. She took a look at the ambulances, the police cars, her family car, the librarian running toward her in the rain, and she threw her soda down and ran with me. As the ambulance pulled away, their dad was too upset to think or speak or drive. He used to be a police officer, but your own kid is something different. My co-worker took his keys, we piled the kids into the minivan and made dad sit in the back seat, and she drove them to the hospital.

P. is still alive, but he has internal bleeding. He's going in for surgery. We are all really shaken and worried. And, frustratingly, I'm doing paperwork because the news reported that it happened at the library, but it technically did not, and the higher-ups need an account of exactly where the accident took place. The road and parking lot belong to the shopping center, the driver was a food stand customer and not a library patron, and we rendered aid because it was a horrific accident and we know all the kids. My co-worker took vacation leave to assist the family. We didn't poke him or move him or otherwise aggravate his injuries. It's just a terrible, terrible thing.

Teach your kids to be vigilant in parking lots and hold them tight tonight, you guys. I'll post updates and a fundraiser page as they're available.

*Name changed for privacy

back to life as usual

Yeah, I ruined the bigger painting. Glazing over grisaille is not for me. I'm painting more vegetables as consolation.

My month of solo-adulting has come to an end, and I hadn't realized how deeply I had relaxed until my insides started nailing up siding and installing storm windows like they were prepping a cabin for the long winter. I don't know how to go on living in tight insulation now that I've had the windows open. Travel and art books and hippie skirts, I guess.

Also WORK. I've been contracting with a film company to do some character design, so that's pretty great.

And then the police officer who comes by the library for coffee & bathroom breaks asked me to make a logo for his knife-making business, and he paid me in ice cream. "You're making something cool, so I got you something cool." This works for me.

This logo is very subtle and artisanal and does not at all say "I am going to stab you"

Putting my shoulder to the windows until I can reach a crow bar.

Little figure studies

My month as solo adult is coming to a close. I'm cramming all the painting time I can into the nights my mother takes the kids for sleepovers. It's been really great being the designated parent during the school week and spending long rainy summer nights alone in the painting studio on weekends. Except for having to do the dishes. I hate you, dishes.

I've been putting off glazing the self portrait I'm working on, so I took a break and practiced mixing skin tones. I think I'm about ready to ruin the big painting now.

She's holding a knitting needle here, not stabbing herself with a pencil.

3x3, oil on canvas (one of those ridiculous little ones they sell at Walmart for a dollar)

5x7, oil on canvas board

5x7, oil on canvas board

Avocado

I have been mangling my attempts at portraiture, so I painted another piece of produce to reassure myself that I don't totally suck at this thing.

I call this one, "a millennial's mortgage payment". 

So that went well, and then Adam Rex told me I did a nice job, so I'm just going to put "produce portraiture" on my official CV now, because that is maybe the best thing that has happened ever and I think I have maybe peaked as an artist.

I'm going to try to crack this human-face-portraiture thing, though. I have decided to work through the academic techniques and figure out which one works best for me, so I've started a grisaille. This is where you paint the thing monochromatically and then glaze in the color after it has dried, and I am DEEPLY mistrustful of this process. Work through the ugly stage. The whole thing has been the ugly stage so far. Learning is the worst. Also it is a picture of myself, so I might be having a subject matter problem. I've got my Mondays back, though, so I have time to fix it - or stomp on it and throw it into the gulch.

Questions du jour with the human possum

Yesterday

Least favorite reference question: "What kind of fluid is this on the keyboard? It looks like drool."

It was not drool.

Also yesterday

"Where are the nearest fallout shelters? We are visiting from California, and I work with the DOD, so I know where to go over there, but we have a baby so we want to stay safe."

"Weeeeell, we don't actually have any fallout shelters. But don't worry, you'd only have 8-12 minutes lead time, so there wouldn't be time to get to a shelter anyway!"

I did not tell him about the cast iron tub in my garage, because it's already going to be a tight fit under there with all the kids and cats and chickens.

We aren't actually very worried about North Korea over here in Hawaii, but you know what I do not like? Department of Defense employees asking where the fallout shelters are. You should know, dude. Or you should make sure we get some. Yes, you, random contractor who is probably in charge of ordering toilets or something. Take some initiative.


Some time later

The homeless guy who sharpens knives on a whetstone across the street from the library came to visit, bearing gifts. He had a shirt on this time, because he and I have already had a stand-off re: his carpet of curly body hair and the library clothing policy*.

"Here's some beef jerky, I made two kinds. It's awesome. If anything were going to make me rich, it would be this stuff, it's so good. I don't know why I'm not rich yet."

"How do you make it?"

"In my car."

We laid the baggies out in the staff room and stared at them.

hobo jerky

also pictured: the jar of homemade hot sauce someone else gave us

We had a brief discussion about the serial killer who served his victims as roadside bbq, decided that this was far more likely to be cat meat than murdered-people meat, and then passed the bag around to smell. It smelled okay. "You try it," my co-workers said. And so I did. Because of course I did. I will eat any garbage people hand me. It's part of my now-very-nearly-not-hypothetical-post-apocalyptic skill set.

I am pretty much almost sure it was actual beef. I have not died or erupted in chest hair yet. Another successful gamble by the woman who once saw a bowlful of rocks and decided to eat one to see if it was candy.

(It was.)



*library policy: body hair does not count as clothes.

A birthday, a skull, a new book

This child is NINE. Last year of the first decade. We have to jam in everything we forgot to do with him during his early childhood before he hits Decade 2: the Puberizing. 

This includes: 

learning to ride a bike (whoops - he can ride a scooter and skateboard, close enough?)

swim lessons (besides just being chucked in the ocean)

proper roller coaster ride (we only have dangerous old county fairs)

road trip on the mainland, with beef jerky and rest areas and cheap motels/KOA camping

Let's do it, kiddo. Happy birthday, Leif.

Painting with Yorick

I didn't expect to have painting time this weekend, so when my aunt took the kids away for a couple hours I threw together the quickest still life I could get my hands on. This is tired and not funny, I said to myself. DON'T OVERTHINK IT, JUST PAINT, myself replied.

"Text me back", oil on canvas, 8x10

The chickens kicked in the door and criticized my work. They knocked over my pencils and crapped on the floor. They are fast on their way to being wildly successful artists with their own instructional youtube channel.

New book arrived in the mail!

Got home from work to find a package on the welcome mat. The welcome mat says GO AWAY, so it was nice to find it there instead of on the garbage bin like my other packages. I need a smaller mat that says "except for you, mailman, my dude".

The book looks great. Editor did a nice job, as usual.

Hoist a pint with me for a birthday and a publication! 

Just some things

The prophesy is made

(Jotting this down for posterity/scrappy apocalyptic survivors who somehow figured out how to search internet archives.)

Walking back from the park, I hoisted Zenny up onto my shoulders. It was a sunny summer day, with a nice breeze, and she took a deep, happy breath, spread her arms out, and said, "Ahhh, soon this will aaaaall be Dead Land! All these people will die very soon."

What.

A few hours later, I casually brought it up again while we were sitting in the garden.

"So, what was that you were saying about Dead Land? And everyone dying?"

"Oh, not everyone," she said, picking cherry tomatoes and lining them up like supplicants around a big beefsteak tomato. Then she looked at me kind of hard and came over to pat my hair in a comforting manner. "It's okaaay, mom. It's juuuuuust a story. I don't want you to worry about the invisible children."

I think she is going to lead the vampire uprising, you guys.


A mystery is solved 

The preschool year has started. Yesterday morning I got up, showered, made oatmeal for me and the girl, put on the kettle, and went to lay out her school uniform. I spread the clothes on the coffee table while she ate; little blue shirt, little blue shorts, tiny underpants, fold-over white socks with bows on them. Satisfied, I sat down with my tea to check the twitters. Suddenly, there was a clattering stampede in the hallway, and Po the Nipple Cat came charging around the corner with all her legs windmilling. She scampered up onto the coffee table and frantically started dragging her butt across it with her front paws, heading right for the clean clothes. I did an amazing lunge-and-tackle across the ottoman and table, scooping her by the armpits and flinging her away just before her butt raked across the clean shirt. As she cartwheeled away through the air, a dingleberry flew off and rolled under the tv stand.

And that is how we solved the Mystery of Who Has Been Shitting on the Goddamn Coffee Table.



A discovery is made

It turns out chickens can get hiccups even though they don't have diaphragms. And they don't like it when you freak out and try to perform the Heimlich maneuver when it happens. COINCIDING DISCOVERY: when chickens are sick for a couple weeks, they don't grind their beaks down with pecking/scraping, and the pointy end grows out like a fork prong.

melted chickens and another painting

The chickens have survived the pox, and I now consider myself the leading authority on chicken nursing skills in at least a 2 block radius.

Here is what you do for pox:

1. Dab iodine onto their crusty face lumps. You're going to get carded for the iodine, because it's a meth ingredient, so act cool. Just to be on the safe side, you can assure the cashier, loudly, "I am NOT cooking meth. It's for my sick chickens." 

2. Don't freak out when all their feathers fall out and adhere to the iodine, just pluck them off like beard hairs.

googled "chicken beard" and was not disappointed

3. When they stop eating and look like they want to die, spread them out on the lawn to bake in the sun.

This was the turning point. They remembered that they like being alive. A bit begrudgingly. With biting. I will take it. 

sunbathing birds look terrible; if you see one sunning on a sidewalk, don't club it to put it out of its misery

So they're just about back to normal now, if a bit scabby, and we are relieved. I really didn't want to dig any more holes in the back yard.

Painting again. 

Lychee season is coming to an end. This afternoon I hauled the little easel up onto the porch and snapped off a few fruits to paint. I couldn't find a good surface to pose them on, so I dug a push pin out of the junk drawer and stuck it right onto the side of the house. Probably I shouldn't be poking holes in the house, but I am Supreme Overlord for the next few weeks and I can do what I want. 

Zenny scootered around on her wheelie toy, stopping to peel lychees for the chickens and watch the painting take shape. 

I say it every year: I love the summer so much.