slow down

The boy and I are sick on the couch, watching Kingdom and eating banana bread. Just seasonal ick, nothing requiring a week of quarantine. 

On Sunday my mom came up. We went over the bridge, through the botanical gardens, and down the road a bit to a crowded driveway with a few shabby houses crammed together and an open house sign. The realtor didn't even bother coming in with us, just shrugged and said, "It's a project, sold as-is." The house was almost small enough to stand in the middle and reach the doorframes of both bedrooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen. The windows were broken, the ceiling punctured, the roof leaky, the porch steps falling down, and the bathroom was an ombre of black mold speckling down to peeling white paint. "That's why it's so cheap." It was $580,000. Christ.

My mother has finally had it with her HOA and asshole neighbors. She can pretty much trade sideways when she sells her place, since the equity is about as much as the (lower end) home prices, but I'm hoping we can find something a little more livable.

So while she is talking to realtors and going to open houses, I have been trying to buy an affordable old truck for hauling lumber/junk so we can move her out and fix up her place to sell. We're getting an extra 22 year-old for the holidays (Gavin's best friend), and he's an auto mechanic, so it's a good time to get a beater truck that might need some work.

And that is why I’m glad to be laying around watching Korean zombies with my kid for a bit longer, before the heavy work of the holidays and home repairs start.

Recipe for banana bread below. I make a half batch most of the time. I’ve made a lot of banana bread recipes, and this one is hands-down the best. You can tell, too, by the stained page and crusty years-old bits of banana stuck to it. The dirty pages in cookbooks are the best ones.

manifest this

I was just in the middle of browsing online graduate degree programs, thinking I could switch careers and make more money if I got a second Master's in criminal justice or forensic psychology or something, when my email dinged with a message from the gallery. One of my paintings sold! It was the one with the swearing in the title. I priced it ridiculously high, too, so I am kind of shocked. Well. If the art world wants me to paint portraits and swear a lot, I humbly accept.

Fuck you, grad school. I'm a big time fancy artist now.

Now I just have to do it about 20 times/year. Maybe not quitting my day job just yet, but feeling encouraged.

Thanksgiving 2024

Hey, we did this thing again, and it went pretty well. The food was good, the cousins were cool, my aunt gave me a waffle maker, and nothing got broken or burned.

The worst thing that could be said about this year's holiday was that my oldest son - who drove down to his aunt's house from Rochester - spent it at the same dinner table as my arch enemy. We know this because she bombed FaceTime while Mike was on with his mother, and his soul left his body. Sadly, nobody accidentally knocked her down the stairs. Maybe for Christmas. 

At our house, everyone pitched in, and the smaller-than-the-cat turkey was pretty amazing. We used to buy for size, but I just don't like leftover turkey, it reminds me of the cadavers in the morgue I studied in art school. This one was more like a giant chicken. I brined it for about 6 hours, and WHOA. Worth it. Buy ten-pound birds, folks.

After everyone was gone, I was down in the studio, painting and typing and laying on my couch. I got a turntable stand instead of a book shelf for storing all the notebooks I cockroached from my mother's house, and the vinyl display racks are perfect for drying paintings. 

Got a new vase for my birthday, and started another floral painting. 

And in between, I've been transcribing. I'm already up to 12,000 words, not even halfway through the first notebook. The average novel is 100,000 words, so if her rough drafts are coming in around half that, it'll be easy fleshing it out into a book. Really enjoying the process.

Feeling kind of happy.  

45

The annual picture post.

My neck is starting to lose structural integrity, it's clinging with everything it's got to the bottom of my face. I gained weight after my surgery/medication a couple Decembers ago, and it took all year to get it off again. This body went up a mountain, into a waterfall pool, around and around my studio, up and down in front of glute exercise videos, stomping around in snow in Baltimore, and flying through the air at 10,000 feet with a quick stop in Colorado. It was a good year for having a body. Not as good a year for having a heart, but it kept hammering away anyway, so it's doing its best.

Studio is still a work in progress, I haven't gotten to putting things back on those shelves yet

All my limbs are still on so far, didn't lose any teeth

Happy birthday, meat sack.

b flat

Last night in the Costco parking lot, we parked the car and I hopped out the passenger side, walking a few steps ahead of Mike as he got out and locked the doors. There were no cars approaching as we stepped off the curb, but then headlights raked over us and I looked back to see that a driver in a big black truck was taking a fast turn toward us while looking over his shoulder at the gas pumps. I reached back and yanked Mike out of the way just before he got mowed down. The driver looked at us, too late, with an "oh shit" look on his face.

"That guy was going to kill you!" my first thoughts said out loud.

"Wow, I'm a big damn hero," my second thoughts said, also out loud, and Mike put his arm around me.

"Huh, I didn't even think about letting him run you over and collecting your life insurance policy," my third thoughts said, ALSO OUT LOUD. 

He gave me a squeeze, "We won therapy!" 

"DONE. DID IT."

We bought an unhinged amount of cheese for the holiday. "Live while we're alive!" 

And that is the second time I have saved this man. The first was in 2001, when I got impatient waiting for him to move out to Hawaii and convinced him to fly stand-by a day early, so he did not board his flight from Newark on the morning of September 11. 

Never mind that he wouldn't have been in either place if it wasn't for me. And never mind that he probably could have survived getting run over by a Tacoma in a Costco parking lot. I'm still telling our therapist, and I expect a cookie.

Reconstituted

I was hearing the wolves howling again. Counseling might work eventually, but the bit at the beginning where you dump your heart out and sort the contents is really rough, and a week is not enough time to recover before having to do it all over again. I'm usually a calm person, but I've been on the verge of tears for weeks, and I cried and yelped my way through our last session like a kicked puppy. I was googling things like 'jobs in Canada', 'how to break down cortisol', 'airline tickets to Santa Fe', 'vrbo cabins Washington', feeling like a raw nerve ending and just wanting it to stop for one goddamn minute. It's human nature to feel like whatever you're feeling right now is how you'll feel for the rest of your life, and I knew it would pass, but it's a hard thing to believe when the wolves are at the door.

There are things I can control, though. Reading has always been my escape hatch, and I hadn't been able to get through more than a couple paragraphs in months, so I checked out a stack of Mariko Tamaki graphic novels to trick my brain back into focusing on an entire story. It’s working; right now I’m reading Bullet Train, by Kotaro Isaka.

When I pictured my future as a kid, I saw a quiet space with a small window and a typewriter, where I could write stories, be alone, and feel safe. Well, why haven't I done that yet? Painting is my thing, but there's room in my life for writing, too. I went down to the studio and hauled out all the old broken furniture that people have ditched down there over the years, cleaned everything, covered and stowed the pottery wheel, bought a few rugs, and stapled tapestries to the unfinished ceiling beams to catch the dust. On Saturday I came home from work to find that Mike had dropped off the kids with my mother for a sleepover, and he was ready to take me wherever I wanted for a date. "Best Buy," I said. We came back a few hours later with a new Mac Mini - the first real computer I have ever bought for myself (I draw on an ipad and blog on my phone, neither of which is good for writing novels). He helped rearrange furniture, wire paintings, and hang blinds across the small basement windows while I threw out old art supplies and set up the computer. The studio started looking pretty dang cozy. By the time we sat down in front of Inkmaster to eat tubs of Indian curry, I was feeling more like myself again.  

We stopped at the art museum on the way to Sunday dinner. The security guard who usually barks at me when I get too close to the best paintings (they are covered in glass, relax my dude) was too busy chasing teenage girls with backpacks that he thought were too large, so I put my reading glasses on and got my face right up in the brushstrokes. I thought about a line from This American Life that has stuck with me: Delight is like the butterflies flying around and landing on the thing that is joy. I felt delight, looking at those paintings.

At my mother's house that evening, I stood in front of the dozens of lined notebooks filled with handwritten stories that are crammed onto all her shelves, then picked one at random. The first page is dated May 2011. Yesterday I started transcribing it, typing away for hours and just enjoying being with these characters I've known all my life. Many of the stories aren't finished, taking up hundreds of pages before another story started telling itself and needed a fresh notebook, but they're wonderful first drafts. I'll get them typed up, and when I find the right one we can flesh it out and finish it properly as co-authors, maybe with some spot illustrations. 

Feeling okay again. And FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, as human logic goes.

Harris

I was right in the middle of dying my hair an unflattering color and thinking about cutting it all off (see: stress fractures), when my phone dinged. Harris! One of my oldest friends from high school, Harris is a wild thing who shows up unannounced from Portugal and blows through in a day, and his timing is always somehow perfect.

We spent a couple hours with his mom (very cool lady), before dropping her off at the airport to return to Molokai, then sat outside Jolene’s with a plate of brisket fries to catch up. Before he left, he gave me a very firm, very long hug, and I started crying. Needed that.

The orange hair isn’t as noticeable in the picture, phew 

Harris and me, 1996

Maybe I’ll be the one to blow through town next time, if I can figure  out where in Portugal he is at any one time.

Disconnect

A long time ago, fresh on the heels of two tough breakups, I went to a library conference in Seattle and stayed with some friends for the week. One of them had a meeting up in La Conner, and took me along. I walked through the little town and felt okay again for a few hours. I’m going to live here some day, I thought. 

A few years ago, I went to a painting workshop on Whitbey Island, and had the same feeling. Something in my chest finally unclenched for a little bit, and I thought about staying there with the bunnies and the walkable streets decorated with pumpkins that somehow weren’t stolen or full of rats.

I’ve been wound up too tight for more than 2 months, and stress fractures are beginning to show. I’ve been mixing up words, forgetting little things; that Bilbo Baggins feeling of butter scraped across too much bread.

So I applied for jobs in Washington. The best ones are East of Vancouver and North of Seattle, near La Conner. If I get an interview, I think I’ll fly out and scope the towns out in person to see if it feels like home. Maybe it’s finally time. 

Artists of Hawaii Show

Yeah, I didn’t win anything, but I did get to swan around with a free beer and pose awkwardly with my painting before getting hit by the bathroom door. 

Really happy with the frame. It was custom made by Masterworks (first time I’ve ever commissioned an expensive frame) and it’s definitely going to be an heirloom. If the piece doesn’t sell, I’ll paint something else for that frame next year.

The awards went to abstract pieces again. It isn’t that people aren’t painting representationally anymore, it’s just that the collectors think we’re still doing Postmodernism and only throw money at piles of fingernail clippings and blurry underwater video loops and bananas taped to walls. Just keep painting anyway. Contemporary Realism will have its day. 

The real crime was that the obvious showstopper of the entire thing, a couture volcano gown, won nothing. The artist could have made another dress with that award money. Jail. Jail for one thousand years.

It was a nice evening, and I fit right in with my “I’m a fancy artist” (faux) leather dress. Even if it did look like it physically hurt me to be doing something sociable.

I’ll work on it. 

Halloween 2024

The deluxe Ghostbusters costume I ordered was NOT a women's size medium, but I did not try cramming my butt into the narrow jumpsuit until after the return window closed. Irritated, I ordered a cheap moth cape, and threw in a pair of articulated bat wings for no reason other than "hey, cool, the wings move". The girl wore an Umbrella Academy uniform, and decided that she could be an alternate timeline character and the wings could be her super power. Let me tell you, I have never made a better costume purchase. While trick-or-treating, she popped her wings up to surprise people at every door, and they all jumped and gave her extra candy. She was dragging a pillow case with about 30lbs of sugar by the end of the evening. 

While we were flapping around the neighborhood, the boy was out with his friends, walking around Waialua in a historic reproduction of a World War II uniform. He also bought theater replicas of WWII firearms, but I would not let him out of the house with a realistic rifle and pistol, even if they did have orange tips. We took pictures for a What We Do in the Shadows kind of painting, though. (He's not into war/shooting, he's just a history guy. Last year he bought a suit of armor.)

We’re running out of Halloweens with these kids. I’m having feelings about it.

Edited to add: Tonight is the awards ceremony at the gallery. Here's hoping.