Purpling the pavement

When I first visited here, the jacoranda trees were in full bloom, and now a little over a year later the blossoms are fading, the trees turning over to green as the fleshy flowers purple the pavement. When I don't wear my glasses, it looks like a low lying violet fog beyond the fence, thick with the fecund smell.



The visions people have when their mind is turned off, the blood flow stopped and their body liminal between life and lack of it, are repeated by the ones who saw what they wanted to see. A divine and loving power urging them to return to the earth, their goodness and rightness reiterated.

In the early mornings, I hear someone knocking on the door and pressing the bell repeatedly. I stumble out of bed, wrap myself in an old quilt, negotiate the complexity of drawings and fabric to be cut laid across the parlor floor and dazedly answer the door.

There are other stories which haven't born the repetition of inspirational talk shows and New Age-y large print books. Some poeple have been slipped jelly like to a different place, lost beyond thier bodies in a place with no light. Something else is there with them, something that isn't lost and is looking for them. Being a cynic, I don't view the phenomenon as much besides an inexplicable. The thing in the dark, searching out the quivering ego, could be nothing more than the instinctual remnants of an animal whose ancestors for millenia were susceptible to nocturnal hunters. In the unplumbable depths of the brain sits the patient idea of the hungry night dweller, still waiting for a slip up, for the unwary to forget.



At the door the cold seamisted air wakes me up. No one is there. Each time I have the half dream the urgency increases. The knocking gets louder.

Activity Quest Adventure Challenge

This could very well be the most important self published zine style non comic book anthology you will ever be involved with.

Also:

the dark

A cockroach in the hallway today displayed none of the behavioral symptoms of cockroach-ness. It failed to run away, it peered at the light, and it didn't crouch down when I did so to investigate it. Its antennae flicked lazily back and forth, tasted the air as I disturbed it and sent tiny molecules of myself, regarding me as I regarded it. It and its peers have survived unmolested by evolution for centuries because of their desire to be together in the dark.

To be in the light alone is to die for a cockroach, and not only the limited range of species who've moved to the apartments and restaurants of the urban undergrowth. In rotting logs and beneath fallen leaves moist with decay stoop the tiny millions of them, unrecognizable to us accustomed to only the date brown of the kitchen dweller.

The ant and the bee, the tireless metaphors for labor--the tiny women of work who have become so accustomed to their own task that they will pursue it regardless of the presence of their thread waisted siblings. Not so the cockroach, for whom solitude is anathema. The ant and the bee are marked and modified numerous times by the fractional change of mutation, but today's cockroach would be indistinguishable from one thousands of years previous and thousands of years hence.



Why, little cockroach, don't you want to huddle in the dark?






PS If you ever want to buy any of the art I post, please message me. All of my work is for sale as long as it hasn't been sold yet.

PPS I have a piece at the UAM in Long Beach, with a reception on the 14th of this month. You should come and pretend you don't know me, and then say something in an outside voice about how wonderful that one piece by Camilla Taylor is.

Salt

Every year, they look smaller and smaller; their skin now appears like confection--the kind which must be eaten just after preparation, before it falls.

Dice

Nate stabs at the wobbly coffee table with two fingers. "Two! Two to beat!" My friend transforms into a hustler as he teaches me to play Threes. He taps at the table with his two demoralizing fingers and I realize that if he had achieved a perfect score of zero he would not be able to perform this piece of intimidation theatre, but then, if he had achieved a perfect score there would be little reason to haze the other players. I perform a series of actions with the dice and come up with a higher score than two. Tom follows me, and with a worse score. Nate collects the three dollars from the center of the table while simultaneously convincing me to deposit another dollar in the spot my previous dollar had occupied. I'm suckered, and pull the bill out of my wallet. As the winner of the previous round, it has been explained to me, Nate rolls first. Finishing his turn with a perfect score, his gloat floats up through his barely structured imperturbability. Before the round is over, he and Tom are already reminiscing about previous games in which other such improbable feats were achieved. Tom and I take our turns more out of adherence to rules than to any expectation of winning.

We are at the party held in an illegally occupied loft because of a promise of wildness. I arrived with two girls who I had met only an hour earlier, and upon arrival I immediately set off to explore the premises. My exploration was significantly shorter than I had hoped it would be, as I was locked in a stairwell suddenly--the door shut behind me as the proprietor of the establishment was securing the more personal spaces in the loft, such as this stair well packed with bike parts and assorted items stacked in milkcrates. Instead of being frightened, I'm instead excited by what I perceive as the element of the unexpected materializing. But I'm quickly retrieved from the locked room, and the musicians in the main room start to play a slow dirgelike jazz. The dice came out in an effort to engender some seediness into the otherwise staid and respectable party.

Girls I knew in the past have disappeared, unfound despite the vast wealth of interconnectivity offered by the internet and its promised destruction of mystery. They've slipped away from themselves, from the selves I knew, like an insect moving into its next phase of life, leaving behind the empty carapace of yearbook photos, emails sent form a defunct address. They've changed their names and passed into a new identity and all accept it with the ease of habit, as unremarkable as a haircut.



We leave for another illegally occupied loft, this one with promises from one of the newly met girls of a much greater degree of illegal occupiedness. Yes, this is the sort of place one could get stabbed in. I attempt to explore again, investigating a couple of pup tents in a corner and a cursory look reveals that these are in fact the bedrooms of the occupants. The veneer of childishness slips from us and we resume our spot next to our box of gas station beers and sloughed off layers of coats.

It snowed

To Chicago I went, where I learned things which can only serve to contribute to further failure to get to work, returned home feeling like someone had spent the duration of the previous night in attempts to kill me by slow throttling. THe blame for this sudden onset of sickness I place upon the great masses of children I came into contact with while in Chicago. Children are filthy and carriers of disease. That is an accepted fact.

At an Arial Pink show (or Oral Pink, or Aural Pink, I was never quite sure which), Nate, my new Chicago friend Akasha and I danced like 5 year olds and got yelled at by other more staid music appreciators. A hairdresser told me that I had a great haircut, and I embarrassed myself with my enthusiasm for the complement.

The conference I was ostensible in town to attend I spent as little time at as possible. After vainly attempting to attend the overpacked demonstrations and panel discussions, I ended up spending the majority of my time with my resident Chicago friends and getting cold walking through weather I'm not well suited to.

haircut

Every time I'm about to leave on a trip, I always have this desire to call it all off. I've had disastrous travel experiences: fights in subways, robbed, sexually assaulted (by a professor!), lost, temporarily homeless, etc. But I'm going to go to Chicago anyway. I'm certain that now I won't be getting drunk in public, I won't resort to fisticuffs, and I certainly won't carry all of my money in cash and on my person.

This sort of Depression era habit of poverty has me perpetually cutting my own hair, despite being able to probably afford a $35 appointment every few months. But why pay someone to do something well that I can do poorly for free?



What's in Chicago? Cold and printmakers at the Southern Graphics Council Convention and for a short period of time I will be in Chicago. I bought a winter coat just for this trip, as I haven't really had a need for a winter coat in the last 5 or so years I don't own one. Printmakers reassuring each other that our medium is not dead, is still relevent, is still viable, and maybe even believing it, too. My friend and his daughter; she is 3.5 years old and I've never met her.



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