spill the wine

I have not touched this blog in weeks. When I started it, I really had only two goals – to get back to a place where I was writing almost daily (though certainly not posting daily, I can't even take that much me) and to avoid all the things that I reviled in other blogs including my own earlier attempts, most of which lay now shed like snakeskin in that swampy alternative universe called Myspace – a place where I am still in a relationship, working three jobs, and holding on to a little more of my hair. I shudder at the bare naked honesty and woe-is-me narcissism of some of those posts, where I hemorrhaged what felt like some sort of truth all over the internets. Some shit you got to keep to yourself.

Having said that, I really have never had much luck at distancing myself from my work, creative or otherwise. I fondly remember old mumbling Alan Jones, my Louisiana painting instructor and friend, leaning in over my shoulder where I stood at the easel and telling me (probably for the fourth or fifth time), “It can't just be therapy”. I knew he was right, I knew that no one was going to make the connection that the overwrought canvas I was toiling over with its conflation of images from Goya's Saturn Devouring his Children and the final shoot-out from Butch Cassidy was really about my relationship to my father. Somehow you had to bring the audience in, even talk to them a bit. That was my painting problem. When it came to writing, the little lapsed Roman Catholic that lives somewhere in my gut takes over and wants to confess everything – still a form of therapy, still forgetting the audience, but at least communicating a little.

So I don't want to write about the one thing I really feel right now, a razor loneliness that rips right to the bone. Lately I have not been communicating much with anyone – the phone and the Facebook in the end, don't seem to count, and most of my work conversations are with teenagers. When I get like this it seems like everything is unresolved. I often return to the Books I Haven't Finished– I always leave poor Celine paranoid on the boat to Africa, Henry Miller falling apart in Brooklyn. The Brothers Karamazov are still jockeying for position in a 1200 page horse race and the goddamn moo cows in Portrait of an Artist. Add to that artwork not done, the scraps of stories and comics and the giant Barbarella painting that has now deteriorated on the wall of two separate apartments, and it starts to seem more important to finish something, anything, just for some sense of resolution.

To return to the title of this blog, some times the reservoir just fills up, and you have to “spill over the sides to anyone that will listen”. The last few months have been nothing but ragwater, whatever small promise a new school year holds has faded, and I am left here, alone, with a post Holiday depression and nothing left to do but type, especially on this cold Sunday morning with my car sitting in the shop.

Still, its better to tell stories. And in the interest of resolution and communication, here's one with a beginning and an end. Once in college, there was going to be a showing of Cinema Paradiso, an Italian film I really loved at the time, in Fletcher Hall, the art building. I didn't have a car or an apartment or any money to spend so asking a woman out was tricky- I finally just told her that she should maybe come check it out. There is a scene in the film where an old man tells the hero that the way to know if a woman really likes you is to check over your shoulder after you walk away to see if she is still looking – a trick I had recently tried on this particular girl with disappointing results. Anyway, the night of the movie arrived and I found out at the last moment that the film was actually showing in the English building. I actually made a few flyers and posted them around the art building announcing that Cinema Paradiso had been moved, in the off chance that mi amor should show. She didn't – she had overbearing, overprotective mother that would never have allowed her to drive into town to see a movie alone, but in the end we still ended up together, my first real college romance and the first woman I ever actually called “girlfriend”. The night of our first date was the night that Cobain offed himself - while one of my rock and roll heroes was finally surrendering to the Ugly Spirit, I was riding a merry-go-round behind some closed elementary school in Opelousas we had wandered into, and then, stomach and head spinning, sharing a kiss with a pretty little Cajun girl I still couldn't believe I had somehow won over. That was the Eden of our early days – later, when things started to go sour, as things always seem to do , she told me that she had gone to see a traiteur, a Cajun mystic, who had disturbed her with the news that he saw her surrounded by darkness. “Don't worry, that's just me” I said. Later, when she was finally gone, I tried to make a painting of a picture someone had taken of us on a Greyhound – she is pale and soft and smiling at the camera, while I am dark, awkward, all angles and compound Adam's apples, staring intently out the window at nothing.