another

 The television says it's Christmas. Jimmy hears the familiar piano jazz of the Peanuts Christmas Special, soft and comforting like the hush of the snow that is starting to fall. The log burning down to embers in the fireplace is one of those cheap paper jobs since dad hasn't restocked the wood pile this winter. Mom, dressed in her pale green nightgown, is hanging the stockings. She pauses as she holds David's in her hand, runs her finger across a plastic race car sewn into the red felt. Mrs. Allen made a stocking for every kid in the neighborhood when they were born, embellished each with these tiny plastic trinkets. Boys got things like tiny footballs and motorbikes, girls dolls and kittens. None of the things on Jimmy and David's suited them. They were not really football and motorbike kind of boys.

some paragraphs

 She runs her fingers over my tattoo. “I've seen something like this in class. Its from an African myth” she says. She's an art history major, still in undergrad, and gorgeous. “See these tears?” she runs a finger now over the abstracted lines that fall from the mask-like face. Honestly, I never really thought of them as tears, though it seems obvious now. “He's crying for his lost brother, who has to go into the world first, to make it ready for him.” I'm not sure about this myth or this tattoo's origin, but I choose not to argue. We are doing well today, and she's not a woman to argue with.

She is a Miami Latina, working class, her own tattoos look more of the jailhouse variety. Big earrings, a lot of attitude, tough as nails. She resents the Florida blondes that she considers competition for male attention. One Sunday I make the mistake of proposing a morning picnic in the park and she says, “ I'm not really a park type of girl” and pours herself a glass of vodka. It is, at best, 9 am. This is a safari I am taking in someone else's life, I am passing through.

That summer she leaves for New York, not certain that she will return for a final year of college. She asks me to hold on to a few boxes for her, though we are seeing less of each other these days. When I go to pick up the boxes, there are other men around and I know she wants me to see that. One night, much later, when I must admit that I miss her, or at the very least, someone warm in my bed, I open the boxes and find them filled with books – real literature, Russian translated into Spanish, Spanish translated into English. The Somerset Maughum book Cakes and Ale is heavily worn and underlined. This woman is a mystery.

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.

rejected folkways record cover

Postmodernism Ruined My Life Part III

After watching Brazil again last night, I noticed that before the bleak end of Gilliam's preferred cut of the film, the protagonists are driving off into the studio-imposed happy ending of Blade Runner, which,of course, is actually the beginning of Kubrick's The Shining. You figure it out.

rock stars and conquistadors, more shocking true stories from the daily grind

Before the Cuban joint, there was the right-wing Christian bagel shop, a paradox that could only occur in the Florida panhandle. When I saw my boss's yellow jeep outside with the Bush stickers plastered all over the back, I knew I was in trouble. America really has become a country divided. The guy had an indisputable rule for everything, including the order for condiments – in case you are wondering, mustard always goes on the bottom of a sandwich. Despite all that, I guess he really wasn't such a bad person. Before long I was working, in addition to my regular shifts and my job at TCC, two or three graveyard shifts cooking the bagels. Apparently, real bagels are boiled, but we cooked them in this slow revolving steam oven contraption.

Around this time I was working on two “screenplays” with two different friends. One of them was a completely absurdist, Charlie Kaufman kinda biopic about Faith No More / Mr. Bungle frontman Mike Patton. Basically my friend and I took all the frustrations of our daily life and put them into the life of someone who may be a rock star, so you had a lot of scenes of our hero saying things like, “ If I really am famous why does my car keep breaking down on the way to the laundromat?” The New York Times called it a “meditation on the nature of identity and the desire for fame” - we called it where we were at. There was going to be this musical number where Mike Patton is turning around inside the spinning oven, suspended upside down and singing some of his creepy Fantomas stuff. If this sounds ludicrous the other screenplay was about conquistadors wandering a modern day Florida. That one had potential too.

Once the bagel boss posted this article by the time cards – a ridiculous, patronizing story about a black man who smiled while he shined shoes for pennies – somehow this has something to do with Jesus and bagel making. We were told to sign this form that we had read the story, and I, of course, refused. That was one of three arguments I had with this jackass. I was finally learning to express my anger and I wanted to express the fuck out of it.

To be continued....

art school jokes aren't funny anymore