night walls

I have this feeling in my legs I had when I was young enough to still be tucked in, when bedtime was always loathed and elaborate plans were concocted to stay up later, to hang around and soak up the adult-ness of night. It' s a feeling of textured wall, cool and slick with gloss finish paint, running along the backside of my legs. My heels, my calf's, my hamstrings. 

When I couldn't or didn't want to sleep when I was little I would always push my booty into the right angel where the twin bed and the wall meet, put legs up the wall and move them. The two fleshy lines would make shapes and have conversations, follow each other and sometimes lift off the wall into outer space and land again, back on the cool bedroom wall. It felt like the safest place to be, feeling the texture exfoliate the back of my little person legs as I ran them across my dark bedroom wall. Watching the legs I was merely a spectator of life, I wasn't in the legs,  I was in the audience at their show, I preferred this feeling, the watching, the not being.

  My first bedroom,  my nursery had bright blue walls with hot air balloons painted on the wall next to where my bed was. One was a Valentines Hot Air Balloon that was pink with red hearts. I loved staring at that one the most. The Balloon room was tiny,  and I found joy in the smallness of the room and that we had that in common. 

 My last memory of me in that room was my small self on the bed by the hot air balloons sobbing. It was the kinda crying you do so hard that your throat gets achy, your body shakes, you are dripping snot everywhere, your eyes feel ripped at the edges from all the wiping, the linens around you are wet. You try everything you can to imagine yourself in a different place, a different person, a different story. You give up, deflated, a  slop human mush on a lunch try bed, and sleep. That was the sound in the air with the Valentines Hot Air Balloon. The animal sounds of a child at night. Painted Balloons sound beautiful- they sound like cartoons and donuts and bubbles. Together we made that small room shake with our big feelings.

being a human is hard

More often than not I feel closer to a fuzzy creature situation than a real live human being body person. 

I am assuming most humans feel this way in their own way?

I suppose I know how to inhabit a body fairly well, being a mover for a living, being a figure painter and all, you know really "seeing" mine and others bodies. 

But emotionally my body feels like this tangle of fibers-threads and yarn and twine, ribbon, floss, wire, feathers, dust, Easter grass, stray hairs, wool, cassette tape ribbon, cotton balls, burlap and a million other textures all woven and ripped apart over and over creating a gritty colorful but overwhelming mass.

It's like if you performed open heart surgery on a vacuum cleaner bag that's been vacuuming around for eternity. 

At the bottom is all the heavy stuff.

Marbles, broken glass flecks, quarters, googley eyes, bobby pins, nail clippings, staples, lost buttons, twisted earrings, other things too that I'm not interested in figuring out yet.

I had this experience my whole life where I look in the mirror and I am baffled that I have a face that's in order. I describe it to friends like Mr. Potato Head. That I feel like my eye is in my ear and my nose is on my head like a hat and my mouth is in my eye hole...

I am not the most private or secretive person ever, so that's, I think why I am so jaw droopingly shocked, it just feel like this huge mis-match. Like I want the exterior self to reflect whats true.

How symmetrical and in order the face and body appear feels severely misleading. 

I wanna just have a disclaimer, or an animal costume I can wear. Today I am actually a backwards polyester zebra with garbage disposal hooves and a broken zipper mouth.

architecture and dream space

I had nightmares all night long. 

One of the only images I was able to recall was this dirty soggy mattress, squeezed in along the side of my moms old house. My sisters and I had to hose it off, there were tiny bugs crawling all over it, I used a white plastic tool in attempt to keep the crawling bugs off me.  

Everything was drippy and wet cement and yard smell.

Once the mattress was de-bugged the idea was to get in in the car, on the ferry, to then move it into a room. One of us would have a new bed. 

Behind me was the backyard, all cement with a half empty green swimming pool. Perhaps we fished the mattress out of there. Across the surface of the pool grew those little wiggly tad pools.  The blue slide still stood there with its aluminum ladder bolted in the cement and the sun faded tongue dropping off into the deep end. 

Squeezed into the rectangle space along with our bodies, the drippy mattress with the bug waterfall, were slabs and slabs of sod that desperately needed to be planted and watered in the new yard. 

People kept coming and going, it was hard to find help to get that drenched mattress moved though the scraping walled space along the side of the stucco house.

I remember feeling exhausted after the mattress was loaded up and ready to go, but we couldn't afford not to go back and get all the green slices of grass. The ferry trip across was too far, and to go and come back, they would have all turned brown and useless.

My older sister and I were directing our little sisters, trying to get them to help us. 

My hands were cold and I knew baby kittens crawled around inside the garage.

I don't know where my mom was, maybe waiting across the water,  for the bed and the front yard to arrive.

A.W.A.R.D.S. SHOW

I took the ferry back to Seattle today to see my friends show. I had so much pink and black luggage it was ridiculous. 

My all time favorite thing is to drink the horrible coffee and mix it with the horrible hot coco upstairs in the ferry cafe. When I found out the hot coco machine was out of the powder mix and only hot water came out I decided to grab a Frappachino from the mini fridge case and mix that with the coffee. I really wanted to like the lukewarm ferry beverage. It was in reality, outside of my ferry coco obsession world, very bad. 

I was home long enough to try and get my VHS player back in action, it got a cord switcharoo thing that makes my brain hurt. I pushed buttons, pulled out and plugged in cords for about 40 minutes solid before my friend came back (who had just dropped me off) and we headed to On The Boards to see the A.W.A.R.D.S. show. 

I barely got in to see it. They were technically sold out, I was so nervous I would have to walk down the street, sit in some depressingly gross restaurant alone and wait, while my friends watched Ricki Mason and the rest dance. 

Thank god I got a seat. Ricki was first and it was fantastic. I know when I'm watching I am absorbing it in this untrained eye sorta way. I think about all the ways in which one can see visual art and depending on your understanding of it, the seeing can become more in tune, or it can just be a sorta static feedback situation. Whenever I see "modern dance" these days I think about painting. How I don't have the vocabulary to talk about it- I try and do this thing in my brain like translating a foreign language through the filter of my first language and trying to match all the similar words together. 

I'm thinking of the game "Memory" where you flip over the cardboard square and see and duck and later you have to find it again when you randomly flip over its mate. It's sorta like that but one is like say a cardboard thing and the other is like a feeling you had next to a doorway when you were seven and just threw up. But maybe they are talking about the same thing or dealing with the similar problem.  The space between the two is confusing. It scares me, thinking about bodies talking about things that I would paint about. I think certain modern dancers I have seen recently are brave. I saw "ALASKA" at On The Boards not too long ago and I cried hard about the bravery. Ricki's piece was like that too.

Painting you are removed, you don't even have to show up at your opening. You can say whatever and it's outside of you in this way that you can just dismiss it if you want. You can spend so much time alone with it. It could never have a viewer.  What I mean is with dance, you are breathing and your face is in there, you cannot get way from what your making- and if it's terribly vulnerable and disgusting and skinless, your doing that and I don't think you can get away from it. It's in your muscles and cells and bones and hairs. It seems overwhelming.

I feels terrifying. I would perhaps be able to modern dance if I could leave my face at home.

Bodies and water

I've been drinking water all day. I'm not super healthy these days, I got pretty sick in Amsterdam and have been doing everything in my power to get well.
I made it though my show there alright, but it was not fun. I've been taking it easy with my mom the last couple days. We caught the ferry over to the island right after my Homo for the Holidays show Saturday night. I packed up the zillions of small and large sparkly things as quick as I could. I just wanted to be across the water and turn into a more solidified human-type shape. Being ill is my least favorite, my asthma is killer in the cold and sadly the running outdoors has come to a halt.

This morning my mom and I scraped frost off her windshield with an Odwalla bottle and a paint stir stick. At the end of her very steep street was a girl standing on the side of the road. We were out in the middle on nowhere so I rolled my window down and asked if she wanted a ride, she did. It was like 20 degrees outside, man, that's like my worst nightmare. I hate being cold so much.
She was a sophomore that slept in an missed her bus. She told us everyone at her school was either into doing a sport or drugs. When we pulled into the high school parking lot past all the yellow school buses lined up in rows I had to try real hard to not let the nauseating memories of Southern California Public HIGH SCHOOL seep into my current day self. I seriously had to shake around and make noises to keep those feeling from creeping back in. It was horrendous the kind of armour I had to wear back then. ugh it was unbearable.

We met my moms friend for breakfast at the type of place I loathe for breakfast. As an non-egg, milk and meat eater, I ordered oatmeal, and thought about fruit an the hitchhiker.
Whenever I am confronted with high school-ness I remember how lucky I am to have survived it, I hope those kids in there know that *this* is on the other side-a life just waiting to be filled with themselves, all the parts they couldn't afford to be then, all the pieces too fragile, unique, complex, terrible, loving, talented...

On the way home from the meaty "Sporty's" experiance we noticed the water in the harbor was frozen. The sun was bright and shining down on the still water, with little boats stuck in, like tall red straws in a giant blue ICEE.

On Vashon Island

I just listened to the movie Julie and Julia with my mom tonight. She watched it and drank red wine, I was turned away from the screen, painting but sat on the floor, right next to the couch, working and every now and again saying "wait, what just happened?" Anyways I though I should blog, 'cause that's what the woman in the movie did. She began cooking and found a sense of self and purpose and blogged about her cooking adventures with Julia Childs book every day. So I thought, gee I can do that, I mean not cook, but you, write stuff.

I'm working on this painting right now, I have three figures down, all of them are super different from one another, it's like a they all exist in separate realities. One is so Alice Neel it's not even funny, it just came out like that. I'm going to sleep on it in a minute here and see what happens tomorrow. There is one figure that's particularly good that of course came out in like one second, but she doesnt have a body, just a head and and a really long Maddonna ponytail, theres not much space for a body, I mean no space, hum, she's the best though.

My mom and I went to a film screening tonight called "After the Storm". It was so fantastic and super funny. It was here on Vashon Island at a randoms house, full on random Vashon hippie, artists, teachers, musicians, filmmakers, etc. One woman didn't want to drink out of a plastic cup. I ate like a million grapes and laughed so loud at parts in the film that no one else laughed at. It was about this group of Broadway type New York fags who hold auditions in New Orleans for kids to put on their own version of "Once on This Island" at a community center in New Orleans that they get up and running again, as it was never re-opened after Katrina.

The kids were so fantastic, the NYC peeps were hilarious to me working with the kids and it just felt SO GOOD to see these super queer teens being held in a space that was safe. It was their world- Drama! They where fry to sing and dance and act and be so overflowing with themselves and their talent. It was really special and beautiful. Being a teen is horrible, to have any type of creative outlet is priceless. I connected so strongly with the footage of them in rehearsals, just working their asses off, giving it everything they got. I think this is why I became a workaholic, I just threw myself into painting and drawing and making. It was important to work hard at it, and took me into me.