I seriously have problems. I’m in hell right now. It’s such
a simple, stupid hell, the kind of hell where nothing really bad is happening,
I’m in no real danger, yet my anger—my reaction—towards every little thing,
makes me want to throw and break something big, something that will make a
crash, something that will make a loud sound. Fuck! Anything. I just want this emotion out of me.
I write. I paint. I laugh with friends. Sometimes, I cry (by
myself, or with friends.) I try to find the lesson in everything. Before I find
the lesson, I talk shit about how hard the getting-to-the-lesson is. I
complain. That’s how I deal with life. That’s what I do. I’ll do something
better when I get better at life.
If I don’t get to see my friends often enough, then I have
my writing, or my painting, or my crying. If I don’t feel like crying, then I
have my painting, or my writing, or my laughing with friends.
This brings me to this evening’s hell. I just wanted to
paint. I’d done my laundry for the first time in a month. I’d cleaned my entire
house. I’d convinced myself I was over last Friday night (last Friday, I had
another emotional blow out and found myself C-shaped on my couch. Surprise,
surprise, my special talent has found me another toxic work environment that has
a way of stressing me out so much I seem to need to cry to express my grief. I
could go into all of that now, the work bull shit, but I’ll eventually find a
way to complain about that later, so let me stay on task) and all I wanted to
do was to fucking paint.
But I can’t paint. What’s the problem? Seems simple enough.
Get out your oil paints, put the plastic drop cloth over the carpet in your new
apartment, open the new fan you bought to blow out the turpentine fumes, put a
light on it all, get out the jar to hold your brushes, get the turp jar with
the spiral coil thingy to wash each brush as you go and mix color, get your
gloves, so all the turps and oils don’t seep into your skin, figure out where
to put the wet painting when it’s done, so you, the klutz, won’t knock into it,
knocking it over, or won’t brush up against it and get it on your clothes once
you clean up.
Oh, and change into your painting clothes (because you are a
fucking single-minded-in-the-zone-maniac when you paint and everything around
you will get destroyed if you can’t get to your color, your paint, your clean
brush, the new brush, the tube with the white, the black, or the other color
fast enough, to mix it up enough, or to get it on the canvas fast enough… GET
it, NOW! Get into your weird zone where you become an ambidextrous freak and hold
paint brushes in your mouth, chase color with your mind, feel need from the
brush strokes, and catch up to the happy accident, and fix it, and then move
into a new explosion of color as the canvas tells you now what it needs and
marries color with accident).
WAIT! Fuck off everything! You still don’t have your studio
set up in your new apartment yet, even though your new apartment isn’t that
new. You’ve been in another toxic work swirl and have been neglecting your own
creative needs. You haven’t figured out, logistically, how it’s supposed to
work in this new place.
Remember what happened the last time you felt the urge to
paint, a couple months ago? You couldn’t find a drop cloth. The sun was going
down and the only natural light was in the kitchen so you found yourself
hovering over the kitchen sink and cleaning out a marinara jar from the trash can
for your turpentine because the lid to your spiral coil jar thingy, which is
where you usually put your turps, which is your usual best friend to cleaning
your brushes during the process, was sealed shut and you were fucked, because
you would have had to drive a half of an hour to the art store to get a new one.
Is it all coming back to you now? How you got paint all over
the kitchen counter. How you started to get high on the turpentine fumes
because you didn’t have the proper ventilation and didn’t open enough windows,
and your new place doesn’t have the air flow of the last place and you didn’t
already have it all set up to protect you against maniac you.
Do you remember crying to Ava because your crazy couldn’t
understand how everything wasn’t all ready set up like at your old place, your old
home of almost 14 years, the home those fucking butt head neighbors pushed you
out of. (Separation anxiety much?) Remember how Ava told you that you’d figure
it out?
Yet, you still haven’t. It’s still a mystery how it will
logistically work in this new place and you feel like an ass for having such a
small problem.
Oh, how about the clean up? Was it fucking miserable trying
to figure out where to put all your shit away, back, or where better it should
go, since it doesn’t have a spot yet, none of it, not like the studio you’d set
up in the old place where it was all open, all there, all ready to leave a
painting wet, the chemicals undisturbed. Shelves, time, lights, work, effort,
thinking, planning, years, convenience, had all gone into your old small studio
space off your old small kitchen in the old place and this space had handed you
your crazy inspiration on a convenience train. You could paint within less than
two minutes of inspiration.
Now, 20 minutes later, inspiration is wearing thin and you
are in a fucking logistical hell.
Before, that last time, when you were painting in the
kitchen, was it smart to bring turpentine into the kitchen and place it right
next to the dishes you eat off of, the counter you cut food on, and pretty
close to the stove? (Just curious.)
Move on.
How’d tonight work out? Was it fun trying to hunt down the
plastic gloves you never found? How about that fan you bought three weeks ago for
ventilation (you were finally thinking ahead and trying to get things set up).
It was good, yeah, with this fan that you left in the package and had to cut out
of the cardboard box to set up in a makeshift spot in the middle of the living
room? That was pretty cool, eh, how it rendered itself useless when you turned
it up to the highest speed, the speed it would take to blow the turp fumes out,
and it fell backwards on your carpet because it’s own velocity was to much to
keep itself balanced on your living room carpet? What a hoot. Oh, how you
didn’t laugh.
What about trying to get the right lighting? That was way
more fun. After you were already pissed off about trying to find your oil
pastels, because getting out all your oil paints seemed like a bigger hell then
the inspiration of the need for immediate creation, that was fan-fucking-tastic
that you didn’t remember your oil paint reserves were low and you only have the
obnoxious colors left, the ones that would only be perfect for painting a 1980s
puked-up disco. Go purple and peach.
It was also pretty cool how that new light you purchased, the
one you bought to replace that old one you loved so much (the one that got
broken in your move to Colorado), which was the kind of light that is just for
these sort of occasions (late night painting in the dark), started flickering,
making you feel like you were about to have a seizure. It would have seemed
silly that the new light bulb in that new light would shatter, as you tried to
tighten it, and keep it from flickering, but, still, it did.
It broke into enough pieces to get into your wine, get onto
your couch, get all over your carpet, and speckle on the black drop cloth,
where you can’t make out the difference between the broken bulb pieces and the flecks
of white paint amongst the other paint flecks that have collected over the
years, so you can’t deny the pleasure in that, shattered light bulb every
where.
All this before you even got to paint (pastel) even one
stroke of paint? Way to go! No, really. Good job. You really got right to your
painting, didn’t you. You had you some fun. And you didn’t even cry, or call a
friend? You only wanted to purposely break more things and wish you had a
casino wall to throw a high ball glass against? (No wonder you’re writing.)
It would seem even sillier that the bulb to your other other
light, the clamp one, the one that made it through three moves and that’s
worked in some of your worst need-some-damn-light pinches, worked fine just yesterday
but was all now, tonight, suddenly burned out when that light was supposed to
be your last please-I-fucking-need-some-light-on-my-sitch back up. (Good times.)
Painting, it seems simple enough, doesn’t it? Inspiration
hits, and away you go. But, if you are me, if you are one part organized and
one part crazed, and if you need some sort of order for your spontaneity, for
your inspiration, if you are intensely visual and you require everything you
need to create to be in view, to be available, to be ready, to be there in the
instant you think—you need—so that your crazed but inspired process is not
interrupted by the little things, like breaking lights, potential paint,
turpentine, and/or chemical spills on the carpet, or by falling fans, misplaced
tools (brushes, paints, gloves, etc.), changing clothes, then the process isn’t
that simple.
When I paint, sometimes I don’t know where I go. It’s just
me. I could care less about shit I knock over, what I’ve eaten, need to eat, if
I’ve eaten, what time it is, and so on… The canvas, the paint, and the process
they take over, if order is there before inspiration hits.
If I don’t have order before inspiration hits, then I can’t
tell the canvas what I am thinking and I can’t hear what the canvas is telling
me back. I don’t get to have the conversation inspiration allows me. Instead, all
I can hear is the chaos of what I’m wrestling with in order to attempt to get
to my inspiration. The breaking lights, the misplaced drop cloths, the stupid
shit not there, the other shit not here, the more shit not working or not in
the right place, those logistics, being fucked up… to me, that’s hell. Total HELL.
It feels like I am going crazy because I can not get at what makes me sane.
Problem is, I just need to figure out how to set up a studio
space in this new place. I like this place. I do. It’s not like the fucking
condo bat cave with the weird lingering energy. Not at all.
This place feels comfortable to me. I even made a carpet
snow angel the day I found this place with Samantha’s help. After my toxic day
at work is done, this place says, “Come in. You’re home. Breathe. You’ll be
fine.” But, since I don’t have a studio space yet, since I can’t figure out
which will be better, carving out a chunk out of the living room, where the
carpet is, where I’ll so fuck the carpet up, or taking out the whole not-really-a-dining
room space, where I now do my writing, I will probably remain in hell. (No.
I’ll get it. I just don’t got it yet. Nesting takes time.)
Again, a small problem in the scheme. But, in my stupid
crazy, it’s a problem. In the scheme of things, I’m an idiot. I have people in
my life who are sick, who are fighting with their health to just reach a
balance where getting through a day is hell.
Finding the right climate is paramount.
By the way, my parents are moving to a warmer climate to
ensure my dad’s continued health and to ensure my mother’s ability to make it,
just in case, and another friend is having some incredibly difficult health
issues and these are two other cans I can’t open because it’s easier to be
shallow and hate my can’t-paint-hell then to remind myself of what an asshole I
am for my trivial hell.
Yeah, pulling the normal card on this one. It’s easier to be
pissed at my life than to feel how scared I am and worried for the people I
love (mentioned and not). So, I have to consol myself. I might be a little
crazy. But, I can only forgive myself for letting these things get to me since hell
is relative.
