mustang sally

shooting Jared and his bad habits.

106 1/2

I am officially scared of you.
You: "Do you like my sign?" (holding a large square carefully lettered and peppered with severe looking little crosses)
Me: "Yeah, Clark, it looks nice"
You: "No, do you like my sign"
Me: "Yeah... good job on it."
You: "Well you know God is having a wedding and if you don't go you can't come...."
You kept going, breathless, shaking that sign at us, The "Christ Saves" vibrating with your punctuation. You, with your huge parka in the middle of the balmy afternoon. You with your unblinking colorless eyes. And we stood there, in our mormon and baptist skins long since shed, immobile, mouths agape.
And then you turned on your heels and walked purposefully away, the sign thrust like a shield in front of you.
The model commented that you were a "scary, scary dude.", advising pepper spray.
I hoisted my camera into the trunk and we left.
I did not cry...
until I got home, tonight, when you hollered at me from the landing about having something you "needed to talk to me about", I pretending that I was on the phone with my mother, "sorry".
"I understand" you clenched, grinding your teeth.
I am shaking, even now.
You, thin and grey and the only person who knows when I come and go.
It takes a crazy to recognize you, dear.
An arsenal of various items to burn and shock Crazy You are on its way, courtesy of the internet, and this lonely pit in my stomach. And I hope you start taking your medication again, because when I am curled in my office at a wee hour I weary of hearing you yell and pitch with fervor at the imaginary somebodys that I know are not in your loft.

one

A really fantastic bit of writing. Made me cry.

Where, vomit-yellow, the lichen crawls
Up the boulder, where the rusty needle
Falls from the pine to pad the earth's silence
Against what intrusive foot may come, you come---
But come not knowing where or why.
Like substance hangs the silence of
The afternoon. Look---you will see
The tiny glint of the warbler's eye, see
The beak, half open, in still gasp, see
Moss on a cliff, where water oozes.

Where or why,
You wonder, wandering, with sweat and pant,
Up the mountain's heave and clamber,
As though to forget and leave
All things, great and small, you call
The Self, and remember only how once
In the moonlit Pacific you swam west, hypnotized
By stroke on stroke, the rhythm that
Filled all the hollow head and was
The only self you carried with you then.

What brought you back?
You can't remember now,
And do not guess that years from now you may not remember
How once---now---on this high ridge, seeing
The sun blaze down on the next and higher horizon,
You turned, and bumbled for some old logging road
To follow, stumbling, down.

Then it all begins again. And you are you.

-Robert Warren Penn

hangups

caution. do not play on or around.

The Freediver and The Dangling Carrot Stigmata

ny times article

This was in the NY Times on this past sunday Feb 15th.

"I'm talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable...is the primary enterprise." -Holland Cotter

This article is worth reading.
And reading again.

There is no sanity in what we do. But how we do it? Well, there is no sanity in that either.

Untitled

Sing your noise
to your headless god
pagan and pink
preaching blood and cold
to the choir.
here I sit silent.
jesus in a pawn shop
and the devil won't bid
on what's left of me.

happy valentines

I am valentine-free for the first time since 1996.
I feel like a bruise.
Took some pictures, ate mac and cheese in bed, IN BED.
warmest place in the house.
doodled me
doodled you.

theft

Morgan

a couple of my favorite handsomes

the door of my new studio

self portrait 2

feb 2

a self portrait a day

feb 1

she only had 5 fingers on her left hand

Done for Sharon for her birthday.