Girl is an Island

In response to The Beach.

Girl is an Island, detail
Girl is an Island, gouache and traces of pencil on bristol paper, 10 1/2" x 13 1/2"

The Beach

In response to Bits and Pieces (Real Bodies)

She is walking through downtown. It’s the kind of downtown with buildings that rarely go above two floors and never five. She hears a band playing in a parking lot and goes to watch. She is really, really high. A dog runs up to her. She scratches it behind the ears.

It is hot. It has been so, so hot. It’s getting hotter. She was wearing a very thin hooded sweatshirt but now she takes that off. She had a two-piece bathing suit on under her clothes but now she takes her pants off too. She is sweating. She hates sweating.

Nobody in the parking lot is really looking at her because some other people have already taken their clothes off too and by now it’s sort of old news.

Bits and Pieces (Real Bodies)

In response to Full.

Bits and Pieces (Real Bodies), ink on paper, 5 1/2" x 8 1/2"

Army

In response to Dependents.

Army, magazine on colored paper, approx. 9" x 9"

Dependents

(In response to As Above So Below. While the writing for this project has been non-fiction up till now, the following post is fiction and all proceeding posts will be fiction too, unless otherwise noted.)

“He leans on her too much,” I heard my grandfather say through the vents, soon after my dad had left. “I can’t imagine she has much regard for that.”

I was shocked. I got out of bed and put my ear to the ceiling, trying to listen more but my grandmother only said “Mmm, well, only the Lord knows, I suppose,” before they started talking about some TV show. And then they left the kitchen and went to bed.

My dad had just left after visiting my grandparents and me on the coast. I didn’t think he leaned on me. I always thought I leaned on him. I’d lived with him for a few months after I dropped out of college, helping out by mowing the lawn and washing the floors and stuff, but I felt bad I was mooching so much so I asked my grandparents if I could stay at their place instead. They always seemed like they wanted company, and they were only an hour away from the city anyhow.

I didn’t know what my grandparents were talking about. I took out a bag of chips from the stash under my dresser and sat on the floor eating them while I texted him: Dad, do you feel like you lean on me for things? I got a call from him a second later but I knew he’d be driving so I didn’t answer it. Call me when you’re off the road, I don’t want you hurt, I texted. Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you worry, I added. Just think about it while you’re driving.

As Above So Below

In response to Reversals.

As Above So Below, ink on bristol paper, approx. 4" x 6"

Reversals

If the literary critic Edmund Wilson is to be believed, San Diego was at one point in time the suicide capital of the United States. "On the West Coast today, the suicide rate is twice that of the Middle Atlantic coast, and the suicide rate of San Diego has become since 1911 the highest in the United States." He wrote in 1932.

"The Americans still tend to move westward, and many drift southward toward the sun. San Diego is situated in the extreme southwestern corner of the United States; and since our real westward expansion has come to a standstill, it has become a kind of jumping-off place." Wilson, in a fit of morbid fatalism, chalked some of this up to an attraction of both physically and mentally ill to San Diego. "The sufferers have a tendency to keep moving away from places, under the illusion that they are leaving the disease behind. And when they have moved to San Diego, they find they are finally cornered, there is nowhere farther to go."

Unsurprisingly, San Diego is no longer the suicide capital of the country, and California is ranks 43rd in the latest figures, so I think it's pretty safe to say Wilson might've been a little melodramatic.

Migrator I & II

In response to Shut.

Migrator, watercolor on watercolor paper, approx. 5" x 3.5"

Migrator II, watercolor on watercolor paper, approx. 5" x 4"

Exposure

Churches early and present talk of "purifying fires" but I always preferred the idea of a purifying cold, myself. Cold is, in many ways, a distiller, an equalizer, forcing on the same heavy coats, nullifying all individual smell, and making dance out of everybody's breath. When I say cold, of course, I mean cold as in a low temperature, and I do not mean rain or snow or wind. Those romantic symbols of winter are about as awesome as Christmas music: It's mildly exhilarating the first time it comes along, but even then the dread of the upcoming months is creeping through your skull.

I never thought the cold was quite as annoying as was the warmth that went into it. I put on four careful layers to head out into negative digit-weather, but soon I enter a warm store and it feels like Texas in July. I don't think it's a coincidence that frozen body parts don't really start hurting until they're unthawed. Cold is numbing, it's the warming up that's painful.

God Doesn't Believe in Miracles I & II

In response to Forever.

God doesn't believe in miracles I, ink and watercolor on watercolor paper, approx. 5" x 5"

God doesn't believe in miracles II, ink and watercolor on watercolor paper, approx. 5" x 5"

Shut

In response to Metaphor For An Urban Dwelling

In the last thirty-five years, the median square footage for new construction of one-family homes in the US have increased from 1,525 square feet in 1973 to 2,215 square feet in 2008. Meanwhile, the average household size dropped from 3.14 in 1970 to 2.59 in 2000.

I know. It's not a great shock that houses have gotten larger or that families have gotten smaller. And yet still lies this notion of not enough space. Before moving this summer, I carted some things down to my parents house, and went out to the garage to put them in storage tubs. I was only able to fit everything in by throwing away old objects I had seen fit to store for posterity when I graduated from high school. Only four years later, pretty much all if it got chucked in either the trash or the Goodwill bin. Perhaps I will come back in four years and repeat the process, to only be discontinued if someday I manage to buy a house of my own to store my useless junk in.

We have carefully built shelves in the garage, supporting an orderly system of these catalogued tubs which go to the ceiling, and yet our garage is still bursting with the accumulated weight of all of our things.

To give credit to my family, it is the home base for six people in a three-bedroom house that has no attic or basement. To give more credit to them, so much of this crap is mine,. I was the kind of child that gathered unremarkable rocks in boxes and refused to ever throw them out, and I admit I have only changed a little over the years. When I had finished my work in the garage, a cardboard box on another set of shelves caught my eye: "Casey's 10th grade school papers". I remember compiling that box's contents very well, and I look forward to going through it someday. Someday, of course, probably not today. Even if "today" I happen to actually be at my parents' house, with nothing to do.

Forever

In response to Circuit

I feel like one of the standard questions children ask about God is "If God made everybody, who made God?" Nobody. "Well, than what came before God?" Nothing. "How does that work?" It just does/don't ask questions/etc are common and unhelpful answers, certainly. But also common are reasonable theological answers about the eternity of God, the lack of comprehension that humans have to understand God's true nature, etc. Which, of course, goes right over the head of a six-year-old. It did for me, anyway.

These days I find myself pretty okay with God's existence and what it means to me. But I find myself asking about the universe now. "How is the universe infinite?" "How can anything be infinite?" "What happened before the Big Bang?" I've heard and read a few reasonable scientific answers to these questions, none of which I could relay and explain to you, as they too go right over my head. And I wonder if as I grow older I've simply traded one set of trusted adults for another.

(On an unrelated note, "Ultimate fate of the universe" has its own Wikipedia page. There is, however, a disclaimer at the top that the article "needs additional citations for verification".)

In some Sunday school classes, a teacher demonstrates eternity by drawing a short chalk line to symbolize our lives on Earth. And then a long one which goes off the chalkboard "and goes on forever and ever!"

I don't think they have it right. I don't think the analogy works. I've never had a problem with the idea of God, but I've always been skeptical of the chalk line. Because if something doesn't have an ending, then it stands to reason it never had a beginning either.

Metaphor for an Urban Dwelling

In response to Building.

Metaphor for an Urban Dwelling, watercolor on paper, approx. 6" x 6"

Circuit

In response to Trains.

Circuit, ink and skim latte on paper, approx. 7" x 6"

Building

This is in response to Home Is a Shifty Notion.

Last night I sat down on my bed in my apartment to do some reading, and I heard some music playing very faintly. It sounded like it was coming from outside, in my building’s courtyard, and it also sounded like a cappella music. I was almost able to make out the last shimmering chords of Biebl’s “Ave Maria”, after which it went into something more contemporary. I couldn’t hear the lyrics and I couldn’t make out the tune.

It's hard to underline how important that was, but I'll try: I fucking love a cappella music. I’ve loved it since middle school, and it used to be a huge part of my life. I’d sung in groups and attended concerts and all that bullshit. I left most of it behind when I moved to Portland years ago.

So when I heard it here in my New York City apartment building I opened my window to find out where it was coming from, and the music didn’t get any clearer. That’s when I realized it was coming through the wall from the building shoved up next to mine.

I’ve heard the person on the other side of the wall every now and then, just barely. Muffled thumps and the like. But then last night I heard their music that just happened to be music I love, and I imagined this person’s soul as it were, sharing a wall with mine. I imagined this person as a future friend/lover, I imagined this person’s quiet kitchen warming a quiet meal. I didn’t imagine this person as male or female, like I often do, I imagined this person as a person. I imagined the two of us in cutaway pictures of apartments where everyone lives together but everyone lives alone. I imagined the two of us knocking on walls to communicate. I imagined playing an a cappella song of my own as a signal back to this person. I imagined us being at least something like neighbors. I imagined us progressing, building towards home.

Home is a Shifty Notion

In response to Dual(ing).

Home is a Shifty Notion, watercolor on watercolor paper, approx. 3.5" x 5.25"

Trains

In response to Cell Study; Binding Study (I think I responded to both, really)

The Western United States was built on the railroad, but now nobody there takes the train.

There were 14.7 million Amtrak rides in the West last year, and 24.0 million in the Northeast. Those are figures don’t include regional rail, and that’s a region that has less people.

When I was in college in the middle part of this decade, I took the train up and down the Pacific Northwest corridor quite a bit, and I never saw a train car even half full. There’s an odd loneliness to taking the train, where you can walk through the station and into the car and sit down and look out the window without ever having to talk to someone, so long as you purchased your ticket beforehand. As opposed to, say, an airport, where you have to get checked by twelve people just to get in the goddamn thing that’s going to take you somewhere. Even on a bus, you have to get your ticket checked and wade through dozens of people to get to your seat (And maybe it’s just me, but every Greyhound I’ve been on is still packed to the gills).

On a train, you just sit.

Cell Study; Binding Study

In response to How Not To Be A Smoker
(You can choose one, or both; I did them one right after the other.)


Cell Study, watercolor on bristol paper, approx. 3.25" x 3"




Binding Study, watercolor on bristol paper, approx 5" x 4.75"

Dual(ing)

This is in response to Boulder + Bloodfruit

When I was ten years old, in 1998, my mom and stepdad and I moved from Morden, Manitoba, Canada, to Eugene, Oregon, USA. I’ve gone back to Canada several times a year since, as my entire family’s still there, excepting my stepsiblings who joined us in Oregon years later.

There’ve been certain times since 1998, while in either country, that I've felt homeless, lost, a half-citizen of two countries, neither of which quite fit. This is, of course, unadulterated bullshit.

A closer reality is the opposite: I actually have two homes, and two countries I can fit into my identity and claim privilege to, and most of the time, “homeless” is not as adequate as a description of my nationalistic feelings as is, “this is fucking sweet”.

As long as I’m a nomad, I’m fine. If America ever elects Bush III and reinstates the draft, I can jaunt back up to Canada. If Stephen Harper ever guts the social health system, I can merrily tear up my Social Insurance Number card and set up shop in Massachusetts. And if global warming nukes the planet and turns Oregon into Waterworld, I can make a new home in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, where real estate prices, by the way, are marvelously low. And I can vote in both countries. It’s a good life.

"Boulder + Bloodfruit"

Boulder + Bloodfruit, pastel pencil on bristol, approx. 4.5" x 6.5 "