Hope and the hairball

We begin again. OH how I LOVE new beginnings!!! I have experienced 43 New years, hundreds of virgin sketchbooks, deaths and absences, break ups and promises, symbolic acts and programs completed...bring it on. Beginnings and ends.

With each shift or split from what was before - comes hope. Yummy, innocent, eyes just opening hope. Hope. The expectation that something good WILL happen.

I'm not too full of the Auld Lang Sein thing. Should old acquaintance be forgot? Well, my thought is if they ARE forgotten - there might be a darn good reason for it. And, if they are not forgot, the point is irrelevant.

As my old friend Urbano once, said....

TAGLIARE LA CORDA! (Cut the chord)

You hope it's going to be ok.

Good bye 2011, hello 2012!

The juicy potential, the fastidious structuring, that 'wrap me up in the coziest blanket' feeling of having done nothing wrong...yet...because you're starting from this very point. 

Nothing wrong??! Oh oh....OOOOOOOhhhhhh!

God that feels good.

NOW hope yourself forward...it's time to reach out a bit, put your best foot, a first foot forward, do something new or in a potentially better way. 

You have to get rid of the "I can't do it" first though, so you put it in the garbage disposal and listen, sipping your three olive martini as those pesky insecurities get hacked to bits and washed out to sea. First like a cat chocking then like it purrrrrrring.

Great hairball of self doubt be gone! 

 

But what if that self doubt is more like a fire iron than carrot peelings?

What if when you turn the disposal switch you hear this raspy chocking death CLUNK as this great symbolic act destroys another appliance and is regurgitated as Godzilla instead of going down as obedient carrot puree? Not another faux pas!?

Now what?

You are frozen - because for WHAT EVER reason, you really expected that THIS time your hope, if it had to be dependent on the annihilation of something else and or had to be regurgitated, would manifest as that familiar plastic Godzilla holding a plate of fried ice cream and 2 spoons at the end of an awesome sushi dinner...not as the beast himself waddling out of the sea ready to wreak havoc on that dark model city set that is your life. 

Whoops, and "Get out of my way!" - you shout but your voice has vanished, and the sound track is cranked up.

You are mortified and your translucency belies your cool.

And you've got cold hands.

 And now you've got cold feet.

And like an over stuffed armchair the reptile is suddenly full. He's mangled and mashed those cables and wires, he's unplugged the entire city...he's gobbled up hope, reason, good judgement and strength and you are alone again having been plunged into a darkness reeking of reptile flatulence.

Singing sometimes works, but not this time.

Stop, drop and roll... nope -

this is the 'Godzilla Self', not a fire drill.

So you try to go back and hide in the pre dawn sparkle of the new, reinventing wheel after wheel for those first feet...if you cant hop hope maybe you can roll it. If you stay there, in the dark, the sweet chirping that accompanies your hope is just that, and you don't have to see that Godzilla will have soon eaten all your crickets...and your city.

Damn it, you think...damn it, not again.    

Go back, what went wrong? Maybe instead of trying to chop to pieces that "I can't do it" you should have used a pen and just crossed out the t. Why do you always have to do things the hard way?

So you mark it up and then take a step, you and your butterfly net and #15 reptile repellant - and it's bright, and intimidating and you look TOTALLY ridiculous...and the hope turns to fear but you're off...beyond the beginning...

go

TAGLIARE LA CORDA

We're turning Godzilla into a giant plastic duck.

twas the morning before the night before Christmas...

Behind the catsup roses...

There you are, behind that minted glass, that honeycomb slab, that watermelon oyster -it is you.

And again you are there behind my sleepy head at midnight, in bed, in a car, in the middle of California nowhere...in my dreams.

There, in that booth, at that table, behind that light, in the dark as that Liberachi toothed hormone drenched 3 olives please cocktail does this "wonder twin power activate" trick in my throat right at that exact second... 

- the second I see you and walk forward and smile and put my lips to that brim and sip... the sip becomes a brick and I am left choking on large chunks of my own stupidity. 

Looser. Idiot. Reject. Duh.

In this compromised state I imagine the never to manifest elegance of these repelled advances as one bead after another flits across the icy surface of your taught body like a broken string of pearls  

all then wrapped in foils, coveted - and devoured later by some imaginary audience who compete for trophies of this poignant tale when that leaded velvet curtain drops

And then back. There you are again, that toothy moment has let go of your jugular, the drama and the oysters and the pearls have receded along with the expectation that this story will ever have a red velvet curtain at all.

So we sit, and I photograph you through the frosty water jug and fall in love with this new portrait as together we make tiny catsup roses in the bottom of a silver cup.

You choose, in or out?

I'm having a conversation with a friend about expression.

 My friend says he thinks about it as coming from somewhere deep inside, and not maybe from out there - like something you might capture..

In or out...NOT to be confused with in AND out... have to make a choice.

I think thats part of it but...the point where it turns into an expression from something else - a notion, a concept or feeling -that point of conception, that split is the part I'm really interested in.

 I think of it as a decision.

Some of us choose to articulate glittered infused fluff into snow drifts surrounded by pink haired ladies eating giant slabs of meat in faded pink leathered booths.

Some drive very fast in circles in varying degrees of uncomfortable temperatures after long midnight or pre dawn pilgrimages to places away from other places where this sort of thing is ok.

Some of us are weathered and brown, wrinkles stretched to our ears where the all in one jumpsuit meets the base of the ear muffs.  Flags in one hand, coffee in the other, yellow teeth exposed. It's 6am and its cold, but and the air is full of fumes, and the rumble of engines, and you're surrounded by the thing that comes before speed, lust for control, camaraderie, anticipation of that edge, and in this case bagels too. 

You chose opulence while many have nothing. You chose and you strutted and you rolled in your own butter filled dreams. You are you and your expressions were intended to impress...who? Whoever you feel less than. 

Or somebody else chooses and picks your concept and displays it for all to see. 

But a concept is like a thought like a feeling, and comes before expression...sort of, doesn't it?

Expression...

the act of representing something in a medium. Something that you actively  put out that symbolizes something else. There are so many things it means. Here it is defined more thoroughly.

I choose this. I captured and chose it and now I'm sharing it. I love it. I took about 100 pictures of this same thing but this was the one I choose.

The what, the what does it express is up to you. You are the other half of the expression. 

Same here.

I made this. If i were to have put words to it, I would say it symbolizes being too close to see what a thing is. It symbolizes blindness and heat and expectation and maybe intense pain or pleasure.

But thats MY take, and it's only my take right now. The other half is you.

One of us then will die first and the expression will stop.

Aaah the indifference of death.

But first, there's allot more people to rub shoulders with, flight plans to create and honey to share...................