Yesterday morning I woke up thinking about my second girlfriend. It’s not uncommon, I wax poetic about our thing. I think we worked nicely. I think she’s with another guy, somone who strikes me as very normal. We had a sweet thing, and I think I might be painting for her. I read in Philip Guston’s book of lectures that everyone’s gotta have someone, someone to paint for. Van Gogh had Theo, he said, and he paints for Martha, (I think is his wife’s name). Well shoot, I want to be great; who am I painting for?
There was so much pain in Tallahassee. I was a shitty adolescent and selfish sometimes, and I clashed with my family and dad and I were having a hard time making it work. Our poodle dog stopped eating when we first moved there, and came over with Addison’s Disease, and her insides kind of bubbled and sloshed in imbalances, topically expressing in nightly incontinences. I think I was in college when she bloated, and I think my mom called me and I went to the veterinary emergency center and walked the dog around the building just sobbing. You could see black and blue through her milky skin, and she was flushed of complexion like she’d aged almost all the way.
I get this newsletter from Rusty Blazenhoff and in it was listed websites created by Danielle Baskin. One of them was a domain name checker/ marriage advice site. The trick was you type in your name and the persons name and the engine checks if the domain is taken. Some mornings I’m really thinking about this old relationship I had. I typed in her name and mine, a kind taboo feeling. The domains were available, so it said we should.
I don’t think I’ll get married. Not for the foreseeable future. Truth is I’m a (respectful) dog, with a contagious virus (herpes), who’s got not much time. I don’t feel comfortable with hooking up, famous last words. Any ways, why do I get hung up on this?
I heard from a classmate that Edison didn’t sleep so much as he took cat naps. Her account was that he only cat napped. I want that. I wonder if Edison went through school on a regular schedule, and then sometime afterwards switched to napping only.
Yesterday was a blast. I kicked rocks for three or four hours, got a new phone, (the same model that my poor Grammy has), and checked out a half dozen graphic novels from the library, as well as Freud’s Jokes analysis. No telling if I’m going to read them. Called my mom.
I found a good way to buy things- it’s right when you need them and not before. Without fail buying before you need something is a kind of fortune telling, superstitious thing. I’d asked a friend a few years back if she buys before or what, because she had years of collecting and projects experience, and she didn’t have an answer, and in fact I think I embarrassed her, but behold I think the less variables the better, and I’ve subscribed to the m.o. that if it’s needed it’s needed and not a moment before, so I ran into a couple spots yesterday in sculpting. After kicking rocks for a while (it always feels like you’re rotting just before a big day- tends to), I worked on Ecorche figures, and a couple figures in clay, and I came to needing wanting steel stick epoxy, wire, and sculpey clay, which I procured. Fast forward an hour and I was out again to get some superglue, running through the streets I was having such a joyful day! The light was crepuscular and some (probably wine drunk) gals in tube dresses and pumps, one put out her hand for a high five, and I obliged and she yelled ‘woooo!’, and I thought God I love today; I love you, I should’ve told her I love you. I loved her, and probably her friend.
I sculpted this trans person a few times and yesterday worked on the portrait and the hands, which I hope to modulate on to the figure somehow and cast it, maybe in opaque glass. For all the people saying it’s a ball or it’s a cylinder referring to structures of the face or something, yeah but it’s also a mouth. They’re lips. They’re eyes. Picasso got it. I’m reading DuBois Africa and the World now, and it’s talking about west African sculpture and how it’s better than anything that Europe had ever produced, and yeah, (though now I’m thinking of standing in front of Bernini’s deposition, but that’s a digression). It’s gotta be somehow about the polemic of intellectual capacity- the powers or lack thereof of observation, expressed through reproduction. All this to say I felt better in a kind of automatic modality of making eyes, making the mouth, of this trans portrait, and their body while I was sculpting it too, in an automatic mode, than I would have in a kind of sculpture modality. Well, here I’m trying to dismiss training, right on the coattails of imbibing in it. I learned muscles and all that through Ecorche, and now I’m putting it through the test of making figures. But I felt, connected like a creator, making eyes, (making eye balls, with hole poked into them for the blacks, then baked hard), then eyelids, and a nose, after the skull, and fingers, etc. I felt so far removed from capital S sculpture, in fact it feels like a dirty word writing it. This is heavily influenced by Guston.
I was talking about Guston (this book of his) to my fox Ecorche teacher, and trying to talk up Guston as the mythic person he is and explains himself to be- an intellectual too, and flipped open the book to show pictures of his work, and there it was, his work, pages with a single short fat line, or another page with another single short fat line, and Diane was cool about it, but yeah it’s funny because the essays made those works kind of profound, but there’s kind of so much you can do with a picture plane huh? It’s funny I think sculptors get away with a lot. Like a figure in sculpture seems to be the currency, and you can be successful for sculpting deer or well I don’t know. I probably just don’t know that much about it. Everything’s hard.
I haven’t painted except for a picture of an alligator tied in a knot all summer, and a little bit at the beginning some leftover school work. What’s the point of a summer if you don’t do something completely pointless? (Says Calvin and Hobbes).
I’m supposed to be doing a bunch of writing and drawing for a political cartooning class. The weeks goal is to make an essay, boiled down to a few points, illustrated, and sequenced like a graphic novel. The fodder is ‘something that completely changed you’, and I want to write maybe about herpes. I think it’d be a good idea, considering otherwise I’m getting specific about relationships (o, that girlfriend I had way back when, it’s a little disconcerting tbh). This graphic novel called black hole seems to be about herpes. It’s a virus kind of thing, like a zombie morphism kind of thing, but the whole time reading it I thought herpes herpes. I rented a car down in Florida when I went down for my Grandfather (in-law)’s funeral. On NPR there was a statistician who cited that a common google search preceding young adult suicides is ‘herpes’. It was a relief to hear, it made sense in a way. Am I going to read these graphic novels then, or write, or what?
