people just float

My childhood was a swift knowledge that I was going to die, perhaps tomorrow, possibly today, a high chance of mortality in the next six seconds. I closed windows to keep bus noises out, rapists and men with mask faces, women made of seashells, and foxes/wolves/wild dogs. Halloween in Portland was a house of dark rooms. Ten foot tall windows hidden behind white curtains and I, crouched underneath the sill, watched witches and Satan gambol past. There are eyes as murderous as tornadoes (another fear, related to basements and Nebraska and TV shows celebrating Natural Disasters). With demons on my mind and a Poe orangutan lurking up every chimney, Halloween was a certain cemetery.

Then, upon growing up in Reformation, Halloween turned into a scimitar triangle shaped like John Calvin's beard. A voice pitched through the nose and Luther booming somewhere Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott! I traipsed in Robin Hood green or skirts longer than my legs and a pearl on my forehead.

Now, Halloween is a brothel and I the Puritan stuck somewhere evil. The first year I moved to Eugene, I overcompensated, draped myself in sheets and a burka. The next year, I covered my hair with plastic snakes and my shoulders with a red dress. This year, my lip is kept decent with a plastic fibered mustache and my legs will go a-walking in jeans. Meanwhile, three blind mice are three 19 year old girls, waving white canes and twenty inches of thigh down 18th Avenue. And behind them lurk the hungry boys, head scarfed pirates, barefoot and boozy. And behind them is a crowd of tall boots connected to cleavage, a sparkle in the left corner and a sparkle on the hand. And behind them is all of Eugene where you ask yourself twice, "Is that a costume or normal life?" Because sometimes it's hard to tell. Blest is the idiot who "dresses up like a hippie." What are you thinking? Be a racketeer, be Zeus, be a reel-to-reel tape. In a valley of the blind, the man with sighted eyes is king.

---

After a good talk with a good friend in which goodness was discussed and conversation often dissolved into the literary and we had to pull it back to plain English (noun-verb, heel-toe), and in which the question was posed "What do you want to do with your art?" and collaboration was volunteered, I've decided to state in a public forum, my intentions toward my work.

Dear Work,

Too long we have sat apart
in separate chairs
facing other walls
with all the lights turned off
and I have drawn by looking at my paper
and not at the object I am drawing.
So now is the time to declaim and declare
and perhaps fail spectacularly.

Love,
Kate

Projects (in no order except the order of association):

1. The illustrated dictionary, books bound by door hinges. A visual exploration of the root and ridicule and visceral experience of the fears of a) getting fat, b) being pregnant, c) letting the wrong person in, d) and others.

2. A short illustrated story-ish. To whit, a serious-minded comic.

3. A cycle of short stories. One of which is finished and longing to be edited in a ruthless, conquering manner.

4. Plot out a book that is graphically-designed. Please see: House of Leaves. This will give you an idea of what I am talking about. Also: Boring boring boring boring. I am fascinated with this idea and I think it could be done better with an ear towards the People. An act of both literature and design where both are understandable and one does not ask oneself, "Am I stupid or am I dumb?"

5. A newspaper story of social and environmental importance in which the Freedom of Information Act will be strewn around like candy.

6. Collaborate with T. (Tobias/in/y: I don't know if you ever read this, or know it exists, but it was your conversation and I will attempt that children's book and maybe take you up on the camera)

---

To close:

"People don't live or die, people just float"
- Bob Dylan

a thursday

So there's this feeling after working with flour when your fingernails are outlined in white and there are white smudges on your face and in your hair and the pile of dough refuses to feel like a baby's bottom -- how that became a measurement standard, I don't know -- and you are working on five hours of sleep and perhaps it is very cold outside the house and in one hour you will have to go make art for the rest of the day...it is at this moment that you feel tired. It's also this sense of Tired as you realize it is once again the end of a week and life seems to be ticking by extra fast in week-long units. Instead of seven days, you have one (1) week. We are the fifth?sixth? week into Fall Term. Midterms. The first wet and driving cold of winter. Already black walnuts are falling less frequently in machine gun precision against the kitchen roof. Damaged cells turn purple with the first awareness that frostbite is in the air again.

Tonight is Thanksgiving, except that it is October and Thanksgiving is a month away. But tonight is still Thanksgiving. We from the Kitchen are assembling at a single house to eat Thanksgiving food and play games and perhaps even engage in family drama if we can come up with a good scenario.

Last week is a blur of little sleep and driving in a car to Portland and also driving back. This week has passed almost as quickly with slightly more sleep and no drives to Portland, but just as frayed at the corners. It seems I haven't written anything except letters in months, years, lifetimes.

In the meantime, bread is rising. Clock is ticking. Rain falling. Car passing. Roommate ignoring alarm clock. And all is well with the blue rug on my bedroom floor and the glue gun on the kitchen table.

marxism

Man. Where to even begin with this day?

A few highlights:

Let's begin with a table outside of the bakery around 2:30 p.m. when a girl asked me to apply to join her sorority.

"We're looking," she said, glancing at my ratty gray hoodie (hood up), bandanna, lack of makeup, and the charcoal dust stained into my fingers, "for diverse people."

I could not get out of bed this morning. I literally groaned as if in pain because it was painful. Waking up was going to kill me. I missed the bus I was supposed to be on and settled for the one I wasn't supposed to be on, the one that made me 10 minutes late to work, the one full of people who smelled like sleep -- the mushy, greasy-haired, grimy sheets, fug breath sleep smell. We practiced avoiding each others' eyes.

Skip to when I took the bus back from work around 4 p.m., stopping at the library and the grocery store. Pause to bewail how my current hippie grocery store of choice no longer carries Swedish Fish which I am completely addicted to. Picture me walking through the Eugene ghetto (such as it is) in my anonymous clothes, stooped a bit because I am tired, carrying a paper sack of groceries (quinoa! cherry tomatoes! eggs!). I, intrepid down the streets, avoiding the crazy people--my secret power is the ability to spot crazy from 20 feet. Using this mad skill, madness was avoided from 13th and O to 8th and Some-Cross-Street. And then I hit 5th and my powers were deflected, like Superman faced with lead-lanced buildings.

Hidden behind a facade of a straight-ahead gaze and walk that went heel toe, crazy came from the left side of the sidewalk, cradling a black dog.

"Halllllay-a," he said to me.

I thought he wanted a cigarette or directions, so I stopped.

"Huh?"

"Halllllayyyyy-aaa."

I did what you're supposed to do: smile, nod, walk by, assume it was meth.

He looked at me, brow furrowed and repeated adamantly: "Halllllaaaaaaayyyyyy-aaa."

As I kept walking my feet away, it all became clear. He was saying, "Hail Satan!" and was truly perplexed as to why I was cheerfully smiling and nodding and walking away instead of looking horrified and strewing garlic around in a frenzy.

He gave up on me.

"Satan keeps you beautiful!" he yelled.

Glanced over my shoulder back at him -- I imagine my face looked ridiculous at this point -- and hopped over a curb, took myself off through Death Park past the couple making out and the sleeping bags in the bushes.

I remembered again the main reason I am not a Communist or a Marxist or anyone else who thought people were a good plan all on their lonesome.

Now, today's happy reality: Cherry tomatoes, $2.02.

Goodnight.

sleater-kinney was a band

We come to the close of today, bearing only wine and peppermint tea and a camera full of potential photographs. We stop to note that a good merlot is a beauty worth the price of souls. We stop to remember how Sleater-Kinney used to be my favorite band and I'd forgotten until recently, waiting, I suppose, for my room to reach an appropriate state of flung-about-ness, the right ratio of t-shirts piled on the couch to papers scattered in the corner near the trunk full of art supplies.

If we spoke last week, I might have told you about how the so-called-to-me-apparent meaninglessness of my life was distressing me. Since that conversation (you remember, it happened over coffee and bagels. You wore that white shoe and I had a headache. We sat on the kitchen floor among dust and spiders.) I have since concluded that this meaningless is acceptable, OK even. Because I come to the close of each day and am done. I am tired and it is late and I go to bed early, but the deeds of the afternoon and the morning tasks are finished. A few odd assignments hang over the weekend or continue through the month. More often the close of the day is the literal CLOSE of the DAY. My stress is my own and belongs to no one else. So I find there is very little stress anymore beyond the usual stress of being a less-than-perfect human being in a world full of crazy.

I have time, hours even, to involve myself in Pursuits. I'm helping out here and there with Gutenberg activities and I can. I told a friend that it didn't matter how late a night of set up went because I literally have nothing else to do (unless I want to). In that moment, I said it to show how willing I was to help. Afterward, I realized it was true. Meaninglessness has lead to an ability to be present if I so choose. How delightful. What takes up my mind during the day ends with 5 pm on Mondays and Fridays, 6 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 3 pm on Wednesdays. I say again, how delightful.

Which reminds me: See the picture up above? Play rehearsal! Everyone (if you're in the Eugene area) should go to the Tim McIntosh/Gutenberg production of Dante's Divine Comedy because it's going to be great. CLICK HERE for more information.

down the highway

I saw hot air balloons, two, red and yellow, blue and orange, rising along I-5 above a skirt of mist at the foot of hills and from the curves of these hills I always know I am 40 miles away from my other home. Along the strip that cuts the interstate in to two running sides, a hawk stooped on something small and frightened. And all along, the fields played out in tree lines and wet grass.

(as you can see, I have absolutely nothing to say right now)

No music on the empty roads thanks to thievery and other nefarious acts that have ripped radios from my car, but there is an Irish song on repeat in my head. Like all Irish songs it bewails time and women, friends now dead and all those dead days no one else remembers. Oddly, I was the happiest I've been in weeks, not because I was leaving or arriving but because all was well and all manner, T.S.Eliot, of thing(s) were well.

Now imagine this at a lilt, slightly mournful because those whom the gods smile upon they also destroy:

"Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm'd and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain hath bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

"When I remember all
The friends, so link'd together,
I've seen around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one,
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain hath bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me."

Potato famine. The end.

in which imagination is a creepy Dickens character

A mysterious index card--my own handwriting upon it in pencil and the sloppy "g"s and "y"s that indicate an early morning or a late afternoon--found at page 1 of Arendt's "On Revolution" halfway through my fundamentals of design class.

THE INDEX CARD:

1 (the numbers are circled). A cemetery in Kabul, Afghanistan. Multiple attacks by the Taliban on Wed. underscored the Afghan government's inability to halt the insurgency.

2. Does this woman need plastic surgery?

3. Ayman Nour, who ran against Pres.Hosni Mubarak in 2005, was later jailed on widely criticized forgery charges.

4. A prospective bidder examined a car on Wed. at a Dubai auction. Debt-ridden foreigners are selling or abandoning cars.

5. This week, Clear Channel Communications tapped a credit line of last resort.

- End INDEX CARD -

This sounds vaguely New York Time-sy. Ayman Nour, as we all no doubt know, is an Egyptian politician, imprisoned (many say) for political reasons, silencing and all. Washington muttered quietly (as it often does). Nour was released this February for health reasons.

THE ART CLASSES

We separated into groups in design this morning so to more effectively discuss asymmetrical balance and attendant tags such as closure, contrast, curvilinear and rectilinear forms, dominance and isolation. Our teacher asked us to introduce ourselves to our fellow group members and shake their hands, which we did, smiling. Felt less bold when after all the handshaking was done three of the five of my group erupted into lung-splitting, diseased coughs, the kind of heavy, phlegmy coughs that signal tuberculosis, chest coughs, gray and green coughs. Run for the soap and disposable paper towels. Turn Howard Hughes. Scrape off all your dead skin with a plastic (disposable) razor and live in an air-tight container like a picnic lunch for the rest of your life.

In the drawing studio, several hours later, J schooled us in the abstract with a series of devil's advocate questions. And I learned that the abstract is more powerful because it is its own world and borrows from nothing unlike "marks on paper that delude us into visions of reality" (a paraphrase) which seems to me to be today's MOST ABSURD STATEMENT.

The imagination (where the abstract is, in some theories, found) is not limitless...rather, my imagination isn't. The imagination is a creepy old man holed up in a dirty Dickensian London shop full of other people's letters, found objects and taxidermied animals. Reality is a vigorous out of town person who comes in with cold weather and market food smells, who rummages in the shelves and boxes, who is prone to acts of arson. Reality has textures, shapes, patterns and ideas not currently in my head. My imagination is mostly a gesture of memory which I manipulate into, prod into, different shapes, but it must be constantly fed and informed and shook up by the real otherwise it just worms away and chuckles over shiny beads kept hidden in a vest pocket for the last five years.

My imagination feels like a Russian apartment right now. I realized this when I was asked to draw an abstract shape today and felt distress consume my entire being (soul and shin bones). If I hadn't already been sick, I might have felt ill. What? Go back into that tiny room and use the same old process? Give me something I haven't seen and scare my mind a bit please.

-End ART CLASSES-

Now something completely different.

A friend recently passed an analogy on to me. I've been thinking through it ever since because I like it so much.

Mr.Johnston:

"Girls know just about everything there is to know about the room they are in.
They even know about the door across the room and inevitably they walk
through that door and find a room the size of a whole world. This freaks them
out but inevitably they find out that the new room becomes smaller as they begin to understand it.

"This too is an act of courage.

"Boys are (can be) different
We don't know of the room or its contents.
We think there is a door but are sure we could kick it down if we had to.
When (and if) we get to the next room, it looks like the last one, even though it is completely different.

"But we talk a good game."

- End MR.JOHNSTON -

- & End THIS POST. Goodnight. Good luck. Go with God, my son. -

artartart

Upon running the calculations through the machine, matching numbers under tracing paper, and employing both Russian and German scientists
I have determined how much longer there is to this day
the answer is:

I have 20 minutes

20 minutes in which I will tell you that my impressions of art courtesy of three community college classes and an optimistic tuition rate = a rant that could go on for approximately 40 minutes. 20 minutes too long.

Scratch it then.

Let me sum it up. If art merely means ripped colored paper pasted onto cloth and decorated with idiom emotions and weird hair or perhaps handmade skirts then I want no part of it.

Perhaps I am old fashioned or elitist or rich or (sneer) bourgeois, but there is a difference between your art and your hobby. Just because it's artistic doesn't mean the whole process is one jolly lolly llama leap through the silk strand world where only good music plays all day (every day) and beautiful people with sparkly souls give you art supplies in exchange for babies. The artistic process, as far as I can tell, is a lot of work. Labor, even. Like with child or like with business.

I don't call myself a musician even though I play piano and guitar almost every day and have done so for the last 10 years. That would be absurd. It brings me joy and peace and fulfillment, but it's not the same. I'm not dedicated in the right way...my soul is not oriented in that position. Also I'm not good enough. And I'm not good enough for a reason. Mostly it's because I'm not a musician.

If I'm a musician, I'm sorry for music. And if the girl with her doily poncho in all the lurid colors of the psychedelic rainbow is an artist, I despair of culture.

All day I heard: THINK ABSTRACTLY! Just feel it. Show me what it means to you. Etc. As if the mere expressing of my feelings using art tools was an artistic act.

I will have to think about this some more.

My 20 minutes are almost up and I still need to brush my teeth.

Goodnight.