Restart

12.11.23

Things are evolving. Turkey day was delightfully streamlined this year. I roasted a turkey breast dressed in bacon, found a jar of gravy in the freezer, stirred it into the drippings, it hit the spot. Simple perfection. My neighbor invited me for pumpkin pie and to meet her two new adopted cats. Then back to my paints and pens. There’s no commute.

The whole thing is to stay centered, relaxed and unopposed. There is a quiet relief here. Keep living your life like you mean it. Reinvent yourself, over and over. Restart. Restart. I get up, see if the sky is pink, wash the sleep from my eyes, make a cup of coffee, and write.

If I wake in the dark and can’t get back to sleep, which happens frequently, I stretch and exercise until I’m tired. If that doesn’t work I get up and write for a while. I’m not botherin nobody these days. It has always been about the writing. I can’t stop it. Drawing waits patiently on the balcony until the writing is done. Drawing demands a certain kind of romance, lighting, setting, a lag time, preparation. Writing barges onto any random page or scrap of paper, perhaps several at once; or here, on the virtual page. I have sketchbooks filled with writing. It’s the story of my life.

I scrounge for images to sandwich into these posts. I want it to be visually focused. That’s the point. I find things I had forgotten from long ago and sneak them in elsewhere, post-dated, and make up a story sifted from fifty pages of contemporaneous journaling. Somehow it makes sense, somehow there is a through-line that has a flow, from one post to the next. Sometimes there is an abrupt shift, or a repeat, or a gap centuries long when I stare off into the distance, watching crows in the tree tops and letting my coffee get cold again.