studio synthicide (1) - the cocomelon sessions

in which my husband and our friend sloan

 ...inspect old synths...

and old guitars

executive healthcare for artfags in poverty (minor reprise)

The BPPV is back.

I like a good acronym.  Benign Persistent Positional Vertigo.  I like how it opens with "benign".  It's reassuring.  "Persistent" is a counterpoint to that reassuring tone, though, less of a fan there.  "Positional" theoretically explains what triggers the "vertigo" but as to why this morning, after months and months of nothing, it should recur-- the aconym doesn't really explain shit.  Which isn't an acronym's job, anyhow.

Wait.  It's not Positional, it's Paroxysmal.  Right?  Yeah, I don't fucking know.  [reads:]  "Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo."  I dunno anything.  Know how I dunno anything?  I ask empty questions on the internet.  My head is a little broken, but not a lot broken, so I can't complain.  Things happen, then they go away.  Will this just be a day, or will it be a coming-and-going symptom of a week?

Anyhoo.  Today will be slow turns and careful negotiations of space.

More drawing done.  More drawing to do.

the burroughs folio - the secret dreamer (4) [secret 13th apt tapes]

basically finished except for minor noodling & fretting, which always happens

 but fidgets aside i feel like i've got my method with this paper down

 three pieces of paper left.  three portraits done.  three to go

executive decisions for artfags in poverty (here's your shovel: re-trench)

Tomorrow I disappear back into the studio.

Tarot to work on, comix to make, novels to illustrate.

Happy forty-ninth to me!  [Cf. my deadnamed birthdate.]

Don't despair!  In New Me years, I'm only four.

executive healthcare for artfags in poverty (ice ice banshee edition)

Took a fall on some alley ice.  Landed on the very tip of my right elbow.

Holy fuck everything, Batman.

executive healthcare for artfags in poverty (banshee of the butthole edition)

Some days, you shouldn't get out of bed.  But on those days, you work anyhow.  Capitalism.

I like how, in aging, the simple act of getting out of bed can result in This or That.  A couple months ago I got up, only to discover my right ankle did not support my weight.  Still no clear idea what happened.  All that's certain is there wound up being a brace--  briefly, a cane!  --and for a while there was a limp.

Wearing the ankle brace caused me to compensate with my right knee, and since the ankle incident, I've had increased stress & discomfort around the outboard tendons on the right side of the right knee joint.

It's just how things happen.  A jenga of tumbledown bullshit.  My body is an inherited castle, very draughty and irish and prone to green fur and probably haunted by a banshee.  I should rent my shit out to Nick Cage.  "Yo, Nick.  I hear you collect haunted castles.  Well, I have a banshee in my anus."

So yeah, yesterday, I got up.  Went to the toilet.  And lo!  Blew out my butthole.  And then worked for eight hours straight, no break.  It's how I like to do it.  It's soothing to my masculine ego, having a visceral, intimate pain that can't really be Treated except by rest, as I am not allowed to rest while at work.

Which probably sounds like an exaggeration?  "Not allowed to rest."  That's not the literal policy, but it is to an extent the literal truth, because there was no backup yesterday.  No second shift who would come in to help me.  And the workload doesn't diminish.  Never diminishes.  It stays constant, all shift.

Lest this all sound like whining--  because it is whining; don't act like you haven't read a blog before --let me stress that I have no insurance, and am pretty financially leveled.  Like, I've got maybe five grand saved from the past year.  So there's really nothing I can do besides keep working, blown out ass or not.  So what if I have a twisted balloon animal knot at the base of my spine?

Some days, you shouldn't poo.  But on those days...  You walk slowly, with intense concentration.  For fear of hearing the siren shriek of the banshee of the butthole.

executive healthcare for artfags in poverty (schtick it in my boipu$$y)

The best healthcare, I've found, is the art itself.  It's therapy.  Drawing is therapy.  Process is therapeutic.  The process of producing art by hand is painstaking and an altered state unto itself.  Art is therapeutic.  Art saved my life.  Art made me sane again.  Art helped me explain myself to myself.  So if I'm talking Priorities, I'm talking making art.  Being able to make art is the first, best investment I can make, in this life, on this earth.  It's the one thing that's worth a damn, that nobody other than I, could do, in this particular way, in these configurations of light and line and shadow and field.  This art is my life.  It is my health and my wealth.  You can't buy a weekend in a spa that feels like getting the lines on a piece of paper Exactly Right.  It's a decadent feeling of power, of manifest ability, of hearing the all the concerted notes to a symphony in the minimal gestures made with your own hand.  It's the business.

executive healthcare for artfags in poverty (not a series)

Contemplating healthcare is one of my favourite things.  Like my nagging cough, or the chronic aches in my right ankle & knee, or my pronounced & worrisome memory gaps, or the tinnitus, or the migratory transitory "spikey-stabby" pains that pray on my hands.  It's fun, thinking about deducting wages from my not-considerable paycheque so as to pay for a Service that doesn't really Serve.

I haven't had insurance in a year.  Since gaining a new scar on my scalp, actually.  I went to the emergency room and they told me Aetna wasn't in their network.  Since the insurance wasn't any good, apparently, I allowed it to lapse.  It didn't make any difference to my bill, which would have been slightly exorbitant whether I had insurance or not, and clearly that worked in my favour since the hospital decided to not directly bill me and pass it off to a debt collection agency instead.

Look, I just don't care.  Tell me why I should care.  Because it's my health?  It's a system of scams.

I avoided having health insurance for over two decades because I was a teenage runaway, hiding from people who did me harm.  I handled my own medicine.  And then at some point the Obama admin decided to do everyone a solid negative and force an entire society to engage with an industry built around subtracting net income from our meagre accounts.  I didn't have insurance for most of the existence of Obamacare, and I paid an annual penalty for not engaging in the bullshit.  I only gave in and got insurance because, curiously, after the skull fracture, someone had to pay for my MRI scans.

I had just gotten done paying my not-inconsiderable emergency room visit, and hospital room, and weird Cronenberg bed that wouldn't let me sleep, when the radiology department decided to hit me up for ten grand I didn't have handy.  As we were negotiating that we found out the hospital was being declared bankrupt, and they decided, reasonably enough, to call it a wash.  "You're in poverty, and someone else is buying our debts, so we'll just say none of it ever happened."

Which, hey, great.  I have no complaints there.

But it does underline the greater incoherence of the thing itself.  The economy of it all.  Like, what is the paying of insurance?  I still don't understand the principle.  I just want to pay for stitches, sometimes, and maybe someone with training & accreditation to do the sewing.  It doesn't have to be professional, cosmetic-grade work.  Just keep it from getting infected.  Try not to leave any equipment in the incisions before sealing them up.  The bare minimum.

I know, I complain a lot.  But the complaints are valid enough, methinks.  The systems don't make any practical sense and are prohibitively difficult for an artfag with cognitive issues and a pronounced allergy to dumb paperwork.  I don't know what a "co-pay" is.  I don't understand deductibles.  None of these things directly relate to the experience of pain, nor to the cessation of it.  If I get a bad cut and want a band-aid, the response should not be "Please don't gout on the form?"

But it always has been.  I have a lot of scars.  Some of them healed okay.  I don't believe insurance was a crucial factor in treating any of it.  To my backwards ass, insurance is this thing everyone talks about like a minor deity which must be placated with virgin sacrifices and also rubies.

My husband tried to explain it to me again, tonight, and the only thing I really understood was the part where he said if my employer garnished my cheque to pay insurance it would be put my income on the other side of the poverty line.  That maybe Medicaid would cover me.  We don't know yet because Medicaid has to review my "case" to determine if I'm eligible to ask for assistance, or something.

No, I don't want insurance.  But I guess I'm getting some?  Because what's the alternative.  Waiting for all this shit to magically resolve itself into a single-payer system?  Where's Doctor Pill?  Are they consulting with Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather about whether Doctor Manhattan can clean Schrodinger's catbox before their waveform collapses my marketplace?

Listen, just give me the epoxy and I'll glue the skin myself.

executive decisions for artfags in poverty (part of an otological regress into finitude)

You could record.  You could.  You could record, and playback, the process of hacking out the art.  The layout process.  The correcting and re-positioning of elements on the page.  You could.  You could record.

Often I do.   Yesterday I did not.  Nor the day before.  I did not record those days because there is a crudity and artlessness to the uncertainty in the initial stages of sketching, a goofyfootedness.  Often I don't.

Recording is something I do when not altogether there.  There's the OCD, y'see.  If the obsessive-compulsive mark-maker is In, in the driver's seat, in the director's chair, then "I" am less in evidence.

Then I'm more liable to record.  But if it's the layout guy, the composition hack, that's less Inspired.  That's mechanic brain; that's function and form guy.  That guy doesn't do much that's inspired.  No sense to 'im.

No sense recording that.  But the camera's charged.  Battery pack plugged in.  Tripod extended to full height.  So maybe next session.  Maybe tonight.  Or tomorrow.  When the brush is in hand.  Maybe then.

lost in the studio, brb