not having had any family but of my own choosing

--i do miss the people i left behind.  the people who abused me, who made me a little crazy, who gifted me these curious scars i call my creativity, i miss them.  i miss those places, the padded smell of cloverfields, sundried kudzu flaking like papyrus, the endless red clay afternoons.  it should be impossible to miss alabama: but people die, and places are erased, whether by lightning or buyout, and all the dread that went alongside winter spring summer and fall's glory, that stuff is as dead as my grandparents.  filed in amber, suspended in the fine comb of slowed time--  because what is memory but increments of spacetime re-encoded in an impermanent neurochemical matrix  --locked precious in a bone vault where light neither penetrates nor is generated.  i miss them though all they were is with me now; i miss them because i lost them and i am losing them again, as time & experience & wear weathers these memories into so many insensible scales of driftglass.  as my memory decays and their faces-- which i kept no photos of --are made strange to me.  if i were to see my father today, or my mother, would i recognize them?  the last times i saw either were in 2004 & 2012, respectively.  two weeks ago i walked out of a public restroom, having locked my bike up outside not two minutes previously, and when i looked around i did not see it and panicked, thinking it stolen, briefly-- but no, i had only locked it up in a place i'd never used before, out of my immediate field of vision.  still, that tiny taste of fear is a preview of what i probably have waiting for me.  one day i will not remember them, and i will be afraid, and i'm not quite sure what to make of that, because i wanted to be rid of them and all the hell that went with growing up there.  so.  yeah

new scar, new me

Tamed the bookmarks, today.  That's about two years of bookmarking & notes for the four GNs I've been building like a layabout hobbiest.  Nobody cares what you say:  they only care that you DO.  While I've been allowing myself to age like a scar collector and pretending to be unafraid of the inevitable-- when what I should fear is it all having been for naught.

Because what good is "the conceptual incomplete"?  (If I had to name these ambient thought projects I call scripts for graphic novels.  They're concepts that haven't been fucking finished because they're not fucking drawn.)  It's not like a fuckin' readymade, is it?  No one's going to pick these things up and finish them for me.  No-one's liable to say OOOOH that pile of overwriting's lovely let's wear it like a fabulous mink stole.

It's only going to moulder in a box, like me when I'm done.

Which is morbid, but fuck it.  Yesterday my husband was talking wills, and I was nursing a fresh scar.  If one requires more motivation than that to get up off the old rusty-dusty and DO something, then that person is prob'ly a PC gamer.  So it's up and at 'em, today.  Tidy the bookmarks.  Tidy the studio.  Add lines to pages.  Fix scripts.  Buy a new print cartridge & start a fresh round of revisions.  GET TO IT.

I am not leaving a pile of work for the love of my life to sort out.  He's not going to want to draw all this rubbish.  I barely do, as it's intimidating and seems like more than life's worth, some days.  But these are the tasks we are set, the roads we pave ourselves so our inheritors may travel more easily, yes?

New scar, new me.  And I've accrued enough scar tissue I barely recall myself.  The memory is loose as milkfed stool, falling out all nasty.  Like I've been meaning to amend the final few pages of Denizen for a few months now.  And here are all these bookmarks on the moon, staring at me.  I don't remember researching these things, honestly, like I don't remember finishing sketches for so much of this tarot.

If god tires of tapping your shoulder for attention it raps you on the skull. 

Let's get to it.

good fuckin' morning

 

fresh head trauma.  no stitches.  just glue

DOT DOT DOT 

...then over breakfast, rivulets start pouring down my face.  i liked stitches

last head wound, i wasn't free-bleeding in my scrambled eggs