Tracing Gould - ooo

Let's take it back to zero.

This fixation, the Tracy thing, started with my great-grandfather.  Right?

Andrew.  Andrew Edward Patty, senior.  First of the Patty line to be born in the united states.  I saw a picture of him on a log cabin porch, from when he was about four or five, along with a half dozen other gray fuzzy faces, all repressing the urge to pick nits or give the finger because it took near a damned hour to get a picture taken.  We paddies took the first fuckin' name they gave us, coming off the boat--  we coulda been McCrackens, or Williamsons, but no, no, we opted for the three-leaf clover of fuckin' names, PADDY, Patty, an absolute cowpie in the face for self-respect, roit?  Fuckin' hell.

Andrew had a high mechanical aptitude, and he was co-founder of the first major garage in Anne's Town, recently re-named Anniston, on the maps.  He earned enough to buy a few modest parcels of land, and we worked them as gentleman farmers, making just enough produce & fruit to be able to say we weren't speculators.  We never really did much with any of it, as my grandfather's generation would be the largest our little clan ever grew, really.  Andrew and Elizabeth, his wife--  about whom not much is said, for she was a very religious and generally joyless woman; she developed stomach cancer in her forties and stopped eating; as family lore phrased it, "She turned toward the wall," and starved herself to death  --A.E. & Elizabeth had two children, A.E. Junior and Edwina.  Edwina would never show any interest in men, beyond taking care of her father, the widow, who retired comfortably and was, as far as anyone can recollect, a very kind, gentle, god-fearing man.

Who loved Dick Tracy comix.

And, lest this whole episode get too teary-eyed, also taught me the N-word.

We'll circle back to that, don't you fret.

So A.E. Junior meets and woos and marries Mary, and they have David Edward and Mark Edwin.  David Edward meets Patricia Shea Williams, marries, and they begat my ass.  Mark meets Jean, they marry, ten years later Jean realizes she's a lesbian and Mark moves back in with his parents, for a minute.  And that's about as big as the family ever gets, right there.  By the time I've entered the scene, the numbers start whittling back down.  Paw-Paw, as Andrew comes to be known, dies in 1988 or 1989.  I run away in 1994.  My mother leaves, later that year.  Edwina dies, like her mother, of stomach cancer & self-determination.  When I come back--  theoretically to see Edwina, before she passes, but she dies as I'm on the road to return, in mid-'03  --I find there's not much left of the various family legacies.  Mark's new wife has picked all the things of Edwina's she wants.  I'm curious about Paw-Paw's things, but I find they're not really around anymore, Edwina having purged the house of memories in the decade following my midnight disappearance.

Because I disappeared in the middle of the night.  No note.

Have I ever mentioned that?

Well.  There's a lot I haven't mentioned.  But let's stick to the stuff that matters.  Namely, what was that shit about sweet kind jesus-loving Paw-Paw teaching his stupid great-grandson america's #1 racial slur?

Andrew and Elizabeth were gentlemen farmers, you'll recall.  Lace curtain Irish, basically, though we'd not have called ourselves such.  But we were.  We were doing our level best to pass for American.  So Andrew did what americans did, to get a leg up in the community:  he became a joiner.  He joined local organizations.  He joined the Freemasons.  He also had black housekeepers.

And, when I squint at the silver nitrate memory of child Andrew on some ancestor's knee, him being barely big enough to pick out of a family portrait, I wonder how old he was when he joined the Klan.

Because that's a big fat missing piece of this whole Tracy thing I've not been talking about, in this hailstorm of amer-arcana and dropped names, and that's the racial politics of the strip.

They're not terrible.  For the era.  They're not wonderful, either.  Dick Tracy Junior's father has a black housekeeper, who nearly gets framed up into a murder attempt; and of course she dies and there's a deathbed speech, and it's all uncomfortable as hell because the housekeeper is a Mammy caricature.  She was a kind of stereotype, but she wasn't a villainous character.  The Dick Tracy strip seems to avoid that, overall--  there aren't evil black people.  They're just too credulous, generally.  When injustice occurs, the black characters that one encounters in the 30s and 40s are its victims.  Victims of the cartooning as much as anything...

And there's all kinds of racism, of course.  So it's not like we should focus on strictly the aspects which haunt me.  My banshee's a pipsqueak, comparatively speaking.  My great-grandfather wasn't klan by the time he had kids.  From what I know, his membership was never a point of pride; it was compulsory, expected, by the time & environment.  I have no idea what he did when he was with them.  

I will be honest and say that I do my best not to speculate.

Paw-paw tried to ensure his children were wiser, and kinder.  Perhaps we were.  But perhaps we were also stupid, prideful, self-deluding potato-eaters.

I say this about myself, because my grandfather taught me the N-word casually-- and curiously.

Do you know what woolly bear caterpillars are?  They were a plague on our family's pecan trees.  Paw-paw had trimmed the afflicted branches and we had turned them into a pyre.  As the fire spit and the raspy webs became soot, Paw-paw remarked, "Watch those _______ burn."  He must have been 75, or 76, by the time he said that to me.  I thought he would live to be 100.

In any event.  This is the subject I zeroed in on, today.  I'd meant to dig into it, weeks ago, but I needed to read a little deeper into the comic strip's run before I drew any conclusions.

There's a whole raft of racial issues we can dig into as this series runs on.  The stuff with the hillbilly comedy relief should definitely be a focus.  Because whitefolk, man.

We're nought if not neurotic as sin.

Tracing Gould - o12

The chronological reading pauses.  Two volumes, four years, and all the pieces of Essential Tracy are laid like tile.  The portrait, as a whole, is a curious work:  Tracy himself now bears little resemblance to his pre-cop, gentleman incarnation.  Success has marked him, made him changeless.

The strips I'm reading now skip around.  The art mutates, decade to decade, in increments, in technical adjustments.  Upscale syndication equals downscale production.  Chester Gould learns to work smaller, simpler.  Learns to work with help, accepting Dick Lochner as a partner.

The war is over.  The war never stops.  The enemy concedes.  The enemy adopts fresh disguise.  From bootlegger to racketeer to car thief to art thief to commie spy to terrorist infiltrator.  Tracy duking all comers.  Tracy is less the star, contrasted with his cohorts, the villains.

The villains cannot stop, any more than America can, with its endless enthusiasms and failed fads.  One week it's the Summer Sisters, the next it's the cruel and terrifying Brow; each saga seguing into its successor through a chain of co-stars and joke characters.  Gravel Gertie, a bizarre compulsive doodle worthy of Basil Wolverton, emerges from the dust-up of the Brow's final, fatal hours.  Vitamin Flintheart, gentleman addict and uncanny ham, pants and pops a diet pill and dons his cook's apron.  B.O. Plenty hawks a spit of tobaccy over the fourth wall straight into the audience's face.  Here comes the neighborhood.

Tess Trueheart returns from WWII, herself reborn into success, a graduate of the WAC.  Tracy's life partner and long-suffering admirer becomes an architect.  Designs the house they will come to inhabit, in the 60s--  the house itself, in my reality, drafted by Gould's own daughter.

Dick Tracy Junior adjusts to being a teenager, finding himself fresh place in a temporal medium where Little Orphan Annie is never allowed to grow up.  Falls in first love, finds the emotion as beautiful, blinding and bittersweet as the funeral service where it will be entombed.

And Pat Patton, half-bright sidekick and jokeman, accepts his place in things as Dick Tracy refuses a promotion, becoming chief of police.  The future is coming on fast, and nothing but nothing can keep progress at bay-- not even the law.  Booze is legal.  G-men have replaced gangsters as folk heroes, and John Dillinger will not be remembered for much other than the reverence with which his mourners dipped their handkerchiefs in his cooling blood.

"Snappy summary, kid."  Flatly displaced, Sam's voice does not vibrate, cannot reverberate, shall not echo anywhere except in the mind of an aged / aging / ageless Southern runaway, still too young to hear the music, much less the muse.  "But whatcha forgot was--  whatcha forgot!  Ya can't formulate 'One' if you don't start with Naught.  C'mon.  Let's zero in..."

Tracing Gould - o11

"Childhood.  Education.  Art.  Sex.  And death."  The freckles on Sam's phizz all but glitter.  "We leave anything out?"

Our scissors stopped spinning a forever ago.  The house is infinitely silent:  fathomless stillness in the ventilation ducts, each as wide around as the boy I was.  Staring into the ducts elicited a curious sense of coded time--  time suspended in light as perfectly as motes of dust performing a tarantella, the room tone of eternity preserved pristine as pearls of air in honey.  Sam won't stop staring at me.

"I'm..."  It's impossible to say why I'm nervous.  "I don't quite know."  Standing, my right knee seems to catch.  Favoring the enormous irish-pale scar center outboard of the joint with a glance.

"Yeah, I don't remember you getting that one either."  Catching a glimpse of himself reflected in the catatonic eye of the floor model wooden paneled Panasonic, Sam gives a subtle start.  "Cripes, Kid.  What'd ya picture me as, Ringo Starr in 'Shining Time Station'?  C'mon.  Shoes the sizea filberts, when I got corns the sizea walnuts, already?  Christ!"

"So..."  Words stretching and distending in my mouth as the captive afternoon strains to synch with my present.  "Sooo...  Whaatt ddd

But my words stick and hang, starchy and forfeit, in the bottled moment.  Sam is three times my size and height, at the side entrance door, opening it.  Kinetic blue discharge escapes, sparking from the hinges, freezedried momentum rasped free.  Turned toward the field of red clover, pecan boughs frozen midruffle, adult back to me, Sam clears his throat.  Cigarette clicks from left to right, right to left of his profile, visible just beneath the lobes of his ears, and Sam hoists a captain's lighter:  the impossible flame there bejeweled in a painterly hash of nib marks and shards of letratone.  The precise photo negative of fire.

"My young friend, I dunno whatcha do with whatcha got."  Sam tokes, and an ellipses of french curves wafts out through the screen door.  He opens the screen door, stepping out onto the creamy faded limegreen porch, heel of his brogan hitting the concrete with an inaudible crack.

The waveform collapses.  Memory imploding abrupt as a soap bubble.  And what's left...

"And what's left?"

Sam's voice a beacon in the black hollow beneath our dreaming.

the wasp's dying crawl

Twenty-eight-- perhaps twenty-nine, perhaps thirty years ago, I watched Chris Neal make a painting.

 

The fine arts building, late nights.  Spring?  Or was it summer?  The two of us juked on caffeine from The Coffee Banque, just across the street.  One of four, five pieces I watched him make.  A curious, dusty-looking thing, craggy plaster worked into the canvas for texture.  A bit of Arizona map from the floorboard of Neal's car, embedded in the sky.  Charcoal slashes forming the skull of a cow, marking the ground.  Hooker's green and yellow clay and umber red beneath it all.  A bold, squared-off window into road trips forgotten & unmade.  Those were brilliant, exciting nights.  The room thrumming to Pigface, watching Neal dance around the canvas, a happy parody of Pollack.

(A wasp crawling across the surface of the still-wet piece where it lay on the floor.  Neal, in a snit of inspiration, leaving it there to become part of the work.  The next day, daubing black & yellow & white in an abstracted, dotted line across the wasp's dragway until there are enough individual accumulations of dots for the wasp to echo forward & back across the rosy desert horizon, motion captured by life.  "That'll finish it.")

An old mate held onto that untitled work a long time, a prized piece.  Neal by then having given up art.  Then the painting resided in storage a while.  Then he offered it to me, for safekeeping.  I kept it relatively safe.  Somewhere in the moves, the original wasp had fallen away.  In an emergency change of address, had to de-frame the canvas.  Rolled it for storage, moved into a new place.  Soon as I could, had it re-stretched and framed again.

It dominated my kitchen around nine years.  Mute witness to all my worst cooking.  Then covid arrived.  Lost the studio.  The painting went into storage, again.  Into a garage, for about a year, I guess.  Then into another storage unit, for about five or six months.  We downsized the storage, so it moved into a lesser corrugated metal closet space.  Another year living in the dark.  Then it moved with us, here, to Chicago.  Arrived before us, point of fact.  No room to display it, and besides, I'd fallen out with all the old Auburn crew.  So it lived in my closet.  A year and a third again.  

Today it's in the alley, waiting next to the garbage.

I dunno.  You keep signal fires burning for as long as the signal's good, then you let them gutter.

There were people to whom the painting had meaning.  I was definitely one.

Tracing Gould - oo2

Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette.

Retinas gliding across the surface of his whites with ice-skate, stop-motion celerity.  Suppressing a shiver of the uncanny I force my focus in, down, onto the rustling newspulp.  Sam's rheumy gaze locked outwith the frame beneath me, making contact, he raises a hand to cock his plum-coloured trilby back.

"Kid," he says, "you're on the level."  The cigarette clicks from one side of his freckled mew to the other, almost audibly, as he turns, looking up.  "But what level?"

The waxen glow of the hardwood beneath me is gold as sunlight.  Redounding off the cut glass corners of the candy dish on the mirrored tabletop, misting butterscotches wrapped in their crisp whispering cello with particulate rays.  It's always afternoon in the front living room, by paw-paw's recliner.  I'm on my stomach on the floor, elbowpropped, and Dick Tracy's back at war with Big Boy.

"You remember that?" raps Sam.  "I mean, actually remember."

"I believe so," I answer, pulling legs beneath me,  "Like, I think I recall Paw-Paw telling me Big Boy was a Tracy villain from when he was a kid."

"Interesting," not sounding interested at all.  Testing the border of the panel he's speaking from, little exploratory taps with nicotine-stained knuckles.  "Think you can help me outta this rig?"  His cynical kewpie eyes sliding to the scissors beside my hand.

"I believe so," I answer, admiring the sheer glint of forever afternoon all around me.  The reflections off wood and glass and steel all caught and sponged up by the Sunday supplement.  The loops of the heavy scissors immense as trigger guards to my adolescent knuckles.  "I believe so."

Tracing Gould - oo1

In my psyche there is a direct association between my great-grandfather & Dick Tracy.  He used to collect them.  His daughter, my aunt, found them appalling & violent & disgusting, so as soon as he died she threw them away.

I did not know this detail until after my aunt's death.

Throughout my childhood, I spent Saturdays "up the drive" at my great-grandfather's house, the hearth of the Patty Family.  That place is very imprinted on my subconscious.  In my dreams I revisit it, though with significantly less frequency at this distance of decades.  My great-grandfather died in 1988, I believe.  He found the intensity with which I pored over the Sunday funnies, which they collected for me, amusing, and I know he watched me really grapple with the 80s incarnation of Dick Tracy.

I was fascinated by the faces.  Sam Catchem was particularly striking, to my child's eye.  But I didn't really know what I was ever looking at, what the stories were, who these characters were.  I had inherited the Max Collins / Kurt Lochner era of the thing, the attempted "modernization" of D.T., and it was completely impenetrable to me.  I understood Peanuts, and Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes.  Dick Tracy was just thing full of talking about "cases" and "criminals" and I was just a kid who stared at teevee passively trying to understand what the fuck a Brady Bunch was and why it looked exactly like the Partridge family, and why did adult stuff seem so fucking stuck in the past?

But this was the 80s in Dogwater.  It was a bubble.  I didn't know who Chester Gould was.  I didn't see the effect he'd had on the culture I came to love because I didn't read the creators of my favourite comix lauding Gould, y'know?  I'm sure los Bros were talking about Dick Tracy but I didn't read those interviews.  I just didn't hear people talk about the effects, the influence.  I was a Bat-Fan like anyone who got secondhand toys and books and grew up with Adam West.  I didn't know how rooted in D.T. Batman was--  because DC made an editorial POINT of not talking about Gould, or the debt owed.  Crime fic writ large owes to the popularity of D.T., and the determination of Gould to bluff & hack his way through producing a daily strip for forty-six years.

I feel like I've spent my entire life tracking influence & interpreting the greater historical context of all this mishegas, catching up with the past, in an attempt to understand & accept the present that we've all been borne into.  Surely cooking my brain in the process.  Ah, the joys of being a human, walking to & fro, up & down this wired-ass world.

The point is, there's no one good reason I've discovered the Need to learn more about Gould and his work.  It's what I'm supposed to do.  It's an alternative to the deadspace that daily comix have become, in my attentions.  I grew up reading dailies.  In a way comix are an integral part of how I learned to read.  And probably why I was so credulous and literal-minded in my adolescence.  Not to diss on dailies.  But the stuff kids dig on?  Oof.  I'm not revisiting fucking Garfield, even ironically.

But then Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette...

OM (or OtM)

My childhood PTSD has led to me being largely unable to remember my very brief time involved in Olympics of the Mind.  It would have been 1982 or 1983, when I was attending Cedar Springs Elementary.  Why was I selected?  Dunno.  I had taken an IQ test, and then a scant month later the school funneled my neurodivergent ass into this program.  It made me miserable because none of my friends were there.

(Mm.  This isn't entirely true.  Jay Phillips was in that class.  Jay was a bright kid, and had extraordinary skill as an artist.  He could draw comics better than anybody my age.  I liked Jay-- but he was the only kid I knew, and he was more plugged into what was happening in that group than I would ever be; he Fit In and the other kids were really into him, whereas I was a weird-shaped peg.)

Anyway I phased myself out.  The organizers didn't ask too hard what was up.  They just shrugged and gave me a certificate.  Which still has Olympics of the Mind printed on it, so my participation must have been before OM had its legal squabble with the Olympics Committee...

I've always looked at this blip in my school history and asked myself what it was about.  But maybe it was simply that the school didn't know what to do with me.  I was pretty boggled and could barely function, some days.  And then I managed to get into some fights, and the school pushed my parents to move me to another district.  Anyhoo.  All that's really sure is I have a piece of paper, and memories of cinderblock rooms without windows, with no rows of desks, and not fitting in even amongst outsiders.

sleeplog - 1o2825

Six, going on seven hours of sleep.  Six uninterrupted.

Have begun a new regimen of tiny pills & tea.  It's testing nootropics time for this aging punk.

It's probably wholly psychological but I noted a weird burst of near-psychedelic Clarity some twenty minutes after consuming my first cup of tea.  The effect was so pronounced I had to double check that the mushrooms aren't the kind I overdosed in '99.  But no:  lion's mane has been very thoroughly checked out and it does not make you trip.  Purely psychological, some weird placebo thing.  Dunno.

There's a chance--  not impossible  --that what I experienced was a brief interaction between the ditchweed I smoke and the nootropic; but my liver is not a lab, and my gut instincts are not the most forthcoming when it involves Reasoned Deduction.  I doubt the interaction thesis, not least because the potsmoke was an hour and a half before the tea.  Weed is something my body is quite accustomed to & unless there's a specific visual indicator there's probably not anything psychedelic happening.  If those sectors of my brain are firing off, an optical effect overlays my vision and I perceive a "swirling" of green & magenta.  This optic was not present.  The sensation of preternatural Clarity waned after ten minutes.

I don't have a better description for the feeling.  It was a feeling: and that feeling wasn't familiar.  It seemed like a perceptual shift.  But I didn't perceive anything in particular, or unusual, beyond Clarity.

All that's certain is I slept deeply & well.

memory fumes / the memorious (a post-it yawp)

A yawp rather than a nope, today.

 

Had a Big Talk with Sig.  It's probably the first time we've ever formally discussed the probability that he'll outlive me.  It didn't sting as much as feared.  He's a sensible fella.  I know he means every word he says.  I've never really been able to say that before, about any guy in my life.

He's determined.  And he's right.  It's better to work on living memory than to live with the dread, probable, uncertainty.  So I'll keep journaling & take notes of the gaps, sift the evidence, and see what's likely & what works.

Updated everyone at work & asked, as humbly as possible, for them to help keep me on track.

Next step:  finding brain mechanics w/out greasy streaks on their overalls.

Meantime I'm gonna finish watching 'Weapons' (2025), and wait for a bushel of vintage comix from the forgotten canadian past to shore up on my stoop.  I ordered 'night life' by Derek McColloch & Simon Tristam.  A lot of my comix picks these past three years have been nostalgia fodder, I guess; but unlike a lotta gobblers of glory days fare, these things are assistants to memory.  I don't have anybody in my life from that era of my existence, and revisiting these things sweeps the leaves from old pathways.  It's an aid to memory, like re-reading, like repetition of tasks.  And it's a pleasure, honestly, seeing the fire in these old b&w books that have been remaindered by the Annunaki of pop culture.

"The future proves the past," as a certain sect of twits like to say.  It's not the stupidest sentence ever written.  Not that I'm studying conspiracy-adjacent twaddle for any of the projects on my desk.  I would never drop some 17th-letter wisdom into the mouth of an Image comix character; I would certainly not have any character from the Wildstorm stable saying such things.  It's fun, collaging this vapour comic together.  Is it profitable?  No.  But neither are my obsessions with William S. Burroughs or Larry Hama's Wolverine comix.  The past is a waste: wasted on those present: and it's fair to say this future I seem to be stuck in is proving it.

So why obsess over my memory flailing for scraps to cling to?  I'm still here.  Until I ain't.  What's certain is my essence: which may be remembered, for recalling that which the rest of ya'll forgot.

memory, cont'd / discontinuous (a post-it nope)

The memory gaps are very small.  Piecemeal.  You could even argue there are moments of slippage in object permanence.  I could, at any rate.  A thing is moved (I moved it, mere moments before) and when I return to search for it, the briefest of panics.  Of course then its actual position in a room is recalled.

But still.  The backpack being moved, at lunch.  The name of a known actor, from a favourite film attached to an old memory (Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and....?  not Dabney Coleman.  who's the third female lead, asshole) that I rewatched within the past year.  When a co-worker looks up the cast, I'm stunned to realize the third was Jane Fonda.  But I knew that.

But I knew that.

Past.  Tense.

Sig watches the memory gapping.  He watches in realtime.  I fumble over my plate at dinner, during what should be as simple as an evening out, groping 'round in the dustbin of my mind for the very small number of times a wild bird has been in my hands.  He reminds me.  He tells me he will be my memory.

It's kind, and loving, and more than I deserve.  And it scares the fuck out of me that this is happening.

I'm okay.  I just had to say all this out loud.  I'm trying to not be scared of it.  It's what it is.

In the park, days ago, I happen into a new friend.  Someone Sig & I have gotten to know over the past year.  He speaks about recent events, people, places.  The entire time, I cannot remember his name.  We part without my having spoken his name once.  Not uncommon; I don't address people by their names often, in conversation.  I might have to change that.

Only after I'm walking home does the name "Bruce" occur to me, followed by his partner's.  But even that blessing comes with a withdrawal, because when I was fumbling through the whole talk with Bruce, I was straining to trigger memory by association: yet Jared was a blank, too.

I'm nearly 49.

There were three days in a row at work where I kept misremembering the day of the week.  My co-workers watch me stop, stare into the middle distance, glitch out.  They see me falter & prompt myself.

I'm not going to lie.  I am scared.  I type this entry, then go back to edit, to fill in the lapsed details.  I'm making myself remember when I couldn't remember things.  I'm worried that there will come a point where this nervousness becomes a feedback loop.

That could be decades, or years, or months from now.  Could be.

The sane thing to do would be to go to a specialist & have a workup done.  Get some tests, scans, all that cool sci-fi shit medicine can do in 2025 that didn't exist when I was born, in '76.  But y'know, that shit costs a lot of money.  And I'm still uninsured.  And still in (relative) poverty.  And even if I could afford it, the tests might prove inconclusive.  Because one thing that has not changed about medicine since 1976 is that there's no surefire test for anything related to the functions of the human mind.

And how much of this is psychological, or induced by stress?  Because I had memory problems long before the brain damage.

Fucko bazoo, man.  Memory.  Wotta puzzler.

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

merry fucko bazoo (a post-it nope)

--as we call it 'round these parts.

No real updates to be had.  I'm hackin' at art.  Some days a brother cannot properly draw hands.

When I think about ninelebbin--  that's a date, son, can't wallop me with charges of disrespeck for readin' a calender  --I hear all the birds in Richmond, chattering as one.

That's what I experienced.  After the phone call from my art partner, Josiah, woke me--  "Have you seen the news?  Turn on the teeevee"  --I screened the footage for the first time.  My roommates began filing in, stunned by the unfolding narrative, so I drifted out...  Through the front door and up a cthonically silent road.  I walked in the general direction of the city proper, outta the Fan district (so named for how the grid fanned away, the further one went from downtown Richmond) and aimed toward the capitol.

After a good twenty minutes of numb trod I was in the capitol district, and there were state trooper trucks parked at regular intervals along a hastily assembled traffic stop / redirect.  No-one gets to the dome.  Troopers in their dopey ranger hats and bulletproof vests milled around, cradling shotguns like they were beauty pagent bouquets.  I tried not to stare, kept on my vector, pointed toward the historical district, the worn bubblepack of cobblestone reassuring me that I'd be at the railroad corridor in another ten, and that's when I heard their fainting couch chatter fading up.

All the birds.  Every one.

It took the ten minutes' walk to hear clear of the wind and occasional engine.  Raining from the trees where sparrow & duck & finch & crow & jay & goose & robin & cardinal & pigeon & dove & raven jittered and flitted, the cacaophony overdubbed in every direction, the sound of a vast and agitated crowd.  Like Whistler in Sneakers, describing earmarks of his trip in the trunk, the geese all chattering with one voice.  No call & response.  All the avians in concerted panick, united in noise & fear: something had shaken the world, something had befouled the winds, no-one knew what, except that it was man's fucking fault.

In wonder I caromed through the fearsong, watching the birds in the trees, sky blue as Krishna, trying to figure out when I'd ever heard anything like this.  Wondering at how, beyond the occasional motorist speeding home or strainfaced trooper out of their truck, the streets were empty.

I wouldn't see them as empty again until the season of the Beltway Sniper.

memory (a post-it nope)

you know & i know no-one is reading, so:  this is a safe space, right?

facts:  my memory blips aren't getting better.  i've drawn things i don't remember, and i've written things that don't cling to the gumline of my stupid-ass mind.  that bothers me-- but since you don't exist, who's to know or care.  a couple days ago, i had just arrived at work, and i couldn't remember whether i'd just locked up my bike less than five minutes previous.  a month and change ago, i walked home after having forgotten i rode my bike to the store & left it locked there

what's the point of writing this stuff down, and re-reading, if the mechanisms of self-reinforcement don't function as previously understood?  why am i making lines on paper if this stuff isn't going to stick?

you can say history, or the value of art, or whatever, but i know--  and even not knowing you, i know you know i know this shit  --that history is a faulty-ass machine for generating vast omissions, and art can't have any sustained value in a system that doesn't see any purpose in remembering the preterite

that's cynical & self-pitying, fer shure.  which ain't the game for me, right now.  i'm just irritable because my hands hurt & i don't have any real confidence in my ability to make art, and capitalism is just a capitalized -Ism that's never meant anything real to me.  art is what i know how to do.  art is what i chose.  the memory thing is depressing, but no more depressing than any of the Real Shit i'm not going to type here, because i don't WANT to remember some stuff

hey.  not giving up.  just admitting it's hard to give a fuck, this morning

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.

dream - o2o425: my face is a television where i don't have the remote

There's not too much to the dream.  It's full of strangers.  Strangers in a strange house-- okay, it was my grandparents' house --having a strange party. (Okay, maybe the party wasn't that strange; maybe it was a birthday.  But I don't celebrate my birthday.  Haven't for decades.)  Okay, maybe they weren't all strangers--  I recognized Jayme Reynolds, I think  --but in terms of being people from my lived life, they weren't part of me.

They're watching something.  It's probably Severance season 2.  That's what I watched last night before bed.  The idea of someone loving you so much they'd seek you out, even if you couldn't remember them anymore, it sticks in my throat.  And then someone started saying something nice.  Maybe to do with my birthday.  I don't really remember, because the crying jag hits.  With brimming eyes I split the scene.

The not-a-dream parts of this really outweigh the dream itself.  Because my husband was trying to say something nice to me, yesterday, while we were having a shower, and suddenly my face is a television where I don't have the remote, and someone else is flipping through thoughts & emotions, and it's all on my face, and my husband's watching as I lose control, trying to keep from crying.

Faster than he can say, "Are you okay?" I'm turned away and saying "I'm okay," and trying to reassure him.  "What's wrong?"  And all I have to offer is, "I'm crazy," with a dead man's laugh.  And then we're drying off for bed, and I'm struggling to keep it stowed.  Then the jag hits again, a wave taller than all my breakers, and it's back to being a sobbing mess again.

Because I've never felt this specifically isolated in all my adult life.

When we were in the shower, the crying began because I remembered Siegfried holding my hand when I was in the hospital.  Which made me remember every time I went to the hospital for a member of my family.  Which made me remember the last time I saw my grandfather, and the last time I held his hand.  Which leads to me also remembering the first time my grandfather held my hand, as an infant.  Because that's something I remember.

I don't know how many people actually possess pre-verbal memories of infancy & access them.  Is it a common phenomena?  I can't say.  But I remember.  Maybe because I'm me, and my brain is fundamentally, biologically different from the majority of people.  This planet is hard on brains.  And nervous systems.  And consciousnesses.  Anyway, which crying jag was I on?

The second, while in bed, straining to isolate & articulate the specific "trigger" for the sob-shit I was taking all over myself.  Because the emotional blocks I keep in place to function around people, and the world, it's about as effective as putting a cork in one's ass to stop diarrhea.  I have emotions, but I don't vent them the way(s) I used to.  And a great many of these emotions regard how I feel about humanity.

As the problem(s) with my operating system cause my thought processes to flicker & stutter like fluorescents working with a bad ballast, I asked Sig, "Am I different?  I mean, since the accident?"  Because in the three years since, it feels like I've grown very distant from other people.  Like, I find them fascinating.  I love listening to them.  But because I'm me, there isn't much common ground.

Sig held my hand, and said, "No.  You're still yourself.  But I think you... turned a corner.  Like you found a reason to live?  Not like you didn't have one before.  But times were difficult..."  Which is an understatement.  The last few years have been a strain.  I should probably have a shrink.  But I don't.  I have this little box I type on, and this window on a diminished & darkening internet.

Anyway.  After a bit, the sob-shits stopped, and I went to sleep for a little.  Had some dreams.  Had crying jag #3.  Then woke at 4am, as usual, to the solitude of another day grinding at a physically exhausting job I do not like nor have any interest in, amongst people I don't relate to, speaking as little as may be managed.  Maybe before work I'll make a stop at the Wind Phone.

There's a li'l red british phone box in the middle of a field, a few blocks from my workplace.  Like I told Sig last night, I've stopped there twice before.  Once, to apologize to my grandparents for not being there when they passed away.  They were old, I had been hospitalized anyway, and covid was a brush fire in a parched landscape.  I didn't know they were dying.  It's hard to not feel guilty.

The second stop at the Evanston Wind Phone--  do you even know what a Wind Phone is?  I didn't, but my husband did  --I dialed Sam, an old friend from the Auburn years.  I called him to say sorry for re-purposing his death in one of my books.  The guy in my book bore little resemblance, but I knew what I had done, so: I apologized for the possible disrespect.  And for not knowing him better.

Dunno.  Maybe those talks helped.  Certainly seems more helpful than keeping a dream journal.

on alcohol

I'm capable of not drinking.  A lot of the world isn't.  I have enjoyed alcohol, within limits.  Most of the world cannot limit itself.  But in the longview?  Alcohol is a waste of money, and it can leave a body & mind feeling wormeaten, AND it's a convenient means of self-deception for most of mankind.

I haven't had a drink in over three years.  It's good.  I haven't had a single craving for one since the accident.  That's baller.  No hangovers, no dumb social obligations that require self-medicating to tolerate, no bouts of doubt or anxiety or fuzzy memories.  No hassles, is what I am saying.

Of course there's a downside.  Friends who don't understand sobriety don't want to hang.  New people who don't understand me react to my sobriety as though I'm in A.A.  Since most of north american society uses alcohol in one form or another I feel less welcome-- in fact I feel like avoiding booze, and people who partake of it, altogether, because alcohol's a convenient excuse for bad & imbalanced behavior.

Ever listen to a couple of drunks discover a punchline?  One person says something, the other rejoins, everybody busts out laughing, then the punchline gets repeated and the laughter redoubles.  Which is great!  Laughter is balm.  But then...  The punchline becomes a slurred mantra as the laughter becomes soggier, and after a few more iterations of The Funny Thing it's like listening to five year olds juked on sugar repeating knock-knock jokes as they improvise percussion instruments from cookware.

All of which makes me sound like an unfun, judgy fuck.  I'll allow it.  I'm not fun at parties anymore.  I probably wasn't to begin with.  But so what?  Most parties aren't that great, and people-- don't get me started on people.  About the sole benefit alcohol has for me, now, aside from sterilizing wounds, is providing an easy read on who & who won't be a good friend.  If someone insists on showing you around a new town and their idea of taking you on a tour of the city is a barcrawl, well...  It's revealing.

There are good drugs & there are bad drugs & there are drugs that aren't for me.  And booze is two out of three where I'm concerned.  If I have any regrets about ever partaking, it's that I wasted time & misled myself.  Most friendships turned out to be acquaintances once alcohol was subtracted from them.  So it goes.

Self-control was the only way someone with my history could survive as a bar employee for a solid decade.  I learned how to become a better artist over those years, owing to the fact that I was the token gay sober man on staff.  Of course I was also closeted and privately miserable and endlessly crusing midtown and never acting on any of it.  So there's self-control & then there's mental illness.  Either way, I would go 3 years at a stretch without having a drink.

I also was the token non-smoker.  Which is a whole other subject-- but then it isn't, either, because what I'm talking about is addiction, and the EASE of suborning oneself to an addictive pattern of behavior.  Smoking was (is) a ritual, for me, as an artist; smoking had become part of my creative process.

The trick, if there is one, is at the outset I told myself the day I stopped enjoying it, I would drop it.  I smoked from 17 (first cigarette) to 26.  In the last three years I had discovered the addiction and was wrestling to quit.  Moderation was not a thing I did.  I had survived murder attempts and near-fatal accidents and backwoods surgery and being a gay teen runaway, so I was smoking and drinking like I had something to prove to death.  I was at two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day on bad days.  And there I was, making myself walk five plus blocks in hothouse weather to buy a pack of not-inexpensive, somewhat difficult to find smokes, only to light one, take a drag, stub it out, then throw the pack over a random fence on the way home.  To make myself quit.

You might infer from the previous paragraph that I was an alcoholic during that time period.  No.  I was simply given to excess.  I didn't have my first hangover until some red box wine at 23.  First blackout, gin, 23, sealed the deal.  None of any of that, I said to myself.  And the idiots in my life who couldn't make that decision, I became less forgiving of.

If you're going to let the drugs make the choices for you you're not "out of control":  You're abdicating control.  You're making excuses.  I became as unsympathetic to myself on this subject as I did towards others.  I did not want to become a deadass loser.  So the bad habits weren't allowed to take up residence.  I became my own project; I wanted to be less angry.  I wanted to feel relief from stress.  So I began to excise the problems from my diet altogether:  cutting out alcohol, caffeine, nicotine...

One day, despairing at the possibility I might not have the willpower to quit cigarettes, I discovered I did.  I'm going to say something maddening, now.  Some made-up wannabe zazen gibberish, but it's 100% true:

I stopped Wanting To Quit.

& the desire vanished.

Lo, I was quit.  If I was feeling stress, I would dream about relapsing, and my response would be "Well shit now I have to quit all over".  Of course I'd say fuck it and smoke the dream fag anyhow.  But it was a decade between cigarettes, and when I did smoke, it was to see if the desire was still there, because covid-19 had made landfall.  Why the fuck not?

Of course I found a substitute.  We are talking about addiction, after all.

Smoking was hardest to walk away from because of the ritual.  The ritual of smoking pot replaced cigarettes & briefly became more cost-effective a form of stress and pain management than anything I'd heretofore known in my life.  But the difficulty of access to marijuana, the furtive illegality of it, the frustrating parade of dealers & hustlers & slow motion losers, made weed less desirable.  Being around weed also meant being around drunks, and by this point in our little jeremiad you may have inferred I was sick of my job babysitting drunks and telling people to take their drinks off the felt and fucko bazoo me boyo by the time I finally turned in my two weeks notice I was DONE being around alcohol.

But that's like hating guns, in America, isn't it?  One cannot live utterly shut of it.  It's a thing that's always going to be in society.  It's in every grocery store on every block in Chi.  Catholics like a drink!  And so does everybody else.  It's on every billboard train and magazine.  It's as American as applejack.  It's also bone stupid boring and gross despite being (don't get me wrong) a terribly fascinating SUBJECT in terms of its history & utility & the endless innovations Alcohol has resulted in.  The science?  Magnificent stuff.

But fuckoff with booze.

No-where in here have I mentioned my father's part in my mental math on the subject of alcohol.  Not really.  So, a closing anecdote.

My father was not an alcoholic.  Not initially. He was, however, the first male on his side of the family to develop a taste for the stuff, after I ran away.  He was not a drinker when he was beating or strangling or drowning me.  But he was a drinker by the time he got to beating his wife, and a for sure alcoholic after his son & wife had both abandoned him.  He'd built a chicken wire enclosure with a circumference of twelve feet out back of the greenhouse so when he was done downing a can of cheap beer by the stove, he could just chuck it out the back door.  By the time I returned home, in 2007, that fenced-in circle was a literal mountain of beer cans taller than I am.

My mother needed a divorce so she could move on with her life.  The only way that could happen was if I lied through my teeth to my former abuser and tell him I loved him & forgave him.  So I lied, and I helped him clean up the farm some.  I helped him bag up & relocate the mountain of beer cans, and at the bottom of the pile, beneath it all, we discovered the misplaced front bumper of the bus that was rusting in the pasture by the surplus military command center rigs he'd bought...

(You know, those wheel sets they attach to a cargo container so it can be towed like a mobile home? Yeah. He'd just bought some on a whim, to go along with the bulldozers and the machine lathe and all the other toys.)

"So that's where the bumper went," he harrumphed as I bagged up several year's worth of stale-ass beer cans, contemplating how this white trash mad scientist had filled our ancestral barn with rotting electronics.  How he had turned from the 70smonster who deformed my childhood into a pathetic old broken-down horder with an affinity for shitty watered-down american lager.

My diminished monster told me he was planning to build a new house out of bud light cans and old tires, maybe, one day.

That was my thanksgiving, in 2007.

This year?  This year was pretty good.

Happy holidays!

sorry i ain't no ///max///headroom/// [ . . . memory, brain trauma, near death experience & other mysteries of the creative process . . . ]

i hate needing to explain who i am in order to explain what i am which is a total headcase

i can't just say "artist" because i taught myself to do this stuff so i could hold myself together

but i want to be part of this world, so i blog as best & as bravely as i am able because holy shit

this world is not nice & is extra hard on everyone & especially brains

today's blogisode:  sorry i ain't no ///max///headroom///

dream - 1oo824 - memory as abandoned house or forsaken home

Two iterations of the same dream, today, both about the ancestral hearth by the highway.

The house built & moved to the county line by teams of horses, back when Anniston changed from being 'Anne's Town'.  My great-grandfather was raised in that house, and he brought his own kids up there.  After my parents tried & failed to escape Alabama by moving to Indiana--  never got an explanation for that one --they came right back to the heart of their misery on the outskirts of Anniston. So that was where I was raised, with a hand at my throat and a belt on my back, in a house that was once property of a klan member.  As a kid I claimed to have seen great-granddad's ghost in the hallway.  (I'm fairly certain that was a lie.  I would remember a ghost.  Any ghost.)  I don't dream about the house often.  The last time I saw it intact, a hobo had broken in and established his bedroll where my parents' bedroom had been; he'd used cheap pornography to spark a fire which charred a skull-sized hole clean through the century-old hardwood floor.  The place has been bulldozed in the decades since.

Anyway, the dreams were these:

[1]  Living with Sig, financially stranded in Alabama, homesteading in the abandoned remains of the campo sancto.  His hair's bleached, badly, and he looks perfectly miserable here.  I was trying to figure out how to bridge a treacherous gap in the front porch when I heard him cry out.  Raced to the kitchen to discover him on the verge of tears, his glasses broken and us too poor to replace them.  The look on his face sunders my heart, and the shock sends me halfway up for air, to consciousness, where I strain, eyes open, to focus on my lover's features on the pillow beside me.  But I can't, because sleep paralysis, so what I see never coheres into anything more sensible than a riot of improperly configured flesh, and the vision appalls me so that I begin groaning & shouting for help.  Sig shakes me, trying to wake me...

[2]  But I am not shaken free of the trap of memory, and so I am again lost in trying to reconfigure the space.  The players have changed-- forgotten faces, none quite as sober as I --but the problems are little different; the kitchen has to be rearranged, the stove needs to be moved, but the floors aren't load bearing and the fixtures are all too fuckin' fixed for me to shift appliances from where they're stationed.  I'm in tears trying to figure it all out, even though the problems are mundane as hell.  The sleep paralysis doesn't set in this time and I wake normally.  I lay there, blinking through the minutes spent thinking about nothing real, and turn to make sure I'm seeing Siegfried's face as it should be.  Sensing I'm conscious his eyes shift beneath his lids and he opens them on me.  "What was the nightmare," he asks, and I try not to answer.  "Sorry my head's a such a damned haunted house."