It's spreading
The apartment is very clean. Not much color. Big glass doors that slide
in front of one another to open at the back. Doesn't matter how blah
everything is inside because outside of those doors is a pool that
shimmers like a handful of precious tourmaline in the changing light
from early dawn until past sunset.
The sides of the pool are like rough white sand, a newly cleaned
floor, a delicate egg shell or the shockingly bright white of a house on
a cliff in Greece. Anything that reminds her of Greece is good. She is better in that olive-rich climate of hot bright and two
thousand blues. Sky. Sea. Windows. Flowers. His eyes.
Languid. Liquid. Luminescent.
They bumped into each other at
a tourist stop. One of the million little stores carrying Flokati rugs,
postcards, the two headed labyris and shot glasses. She was looking at
the bottom of one such glass up close, having forgotten about the
glasses hanging around her neck. He was, apparently, focused on a
postcard scene from Santorini.
Startled, she gasped gently and he grunted (a perfect metaphor for
what would come), and they turned to see who was on the other end of the
annoyance. That's when she remembered her glasses. She reached down to
her chest without looking to find the chain and pull them onto her nose,
and he stood there, proverbially frozen.
Later luscious lips locked.
But that was a long time ago and
now she stands on the other side of the glass, looking at the clean,
clear ripples on the artificial ocean outside her apartment feeling
totally alone.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
The Daily Write: Photo #4 (August 18, 2012. 12 mins more or less)
Photo #4
Datebook
Sunday, January 5
While some artists spend years mastering their techniques with oils or acrylics, Myan Ludwig, a painter of realistic life portraits, has spent the last 10 years working on her breakthrough taste paintings. A typical painting is nothing short of colossal in size, and her controversial "The New Last Supper" is no exception. Not only does she bring an irreverent heuristic sensibility to her subjects, she tackles sacred images with the iconoclasm of the post post-modern Occupy era.
In The New Last Supper, Myan has chosen to focus not on the faces of the apostles, but rather on the meal. Whereas the original painting shows a meal of bread, Myan's revisioning is a grotesque scene of gluttony, American-style. Turkeys (just slaughtered, in a state of defeathering, stuffed and trussed but not baked, roasted crisp and brown and sliced on an overflowing plate) are depicted next to boxes of Hostess snack cakes, McDonald's meals and burritos. The apostles themselves are, perhaps too literally, corporate CEOs, Ben Bernanke and the Saudi royal family.
But what makes Myan's work so extraordinary is not her controversial pop-media subjects, but her use of edible paints. Attend any of her openings, and with the right ticket, you will be assigned a 2"x2" square for tasting. Lest you worry about germs, all paintings are correlated to an electronically-controlled grid. Once a square has been licked by a patron, the pinpoint light goes dark and that square is no longer available.
Datebook
Sunday, January 5
While some artists spend years mastering their techniques with oils or acrylics, Myan Ludwig, a painter of realistic life portraits, has spent the last 10 years working on her breakthrough taste paintings. A typical painting is nothing short of colossal in size, and her controversial "The New Last Supper" is no exception. Not only does she bring an irreverent heuristic sensibility to her subjects, she tackles sacred images with the iconoclasm of the post post-modern Occupy era.
In The New Last Supper, Myan has chosen to focus not on the faces of the apostles, but rather on the meal. Whereas the original painting shows a meal of bread, Myan's revisioning is a grotesque scene of gluttony, American-style. Turkeys (just slaughtered, in a state of defeathering, stuffed and trussed but not baked, roasted crisp and brown and sliced on an overflowing plate) are depicted next to boxes of Hostess snack cakes, McDonald's meals and burritos. The apostles themselves are, perhaps too literally, corporate CEOs, Ben Bernanke and the Saudi royal family.
But what makes Myan's work so extraordinary is not her controversial pop-media subjects, but her use of edible paints. Attend any of her openings, and with the right ticket, you will be assigned a 2"x2" square for tasting. Lest you worry about germs, all paintings are correlated to an electronically-controlled grid. Once a square has been licked by a patron, the pinpoint light goes dark and that square is no longer available.
Friday, August 17, 2012
The Daily Write: A bottle of pills (August 17, 2012. 12 mins)
A bottle of pills
The house up on a hillside in a nondescript neighborhood contained two bottles of pills behind two front doors. The master bedroom also had two doors. The bathroom only one. The kitchen seemed to be an afterthought, cramped and hard to use to make a meal. She didn't need much though. She wasn't accustomed to eating. A purse full of gum and mints, a cupboard with cookies and marshmallow cream she kept just to remind herself that she could eat if she wanted to, and a fridge containing cold Tang, a stick of margarine and an empty egg carton stuck to the bottom Plexiglas shelf on some ancient sticky strawberry jam, the remnants of a disgusting old boyfriend she guessed, staring at it with anger.
She couldn't touch it, of course. Couldn't risk bending down and putting her head next to that rotten old fruit and sugar pulp. She would pay a price too high if some part of her hand touched it. So she stood there, glaring, breathing, then trying to breathe, then losing breath until she fell down in a nauseous haze of dizzy.
Sometimes the only way out was the most grueling and painful. Her head hit the edge of the open broiler drawer and got cut, an oozing sweet gash of red. After she came to she just lay there, feeling the wetness dripping through her tangled hair and staring at the bumpy ceiling, textured like an orange peel, peeling and yellowed paint curling like clouds.
One leg bent, her hips flat and hands by her sides, she wondered what god would think, looking down on her in this position. Chewing the inside of her lip until the urge to puke overcame her desire to stay still for the next 7 hours, she turned her throbbing and wet head toward the rubber molding under the sink cabinet and felt the bile spill out.
Milo walked in the left front door just then. Some part of her was happy to hear his shuffle toward the side table with the day's mail, keys chiming as they got dropped down onto the wood (how many times had she told him to watch it so the table didn't get scratched?) She thought about calling out to him, but decided it would be far better to simply be found, in a fog. He hated her "dramas" as he called them, acting as if she had nothing to do with the scene she made, in a pool of her own blood on the floor between the stove and the sink, seemed the better choice.
The house up on a hillside in a nondescript neighborhood contained two bottles of pills behind two front doors. The master bedroom also had two doors. The bathroom only one. The kitchen seemed to be an afterthought, cramped and hard to use to make a meal. She didn't need much though. She wasn't accustomed to eating. A purse full of gum and mints, a cupboard with cookies and marshmallow cream she kept just to remind herself that she could eat if she wanted to, and a fridge containing cold Tang, a stick of margarine and an empty egg carton stuck to the bottom Plexiglas shelf on some ancient sticky strawberry jam, the remnants of a disgusting old boyfriend she guessed, staring at it with anger.
She couldn't touch it, of course. Couldn't risk bending down and putting her head next to that rotten old fruit and sugar pulp. She would pay a price too high if some part of her hand touched it. So she stood there, glaring, breathing, then trying to breathe, then losing breath until she fell down in a nauseous haze of dizzy.
Sometimes the only way out was the most grueling and painful. Her head hit the edge of the open broiler drawer and got cut, an oozing sweet gash of red. After she came to she just lay there, feeling the wetness dripping through her tangled hair and staring at the bumpy ceiling, textured like an orange peel, peeling and yellowed paint curling like clouds.
One leg bent, her hips flat and hands by her sides, she wondered what god would think, looking down on her in this position. Chewing the inside of her lip until the urge to puke overcame her desire to stay still for the next 7 hours, she turned her throbbing and wet head toward the rubber molding under the sink cabinet and felt the bile spill out.
Milo walked in the left front door just then. Some part of her was happy to hear his shuffle toward the side table with the day's mail, keys chiming as they got dropped down onto the wood (how many times had she told him to watch it so the table didn't get scratched?) She thought about calling out to him, but decided it would be far better to simply be found, in a fog. He hated her "dramas" as he called them, acting as if she had nothing to do with the scene she made, in a pool of her own blood on the floor between the stove and the sink, seemed the better choice.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
The Daily Write: I walked out (August 16, 2012. 12 mins)
I walked out
My M.O. was always the same: pick 'em up, fuck 'em, kick 'em out or walk out on 'em. I didn't need no fancy proclamations of "oh baby you have the sweetest pussy I ever tasted," or "your titties are like buttercups." I knew just how it was - an animal thing, brought on by senseless chemicals coursing through under my skin and some kind of stupid scented, no one could smell it, thing the man brought out of the woman when they got near enough to walk in each other's waft.
"Baby you're a long, tall drink of water" was nothing more than senseless gibberish to me. Didn't have no power, didn't need to be taken no account of neither.
"Cut the crap, Luther (or Harold, or Johnny, or Jimmy, or Luscious, or Tim), I don't need to hear you talking and you shore as hell don't need to hear yourself. Now come over here and get busy." I spread my legs out wide like a display, lift up my silk and satin 100% like real nightie and let him take me. At least, in his mind, that's what he be doin. In my mind, course, I be takin' him. For all he's worth. I got what he needs. I know how to use him to my advantage.
Then little Lilly Jo came along, changed everything. For the first time I could remember since before my mama left me when I was five, I felt like I couldn't live without another person. Frankly, if I'm being truthful here, this was more than I could take. I didn't count on feeling worried and loving about another person and I sure didn't want to think her life was in my hands. Naturally, though, it was.
Lilly Jo was pudgy and rolly, like soft bread dough. She had the biggest little cheeks I ever saw, and her hair was curly and soft, unusual cause it was red, gold and brown, all together. People used to ask me "did you color your baby's hair?" as if I had the time or inclination. Sometimes, just for the heck of it, I said "why yes, I did, just last Sunday, do you like it?"
Lilly grew faster than I liked - going from being a soft ball of laughter and stink to something lanky and slim, like me sort of - only she glided across the floor where I just sort of pounded across it, taking what I wanted. Lilly had wiles and ways. She could make you do anything just by smiling and blinking and this worried me. But not enough I guess. Cause I still let Bobby move in with us, even though every hair standing up on the back of my arm told me not to.
The night he finally came to stay the wind bit at my skin coming through the cracks between the logs in our homemade little cabin. I shoulda known then something wasn't right. It was late summer. Hot. Burnt. But I felt shivers running down my back and across my calves. And Lilly Jo, she didn't make one sound at all. Not one.
My M.O. was always the same: pick 'em up, fuck 'em, kick 'em out or walk out on 'em. I didn't need no fancy proclamations of "oh baby you have the sweetest pussy I ever tasted," or "your titties are like buttercups." I knew just how it was - an animal thing, brought on by senseless chemicals coursing through under my skin and some kind of stupid scented, no one could smell it, thing the man brought out of the woman when they got near enough to walk in each other's waft.
"Baby you're a long, tall drink of water" was nothing more than senseless gibberish to me. Didn't have no power, didn't need to be taken no account of neither.
"Cut the crap, Luther (or Harold, or Johnny, or Jimmy, or Luscious, or Tim), I don't need to hear you talking and you shore as hell don't need to hear yourself. Now come over here and get busy." I spread my legs out wide like a display, lift up my silk and satin 100% like real nightie and let him take me. At least, in his mind, that's what he be doin. In my mind, course, I be takin' him. For all he's worth. I got what he needs. I know how to use him to my advantage.
Then little Lilly Jo came along, changed everything. For the first time I could remember since before my mama left me when I was five, I felt like I couldn't live without another person. Frankly, if I'm being truthful here, this was more than I could take. I didn't count on feeling worried and loving about another person and I sure didn't want to think her life was in my hands. Naturally, though, it was.
Lilly Jo was pudgy and rolly, like soft bread dough. She had the biggest little cheeks I ever saw, and her hair was curly and soft, unusual cause it was red, gold and brown, all together. People used to ask me "did you color your baby's hair?" as if I had the time or inclination. Sometimes, just for the heck of it, I said "why yes, I did, just last Sunday, do you like it?"
Lilly grew faster than I liked - going from being a soft ball of laughter and stink to something lanky and slim, like me sort of - only she glided across the floor where I just sort of pounded across it, taking what I wanted. Lilly had wiles and ways. She could make you do anything just by smiling and blinking and this worried me. But not enough I guess. Cause I still let Bobby move in with us, even though every hair standing up on the back of my arm told me not to.
The night he finally came to stay the wind bit at my skin coming through the cracks between the logs in our homemade little cabin. I shoulda known then something wasn't right. It was late summer. Hot. Burnt. But I felt shivers running down my back and across my calves. And Lilly Jo, she didn't make one sound at all. Not one.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
The Daily Write: Paper Towels (August 15, 2012. 10 or 12 mins)
Paper Towels
She didn't believe in them. Never had. Well, not since the hippie moved in with her mother back in the late 70s. He labeled every bottle in the house, got rid of all the bad detergents and toxic producing cleaners and replaced the paper towels with cloth rags. Being a rather beautiful man with precious taste, he didn't simply put up some dirty old terry-cloth numbers, but instead he cut up old saris his mother had brought from India when she came in the 40s.
Along with beautiful fabrics used as rags, he brought a new sensibility to the dinner table. Curries. Stir fry with deep purple eggplant the size of a civilized zucchini before the summer turned long and they grew into giant unwieldy things, sweet corn fresh from the cob and Zachariah's farm on Hood River.
Before he moved into their house, he had been living in a warehouse with a giant rolling door and wooden beams. The rain leaked down through the roof and onto the hay spread on the floor in the big open space that held an old cider press. She didn't want to admit that the almost rotten apples which came in on the back of a rusty 1950s Chevy tasted so good as juice, but one couldn't avoid the sour sweet goodness that tasted the way autumn smelled, wet and loamy.
Everything seemed to sparkle after he came into their lives - ordinary objects were named, extraordinary textures lined the towel bars and walls and ceilings. Stars were painted on walls and a moon was carved into the dark wood of the bathroom door. Plants were suddenly crawling across the bare walls, creating the feeling of being in Max's jungle with the Wild Things.
She didn't believe in them. Never had. Well, not since the hippie moved in with her mother back in the late 70s. He labeled every bottle in the house, got rid of all the bad detergents and toxic producing cleaners and replaced the paper towels with cloth rags. Being a rather beautiful man with precious taste, he didn't simply put up some dirty old terry-cloth numbers, but instead he cut up old saris his mother had brought from India when she came in the 40s.
Along with beautiful fabrics used as rags, he brought a new sensibility to the dinner table. Curries. Stir fry with deep purple eggplant the size of a civilized zucchini before the summer turned long and they grew into giant unwieldy things, sweet corn fresh from the cob and Zachariah's farm on Hood River.
Before he moved into their house, he had been living in a warehouse with a giant rolling door and wooden beams. The rain leaked down through the roof and onto the hay spread on the floor in the big open space that held an old cider press. She didn't want to admit that the almost rotten apples which came in on the back of a rusty 1950s Chevy tasted so good as juice, but one couldn't avoid the sour sweet goodness that tasted the way autumn smelled, wet and loamy.
Everything seemed to sparkle after he came into their lives - ordinary objects were named, extraordinary textures lined the towel bars and walls and ceilings. Stars were painted on walls and a moon was carved into the dark wood of the bathroom door. Plants were suddenly crawling across the bare walls, creating the feeling of being in Max's jungle with the Wild Things.
The Daily Write: Burnt (August 14, 2012. 10 mins)
Burnt
Some things aren't worth mentioning. The betrayals. The authorities. The resulting sorrow.
Trauma, on the other hand, that might be worth exploring. The way it builds up like a question inside your gullet. A sick, light helium feeling of dread and wrong been done. It builds up into an unimpressive weight of mucous-thick grey, a viscous mud clogging up the system. Trauma is five trips to the toilet in two hours, bleeding diarrhea like water, festering pain so low in the gut it feels dangerous.
You eat at yourself from the inside, close your eyes and take three tiny pills hoping to forget. Grinding your teeth together until jaws are aching, turning on the couch, ungainly and huge, your nightgown bunched up underneath your side until it pulls at your throat. Choking on accusations and misguided assumptions, no hope to redeem oneself. No hope.
It's one thing to choose deception as a path in life. Almost honorable. The grifter's code. It's another to believe you are doing everything right only to be misinterpreted until you believe you may have been doing it all wrong. No amount of crazy outside can help you deal with the doubt inside.
You burn sage and candles, cough in the smoke of herbs and incantations, and pray for release. All the while, you wonder what karma brought this misery to your doorstep, and how much more you will have to repay before it is over.
In the distance, the train whistle screeches into a dense fog. Summer cold. Icy isolation. Some things take time. You hope. You hope time is the answer. You hope it's all over. Heal now. Heal.
Demand it.
Some things aren't worth mentioning. The betrayals. The authorities. The resulting sorrow.
Trauma, on the other hand, that might be worth exploring. The way it builds up like a question inside your gullet. A sick, light helium feeling of dread and wrong been done. It builds up into an unimpressive weight of mucous-thick grey, a viscous mud clogging up the system. Trauma is five trips to the toilet in two hours, bleeding diarrhea like water, festering pain so low in the gut it feels dangerous.
You eat at yourself from the inside, close your eyes and take three tiny pills hoping to forget. Grinding your teeth together until jaws are aching, turning on the couch, ungainly and huge, your nightgown bunched up underneath your side until it pulls at your throat. Choking on accusations and misguided assumptions, no hope to redeem oneself. No hope.
It's one thing to choose deception as a path in life. Almost honorable. The grifter's code. It's another to believe you are doing everything right only to be misinterpreted until you believe you may have been doing it all wrong. No amount of crazy outside can help you deal with the doubt inside.
You burn sage and candles, cough in the smoke of herbs and incantations, and pray for release. All the while, you wonder what karma brought this misery to your doorstep, and how much more you will have to repay before it is over.
In the distance, the train whistle screeches into a dense fog. Summer cold. Icy isolation. Some things take time. You hope. You hope time is the answer. You hope it's all over. Heal now. Heal.
Demand it.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
The Daily Write: Happy Birthday! (January 27, 2012. 12 minutes)
Happy Birthday!
"One hates to be maudlin, but it's oh so much easier to remember the difficulties," said the long necked woman, too thin to have come by it naturally, as she linhaled leisurely on her unfashionable cigarette and looked above the head of her companion.
She exuded old money and class, you could see it in the way she looked distantly at the person closest to her, as if erecting an invisible barrier - "your class...mine." It was hard for anyone to imagine her young, although few even tried. See, women like that were difficult to humanize, with their taut, controlled elegance and withering yet graceful demands.
She tapped her tea cup ever so slightly, and the waiter standing by poured her tea, refilling the porcelain cup only three quarters so as not to be garish. Nothing in excess.
"The problem with the scenario," she said, exhaling over her left shoulder which was ornamented with a cloisonne clasp on cinching together an umber raw silk scarf, "is that if I tell you the truth about my childhood, you simply won't believe it."
She raised one eyebrow and looked directly at the befuddled man sitting across from her at the small cloth covered tea table. He seemed tongue tied and instead of speaking, looked at her like a curious Basset hound might eye a stranger with a piece of raw liver in her hand.
"Oh, all right - if you insist." She crushed her cigarette gently into a leaded crystal ashtray which was taken away and replaced with a clean one before she finished exhaling. "I suppose you could say, it all started at midnight on terribly hot August on The Cape."
Just then the Basset's cell phone rang, a horrible tropical horn blurting in a space that was not used to such a banal and inappropriate interruption.
"Uh. Oh. Dear - I'm so sorry," he managed to say while trying to turn off the phone, which of course, as one would expect in such a situation, was accidentally dropped into his tea, causing the cup to overflow onto the tiny plate beneath it. They both looked at the golden brown liquid as if it were urine or poison, yet neither said anything more.
"One hates to be maudlin, but it's oh so much easier to remember the difficulties," said the long necked woman, too thin to have come by it naturally, as she linhaled leisurely on her unfashionable cigarette and looked above the head of her companion.
She exuded old money and class, you could see it in the way she looked distantly at the person closest to her, as if erecting an invisible barrier - "your class...mine." It was hard for anyone to imagine her young, although few even tried. See, women like that were difficult to humanize, with their taut, controlled elegance and withering yet graceful demands.
She tapped her tea cup ever so slightly, and the waiter standing by poured her tea, refilling the porcelain cup only three quarters so as not to be garish. Nothing in excess.
"The problem with the scenario," she said, exhaling over her left shoulder which was ornamented with a cloisonne clasp on cinching together an umber raw silk scarf, "is that if I tell you the truth about my childhood, you simply won't believe it."
She raised one eyebrow and looked directly at the befuddled man sitting across from her at the small cloth covered tea table. He seemed tongue tied and instead of speaking, looked at her like a curious Basset hound might eye a stranger with a piece of raw liver in her hand.
"Oh, all right - if you insist." She crushed her cigarette gently into a leaded crystal ashtray which was taken away and replaced with a clean one before she finished exhaling. "I suppose you could say, it all started at midnight on terribly hot August on The Cape."
Just then the Basset's cell phone rang, a horrible tropical horn blurting in a space that was not used to such a banal and inappropriate interruption.
"Uh. Oh. Dear - I'm so sorry," he managed to say while trying to turn off the phone, which of course, as one would expect in such a situation, was accidentally dropped into his tea, causing the cup to overflow onto the tiny plate beneath it. They both looked at the golden brown liquid as if it were urine or poison, yet neither said anything more.
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