As if all the stars you've seen have been busy looking back,

                                                 *sketches part of early design process for a logo/brand/identity



Nausea, in the space above my belly. Am I making 'stillness' up, by holding my muscles in a certain way?

Allowing the effort to drain away, everything starts to gently shift on its own, eyes closed, as I listen to the muscles negotiate with each other. Rolled and buffeted by space, her voice  washing over me like being inside the belly of a wave, far out past the break, swells of potentiality that subtly shift the direction of the ship of my body. Anchored in space and time, moored by my feet engaging with the surface I stand on gives the rest of my body permission to get lost in the drift.

Internal currents, muscular chatter like gulls on the breeze, hard to tell if I am an object at the mercy of the ocean, or if I am the ocean itself in this metaphor. Sea sickness subsides when I allow my frame to rock with the waves of information and sensation rolling through me. Sunshine pours in the windows, I can feel the brightness against my closed eyes, and after what has felt like a lifetime of winter I can almost smell the salt.

I finally recognize you, Priestess.




Walking my dog to the coffee shop, on our way to the park one early morning, the sun was just kissing the tops of buildings with its blushing warmth. Glancing up at its trajectory, I noticed a small square bit of fabric on a long stick, swinging in wide arcs from a rooftop, upsetting a large body of pigeons that were taking up residence on that roof. They wheeled around it, a wide ribbon of birds moving as if of one mind, like rippling fabric, or an intelligent wave, and alighted right back where they had taken flight from. The flag disappeared, and a face materialized at the edge of the rooftop. He saw me see him, so he waved. I waved back.

I've only seen that flag waving and the birds responding a few more times. But the pigeons are always there, obviously comfortable in their multitudes, and I wonder what the nature of the flag is, what his relationship to those birds might be.

Pigeon Lord(e) was the name that came to me.

Once, last summer, I saw fireworks outside my window, in the late afternoon. Confused, I watched for a few minutes, and finally realized that it was those birds, that mass of pigeons moving together, the deep pinkish gold light of the setting sun bouncing off of their wings in flight.


*A week after I wrote this piece, a massive fire destroyed these buildings and all of the pigeon coops on top of them, the existence of which I discovered in articles writing about the events as they unfolded. Walking by the aftermath, in the light of day, I am distracted by the calls coming from a few pigeons circling above the twisted walls of the buildings, possibly crying desperately for their home and companions who couldn't escape the flames.




On a gig recently, working an impossible amount of hours was overlapped with a huge amount of hours taking classes, and the shift from inward to outward looking manifested abruptly, the seams beginning to show. Like a computer trying to function with too much material on its hard drive, I had little control over my output, and I could see  at one point the artlessness of my responses reflected in my boss's face.

There was a handsome man on the labor crew I was supervising that persistently angled for my number, smoothly uttering promises of sexual delight, euphemisms that quickly began to repeat themselves, no matter how firmly I refused.

But he was engaging in a different way than most of the guys. His sexual banter was focused around the idea of taking care of me, rather than taking something from me, and maybe in the midst of not taking care of myself, it struck a bizarre cord, one that is never quite so exposed. Following that subtle thread, I laid down next to him during lunch, on the floor underneath the structure we had built together. I asked him random questions, considering him as he chewed on his responses. It didn't take long for him to shift toward sexual references, and I asked him 'What if I don't like sex that much?'.

His eyes may never have been as beautiful as that moment when he turned his head to look at me, seeing through his projection to what was actually there for a single, solitary second, realizing that everything he had said had been the wrong thing. I may have proof in that glance that I am more than just a figment of other people's imaginations, a mirror, a ghost.

I understand now, how the seams we try to hide are the places where the identities we've crafted break down, because they are lines we have drawn onto a thing without lines, boundaries we make to contain our own potential, a way to know myself as SUPERVISOR to make up for a lack of knowing who I am beyond that context in any scenario.

I understand now, that what I am looking for is other curious people, and that curiosity lives inside of people from all walks of life, not just in either the intellectual or the physical planes and the people that inhabit them - the mind body split isn't a split, but a series of mismarks on the map, a confusion of languages at the intersection of material and immaterial. Curiosity is the thread that connects us to each other as sentient beings, it is the blood that flows through the veins of the creative beast that lives inside of all of us, however it chooses to manifest, if we let it.

I gave him my card as a reward for the look in his eyes, for the possibilities it made me aware of. Lets see just how curious he is.

And broken heartstrings bled the blues.

I have not been brave in art. I have been merely a technician, and possibly, that is why making art has always been a painful struggle for me, one I would happily avoid to go cover myself in grease and heft heavy things around. Just because I can use the tools of society's concept of Artist with obvious skill and precision doesn't automatically mean I have said something worthwhile with any of it. All those awful early student paintings my mother is hoarding are the same as anyone beginning the study of a craft - coagulated excesses and structural inaccuracies, just as my first welds were lumpy and unsuited to actually supporting weight, useless - we must all do those same technical studies to build the skill set to actually craft things, and our growth is measured by how far we have evolved since those early attempts at creation. I was always just trying to tell the truth. To do what was 'right'. It is easy to aspire to truth in a discipline, truth of form, but it is only of face value, it can only ever be vaguely structural. Floating on the surface, wrapped around a skeleton, holding something together, but not imbuing it with meaning or experience. We can rely on truth of form and space as being universally agreed upon in its general 'rightness'.

The nude figure is an ideal study subject, as it is often completely devoid of a specific personality, stripped down to a loose similarity that dispels the illusion of self we drape around us/shield ourselves from via clothes, and witty conversations or political stances. I wonder if that has something to do with the proliferation of tattoos in my generation - trying to claim a self-hood that extends deeper than our clothes and is impossible to be robbed of, or so we don't lose ourselves in the constant tidal shifts of acceptability and expectation coming from generations past. I cling to my figure modeling work as a tiny bit of respite, like going to yoga, one of few places where I can safely escape judgement, free from assumptions or expectations related to my role, gender or sexuality. I can completely unmask, allowing a room full of people bear witness to the truth of my existence without feeling the need to protect or defend myself. But it is easy to hide in that intimately non intimate place, never getting past skin deep. To not feel.

I have tried making art as an emotional experience, but a desperate fight always ensues in my brain with what looks correct, and in response to some deep desperate fear of exploration, of straying too far from the recognizable, I give up. I shrug my shoulders. I do something else to avoid the helpless frustration. If Life imitates Art or vice versa, I have spent my Life/Art in search of Truth... not of Self. Maybe I needed to find Truth, so I could construct Self from a premise I can rely on, a foundation rooted in function, where every muscle is justified for its existence and can be moved with purpose... I have been tasting other people's wants and dreams, like Goldilocks, to see which ones taste 'just right'. Artfully avoiding having my own, so I don't have to learn the bitter flavor of disappointment. Trying to embody truth, rather than self helps me lose myself in the machine of working on crews, and the loudest thing being spoken is body language, and we are all an extension of each other, a functioning being made up of characters and muscles allowing me to interact with the varying degrees of wants and dreams, truth and self, and I can be lost in a tidal wave of emotions that pass through me like electricity, but don't weigh me down because they do not belong to me. Sometimes I desperately wish I could bring that home, wrap myself around like a blanket, like a human being, to taste the technicolor realness of wanting something - but I know that the ringing truth of making structural things speaks to our rational selves. I can allow a total sensual immersion in work/coworkers because we are all aspiring towards the same thing, and the similarity of our experiences is reflected in each other with such intimate familiarity that I forget they have lives, girlfriends and wives and children they go home to. Expectations and friends, roommates and pets. Families and needs. When we step offsite, there are rich, throbbing Real Selves where the Rational Men used to be. 

Sometimes I can feel the beast in my blood that I have yet to look in the eyes. I don't know when it woke up, but I am too unsure of its needs and expectations to bring it into existence by calling it by name. I think it is my Self, and that it grows too hungry for me to contain much longer. I have been on a passionate pursuit to break every boundary I've encountered, and have always found truth on the other side, disproving the necessity for other people's boundaries at all. But I can't be truth in my core, truth is just another boundary. It is a thing that sits outside, and on the surface, and while shielding me valiantly from lies and illusion, so too is it shielding me from the richness of emotional experiences.

Maybe Truth is the next boundary I am meant to break.