Everything has been hell this year. Things are falling away, apart, and the tectonic plates of my life are all shifting; the subsequent earthquakes wrecking much devastation. But I am here, and out there is here, so it's not the end of anything, even if the shakes make it feel like it is.

Some photos, some songs, a spot of a poem.







( RUN RUN RUN! )





♥

When your warmth presses, I am a poet
elsewhere, I am not
where else but yours are there words -
nowhere, not at all.

Out there I am empty glassed, hungry, wary, searching
in you, I am not
when your pulse beats, the water pours
everywhere, over
everything.

Breathless and asleep behind my own deadlines, as usual. Not as far behind as it seems though, because weeks 2-4 were actually completed, but as they were private commissions, I will not post them here. Thus, that brings us to:

5. Patrick Wolf. Musician, madman. Imaginary concert poster.



And some photos:

It's hard sometimes, this art thing. There's so much doubt, so much fear, and so much want. Same with writing, but you know what I mean when I say art. My friends laugh at me when I say I want to touch the face of divinity - of God - with something I create, but it's the biggest part of me I know for certain, that desire. I don't even necessarily believe in God - though divinity I cannot deny, because I've seen it in the faces of men, and in the words of Nabokov, in the stroke of Vermeer's brush. Point is, I want it so very much but I'm so afraid I'll never get there, and if I don't, what then? Who am I then; what was the point then? I want to quit every time I pick up a pencil because I am so afraid, and so doubtful, but then I think - I don't know what it is to stop. This is all I know. And fuck it if I don't love it like hell.


bigger.

"there's no waiting for us or, (tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow)"
18 x 24, watercolour and cut paper on paper

( close ups & process )

♥



♥

Bang-whimper time, babies. They say the world's gonna end, so it's time. Don't have much to say about the last one, after all, it's just some manufactured thing: calendars, numbers; they're just here to help the collective OCD of modern society - shape some sort of structure into the absurd entropy of evolved consciousness. It means nothing to me, when thinking logically. Except I don't claim much logic; except I have it too - obsessiveness in metric tons, compulsiveness in kilonewtons; so sometimes I do think about it, numbers, as some sort of barometer for a life's distance traveled. Here's my reading: 26 years. Distance traveled: 0. Today, I ask the same question since the very beginning: why? And I am here, at the starting line with the same answer: I don't know.

In more prosaic terms, here's what's gonna happen this year: 52 weeks, 52 projects. In an attempt to build better compositional skills, explore new mediums and techniques, and at the same time thus building an illustrator portfolio, I will attempt to undertake one imaginary job per week. Book covers, story illustrations, t-shirt graphics, company logos, portraits, fashion & textile design - as many as I can. Try to keep it interesting, and of course, it'll all relate to an interest of mine (unless commissioned), so it should be a good time. There it is. Here we go.

01. Seven Nations, Celtic Rock band, CD cover art.



Feel free to suggest a project. I'm open to all ideas - style, subject matter, medium - end of the world, after all. No point in limitations.

Can't believe it's been another year. Here's to failure, and cracking the joints; doing it all over again.


bigger. de.tail.

deep roots are not reached by the frost (or, the termite crumbles of the homes we knew)
18 x 24, watercolour & paper on paper

♥

Utah.






( + )

♥

Lastly.



!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beyond Eden photographs, Lou; life under a marine layer.







( ♥ )

Paintings I've done this year for some lovely folk.



( Patrons make me happy. )

Went to see Patrick Wolf for the third time in concert at a Masonic temple. It was an acoustic set, and it was a set plagued by ghosts. It was one big aural high, and that's where this began to germinate.



The bigbanged meaning of it all. (or, I was once a boy.)
16 x 20, watercolour and paper on paper

( Closer, process, etc. )

♥

So this will be my Beyond Eden entry. No progress shots, because this was done in a bit of a fever after seeing Vermeer in person for the first time. Consciously avoided painting a face, because showing a bit of soul in a face is easy, and character extends beyond someone's salty eyes. Sometimes it's about light, movement. Not saying I succeeded (and actually, I am now aggressively back to painting faces) but it was a good exercise for me, I think. Well. Enough prattle.



nameless (or, forever a stranger to myself)
16 x 20, watercolour on paper


Come to the show! Say hello. This is what I look like:



Except perhaps slightly less dirty and with more clothes.

Dudes. After struggling in vain for a near four months over the last painting (a photo of which I will most assuredly not be proliferating), I was ready to throw in the metaphoric basket. Cut off my fingers at the interphalangeal joints - perhaps an ear or two - act, in general, with all the manner of hyperbolic depression so frequently attributed to we artist-types. But, but, but - maybe it's not time yet. And hell, even if it was, what else is there to do?



(good things come in larger resolution)

"Seaing. or, (ageless and broken up by salt)"
18 x 24, watercolour, paper on paper



( close-ups and other tomfoolery )

This will most likely be my Beyond Eden entry this year. The show looks stacked, as usual. October 1st and 2nd, Barnsdall Park, kids. Come say your pleasantries.



♥ ♥ ♥

Also.




And, and, and. I am sewing dresses and learning blues scales on the eletric guitar and improving my mind with extensive reading. Darcy will not complain of me.

December 31st

Someday, even Albert Camus will be dead: Or, Mortality!


            The last entry in Albert Camus’ journals before the quintexistential car accident robbed me of his life states things such as:

All my life, as soon as a person got attached to me, I did everything to distance them. There is of course the incapacity wherein I am to make commitments, my taste for people, of multiplicity, my pessimism with regard to myself. But perhaps I was not as frivolous as I say. The first person whom I loved and I was faithful to escaped me through drugs, through betrayal. Maybe many things come from this, from vanity, from fear of suffering further, and yet I’ve accepted so much suffering. But I have in turn escaped from everyone since, and, in a certain way, I wanted everyone to escape from me.

            And he ends:

I sometimes accuse myself of being incapable of love. Maybe this is true, but I have been able to select a few people and keep for them, faithfully, the very best of me, no matter what I do.

            I tell people all the time, “Albert Camus is my soulmate.” Everyone laughs. But passages like that only drive that feeling deeper into the part of my brain that decides my truisms – however, this is a tangent. This is, surprisingly, not about Albert Camus.

            A while back I went completely off the rails. Dropped a boiling vat of black-tar crazy on this bloke I was seeing. He didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, he was doing everything right. I didn’t know it that exact moment but in hindsight it was all me. I had started feeling an anxiety which manifested itself within a disturbing dream, and upon awakening from the unreality, actual reality suddenly seemed like something dismembering – I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t breathe straight, and so of course, I had the brilliant idea of having this man call me after which I immediately cried, without any provocation, “WHY ARE YOU LEAVING ME?” Well, that’s paraphrased, of course. I’m sure those weren’t my exact words, but that pretty well summarises the tone. Suffice to say, not my most dignified moment. He took it well; he’s a gentleman, for the most part. He told me I was being crazy; I should calm down. I did; I realised midway through my meltdown that I was, in fact, having a meltdown, and I apologized. We did some under the rug sweeping; I never saw him again; c’est la vie. That’s not the point. The point is, I realised something that morning.

            I have issues. Issues, capital I, issues. Not born-with-it, synapses not firing issues, but a posteriori crazy fermented into wonderful acidity by my past relationships. Specifically, it seems I have abandonment issues. More specifically, abandonment of the unexpected variety. Less specifically, it seems that I have change issues. Which is the point, the universal point, because don’t we all hate change; don’t we all hate the forward march of time that demands inconstancy as our only constant? It’s not death and taxes, because eventually all governments fall and eventually this world will crumble-bang into a nothingness I have a hard time wrapping my mind around; a nothingness that is so thorough it cannot even contain the nothingness of death – it’s Time that we can count on, and with time comes the ever-present death and rebirth of each moment and each thing that lives within its wide, gossamer boundaries.

            Point is, Albert Camus has lasted longer than his body, but even then, someday society will evaporate into the ozone-empty horizon and words and language will float away with it, and then, Albert will be completely, irreversibly, depressingly, dead.

            There’s the tragedy of life – that it ends. Life itself, will end. It’s not just our bodies that are mortal, it is everything – everything physical, metaphysical, scientific, theoretical, everything-everything is mortal. And yet here we are, stubborn little species fighting this one truth. We are all in a constant battle to keep something longer than we are allowed – our bodies, our possessions, our loves. We have contributed millions to the health industry, the plastic industry, because we are afraid of every new mole on our faces, every slight crevasse that signals change. We word it as a loss of youth rather than a gain in maturity. We throw away our possessions rather than free ourselves from our materialism; having your heart broken outweighs the miracle of it having found, if only for that one beat, another heart with right specifications for the perfect pas de deux. Moving forward into the uncharted, the unfamiliar, is always a risk first and an adventure after; change requires an infinite signing of waivers. And there’s nothing wrong with that – safety and familiarity is comfort and comfort should not be dismissed (far too few of us have it), but familiarity breeds habit, and so we have become creatures enslaved to routine – creatures of habit in a habitat that will inevitably make success in the impulse a complete impossibility. You would think then, that with our dense craniums and capacity for written history and scientific theory, we would evolve out of the notion of homeostatis, but here we are, hanging on and recycling trends decade by decade. Instead of evolution, we have used our superior brains to unnaturally lengthen our biological bodies whilst ignoring all else, as if the square root of happiness is in mere existence.

            In my favourite essay by Albert, Sisyphus, fated to push a rock up a mountain day by day til’ the very last exhale of time, is described as happy – “Sisyphus must be happy,” Camus claims, because the finest point of this essay is that the simple struggle of life is synonymous with joy – if we know and revel in the absurdity. Camus purports that the simplicity of having complete understanding and the complete responsibility of his task was enough to answer the big why of living. There are many reasons I love this essay – not only do I agree with most of the philosophy, but it is also wonderfully concise, and it references Greek mythology of which I have a fondness. Indeed, such is my love that someday I even plan on getting the entirety of it inked permanently on my body (which, contrary to some belief, is not a temple – more a well-kept apartment). But I do have one major point of contention. Thing is, I don’t believe Sisyphus’ punishment is a perfect allegory for the human predicament. Perpetual toil, sure, that’s true enough. But Sisyphus had something most of us do not enjoy the reassurance of having – predictability. Sisyphus never had to worry about turning around to be gobsmacked by financial ruin, or death, or infidelity, or love; he was blissfully alone and thus blissfully free of the entropy of society that so frequently turns our joys into our enemies. He need not worry about loss – he has nothing. He need not worry about change – he is a body of grief trapped in amber, and change for him can only be seen as freedom from continued monotony.
            That is not our lives. Change for the average person means fear – the worst kind, not just the kind that jumpstarts the endocrine system, but the kind that settles into every crack in the cerebellum and paralyses the capacity for thought and sense. It indulges the opposite of instinct which helps us evolve and survive; it indulges human arrogance of perceived knowledge and statuesque doggedness – the arrogance that convinces us that it is possible to cling to the past and the familiar, and there, in that folly, things implode.

            What then, is there to do? The threat of change is a burden that cannot be unworn; short of a complete reboot and permanent erasure of our memory, there is nothing to be done about the fear. There is then, only one option – we must walk into the dark lands, bringing joy with us, so that the change we are met with will be that of sun, and we must remember to look around us at the wonder of treading this land at all. A new day even in a world as bleak as ours is a gift many would have wished for but did not receive. It is an aphorism that has been rendered saccharine and cliché by the cynics of this age, but carpe diem is our last defense against the night. We must seize the day, and keep it warm in our palms, so that when shadow falls, we only have to open our hands for light to guide us. We must remember also, that the very concept of evolution depends on change – sometimes species evolve into something more equipped to handle their environment due to biological gaffes that may at first ostracise or hurt. Mistakes can be salvation, if not for the present, then for the tomorrow.

            I have learned my lesson. Perchance a short lived one, given that I too am a creature of habit – perhaps even worse than most – and I know that the lack of immediacy will, in time, cause me to unlearn this new shiny bit of truth. It’s a bit of a grace and a shame that we are not often met with hurt blatantly resulting from the mistake of fighting change – we are, after all, a very clever species and our attempts to stall time often succeed, and when they don’t we are good at projecting culpability to the mysterious universe out to destroy us. Thankfully, our cleverness also means that we are armed with language and the capacity to record history, and so the possibility lives that we can learn from our pasts, even if it seems like we never do.
            Nonetheless, I will do my best. I am determined to evolve, grow older, get gray hair. I am determined to walk into bottomless pits to enjoy the freefall and ensuing wind without fear of when body meets unknown. I am determined to ingest time and let it work its will in me. I am determined to change. I am not afraid.

♥
n.s.

+







( Until the end, there is climbing, and there is man. )

(click for bigger!)

Hard like winter; wet like rain. or, (Here is here.)
15 x 24, watercolour, paper on paper

( details and process. )

♥ ♥ ♥

Also saw a lot of Los Angeles and its geographic neighbors the past month. Camera at the ready, of course.





( Here is there. )



As Bokonon would say, busy busy busy.

Everyone says I belong in Portland; this show is very apropos.


(Bigger is better - click!)

Le Premier Homme; L'Homme Révolté or, (My joy was endless.)
18 x 24, watercolour & paper on arches

( Detail, process, fun! )

♥♥



Thinkspace show at Timothy Karpinski's Together gallery in Portland. If you know me at all, then you will understand how much I am freaking. out.

December 29th

Let Him Go, Let Him Go From Me

             Stoney looks me in the eye and says it, and it’s nothing, except it’s Stoney. Stoney in his Docs, stomp-stomp laissez-faire sangfroid, Stoney and his curled cigarette smoke statements.
             He says, see ya, then. That’s it – see ya, then, and the thread snaps and it all unravels and I drive home shaking and wailing into the desperate decibels of Nick Cave, windows rolled down so the winter ice can prick into my subdermal layers and I can feel the capillaries crackle.
             That’s all he says – see ya, then. Except it’s more than that. It’s more than that cause it’s Stoney, who I’ve known since we were just swimmers in our fathers’ scrotums, since we were just concepts in our mothers’ fevered diaries. Stoney, fucking the girl of my dreams, Katerina The Sublime, Katerina who chose Stoney the moment she saw us both at Yosemite one summer, eating rum-soaked beans out of the can. I think about her like breathing; I don’t think at all – it’s an involuntary reaction of my body now, except not in the trachea, localized a bit further down. She’s a dream within a dream, all red hair and red lips and red cheeks. And she’s his, not mine. Nothing is mine.
             Not even Stoney is mine. And he says, see ya, then, and that’s when that realization guts me.

             Sometimes I want to fuck him. It’s how it’s always been – worshipping the earth beneath this drunkenly enlightened vagabond, watching as he seduces every person he meets, and eating the scraps, the crumbs, that trickle out his pocket. My life is my life because of the force of him, the gravitational pull he has on adventure and entropy. It makes sense then. I’m no special thing; I’m not exempt from his sociological physics; sometimes I look at him and I wonder. Sometimes I look at him and I want. And it’s not some mid-life sexual identity crisis, because the thought of his cock sure as hell isn’t pleasant and the tiniest sliver of Katerina’s breast never fails to make my balls catch, it’s not that at all. It’s the vibgyoric vim of his words, that boom-boom shiver of his battle cries. He’s brightness and abandon, run through with the electricity of living, and sometimes I look at him and I want to plug into it, that energy. Sometimes I want to fuck him and feel his insides and feel like I’m inside him, inside my own life, instead of a spectator in the cheap seats.


             We’re leaving a house party when he says it. Nothing special, coming off our highs, and when it starts Katerina is head-first, ass-out in the bushes dry heaving while Gills holds her hair. It’s me, Stoney, Paul, and Crux, passing around our last cigarette and discussing the oncoming heat. The past month has been suffocated by rain and hail and sleet, so the opportunity to bury ourselves in the dry dirt has us all spewing laughter and grandiose plans.
             Crux wants to go clear across the country. Just drive til’ we hit someplace hot, he says. Maybe Texas. Maybe Hueco. Let’s go climb some rocks, man. And that’s Crux, always trying to get us to visit his kin.
             Of course it’s Stoney that’s opposed to the idea, calls him out on it, says, Fuck no! extending the vowels to make his disapproval clear. Jesus Christ, Crux, how many times do we have to tell you? We don’t want to go to fucking Texas, that hick ass, gin-soaked, flag-covered wasteland. Last time I was there someone tried to run me over with his four-wheeled jalopy, man. Just for being olive. Nah. Let’s go to the mountains. Denali, man. Alaska! Alaaaaaaaska. He punctuates his pleasure for this idea by shimmying his hips up to Paul, who pushes him, and already unsteady, Stoney falls to his knees and laughs. You guys are pussies, he laughs and laughs, spine on the grass.
             You’re the one who hates the cold, asshole. You’re the one that’s gonna be whining about frostbite and shit on the drive up, Crux says. And look, we’re not all backwoods cannibals in Texas, all right? Look at me. I don’t have a mullet. I drive a Prius.
             You don’t count, Crux. You’re gay.
             We all laugh at that.
             Fuck your faces, he says, flicking the spent cigarette onto Stoney’s crotch.
             Yeah, you’d like that, but we like chicks, Crux.
             Whatever, man. Look, so what’s it gonna be, then? We can’t go to flippin’ Denali. Any of you ladies got a float plane readily available? Princess? He looks at me this time, eyebrows raised. Think your daddy can spare us the company jet?
             I hate that. C’mon, I say. You know how my dad is. You know I probably can’t go at all if we’re gonna drive that far. I pat all my pockets before I finally remember we’re all out of smokes.
             Goddamn, Morgan, Stoney says, up on his elbows now. You’re gonna own that place; you can’t tell me you can’t take the week off.
             I stuff my hands in my pockets, say, C’mon, it’s not like that, and I know what he’s going to say before he says it.
             Yeah it is! You work too hard, Morgan McMill, he says, mordant lips pressing into the M’s like an irate mother, and, I’ve seen how many assistants you have – you should be spending your finite, your precious, your only minutes on this sick sick rock with your dick in a woman and your mouth on a bottle of Jack, man. We, he swings his head around on his neck, indicating the others, we poor bastards have to work. You actually have choices! Choices!
             Sometimes I want to fuck Stoney. Stoney on the ground half-drunk, half-high, spouting his epicurean bullshit and selling it, selling it with the ease lined into his shoulders, the soft curve of his brow, the open hands upturned on the grass. Stoney selling it with his body, pliant with earnestness and the simple life that thrummed underneath.
             I wish it wasn’t, but it is, and I say, It’s not like that anymore, Stoney. And I say again, You know how my dad is.
             Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah blah, woof woof.
             Paul, always the diplomat, ends the conversation for us. Shrugs, Whatever. It’s your life, Morgan. And he looks at Crux and says, dude. Dude, we gotta go to the mart and get some Spirits. And he kicks Stoney, who’s on the grass now with his arm around Katerina, redheaded seraphim asleep, mouth nuzzled open on Stoney’s neck, Get up. I need some Spirits; get up. It’s cold out here.
             Chemically mollified by the mere thought of nicotine, Stoney rubs his head on the grass. Even on the ground with his face next to my boot he manages to delegate with imperial command. Morgan, you’ve got work in the morning, yeah? he says. Mind giving Kats a lift home and tucking her in?
             Lying Katerina down on Stoney’s bed. Red hair on his white sheets, taking off her shoes, her coat; her exposed neck Irish cream under my hands. And it’s true: I’ve got work in the morning; I should be getting home, but even then something like desperation makes me say, She’s your girlfriend; you take her home. And Stoney just laughs some more.
             Choices, McMill. Be a good lass – take her home. And that’s when he says it. All right, breath white out his mouth, exorcising the heat of his lungs, have fun at work tomorrow. See ya, then. Rolling to his feet, he and the boys and Gillian head down the blanketed night to Figueroa, waving their hands absentmindedly over their heads as they orbit obeisantly around Stoney, stomp-stomp-stomping boisterously in the center, the echoes of him coming back to me.
             Alaska, he’s saying. Alaaaaaasssska!

             The party swings stridently behind me, the yellow incandescence of its belly casting gold into the fire of Katerina’s hair, her mouth, dreaming on the grass. She’s cold in her dress, her bare arms tucked white underneath her chin, traces of a shiver running down her legs, knees apart. She smells faintly of bile, but also of powder and oranges. Everything is so loud, and so cold, and so pungent, but none of this matters.
             With Stoney’s words pressed into my heels, a branded conflagration of crisis, I go to my car, leaving the fallen Katerina in my wake. Nick Cave smothers me through the speakers as I drive home, and I think to myself, tomorrow. Tomorrow.

Or maybe I can. In any case, this is what happens when you combine intense joy, Thai Iced Tea, a marathon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a Camus overdose, nicotine, and art-fueled insomnia.

William the Bloody, Damon Salvatore, & Meursault walk into an Algerian bar...

December 28th

There's no waiting for us.

               One thing immortality didn’t change was the pace of time.  Most days, time crept into his skin prick by prick, just like it did when he was alive, and sometimes, sometimes he couldn’t remember the moments just before – they crashed inside him with such gale-force chill, like phantoms; like the arc of a blade falling in a precise swoop.
               William didn’t know how he got there.  He guessed it had something to do with that fuckwit kid; choices had been slim on his back-alley tour of the world, but until then he had avoided eating backpackers – they always smelt of patchouli and gave him hairballs, hell to get rid of – things just got hard the moment he got to Algeria.  This was the desert; this was the desert and he was hungry, and this was the desert and the boy turned out to be the only thing on the menu. 
               Kid must have taken something though, something strong, because one moment he was driving down some gravel road with the Sex Pistols loud in the stygian dark and one beat later he was face first in the sand with the Impala lighting up a juniper.  And he was hearing voices again, mostly hers, and it was a nuisance because it meant guilt, and it was a nuisance because it meant that his jeans got tight and the guilt wouldn’t let him do anything about it.
               It made sense.  He should have known.  When he was done the boy had collapsed to his knees and had stopped screaming; the boy had started laughing then, little blood bubbles bursting through his teeth, flecking a tangled beard red. 
               “No shit, man!  No fucking way!  You’re a vampire!  Jesus Christ, you’re a vampire!”
               Bother was, he didn’t kill anymore.  And that was hard; it was hard not to just snap necks, not cause of the rage, or lust, but because most humans just didn’t know how to let him have a nice, quiet, meal.

 

+

 

It didn’t surprise him, the other vampire sitting on a barstool, both hands wrapped tightly around a scotch.  It was 3 A.M. in barely developed Kouba during the Saharan summer, a time and place the suicidal nature of the long-living were instinctively drawn to; ever since the French occupation in the early 1800s, it seemed that the conscience-ridden of his kind had all straddled the Chehili into Algiers for the very purpose of finding barstools and scotches with which to contemplate their sins.   The vampire belonged. What didn’t was the human, sitting by the window, still but for the movement of his right hand occasionally touching a cigarette to his mouth.  There was blood on him, not his own.  With a full ashtray and a cup of coffee in front of him, there was a nothingness to his presence that was unnerving, even to the undead.  But William figured maybe that was just the acid, still pulsing softly through his system.

 

               The barkeep was dispassionately flipping through a filthy magazine when he approached and didn’t bother to look at him until he cleared his throat.  Even then, he took a minute to reverently trace the breasts of some freckled Pole before looking up at William with the impatience of a question curved into his dark lips.  He belonged too, the barkeep, with his green eyes and thick eyebrows, and so much skin, olive and glistening in the arid heat.
               “Glass of scotch, heavy on the scotch, mate. S'il vous plait, s'il vous plait.”
               “Vous vampires et votre scotch.  Et qu'est-ce qu'ils vous appelez?”
               “William.  And yeah, we’re a boring breed.”  He looked to his left, where the other vampire was now looking at him with a smirk.  “Aren’t we, mate?”
               “No.  We just have taste.”
               “Taste, mon cul.  Fucking parasites,” the barkeep muttered, returning to his magazine after handing him a glass, graciously filling it to the brim. “Just don’t taste my one paying customer, and we’ll be all right, mate.”

 

+

 

               He was down to the filter of a Benson he’d swiped from the backpacker when the other vampire stumbled over.
               “Sharing is caring, brother.”
               “Ah.  American, are we?  You know you’re a long ways from home for such a pretty thing.” He put a fresh cigarette between the vampire’s lips and struck the lighter as the American inhaled. 
               “And you’re too British to have such an ugly haircut.”
               “Jesus, you’re shitfaced.”
               “Well I’ve got a couple hours of scotch on you, Willy,” the American said, smoke curling into his eyelashes.  “Name’s Damon, by the way; I know you’re dying to know.”
               “Already dead.  Though probably not as dead as the bloke by the window.”
               “Fuck.   Yeah.  Fucking asshole.  God, humans piss me off.  Fucking fuckers.”
               “Well that’s a boatload of drunken ire to come the hell outta nowhere.”
               “It’s just – look at the him.  Just like all of them, right? Always having these fucking existential crisises like they’re all inevitably doomed to serve an eternity of suffering.  Humans don’t know shit, man.  They’re all gonna die.  They’re all gonna get to stop being here.  We - we have to choose.  We have to choose to die.  For tomorrow and tomorrow and fucking tomorrow, we get to contemplate life and we get to contemplate death.  Them, they get to be cowards until their bodies choose for them.  There’s no waiting for us.  There’s just death, and there’s just choosing.”
               William looked at Damon. He really was a pretty thing – with every feature sharply outlined – wolf-blue eyes rimmed with dark eyelashes, white teeth bared inside a full-lipped, moist-red, scowl, flushed pink cheeks palely framed by dark long hair – and he was prettiest when his face stilled.  He was easy to read.  “Who’s the girl, mate?  What’d you do?”
               Damon didn’t flinch, too inebriated take offense at his own transparency.  “I killed someone.”
               Even with the gravitas heavy in Damon's voice it was hard for William not to laugh at the absurdity of the statement, “Isn’t that the point of us?”
               “No. Not just someone, man.  There was a girl.”
               William sobered.  This he knew.  “God help us, mate.  It’s always about a girl.”
               “It’s just – I meant it, you know.  Earlier.  I don’t know about you but it’s just been decades of fucking up over and over again.  And yeah, there’s the thrill of seeing what might be different the next day, and there’s blood and fucking and scotch, but that gets boring real quick.  And then there’s just this – this until you fuck up one last time and then the question becomes the only question and the question never leaves you – why am I here?  Why won’t we die?”

               The question hung so palpably in the air that even the barkeep stopped perusing his pert blondes and the human by the window put out his cigarette.  With calm precision the man turned his head; the two vampires recoiled. Slowly, the figure, clad in a sweat-stained suit, walked towards the counter.
               He didn’t look at the vampires sitting to his right at first; he just placed a gun on the gin-soaked oak, quietly said, “La police est à la recherche de cela. Je m'appelle Meursault, “ and this seemed to mean something of import, as the barkeep dropped his magazine and quickly turned on his heels to run up the stairs.

                The bar stilled for a moment.  When the man finally turned to face William and Damon, it was with a halting English but sure-bred calm that he said, “Aren’t you boys hungry? It’s time for dinner,” and with one motion he took Damon’s glass and splintered it on the counter, caught the largest piece and slashed once, twice, thrice down both wrists. 
               The whole act must have taken at least fifteen to twenty seconds, but to William, it was one of those moments that arced into him in one fell swoop.
               Meursault had overheard their conversation; this was his answer. 
               Time crawled back to its petty, pinprick, pace as Meursault’s blood slicked warm down their throats, simple and unceasing, until all heat was gone from the body and the man collapsed unbreathingly at their feet.
 

-n.s.

♥

Yes.  It happened.  I hope the Nobel and Pulitzer folk don't hold it against me.

To quote my favourite Bokononist - "Busy, busy busy."



"carried on fog exorcised out the lips or, (Run run run as fast as you can.)"
18 x 24, watercolour on paper

( details, and how this came together. )

For Beyond Eden next weekend. Probably the most hours I've ever clocked on a painting.



I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! or, (life is a haunted house; we are its ghosts)
18 x 24, watercolour on paper

( some photos of the process, details, and and where it all happens )



Let's go; let's go!

This has been one sinkhole of a month.

Beginning of a long short.

December 27th

Seeing.

       Little glimmer bullets; subsumed by warm, wet, white; I take too long in hot showers – the rebirth, the old cells washed away into the sewage; this softness, the comfort of touch, constant touch down my body; I like it, it quiets the gossiping – so persistent, so frightened, all day, quiet for thirty minutes and I don’t have to move, I don’t need someone else to look at me, there’s no procedure required, just water heated to steam, disrobing, and blessed nothing.
       Jack’s large body breaks in, interrupts, clawed hands on the curtain, jeering canyon of a mouth, “Let go of your wang, Liv; we’re late.”
       “I’m not – I wasn’t – ”
       “Look, I’ll touch it for you later if you want, but we gotta go, you know how Bubs is about this sorta shit.”
       I catch Jack’s face when he spits the s-word; he curses with his brow, and his lips, not just his tongue; some sort of back-alley sangfroid, skin fisted into visual vitriol, comical and sad, both.
        I thrust my pelvis at him.  “Get out of my bathroom, baby-girl.”


       It’s no mystery why Jack drives like the city’s on fire.  There’s power there, in the engine of his Benz, a stolen high from a borrowed vehicle; Jack plays smiling serf to the paisley-tied bourgeoisie tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, serving them their triple-digit merlot, and he finds release in the dark blur or the highway; it is his revolt.  It is his addiction, his passive suicide, even more so than the white powder he’s inhaling through a liquor store receipt. 
       Everything about this kid can be summed up by what he says next, this half-empty groan, half-full chuckle:  “Yeah, that’s it.  There.  That’s it – that’s the stuff.”
       All for show, except I’m the only one in the cheap seats.
       “Jesus.  You can’t wait til’ we get to Rochester’s?”
       “It was a red light, man.  Chill out.”
       Red light; Jack’s dark eyes are lit in the misappropriated thrill, scab-kneed boy with too much hair.  We used to climb trees out in Douglasville til’ we earned enough scars to impress the angelheads of the famed West Coast; then we gassed up my rust-dressed jalopy, said goodbye to our weeping mothers, and now this is what we do.  It’s hard to understand how or why or even when, so I don’t think about it; I look at my hands instead, clean in my lap.  He’ll touch it for me later, if I want.  God.
       Jack is talking wildly, limbs loose with Shakespearean abandon, cesspit mouth spewing planned debaucheries, pussy this, pussy that; all I want is to quiet him with my arms. 

       It’s not his body.  It’s not even who he is, because this city has robbed him of an identity.  It’s just that he’s here, always been.  And I know how this world works – things like Jack, they’re rare.