2000-07-01

i spent the week painting and little else. im trying to force myself over the "Jaded" aspect of having taken so many art courses, into the thicket of pure gushing color love. making real expressions of who i am, and not ideas culled from others, barely rehashed.

i'm recreating myself over and over. i have a thousand different banners to hang over my head. different outfits to wear, different voices to use. different forgeries to convince everyone with.

My paintings are all over the place. None of them look anything alike. very often i hear my teacher's voices proclaiming over in my head: "it just doesn't Grab me, you're not giving me anything to hold onto"

(Bob Yarber said this, who's work is now on display along with Warhol's in Sonnabends, NY . . .).

It's like all the lies i've told, the lies i've learned to make since i was little, have become so overwhelming, that i have swindled myself. Its hard to determine where the me ends and the false extensions begin. I believe what i say, and forget what i feel.

anyway, tonite i talked to mom on the phone for a little bit. she's dealing with the new deteriation of her parents. mom-mom is in the clutches of severe alziehmers (spelling?), pop pop has liver cancer. what can i say about it? My grandfather has nostalgia of the past, of how families used to be. And it's butted up against today's facts that todays mid-class americans (my family, aunts, uncles -- good examples) are too busy to watch over a dying loved one. They've got work to do, races to win. my grandfather is becoming more bitter than i've ever known him to be. He is afraid he will die alone, all of his work, raising this family . . . and he feels it is a slap in the face that no one will take care of him. He's got to accept the love as it exists in the family, not as he wishes it to be. or as he had hoped it would be.

And What else? maybe not much for now.

i've stopped recording my dreams, word for word, trying to get every little detail down. this week i just decided to kind of sit there and think about them instead. It's like should i jump out of bed out of respect for the alarm that's going off, or just hit snooze.

IT's ok to hit snooze!

much love, peeps --