I don’t know if I’m grieving for lost family or if I’m fed up with trying to find some sort of outlet for two books and a studio full of art after all these years of a hundred some agent queries, gallery tries, or if I’m going crazy dealing with a business that in spite of thirty years of hard work and constant learning, of surviving earthquakes and recessions, disease, lunacy and death seems to have run its course, or all of the above but I’m stuck. I don’t want to paint anymore. I can’t find a project for my writing. My mind goes adrift. I’m often exhausted. Bill gets tipsy and almost falls with a knife in his hand and I am overwhelmed with the feeling that I can’t take care of anyone any more, that I can’t face another disaster. Driving home from work, I feel sad that my dead mother will never taste a strawberry again. Dead friends chuckle in the back seat. I tell a dear friend who doesn’t want to hear it that the whole God damn economy is going to blow up sooner than later. I’m so fed up with reading and commenting and trying to do something about the fascists taking over the last vestiges of America and the world. It’s gotten so depressing, I just can’t seem to even research anymore. I swung a deal for a 17th century Italian cabinet and spent a week restoring it but the thrill seems gone and it sickens me. It scares me. It makes me feel ungrateful. By some incredible miracle, I have been saved from the street by Chuck moving out and leaving me this wonderful apartment with Bill whom I would have moved in with many years ago if finances allowed it, but I can’t shake the fear that I’m not on the lease and have no right to rent control if anything happens to Bill. And I feel like an idiot for not admitting that anything can happen to either or both of us at any minute anyway and not appreciating every minute I have left on this earth. Mostly I think I’m isolated. Friends have died or gone, new outlets don’t pan out. I have seriously considered writing about my high school ten day spring break field trip in the desert after dad died, especially considering the isolation, depression and feeling of entrapment that has slowly closed in on me as my mother withered away then turned into a monster, my money and ability to make it faded and friends began to die is almost identical to the entrapment I was fighting as I got on that bus at sixteen years old and began to pull myself together and put my life in the right direction after my drunken father blew his brains out and my mother and I found his rotting body in his apartment. The entire basis for that metamorphosis was the fact that the desert that I never knew though felt like I always had was the place where I spent the first three years of my life, a memory erased by my mother and father’s bitter divorce and dicey relationship forced on the two of them by their half an accident son. Just reading her letters to her family when my father left her after he found out she was pregnant was such an illumination into the bizarre dance of circumstance that has been my life. I took a guitar that would teach me music on that trip. I got my first crush. The energy and escape and rediscovery of my very beginnings in life the trip opened to me led me to force my way into a circle of older high school kids involved in theater and the arts. It released me from the prison fate and other people had closed me in and sent me on my purpose in life. I have worked and struggled and pounded on the door ever since, for close to fifty years now. Somehow, some way very soon if I have to kick it open, light it on fire or blow it up, I will open that door. Once again I will come home to one that never existed but was always there waiting for me. I learned to walk very quickly as a toddler for the only thing I had to lean on was the side of a trailer broiling in the heat of the desert sun.
6/23/20
That was five years ago and I'm still here and hanging onto a thread so much thinner and more fragile. I somehow managed to get back on track with my writing and went through and orgy of painting with hundreds of works. I started a third book and honed the first two. I wrote that short story about the desert and a collection more. I somehow managed to hold onto a corner in the upstairs of the store and get a job cataloging antiques for an online auction company in a warehouse in South City. I helped Bill through a heart valve replacement, two stents and a protracted six month diabetic sore that healed up three months ago and seemed to herald a new start only to be shattered by a mysterious paralysis that made him almost an invalid and unable to get the the hospital because of the plague. I worked through that and figured it was probably the beta blocker they put him on after the heart procedure that left him hobbling on a cane. Then the general consensus is that he got so weak with six months of not moving, his body started to shut down. Physical therapy seems to have started to turn that around and I pray he will get back to at least using a cane and being able to get out. My God, He hasn't left the apartment since the first of March. Oddly enough, the plague and ensuing nationwide riots have been a purge for me in a ghastly medieval sense. Americans are finally starting to wake up and the world that has been waiting for us for years is breathing a sigh of relief. Now my books that predicted this ten years ago are prescient. But the depression has descended again and with it the fear of losing Bill and the roof over my head. There is a ship's clock for sale.
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