I've Been Bad

I've been bad. We've been watching so much Battlestar Galactica (two and three episodes some nights - imagine YOU were three seasons behind and had all of it on DVD so you didn't have to wait for cliff hangers). The Pegasus episodes were all done in one mind boggling emotional cataract of an evening. When there is so much of other people's stories in my mind my own images recede.

And I stopped writing Morning Pages. I stopped when I did the depth journaling back in March (Morning Pages seemed like weak tea compared to the coffee of the depth journaling) and I never started again.

Then work and summer and travel and trips and blogging and... before you know it my painting was all shut down again. The stupid sheep were the last things that showed up, and we already talked about those. Damn ovines.

So no reading, no radio in the car, no movies, absolutely no Battlestar Galactica, no magazines, no Sunday comics... And three mornings ago I started the Morning Pages again (and was immediately whacked like a kid who's played hookie for a month - "You need to gesso that canvas again and GET TO IT. 'Show up at the page.'") And I just slapped paint over two pieces that were going NOWHERE (now they have potential - blank white and blank blue) and wet another WC page.

Playing The Summer Obsession loud (Burning Bridges in my headphones right now - I think I'll repeat) and hammering this out on the keyboard, seven minutes until I go downstairs and staple gun that next wet sheet of Arches 140 pound hotpress to the board... I feel better than I have in months.

When I'm painting I think I can be this civilized ordinary being, that doesn't need this interior jungle life to survive, and I can take a break from painting whenever I like. When I stop painting the animal comes out and I turn into a snarling caricature of myself. Someday I'll learn and just stick with it, one page, one canvas at a time. Leave the quality to God, but the quantity and regularity are MINE, and I can't screw with them or I grow a forehead ridge and hairy knuckles that drag the ground.

So when that acrylic dries I've got a lot of wild ass scribbling to do to see what comes out of the anger and glee. There are people in here waiting to get out, and they jostle the queue if I let them pile up. And it's time to go nail that lovely 500 year old paper recipe to the modern masonite I use as a painting platform. I feel like hollering like Tarzan and swinging off down the stairs to the garage for my staple gun.

(beating his chest and yelling, swinging on the ceiling fan...)