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A funny thing that comes to mind on certain days: that, when I woke up that morning, I couldn't have predicted that I would be in that particular spot.
I was thinking that with the late afternoon sun lasering through the passenger window on the way back from Culpeper... on a half-tank of gas that the lady at the employment agency made possible. Nope, couldn't predict that conclusion.
My plans were to sell some furniture from the home place (in case I need to set up a studio/live there) and come home to put a rear axle seal in my rejected-state-inspection truck, and get it legal, again. High Five for the furniture: now I have space to re-assemble an OldSchool drafting table and leave an easel in the middle of the room, bathed in northern light.
The truck... got waylaid, kinda. The axle is out, the concrete smells like cat pee as only gear oil can, but things got different...
...beginning with finding out that my unemployment benefits have ceased. Not my bills. Or gas for my 500+ miles a week, in my school commute. Or the art supplies I'm required to have, every week. And beer, cigarettes, and maybe a little food, on occasion.
I will say right here that Conservatives can kiss my big, smelly white ass. Our Delegate thinks we're only entitled to 26 weeks, and you're outta here. Probably intended, literally. "Get rid of the ne'er-do-wells. Leave the county for Good, Upstanding White Folk, whose family settled here, 300 years ago. Oh, you rich bastards from northern Virginia can stay here, too... you'll just never be part of our 'Club'."
Pardon. I had to let that go.
After several phone conversations, it wound up that there might be three weeks before I see any cash. Not that I'm not grateful for a safety net for The Unwanted. Or wish I had a real job.
This is going to be tight.
There's an up side to all of this, though.
After the few pieces of furniture went for a relative pittance, I decided to stop by the little mercado at the edge of town...
...and sold five pounds of peppers to a grocery store, for the first time, ever. En español.
Of course, I spent five dollars more for groceries, there, than I earned. But, I earned a friend in la Reyna, the first auburn-haired, green-eyed latina I'd ever met... and found a way to never have to go to FoodLoin, again. Oh, and they have real Pepsi. With sugar, and not high-fructose corn syrup. My tastebuds remember that flavor.
And, there's a huge pot of collard greens simmering on the stove, from my own garden.
It smells like Soul Heaven in here.
If I'd doubted this going-back-to-school-at-my-age thing, I've now gotten over it. Something I learned, a language that I knew little of, three months ago, put food in my house. Only spoken in present-tense, mind you. Spanish 101 doesn't do Past and Future, so I probably still sounded like an idiot. And, my instructor is a SheWolf of the SS. But, she can't make me un-learn.
I've learned to love making images, again. The drawing teacher is giving me advice on selling artwork. My "major" studies are right on top. I want to do it, again, next term.
Three Weeks. That'll be the end of my first semester. No money for Thanksgiving. But, I'm thankful, already, for losing my job, if this begins something anew.
Inspiration don't come easy, that's for Damned sure.
Can I leave without snark?
No.
I still hate Conservatives. This breed, anyway.
Perhaps the most egregious serving suggestion on record... considering the salt and funk content of these OnionGarlicWise chips.
But, Oh... I have dared.
First thing in the morning... with day-old spinach dip.
With a Dr.Pepper on the side.
Junk Food Nirvana, I tells ya.
(Quote lifted from fictitious arts critic, LeonardPinth-Garnell)
If today was Hallowe'en, there'd be no need for extensive costuming: I just took a look at myself in the mirror, and I swore I was participating in a ZombieWalk. Children would scream for miles around, so convincing are the hollowed, baggy eyes, stumbling gait, and vile humours oozing from all manner of orifices.
Instead of sitting in Spanish class, where I should be, I'm typing this... a luxury I can ill afford.
So assured that the worst was behind me, I managed to salvage the last of my pepper crop from another frost, wash clothes, do my homework, and do some cleaning, yesterday... before the nasal tsunami broke.
Delightful, yes.
As an added attraction, last night provided some particularly Bad dreams... not bad, as in "horrifying", but as in... "asinine":
Under heavy security, I was visited, in my sunroom (which I do not own), by the FirstFamily... greeting the FirstLady with open arms (though I was clutching, for some reason, a battered, empty tin cup), while the ChiefExecutive took a nap on the couch, back turned to the proceedings.
That was sufficiently bizarre to wake me in the middle of the night, and say, "What the fuck was that all about?" It wasn't the only time, either.
Please send morphine.
It's like clockwork, or destiny: either my immune system goes on vacation, the intense four-class mid-term is taking its toll, or I've fallen victim to the germ-factory that is our school system.
Again, O Cruel October, with your ridiculous temperature extremes.
I just hope it ain't the Big One.
In my dim memory, I still recall a Hallowe'en party that I attended in a pretty convincing scarecrow suit that my mom had cobbled from shredded paper bags, winning the contest for Best Costume, and heading upstairs immediately after to go to the doctor.
Damn, October. Lay Off.
Three hours after i got home from classes, I was in bed. So was the cat, who'd hocked up several times in the kitchen, in a show of undesired solidarity. I'd dozed for an hour or so, and my radio alternate called (unaware that we're pre-empted, for two weeks), and wound up in a conversation about reincarnation with my head covered by the comforter. Thinking that if I relocated to the couch (to continue with the IFCMontyPython tribute on telly) that I'd revive.
Yeah... at 3AM.
Five hours later, here I am: twelve hours of sleep, on-and-off. It had better do the trick... the truck needs brakes and state inspection.
Send Good Karma, immediately... or someone to feed the cat, so she won't resort to feeding on my moldering corpse for sustenance.
I'm not trying to make any big statement, here. Just, I was listening to Iggy & the Stooges at ridiculous volumes on the ride back from drawing class, today, and reveled in the wry, clever, twisted lyrics. Yes, there are lyrics under that barrage of guitar distortion and thump. That's why I just threw two of them up, metaphorically.
There's been a copy of Raw Power in my collection ever since I started a "collection". First, a cutting-edge "cassette", that I bought when it debuted, while still in high school. I was too hip for 8-tracks. A drugstore deck, plugged into a crap guitar amp (a "Kingston", ironically) that I bought with my first drugstore guitar. Then, an LP. Typical consumer, when the re-mastered CD edition came out, you guessed it, plonk went more royalties. But, they put the bass back into the new one. It sounded nasty, then... it sounds NASTY, now. "Runaway son of the nuclear H-bomb", indeed.
It was among the first records I ever bought with my own money. Oh, there was "Batman", the original TV soundtrack (which I still own), that I begged for at a record store from my mother. But, when my first job came along, and everyone else was listening to Grand Funk Railroad and Bread and god-knows-what-fucking-else, I discovered the Stooges, T-Rex, Mott the Hoople, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. In my bedroom. In provincial backwoods Virginia. No wonder I didn't have many friends.
I was "goth" when Goth wasn't cool.
"Watch out now, 'cause I'm usin' technology.
Ain't got time to make no apology."
A cold, hard fact I didn't need to take drawing classes to discover: there's no "salary" for a person who thinks they can make a living, selling pieces of their ego.
Here's a good illustration (with absolutely no pun intended):
We were wrapping up class on Wednesday... a frustrating one for me, adapting to the concept of "grid" drawings (where you divide your paper into equal blocks, and the image you're copying from, as well... it's supposed to train your hand-eye coordination to duplicate proportions from small-to-large). I was hating life: it felt like drawing through a chainlink fence.
Then, while packing everything away, I heard the prof talking to this guy who drifted into the classroom: a heavy-set, older student, supposedly from the French Embassy in DC, effusing about the conte crayon drawings on display on the third floor. He wanted to buy them all, and more. Because they were red. Just the color red that the embassy was looking for, for their decor. Because they are Frawnch.
Price negotiations, galore. The prof called me out, and asked me to go upstairs with them to look them over. I thought, "I can defray my materials costs! I can eat like a real person, now! Me! Old Fucker!"
Not really. The one drawing of mine that he was interested in, of the Jazz singer from two weeks ago, I'd already promised to her. I think it pissed him off... because he wasn't interested in any of my other work. "No," he said, looking over sheet-after-sheet, "we are not interested in these."
Good thing I don't wear my art on my sleeve... though it was good for a five-beer discouragement antidote, later.
Maybe some other day.
Still... I prefer that this little piece of me goes to someone who really wants it. It is her, after all... as she sees herself. That's worth $150.
Really.
I just won't be eating any "FreedomFries" for a while.
...todos las días.
One of my erstwhile blog buddies, gone onto bigger and better things (malice.diaryland.com, seen on AceOfCakes) is now proud owner of a name-check in the Times:
You go, pastry lady.
Since following the commuting horde will never be something that appeals to me, more often than not, I choose to find the back roads to my destinations. Some call them "Blue Highways". It might not be the most time-sensitive choice, but, if I can find a moment or two to actually enjoy the trip and really SEE where I am, and going, it doesn't seem as big an ordeal.
And, believe me, I have to do plenty of miles to justify being paid to go to school.
As fate would have it, there are three battlefields in between my home and where I have to seek education. The Wilderness. Chancellorsville. Fredericksburg. My shorter ride takes me through but two of them... all the better. In the deep Virginia woods, it doesn't take much imagination to conjure up what went down, almost one hundred fifty years ago. The least that is necessary to roll over graves is fine with me.
Not that the people who live in the planned community in the middle of No Man's Land ever notice. I'd be afraid to dig up a garden there, in fear of what I might find.
A year ago, today, my mother breathed her last. I don't know if she had to endure it, as heavily sedated and incoherent as she was. Let's just say that as dissatisfied with life as she often iterated, and bellowed as such in her hospital room (heard down the hallway), there must be some peace, now.
A year. Hard to fathom. But, it's done.
And, life goes on.
I haven't written much in recent weeks. But, even though I've managed to again find the least cost-effective means to re-educate (Art classes, with no books... are financed with food money to buy drawing pads, and a billion other media), I'm feeling an upswing. In other words, I'm working my ass off. The big payoff: having two of the models who looked at my work say, "that looks like me... that's how I see myself". There is no higher compliment, I don't think.
In between all of the stressing and fervent activity, I was invited to spend the weekend at the remote home of a long-lost couple, friends. The scary part was realizing my tolerance of alarming amounts of tequila. The sublime part was waking up, camped out in the yard with my hosts, by a hummingbird, six inches from my head.
I can think of worse ways to regain consciousness.
When it's a sound to which you've become unaccustomed, the hiss of rain outside your window, late in the night, will wake you. For weeks, it's been Dry Gulch in this corner of the chaos, sagging, in the wee hours, "lugubriously".
"Lugubrious". I had to look that one up to recall the meaning: "mournful, to an almost exaggerated degree". Maybe not the word I wanted to use, after all. I was more interested in the pronunciation, which sounded "oily", since everything's kinda "oily", outside. The radio's static-y. Even the cat plopped her ample fanny in the clothes basket for a snooze... temporarily postponing her 24-7 patrol of the yard.
You know something has changed, fundamentally.
But, Mournful... no. With the calendar movement into Fall, comes a few dark patches. On Wednesday, realizing that it was her birthday, I visited my Grandmother's spot in the family plot... alongside the rest of my family. Absolute Absences, in the physical sense... though, my mind has been shaped with their presence, so they're not gone.
That hillside, ornamented with granite and old cedars is plenty bereft, though.
My mom's birthday. A lost friend's. Another friend's illness. So Fall commences.
Metaphorically.
It remains a Wall Of Green through the windows... only a few patches of stippled color from those few plants that expired from pure exhaustion, and not frost. Frost seems a long way off, since only yesterday all of the fans in the house were spinning to stir the upper -'80s soup. A brief visit to the pepper garden at the home place revealed the potential of lots of picking to come. Out-of-kilter Global Warming... it's good for the pepper crop. And the mosquitos, who have been delighting in my flesh for months.
But, transition is obvious. I thought, earlier, that today would be a grand opportunity to get my homework done... and "homework" is a word that I wouldn't have dreamed of using, twelve months ago.
As I sit here, typing this, it's very close to mid-term. I seem to have found a way to get through Spanish class. Illustrator is no longer a complete mystery. I'm up-to-date with the mind-juggling that design class has turned out to be. Drawing... that's been my revelation. And, I learned what it takes to bring it home, and get it done. The hard way.
Five months of idleness and self-doubt didn't set me on a particularly pleasant road. Consuming a six-pack a night was no cure, and is no substitute, now... which you discover when you drag yourself forty-five miles to school at 8AM, after waking at 6. With A Big Head.
So, perhaps "transition" isn't a demonstrative enough word.
"Holy Shit, what a difference!" will have to suffice.
I still have to find a way to make all of this work turn into "Work"... and not spend the rest of my days in solitude. Those transitions I will welcome.
PS: Why I called this post, "In A Nutshell":
The squirrels have lost their minds.
Obviously, the diminishing sunlight has put a spastic urgency in the daily lives of those erratic rodents. Adhering to cliché, they dart, lemming-like, into the path of the car with alarming regularity... and, judging from the tufted-tail remains on the highway, aren't all lucky enough to take that risk in front of me. They're all over the yard, scavenging. I've found walnuts on my front porch, under the spider plant on the table.
And, yesterday, before packing up for school, there was one of those little gray bastards walking through my living room. The screen door was propped open so the cat could get some last-minute snack fixes, not so some rat with tail decorations could waltz in to reconnoiter the house... a house, obviously the lair of a Predator.
What could it possibly have been thinking?
THINKING?!
The squirrels have lost their minds.
