New Tat

Did this drawing last night, in one marathon sitting. I'm pretty slow (and deer legs are wicked hard to get right -- they still look pretty stiff to me). It was midnight when I finished. I'd been reading Russian Fairy Tales illustrated by the remarkable Ivan Bilibin all day, and re-reading The Master and Margarita, so maybe that's why it's so... um.... whimsical? macabre?  Whimsico-macabre. I promised my girlfriend that I'd design a tattoo for her, to finish her sleeve which already has a Japanese folk tale wound up in it. So I figured this would fit in. It will be mostly green with some red for the blood and fungi, and the deer will be fawn-colored.  If she accepts it, that is.  If not, I don't blame her.  It's weird-lookin.

Thanks for that, BP.

It's like reruns of your favorite sitcom. Day or night, if you start feeling a little dead, a little disconnected, like you need a bigger narrative to connect with, want to cry a bit maybe, or maybe all that talk of the "junk shot" in the news has got you hot and bothered in that trashy midafternoon cable-porn kinda way, just take a gander at those black billows and feel your puny sorrows and vagrant loin-heat leach out into big Mama Gulf:

Live feed of the oil spill.

Thanks, BP, for attempting to fill a hole in our collective gut with tires, string, human hair, tennis balls, and whatever other cheap shit you can lay hands on. Because sometimes we just feel so empty inside.

Heart of Darkness, or Yes, I Took a Lot of Theory.

IMPORT REPORT SUPPORT TRANSPORT
COMPORT DEPORT EXPORT
APPORTION DISPROPORTION
PORTFOLIO
PORTAL
IMPORTANT IMPORTANT
IMPORTANT OPPORTUNITY

[In training today I noticed a remarkable number of words contain "port." My cynical and corroded heart told me the following, in a pretentious monotone, to be sure.]

Corporate language and the PORT.
Hot blue receiving bays of sweet virgin lands locked across waters (accidental and irreversible like swollen waters before parturition) to scummy chilly harbors where burdened northern rivers expire with stretched mouths, entered and left by teeming thousands. PORT- -PORT- -PORT is: an inner, suprahistorical preoccupation with commerce's first rapine birth in sorrow and riches (EXEUNT: riches) by ports, ports, ports opened everywhere on every continent. Forced open with guns. Eased open with gifts. Latin gate, entrance, harbor; Latin to bear, carry, bring. We always give back. Open the port. Wider. Put a burger in it. A bigger burger. Thank you for your participation. This is a very important opportunity.

[I'm no hater. I can't wait for this paycheck. I warned you. My heart is bitter and corroded and makes the worst of a really good situation.]

Day One in Brah-son City

And I've already trashed my hotel room like a rock star. Not only that, but I am simultaneously typing this, reading the New York Times, and watching music videos on a giant flat screen TV about three feet from my face (why did they hang the TV above the desk? I have the resistance of a homeschooled freshman at a  college party.)

This new job is a big deal, I guess. Five days of training and piles of manuals and four course lunches and big hotel rooms and two-hour powerpoints on business ethics and black-and-white suits... all paid. I made a hundred bucks today sitting on my ass. Actually I only sat on my ass half the day because around 3 I became violently ill and had to be taken upstairs to lie down on a king size resort bed overlooking the spring forests, after a hot bath. I wasn't faking, jerk.

The most interesting part has been watching the subtle power plays between the local mountain folk, some of them Cherokee (though none look it, to be honest, probably due to Cherokee's famously liberal enrollment policies), and the training staff flown in from Chicago. Sweet-faced office-muffin lady gestures Vanna-like to the bullet point which reads, "PETS," and says, "Now most pets are perfectly friendly, but we just ask, for the purposes of this study [involving in-home interviews, FYI] that you request the owner of the pet to please put him or her in another room for the duration of the interview." A lot of my fellow trainees have worked on various reservations before, and a chuckle goes round the room. I'm thinking about the feral dog herds of my hometown whose sole human connection is with a bullet, and the chained furies of the Navajo res in their circles of barren earth through which one passes like a ball on a mini-golf course, with fear and trembling. One lady says, "Ma'am, hev you ay-ver been on a resurvay-tion?" (Excuse the weak attempt at dialect; you really just had to hear this woman.) "Well, um, no," says the HR muffin nervously, amidst more laughter. "Guess you got nothin to say about dogs then!" hollers one of the men. And then the lady (veteran park ranger) politely prepped us all on what to do WHEN we run into bears, and another man followed up with a tutorial on bull elk. The trainers were crestfallen.

This kind of thing went on all day. When the trainers suggested professional clothing, they were laughed out. When they suggested certain ways of speaking, someone said, "No ma'am. You jest best have a sense of humor is all." The slow-talking, in-the-know locals versus the big city professionals.

Tomorrow we do role-playing. I'm nervous in the way one used to get before those prepared speeches in high school, not for any particular reason, just trembly and fuzzy-brained.

Dear Denver,

Push out blossoms from your filthy frosty fingers.
Roll a big rowdy sun up from the plains.
Leave off stacking snow for a minute.
Come out, my mountain city loves,
come out! It's almost spring,
and I
am coming
back.

Account of the Murder of Isaac Kountz, 1876, Kimble Co., Texas

The hooves of the comanche horses strike even to the roots of the grass, crunching the water hidden there. At the western edge of the yellow fields of the air, the sun pauses in its rush for night. Isaac and Sebastian watch the men come up the ridge. Their sheep drift. They tuck their dingy tails between their legs and skulk into the junipers. No one will come for them.

Isaac and Sebastian climb a stone to see. Isaac's eyes, blue as the prussian army, flash their signals down below. The wind which has blown across the plains all the way from the ice nation dies and the brothers lose their balance in the stillness. The riders have read the signal. Sadly, Sebastian puts his new hat on. They jump down and Isaac looks back in time to see the last of the sheep vanish.

"Sheep are gone," murmurs Isaac.

The comanches are beautiful. Their arms and necks are like stones that lie under the river and their hair shines blue with oil. Their smell rises up as sweet as the skin of horses with the freshness of living organs and the bite of juniper berries. They advance in a constellation, knotted to the sun and the going of the sun, sweeping over the ridge and over the fixed elements of life.

The riders stop in front of them. Down below in the arms of the river Isaac and Sebastian see the house, resourceful and brittle like the castings of caddis fly larvae; but the shape, almost square, suggests a wound on the world, a forecast of something inevitable and painful. They are filled with sadness because they do not think they will walk through that door again. Nostalgia for this ridge, the last ridge, and this last evening of eleven years, overcomes the child Sebastian. The tears run down his face and he does not hang his head to hide them from his brother; the dry air licks them up. Fletched grass quivers in the last light, and the stones soften and turn sweet like the german marzipan Isaac only just remembers, but his eyes look to that single cloud hung like a mask over the mountain across the valley, and he wrinkles his forehead, trying to remember a name of it he never heard. Tomorrow is Christmas.

The first man aligns the rifle with his black fringed eye on one end and Isaac's grass-gold head on the other and joins them with a blast. Sebastian sighs. He kneels slowly, hands, right knee, left knee, to the magnetic earth. A shadow falls across his face. The comanche reaches down from his saddle and takes the hat from his head, and the riders follow the ancient day west, throwing their shadows back.

[Note: This was the last recorded Comanche conflict in Kimble County, Texas.]

Trials of the Vagabond-King

There were many years of preparation for the act. Many years of hearing the stories told and telling them back correctly, of affirming that I did understand, did believe, had indeed invited the sweet bearded vagabond-king into my heart and only him. It was after the otherwise ordinary crackers and juice had been spiced with the unique terror of ritual, the necessity of the true-heart's test, "Be sure! If you doubt, you will die," that I took communion.

The lights were dim and pearly. My head did not yet reach over the seats. The blood and body came on silver trays, borne by ordinary ladies I had seen on other days in ordinary places. I wondered if the grown-ups were afraid for me. I was not afraid for myself, having that certitude children have of passing all trials of purity of heart. I picked the biggest piece of Saltine cracker and the fullest thimble of Welch's grape juice. The room was silent. The blood lipped the lily cup, blue-sheened, lights on it. The body brown, salty. A tiny amount. No feast. A modicum of meat and moisture, an inoculation.

I had found, creeping around the church on Wednesday evenings with my best friend the pastor's daughter the boxes of Saltines and jugs of Welch's kept in a cabinet under the sink for this occasion. We helped ourselves. At home my parents called it grape juice and crackers. So the fact was no scandal. The realities of the juice & crackers and body & blood existed beside or upon or within each other. It was the mystery of the single object that draws to itself by its power a number of stories which move through it without tyranny, a mystery I recognized from a game I played with my mother in which we listened to wordless music with our eyes closed and told each other what we saw, and also from this fresh, cryptic realm of letters, whereby marks represented sounds which referred to things. Later I would learn one of its names: metaphor.

I was a great lover of science in those days. I passionately declared my intention to be a scientist and deal in mysteries. Likewise I was a great lover of the divine, and declared with equal passion my intention to run after the vagabond-king with white lilies, cup of blood, and dust in my shoes forever.

Science lost me first, sometime in late junior high, when it wedded itself to strangling, monochratic mathematics, which quietly squeezed mysteries into hypotheses and sieved the still slightly warm hypotheses through the seven severe layers of interrogation which were supposed to produce, through repeated refinement, a lump of pure truth. I could not believe it any more than I could master the alchemy. Christianity, though, with its dark capacity for transmutation, god to man, water to wine, wine to blood, retained my ardor for a long time. It lost me only when its grip tightened, when it demanded certainty instead of curiosity, when it had more answers than mysteries, and a dearth of silence and simple terror.

When the multiplicities that must move are fixed, the vivifying, electric, scandalous, mystery-cult collision of unlike substances proceeds elsewhere. Walk on, vagabond-king.

Do Not Interrogate the Heart

Last night I cut my heart out with a knife at a public pool. I was under the impression that it was something everyone tried at some point, like meditation or reading Ulysses. It was unwaveringly painful, in the way it hurts when someone dies or leaves you forever. I held it in my hands. It was white and still. My limbs grew heavy with that sinking that happens before a faint, but I didn't faint. It wasn't enough to hold it. I couldn't see the problem. So I slit it open like a peach, just to peek inside, but the knife was sharper than I'd thought, or the heart was softer, and the blade slipped straight through. The halves fell open. It was hollow and cool. Vertigo swamped me. I thought it was time to put it back, but I couldn't get it in straight. It was so delicate it kept tearing, and the most alarming thing was the way it was drying, so that the cut edges turned hard, curled in, and didn't fit together anymore.
My aunt found me. "You are going to die," she said coldly.
"No, no I'm not," I said. "A doctor could put it back."
"Put THAT back? No. That is ruined. They might be able to save you with some other heart, but, THAT..." and she stalked away to find a doctor. I watched a diving contest, feeling my vitality sink and sink gently down.
Later some kind stranger gave me a briny, clotted cow's heart swimming in blood in a plastic bag. My aunt approached with a surgeon. The new heart was going to be too big, but at least I might live. I kept the shriveled, yellowish pieces in my hands.

If you're viewing this from anywhere in the Southern Appalachian region, you'd best come.

I dreamed that Puck came back. He had lost his leg, so I made him one from my own hair. I fitted tiny thorns in for the claws. I tucked it up under the feathers, against the bone. Then he jumped up on my shoulder, and never left me again.

Birth of a Flyer

Layer 3: Coming soon!

Layer 2:



Layer 1:

The Brahman Delegation

My contribution to BBH's collection at the New York show.
I've been all about the chipboard lately.

Puck Fix

You know what? I might as well get a tattoo of Puck, if I were to get one, that is. That little jerk really buried himself in my heart.
This was going to be a card, too. I might still print it. It's my favorite.

Affordable Dental Solution

If I sit with my mouth open, flies attracted by the odor of rot will lay eggs in my teeth, and when the maggots hatch, they will nibble out my cavities painlessly with their tiny mandibles, and when they are done, I will shut my mouth and swallow, seeing as how they are made entirely of my own teeth, and seeing as how I don't like flies.

So Disgusting It's Almost Delicious.

Swarming Carnivorous Worms and Sea Stars

Here's to you, Sally.