resolve

Not to be mired in some muddy version of depression and resentment. If it's being heard that I want, here I am.

Thoughts on Saturday: Remember? Being thankful. I even wrote in my Facebook status that ___ ____ is "thankful." One word when I had paragraphs inside me.

Paragraphs that spilled out, in tears, sitting in a clean car on a sidestreet near my house, on the way home from having lunch with old high school best friend who I was terrified of seeing because I thought maybe she'd get angry at me for no reason again, and I'd be so desparate to maintain the friendship that I'd try to say what I thought she wanted to hear, when really nothing would have satisfied...

But that was months ago. On Saturday, after lunch, thankful for lifelong friends, who I'll have stupid fights with but will always be friends. Thankful for my clean car, evil though it might be but I just didn't care right then. Thankful for the clear blue sky and painfully luminous light and listening Lauridsen's O Magnum Misterium, which I then bought because I can afford it now, and thankful for that and for the old man in the antique store with boxes full of dusty doorknobs, trying to sell me a very nice coffee table, the right size, worn, yes leather but already used, a little out of my price range. Thankful for having a price range. Thankful for coffee tables. Thankful for a relationship that seems to be working and for the trees and houses and the calm of it in the middle of the 4-day weekend, and the man riding a bicycle down the street, and tears falling because of it.

And wanting to write it and share it when I was feeling it, thinking of it while I made dinner and while I did something else on the computer and talked to somebody else and didn't call somebody else...

And a feeling of projects being more important that galavanting about the country visiting old friends, how I used to love that, having adventures, but now I want to be a scholar, I want to be an underground artist and I know that I am too smart for what I do but nobody else can get a book and sit down and read it and understand it and nobody else can synthesize it and create something new, informed by it, and nobody else can publish that new something and share it and engage in dialogue...

And reading finally a book lent to me about the artist who created Spiral Jetty, and reading an interview with him and he's very well-read and his art is in context and I want to be informed and know why Duchamp is Cartesian, old dead white men that they are, and I want to read Nietsche, whose name I can't even spell and I don't feel like looking up, so I can argue against him cogently, and there's absolutely no reason or excuse not to do any of this.

So I already have a full-time job and another part-time freelance job, but projects projects, and here I can record them and what I'm aiming for -

What I'm aiming for in these posts and my painted spirals - without context though they may be - is a kind of transcendence - maybe mystical and escapist as the artist says - he's not interested - but not escapist, I think, because it's the most basic and honest expression of the world I inhabit, maybe not the world you inhabit, but mine - which is always mystical and always puzzling and always holy, painfully preciously holy, and if I'm depressed I've just gotten disconnected from that holiness -

And I'm rambling so I probably won't post this -

No, writing that give me a stomach ache, so what if I write that i will post this -

nobody reads it anyway - and that gives me a little pang of anxiety but at least not the ache of words stuffed in with nowhere to go, rotting and festering and making my stomach ache -

So maybe this little post is just a little piece of the manifesto of this blog and all the oil paintings lining the place where the carpet meets the wall next to my bed -

And the manifesto says that through this desperate, convoluted, naive, invertedly self-conscious rambling and through the unraveling curves and curliques on the canvases, that I'm aiming blindly for some kind of truth - not a universal one, really, but the kind that ties everything together in the reality that makes the blue sky give me tears and sometimes the outlines of objects are crisper and realer and I see very clearly the connections between them - and drugs are not involved or necessary because everything is so very obviously connected - all the cells that make the person that we construct but really changes every day - and all the ancient cells inside our cells - and all the creatures billions of years old that we were made from - and the truth that makes everything precious and sentimental and gloriously plain -

And if I can access it through words and through daily experiences and through math and through science and through philosophy and through art and through music - and if I can read and be in dialogue with enough of it - then the manifesto will be manifest.

And so that's what this is. A record of this dialogue, through spirals and fractals and tears, aiming to outline whatever underlies it all and ties it all together. A mystical diary.

Thank you, dear invisible reader.