The little nurse crumbling to the ground earlier today really twisted me up for the rest of the day. The nursing home weeks finale started out with me and Kat sitting outside in the could eating good food and I have to say I enjoyed it and almost as quickly the ravages of real life came storming up and kicked the door down.
Of course it made me think of dad. It made me think of my year and three months of sickness, infections and absolute realities. I found myself feeling very, very sad. I was thinking of my first wife’s terrible loss when her second husband Ted died of cancer six months after retiring. The loss my daughter felt over that also. The loss Maggie and Sunflower felt when Mary passed.
Our lives are scored by loses and how those loses affect us. We can become stronger through the lessons that will come or we can find ourselves floating endlessly in sorrow and confusion and never get beyond that.
Memories continue to flood my consciousness. As the memories present themselves I feel a rush of an emotion that is attached to the memory.
Look at me now.
I have come such a long way.
I have taken on the giant and I have won the battle for the most part.
I am victorious.
Victory however is a small price to receive here.
Victory here is like most of the wars this country has had.
We didn’t win.
We just appeared to win.
Especially to those people who were not paying attention.
Which is most of them.
My life is rationed water.
A ridiculous diet.
Ridiculous things like can’t eat banana’s or oranges.
Eat all the god damn meat you want for protein.
Being a vegetarian is almost impossible.
So what happens if I ignore the rules?
These memories are not like normal memories where normal memories are deceiving, fabricated or altered, these memories are so clear and real. The sensation of needing to cry immediately is there a lot.
I was sitting outside on an absolutely beautiful day. It was that kind of blue sky and white puffy clouds with a nice breeze and brilliant sunshine that just makes memories burst forth like the blooms of the newly planted flowers.
I was thinking about high school and not high school for high school but for the moments in that Maggie and I held. Some may say that our love affair was wrong but it was the most perfect thing that I have ever experienced in life and from this love affair came the most perfect child in the universe.
I was so willing in the beginning to embrace Maggie and the love that we felt for each other and she did too. We were so into each other that the rest of the world just did not exist.
There is a method of better creation, better products when you put some real work into it and not sit around being pretentious.
There’s a problem with that type of relationship. When it ends, it ends hard. Maggie’s life and my life were changed forever.
For me the changes were not always good. I suppose it was that way for Maggie also. There is a problem with the kind of love that Maggie and I knew. You never completely stop loving each other. The love never completely goes away.
There’s something wrong with this picture folks.
My heart is breaking at four thirty in the morning on a Saturday morning.
I organize my newest art works for Bird to take with her when she come again.
I don’t know how I feel about any of it.
I find myself actually working some form of pattern with it all. I make sure I paint when I can. I make sure and create either a necklace, bracelet or earrings. I make sure to write in the three venues that I am currently working in, non-fiction, fiction and poetry and I update my blogs when needed.
I also make sure and keep the Facebook and Twitter accounts up to date with me checking all updates and updating my pages.
Never before in my life have I ever kept a consistent method of doing those things that I do that are creative. If I had my guitar here I would be complete and this is where the apartment comes in.
The apartment for me is nothing more than a live in studio. I find it eternally exciting and breathtakingly frightening.
Art, creative process is a job. I am currently employed by myself. I have a great slice of time right now that allows me to work this like a job and to begin to make a living at it.
I think I might have lost focus here. The premise of this publication was to document the things that were taking place for me while being in this nursing home rehab center where I have been dropped from the rehab part and I am trying to get free from the nursing home part and start a new life and to document that new beginning also.
No, actually I think I am right on cue with this.
My days are spent emotionally falling apart, feeling more together than I ever have and somewhere that is a new place. A sense of nothingness, finding myself off into the realm of were nothing exists.
Through this transformation I am writing, painting, creating, crafting, goofing off and creating havoc to the strange and pitiful lives of my fellow nursing home cretins.
Combined with this is also my relationship with my brother and his family that has changed so dramatically that it I breathtaking when I think about it and that happens to be the case on the other end of the spectrum with my daughter and my grandson.
I sit every Saturday like a dog at a door waiting for Sunflower and Wyeth to get here to visit. I have an undying faith and yet there is a nervousness to my waiting. What if they don’t show up? I will tear something up I swear to God. I will chew the legs off of the table.
My life surrounds them showing up. It is the moment in my infinite universe that is all mine. It is the time that is perfection.
I wait for my brother Jacob and his two boys but not like I used to. I know they will come eventually.
I think my new photo project will be to take pictures of the food they send me for each meal and put the caption on it, “Would you eat this?” or “How desperate are you?”
For now I will wait. I won’t let myself get too involved in anything else. I will wait just as all of us wait. For some they stopped waiting and accepted their fate. Ah what a heartbreaking state of affairs this nation has become.
cool peace
hippy mike
love
spirit
stay groovy