i tm i

Scissors, Paper, R- ags

I was doing some paper collaging recently and in the moment wondered why it felt so appropriate to have a workspace strewn with paper cuttings.

Then I remembered my mom would have a pile of papers at the table. She went through them, carefully select something that was meaningful, and tear or cut it out and place it in another pile of papers to be later traded in for discounts on goods or services.

As many others in the US, my mom clipped coupons out of newspapers, flyers, magazines, wherever. This was another activity that became added to the list of things that one did as a good house wife on a tight budget. My mom did this exercise. As if it could save the family… Something.

If one put in the time to hunt through advertising for the right scrap of paper and turned it in at the right store, within the right time frame, one could exchange a coupon for something of much greater value. Like magic.

Apart from coupon clipping, my mom also made these reinforced, cut out paper dolls for me. I have memory of figures that were a medieval prince and princess or some such? Just illustrations cut from somewhere and turned into low-budget toys for a child. Like magic.

Less can be more. Less can also just be an expression of less.

In junior high school I had to do a specific collage project to personalize my art class portfolio. I lost marks on it because the composition was imbalanced. That annoyed me. I wasn’t concentrating on making a serious art piece. I could barely concentrate on anything. I was trying to find a way to have fun with it, get into the junior high flow projecting good feelings somehow while I– you know– also endured crushing, dizzying anxiety that came with pover-puberty.

At twelve and thirteen I was already having suicidal ideations. My brain gets soaked in all new levels cycling levels of mind-altering hormones and I have homework and mid-week bible study plus no two day weekends for all the church I have to attend. And what class do I have on which day? And where is that classroom? My mind isn’t letting me make any of the math formulas make sense. And oh, I can feel other students talking shit about me– did I menstruate on my skirt again(?!) And, dear god, the number of idiosyncratic teachers to deal with has tripled! And I never have proper gym clothes… And… Boy howdy, that there Jesus feller did never give me that peace that passes understanding!

I was rightly expressing my inner state with an imbalanced composition. I should have gotten full marks, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain my “process” or make an “artist’s statement” defending my choices. Some outspoken neuro-normie student could have done it. I wasn’t one of those.

Now, here I am in a third world country, going through death-puberty while reluctantly being parent to an elderly toddler nearing death-infancy– who nags me to do house chores in two languages, while I am doing them– and for some reason I’m cutting up paper, arranging print scrap. As if that it could possibly make any difference in the world to this household.

If only the patterns I find myself following would make a lovely suit or something at the end.

I know for others scissors are more than a simple technology. They are a powerful magic tool. Just think about how you get to wield two blades at the same time with such subtle precision. And two blades should be more dangerous, but the risk of harm is minimized. They are fairly safe, until they are not. Symbolically, that is strong stuff.

In my hands, I would cut at all of you with scissors if the sting meant I had your attention, no, more than that, if I had your understanding. But no. However frustrated I am, I give the bunted sides– out of ingrained “Christian” politeness. Yet I am cutting to soothe anyway.

And the bricolage I come up with– for all that goes behind this “comfort hobby–” appears mediocre and futile to my inner critic. Especially when there is a “real” visual artist making “real” art in the same house.

Copy, Artemis

Some very well cared for human beings flew around the moon this month.

I was right there with live-stream of the astronauts as much as I could be enjoying the glitchy feeds, relating hard with the cramped living quarters and… waste management issues.

When people go camping they don’t think much about where to put all the shit. It’s natural. It can go in the Nature. Or in the vacuum of space.

But what do you do when you have limited resources and are camping out in an urban environment that is all pavement, security cameras, limited privacy, and limited toilet usage?

And what ever nature that is available is precious and will be protected from being used as a toilet– I should add.

This was one of my logistics nightmares when I was one of the unhoused, living in a van in Williamsburg, Brooklyn back in the Hipster days.

Solid waste was by far easier to deal with. One can evacuate into a bag and drop that off in a trash can as one does with dog waste.

Liquid waste was more interesting to deal with. Especially in the cold months. I remember winding up with an accumulation of gallon jugs filled with frozen urine stored under the van. It was embarrassing.

I made myself do some reconnaissance and be brave (mostly that) so I could start doing waste disposal “runs” (walks actually) carrying sometimes four jugs of piss at a time to a nearby public toilet. (That’s four gallons / 18.2 liters of urine, y’all.)

I would go from from where Figo Il Gelato Italiano is now (It used to be an unpaved parking lot for zip cars when I was there.), across N12th street, into McCarren Park and all the way to the toilets near Lorimer St.

It is about a four minute walk that my skinny ass made during daylight hours carting obvious liquid waste à la main to a proper sewer system access point. Then I would toss the empty containers in the waste bins and scuttle back to the van pretending to be a completely normal person.

I don’t think I ever used those toilets apart from those waste runs. They were not very pleasant.

And just like the astronauts, my actions were being scrutinized from afar. My upright and properly domesticated neighbors needed to watch to make sure I wasn’t going to start breaking into buildings and or stealing things, or be too… you know, improprietous. I was a street person. Or course they would need to be wary. It’s what humans do.

I had to keep my head down while somehow hold my head high at the same time. And be sure to dispose of waste correctly lest I be visited by the fine fairy. Which sounds like it could be real nice. But it ain’t. Because even if, damn they fine, they’re going to ask me to cough up money that I didn’t have yet that I need to buy food with.

Oh, to have billions of dollars backing me just to make it snow a little bit in space. No one wrinkles their nose at you in disgust for that.

Wildly enough, all of this fringe living nonsense was part of how I became included in the NASA Artemis space program. No, really.

Sticking it out in New York led me to becoming an art model. That put me in contact with a nerdy figurative artist friend who brought me in via the Lunar Codex. It’s a whole project where NASA litters the moon with examples of human creativity because… that’s is also what humans do…?

I can’t send children to the moon, but something of me is there in name and likeness. I got a Magario to the moon in some fashion.

And it did take me freezing in a tin can Apollo 13 style and being a mission specialist in charge of waste management to do it.

no(t)stalgia

You want to know a strange feeling?
Opening a box that’s been shipped to you from the other side of another country and finding it full of objects from your childhood–
Objects that made up your immediate world as far back as forty years ago and were part of your day-to-day for years, that you haven’t seen for years. And now they are with you again far outside of their initial context.

How do you express the meaning of these things when meanings were never defined in words because these objects were with you before you had full grasp of language?

Are things only really valuable if you can condemn them to be recreated inside a mesh of language?

Then, even then, neither the language nor the things gain much value because they are mine. And what am I? What authority backs my words to give them weight and validation that would convince anyone else agree to give them greater value?

Nostalgia has been a hot word these days, but I do not long for my past. Nostalgia is not a word I would use to describe what I feel when I reconnect with my past. Unless the practically nauseating, full body shudders I get is nostalgia?

The feeling is more like the spookies that come over me when I visit haunted places. I guess that means I haunt myself. I conjure up the ghosts of my past selves. And I have to face their disappointment. I have to explain to them how I continue to be trapped in a (mental) health hole. And why the world isn’t any better.

Try explaining to a child why birth capable people in Puerto Rico and Greenland desperately needed to be sterilized for the good of humanity without their knowledge or consent, but known human predators aren’t lobotomized right away. It’s cheaper and quicker the transcranial magnetic stimulation, but we suddenly have ‘the ethics’ to consider for these people– for some reason. 😒

(I hope those two islands unite in their shared sorrow and make something powerful of it.)

Among the self-haunted toys, books, and things, I found a bag made by one of my sisters when she was learning to sew as a preteen/teen.

The bag was full of my plastic jewelry from the 80s: pop/snap beads and bright plastic charms that clip onto bright plastic chains that were too itchy to wear.

There was also a rainbow heart necklace that I wore once for a grade school class picture.

Looping that piece of the past around my neck now, I feel it strangling me in ways I did not feel when I was little.

How do humans call themselves advanced as thinking animals when it’s sociopolitical daring for me to wear some bright vintage children’s jewelry? What good is all this impressive human cognitive powers of logic and emotional intelligence if ya let yourselves get narrowed in the think-works so bad that heart symbols and rainbow colors manage to engender such… fear? Fear of being impinged upon by an “other.”

Not only are my past selves disappointed in humanity for being this asinine, but probably the ancestors too. Not just my people. All of them.

You want to put people on Mars, in an environment entirely hostile to the species, but you can’t figure out something like fair public bathroom usage in Florida? Really?

Can you hear all the booing from the beyond yet?

No? Well, I’m booing. And not in the spooky way either.