i am coming back

sometimes things get to be too much and you have to take a break, intentionally or not.

i've been doing nothing, creatively speaking, aside from a few photos and cooking, for months, but now i feel ready to get back in. and its not just because pat has created a mega-studio next to my desk (because now we live together (!!!) even though we miss devo) with a 12" x 17" scanner and giant wacom screen. i'd rather stay away from the computer if i can and figure out how to work without it. maybe even figure out how to draw.

i've felt so removed from things, but i feel like its time to take charge again and do some things with my life. sometimes its very tempting to just come home in the evening and watch tv while eating toast and drinking beer. with my new job i won't be tempted because daytime tv is totally boring and i won't drink very much at all anymore and i'll go to the ymca to swim and i'll be so healthy and creative.

i think i was coming to these goals before i got offered this job, but it certainly made things more realistic. i felt like i had been half buried in the sandy sludge bottom of a pond overgrown with algae and depleted of oxygen. i felt like if i could poke at my brain it would just blob-jiggle in place like one of those opaque jello-molds, but instead of being a nice, cheery early 60s color like peach, it would be sickly gray-green-brown. i was pretty sad, pretty down-trodden feeling. when i started feeling better maybe a month or month and a half ago, and not feeling like i was just being pushed along in a lazy river current, i really felt like i was coming up out of the dark, into the surface of the water, where i could breathe again. maybe like a fish feels at the end of winter when they begin to thaw and can jump up out the water into the sun again. i don't know where all these water metaphors are coming from. i guess i miss the ocean.

anyway, my point is, sometimes we're all there at the bottom, but we come out of it, eventually. i like this part of the summer. i like the humidity. hazy nights make me feel more connected, like my body's dissolving into the air around me and mixing into everything else.



on that note, looking at pictures of my young grandparents with my baby uncles and aunt and mom makes me feel pretty sad, but i always forget and look at the pictures anyway.