Rough Days and Old Milwaukee

I rambled only slightly drunkenly last night to a sound guy from Milwaukee, up for the Bent Festival, about how I couldn’t help feeling like I was in a sitcom as I was driving through and around Milwaukee. It had a gritty yet domestic feel, an accessible urban landscape. Things were solid and a little depressing. Time felt suspended and the people seemed rooted to the place, past and future. The sound guy nodded enthusiastically throughout my rambling, as if I was making a lot of sense. I’m fairly certain I wasn’t. And I don’t know what any of that has to do with sitcoms. Maybe I’ve just watched too much Laverne & Shirley.

It rained on the way down to Milwaukee. It rained while I was in Milwaukee. It rained, and I had had a really rough couple of weeks. A life and a love that I had given everything for had just crumbled, finally, entirely, heartbreakingly. It was something that I couldn’t (and still can’t) bear fully, the pain being way too much to ever take in one sitting. (Every day I let a little more pain pass through me. I’ll cry for maybe two minutes and then get on with things. Or I’ll let the emotion totally overwhelm me for only 10 seconds, gasp, sob, then continue walking out the door to a distraction.) The trip to Milwaukee was an opportunity of coincidence, a plan put into spontaneous action, a way to go, a place to be, the past and future rolled up tightly together in an overnight bag and thrown in the back of an economy rental car.

That thing had shitty wiper blades, let me tell you.

This love I lost, the love of my life, I reordered my entire life around it. Everything that had come before it fell away, grew faint and insignificant. When it ended, it was as if a love of thirty years, not nine months, had been destroyed.

And it is all the more devastating to me, because I laid myself bare in this relationship. Never before had I exposed my faults, my mistakes, my pain. I rolled them all out in a series of painful confessions, late-night phone calls that lasted hours, anxious emails with paragraphs and paragraphs of explanation and analysis – emotional, taxing, and scary as hell. I made myself more vulnerable than I have ever made myself to another human being, because that is what you do for love; for real, true, fucking love, that is what you do.

I had never loved someone like that before.

But of course you can’t control what other people do with your truth. Their truth might beat the crap out of your truth and leave it bloody and penniless on the side of the road. That’s kinda what I feel like happened to my poor little truth. I had to pick it back up, dust it off, and say, “It’s okay, little buddy. That didn’t have anything to do with you. It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

And we took a road trip to Milwaukee together, my battered truth and I. And we were a little too numb to do much besides drink in the downstairs lounge of the Best Western, but we learned some more things together, because truth just keeps taking life in, you know? She grows and learns, makes mistakes and sometimes repeats them, makes new mistakes and feels really bad about them – but I’m there for her now, in a way I haven’t been before, to make sure she doesn’t beat herself up too much over it.

 

The Royal We Awesomeness

One of my friends recently wrote me complaining about how she never hears from me, and she said, “You need a blog!” And this is funny because: I have had a blog for nearly four years now (not this one, the now defunct Elaborate Hour).

Ah well. Perhaps I was not doing enough push marketing.

Status updates for your favorite San Francisco transplant:

• Fishnets have been replaced with wool tights and legwarmers (look for the return of fishnets late spring)
• Primary social networking site is now Facebook as opposed to MySpace
• I eat hotdishes
• I eat tater tots
• I eat cheese curds
• I eat a LOT

I’m also working on two arts-related projects – my own, Art Head, and a local arts festival called Art-a-Whirl. One of my primary goals when I relocated to Minneapolis was to transition my career from general nonprofit administration to arts administration. I couldn’t have picked a better city in which to make that transition, and while I haven’t found full-time employment in the arts, there are endless opportunities to get involved and network within the arts community here. And the community feels more accessible to me than the community in San Francisco. But that may be due to the fact that I’m here with fresh eyes and no preconceptions – I’d been in San Francisco for seven years and didn’t really seek a place in the arts community, not as a contributor anyway, and the longer I was an outsider, the higher the obstacles to involvement seemed to be.

But I am really straddling the two communities right now – working with a local Bay Area nonprofit, Independent Arts & Media, to launch the Art Head project, while simultaneously exploring my future in the arts in the Twin Cities (as well as hoping to launch Art Head and an Indy Arts office here)! And now that I have articulated that fact, I realize that I need to actually include in my life strategy a plan for how that straddling can happen most effectively. Effective Straddling. Not to be confused with Effective Saddling, for which you will want to take a clinic.

And as for my personal art, well I have decided to devote resources to developing my writing. I’ve realized that writing is my primary mode of creative expression, and while that may seem like a “duh” moment to ya’ll, that realization had never crystallized for me until just recently. And the way I thought about it was this: I thought about the drive that an artist has, or really, anyone has, to translate or interpret something in the world, of the world, and how they turn to their medium to craft their expression, their interpretation of what they see, hear, think, feel. And I thought about the times when I have wanted to capture a moment, turn it into something more and share it with the world, or even just with myself, and I realized that what I naturally turn to, my creative language, is…language.  And now that I Know That, I don’t have to have any ambiguity about pursuing it with a passion!

It’s all about focus, people. And My Awesomeness. Or Your Awesomeness. Or The Royal We Awesomeness.

Ahhh, I finally found the title for my post.

 

Hail the New, Ye Lads and Lasses

“And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Defining t. vulgaris in Pictures

To begin, I shall post a series of images that I feel best convey the spirit of my new blog. This blog is supposed to represent a new skin, or some other new way of being. But I’m not sure why or how, so I’m starting with these images to see if any themes emerge.