Eyes

My eyes are starting to clear up.  I still need to be careful not to push it.  Had a followup with an ophthalmologist yesterday, and another on Friday.  Looks like it's just an infection so a drop of Ofloxacin every two hours should be enough.  If it's  something else I might have to use steroidal drops, and that has the portential to cause more harm than good if it's the wrong diagnosis.  I cannot afford to harm my eyes!

The softer lead is definitely not for shading.  I may have to erase some of the lighter work and redo it.


* * *

Sometime back in what I think must have been the late 'Nineties (earliest '00s at the latest?), I had an unusual dream that took place in someone else's imagination. That's according to the details of the dream, you understand. You know how in dreams, you just kind of know things, like the information is inherent? That's what I mean: the premise of the dream was that it was essentially someone else's, and I was appearing in it. Told you it was unusual.

The dream was this: I find myself standing in a hotel room, very plain and generic, dimly lit, the décor is entirely in red. I am alone, and naked as if I arrived directly from bed. I know somehow that this is a room in one of the upper East Coast States, like New Hampshire or Connecticut. It is late evening.

As I stand there, Dana arrives back from a night out. She has been dancing. Thing is, she does not actually enter the room via any door, as there is no door – she simply appears, strides quickly to the bed and throws herself across it. She seems despondent, weary, lonely. Soul-tired. She does not notice me at first.

I back up against the wall facing the bed and slide down it to a resting crouch, not wanting to disturb her, but she seems to notice and turns her head to see me. Instead of being startled or alarmed, she slowly drags herself off the bed and paces across the room to sit on the couch with me(suddenly I'm sitting on a couch – dreams do that). She sits with me for a while, not speaking, just letting me keep her company. I wonder why she tolerates my presence, usually in dreams she doesn't. I tell her that I like the room, which seems appropriate in the moment though on the surface it's a silly thing to say.

She gets up, still very sad, and wanders to stare at a window. The drapes (or were they blinds?) are shut, and I am certain that if I were to open them there would be no window, or that it would bricked up. I follow her and stand behind her, my arms around her, holding her in a warming embrace. She says nothing but lets me hold her. No window, no door...I reach a few realizations. This room is not real but one she has conjured in her mind, it is a safe haven to which she has retreated for solace. The reason she does not find my presence threatening is because she believes I too am a figment of her imagination. She needs the comfort of someone who loves her, and for some reason she has chosen me to call to her side.

* * *

That was the dream. It was a strong one, very clear and vivid, and felt like “one of those” (see previous post). I've never ha an out-of-body experience that I know of, but that dream very much felt like it must have been something of the sort. I believe Dana called me to her. Get this; not long after, a few weeks at most, I ran a search for her online. That's not something I 'd ever done before and haven't since, because I'm always afraid of what I'll find – for instance that she's married. I found her, though. More, she had posted her itinerary. On the night that I'd had that dream she had been in that upper East Coast state, and she'd been dancing.

* * *

So I asked about the dream I had in which she had been writing a letter at night and her hand froze up, preventing her from following through. Just a dream, or something that really happened? I don't know. In that dream, like the one above, I felt I was called to her side. Disembodied, she did not know I was there. I stopped her hand.

Vision

Getting over a corneal abrasion and eye infection.   I can finally look at my screen again but only for a few minutes at a time.  TV at a distance, if I'm not focusing on it much.  No reading, no drawing yet.

I wrote the following weeks ago.

* * * * * * * * *

Do you believe in ESP or is it all in your head?

I knew a girl named Dawnette once. Not closely, but enough to say hi to. We shared one class in high school, and that was the extent of it. Once I was no longer in school, there was little chance of an encounter. Our worlds did not intersect.

So it was curious that one night I dreamt of a chance encounter with her in a shopping mall. As in, 'What brought her to mind?' Not really that remarkable as dreams go, just enough to stand out in my attention after waking. You know how dreams go.

The every next day, I was at a shopping mall and there she was. We said hi, and went on our mutual ways. That's....well, you can say it was a a coincidence but it would be a ridiculously large one. I've had more since then, and some of them markedly upped the ante in terms of detail that turned out to reflect real-life events. I had been a skeptic, and I applied rational thinking to these experiences. In the end, the “rational” explanations were so improbable as to be insulting.

It's worth pointing out that the mall in the dream was not the mall we met at in real life the next day. In the dream we met at Clackamas Town Center. In reality, I saw her at Eastport Plaza. Dreams embellish, they get details wrong or at least take poetic license.

* * * * *

Lori H. vanished without a word near the end of '85. In 1986 I was plagued by bad dreams about her. These dreams placed her in a certain place, a particular predicament, and surrounded by specific persons. Nothing about her had suggested any of these things, thy seemed to spring solely from my imagination...yet there was a peculiar and disturbing resonance to the dreams. They seemed more...immediate than other dreams. More urgent somehow. I awoke from them with the overwhelming conviction that they were not dreams but real. Frustrating because – obviously – dreams are just dreams. That's what I kept telling myself. Disturbing because I had no way to find her or to verify that indeed dreams are just dreams and can never be more. I needed to because I cared deeply for her, and these insistent bad dreams left me feeling that I ought to be there for her, ought to do something to help. They instilled in me a sense of guilt for not being there. That was the big struggle, the tremendous guilt over not being able to help and the urgency in convincing myself it was all in my head.

One important detail: in the dreams, there was a mutual friend trying to help her. I had no real-world contact with him either, so could not reach out for confirmation.

I started binge-watching movie rentals in a bid not to sleep. Stayed awake for days at a time until I dropped. When I did finally sleep, it would be too deeply to dream. The it would happen again.

It stopped after a year. 1987 was blissfully free of bad dreams. That December, though, I met with the aforementioned mutual friend. When I asked of Lori, he said “You'd better sit down.” He then proceeded to tell me of her life in 1986 – not knowing that he was reciting my own bad dreams back to me detail for detail. It really happened. It happened at the time I was dreaming about it. I just hadn't had any way of knowing it was happening. So how did I?

She was alright, by the way. I didn't have to worry anymore. But it was kind of a mindfuck.

One more dream from that account, as it seals the deal. My birthday had been coming up, and I was deep into depression. I left a letter for her at her father's house. She had been through enough that.(as I was told) it was not easy for her to deal with people she knew, so I didn't hear back from her. I did, however, have a dream on a particular Thursday that she was at her father's home that day, met with her brother, and left again. The following week I called her father to ask if she had been there....he said yes, that it was probably the previous Thursday....after a moment's thought he said, yes, it was definitely Thursday – he was sure of it because Lori's brother had been in town and she'd very much wanted to meet with him.

Try to tell me that's a coincidence. Try real hard. And allow me to raise the most reasonable objection so you don't have to, that perhaps I misremembered the dream to fit the facts. It's a smart objection, I thought of it too. The fact is that I had written the dream down and could refer back to it. I'd been in the habit of writing down my dreams at the time. Especially the ones I thought of as “those kind” of dreams, the ones that felt somehow...more.

That's how you turn a skeptic into a believer. Not just personal experience, but experience that can be backed up with proof and can't be rationalized away as delusional. Given what the dreams had consisted of and how shitty I felt after each one, it was not something I had wanted to believe.

* * * * *

What do I want to say about Dana Marie? Boy, at this point I don't know. I guess it depends on who I imagine will read it, her or the people who know her. If the latter, then I'd want to leave them with the ways she made an impression on me. The Separator Wars of Kellogg, 8^th Grade. Seeing her onstage the first time, in The Music Man, which catalyzed me to overcome my crippling shyness about trying out for a play (which I'd always wanted to do but could never see myself doing). The way she quietly reduced our teacher McNamee to a jittery mass of gibbering madness. The odd reaction I had to seeing her with a cigarette for the first time in the school parking lot (smoking suited Lori, it's one of the things I missed about her, so it's not as if I've anything against smoking...but for some reason it seemed all wrong on Dana).

If on the other hand Dana were reading? What have I not already said? Or asked?

I think I'd ask her if she believes in ESP. Or dreams.

I'd especially like to ask her if she ever had a night somewhere in the 90's (I forget just when in that era – mid-90's, I think) in which she was writing me a goodbye letter, alone in the middle of the night, with an alarming aura of finality about her, and for some reason her hand froze up and wouldn't move, preventing her from finishing. That night in particular I would love to know about, learn that it was just my imagination – just a dream. .

You're balking, aren't you? It all so sounds very irrational and unreasonable. I know, I've been there. For instance, over the years I've had dreams in which Dana has been under the leash of mafia figures. I don't know where that comes from, and I reject it as having anything to do with the real world. It's not just unreasonable, it's just fucking unthinkable. I reject the idea, I won't have it. But it would still be a relief to hear it from her: “That's not real. You're nuts.”

It's not the only reason I find this hard to let go, but it's one of them. I still have dreams of her every now and then. Not many, almost never, and almost none of them feel like “one of those”. But I always have to wonder. Have you ever seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Talking with Dana is my Devil's Tower.

* * * * *

In 1986, when I was having a year's worth of bad dreams about Lori, I also had a just a few about Dana. Same feeling of immediacy, like there was an extra layer of reality about them. Same dream repeated. It didn't say much but it said what was important. In the dream I am walking home from school, but the geography is all wrong: I am walking through the warehouse district, the streets empty. Dana sits alone on a loading dock, knees pulled to her chest, arms folded over them. It's a defensive,

protective position. She is miserable and lost in herself, and though I ask her what is wrong and try to comfort her she is oblivious to my presence.

And I should have been there for her, even if it was just a dream.

Not Black and White

Say that Jesseca has sent me a sculpture to decorate the yard, and I like how it looks in the sunlight. It makes a nice tableau. So I draw it, enter it in one of the Gresham art shows, and someone buys it for a few hundred. The drawing was mine, sure, but the design was Jesseca's and I just passed it off as my won. What are the legal parameters at work here?

If I snap a pic of a vintage Corvette, I can sell it with no worries that a lawyer from Chevrolet is going to come looking for me. You see the question? I don't know where the difference lies. The Corvette is Americana and my drawing is pop art.

I have a photo, one I took myself, of a hanging ornament in my backyard. It is against some vine creepers and latticework but the central image is the ornament. I don't know how far up the production line that goes but it's somebody else's art and I'm going to draw it in watercolor pencils. What are the laws outlining what I can do with the piece after that?

* * * * * * * * *

Trying to finish that large double portrait, and it's so much more difficult than anticipated. Jesseca tells me it's that the photo was taken with a flash, and that's certainly a major factor. It makes the shading difficult to calculate, as well as three-dimensionality. Also working on a piece that is substantially larger than I normally work...I dunno, I've done one larger portrait before, but not one taken with a flash. My eyes don't want to focus on the tonal shifts, tracking them makes me feel almost dizzy. I've printed the faces out again closer to the size of the drawing, I'm not sure it helps yet. I'm also varying the 0.3mm thickness with a 0.5 as well as using harder lead. The soft lead will be last, and then a spray with fixative so that it doesn't smudge or smear.

Because of this I have not been working on the image of Sharon Mitchell. I hope to do that soon too. Think maybe I said before, I feel like I need to do side work like that just to remind myself how to draw – it's that bad, it makes me feel as if I've totally lost the ability. The double portrait looks good so far, mind, when I step back from it...but someone else will have to assess whether it's up to my best. I keep having to redo areas, and half the time I feel like I'm settling for inferior results.

* * * * * * * * *

(Tuesday, 5:30 AM)

About 90 minutes sleep, awoke from a dream about a punk wild-child girl who was attracted to me but was telling me we should have nothing to do with each other. The attraction was mutual but she was convinced of out mutual incompatibility: she was an exaggerated bad grrrrl half dedicated to her life of chaos/crime and half resigned to it, and she thought of me as...I dunno, vanilla toast. Somebody who's idea of dangerous is watching Rob Schneider movies. Someone who eats oatmeal but does so out a neon skk8er themed bowl and thinks it's edgy.. I woke up thinking:

1. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you...”
2. “Check your assumptions. I'm not afraid of how wild you think you are, and who you think I am is kinda fucking insulting.”
3. This dream reflects what I'm feeling about Dana.

I have a screencap of her from Pretty in Pink that I'm developing a sketch from. Won't be a full drawing, as the details are not as crisp as that would require. Technically not a screencap, it was taken with a camera aimed at my TV because my comp still won't play discs. Her eyes in partiular are shaded enough to require me to figure them out first. This will be in color. You remember the John Hughes movie? Dana was an extra, playing a schoolgirl and passing right in front of the camera. Her hair is , let's say, very 80's (which I like), not punk and not even Wavo (does anyone else remember 'wavo'?) , just pushed up by a headband. 

It occurred to me that I have reason not to post it once it's done, but I'm alienated enough and disheartened that I'm not sure I care anymore. In her silent way, she has gotten her message through: “Die already.” Maybe what she feels toward me isn't contempt, maybe it's just utter cold indifference. Maybe it's the same cowardice as the girl in the dream, but at least that dream proxy for her had the backbone to say something.

A girl I liked named Andrea said to me once "I'm sorry I'm not who you wanted me to be.” I didn't know how to respond to that, but it bothered me in a way that took time to figure out.. She was trying to be kind, but...I never want to hear that shit from Dana. She has no fucking right to decide for me who I wanted her to be.

If my own assumptions are wrong, at least I've been trying to discover whether I'm right or not.

tThe cinema of David  Cronenberg has had one central theme, that of identity.  There's a scene in  A History of Violence that really resonates with me. It's the concern I'm struggling with here, not just disillusionment with Dana but what if anything I hope to do with these blogs.  I'd write up a review of the movie for my other blog but in all honesty I don't trust her to get the point, let alone ever read it in the first place. In the movie, a woman has discovered that her husband is not who he says was – that he hid from her a criminal life and a volatile identity. With her he has been a different person entirely, almost story-book sweet and unblemished. Disney perfect. Until the recent revelation, she has done her best to put on the same facade for him, so as not to threaten what they've had together. The betrayal has been his failure to trust her with his true self. There is a moment of her entering a doorway and finding him there unexpectedly. The power of the image isn't in the resentment in her eyes but the fact that she is half-undressed and refuses to hide her body demurely as she always has done in the past. That and the obscenity she hurls at him.   The gesture fairly yells “Did you think I was too fucking nice to let me know you? For you to trust me? Was I so precious that you had to wear a mask and lie to me? Let me show you just how fucking nice I am.”

Maybe I'm on the wrong track, but that's how I feel, and in a big way.

There's only one person responsible for how she is seen and understood, and that's Dana herself. I can't read her mind. At least one of us has made the attempt to be understood. Her silence has left me free to believe anything at all. She was afraid I saw the worst in her based on prejudices that were never mine...she should give a thought to how I think of her now. This time she's earned it – hell, this time she chose it.

I want to be known for who I am and not for who someone thinks I am. By her, preferably, and for better or worse. That was the main reason behind the two blogs, that through my reviews, the substance of my few posts on FB, and eventually my work here I would demonstrate my own values – because they are at odds with the assumptions Dana made of who I am when she shut me out. It's not just that she was wrong but that the prejudices she ascribed to me are anathema to me. If she's going to hate me, I'd rather it be for who I am and not for who she mistook me to be.  I don't know what her values are or whether mine are anything she would respect, but they're out there for anyone to see.

So, honestly, at this point I don't think either this blog or the other serves a purpose anymore. Not much of one, anyway. I've told others that I could have been okay just vanishing from the face of the Earth, from anyone's memory. That sounds way comfortable right now. But I'll keep both blogs going anyway. Like Dana, I'm stubborn. It won't reach her, but at least someone will see me for who I am, and just maybe they'll find something in that they can  respect.

 * * * * * * * * *

I'd ask her one thing. Was there ever a night, somewhere in the mid-Nineties, in the middle of the night when she sat alone in her house, in the living or dining room, at a table writing a letter...and her hand froze up, just stopped working so that she was unable to finish the letter? If there was such a night, she'll know what I'm talking about. I'm not going to explain it to anyone else.

Probably just a dream, as so many were.