New painting completed

'Comforter', 18" x 24", enamel and crayon on Masonite.

This me with mom at the hospital shortly before she passed.   She was covered in her favorite Biederlack comforter blanket, red and white with a hearts design.

Ever since that day I've been needing to paint this. For a while I lacked he courage to try.

It's looser than My usual work and took maybe two weeks of experimenting with the paint and crayon before I got the look I wanted for the texture of the blanket.  I've never done anything this personal before and I think it may be a huge step forward for me - provided I follow up on this direction.  I want to, lacking at the moment the time, material, and next image.  I'm even happy with the actual finished texture of the painting itself, once I'd coated it with satin sealer.

goodbye Dana

Dana will never, ever be free of her cage.  She built it herself, I cannot free her from it.  Her cage is her fear of speaking to me.  She refuses to leave it.

She blocked me from sending her message.  That's it.  She broke my heart again.  She found courage and compassion for one brief moment and now it's gone.

Think I've established that that is NOT Guanyin on Dana's back.  Compassion is a meaningless concept to her.

Dana, If I offended you I'm sorry.  I'm sorry my morals and values aren't what you thought they should have been.  I 'm sorry that I refuse to judge a group of people you'd have me condemn.  I'm sorry you have a doppleganger.  I'm sorry you acted guilty and afraid and helped me believe something that wasn't true.  And I'm sorry you didn't have it in you to be a true friend.  I'm sorry you decided now of all times would be a great time to break my heart again.


I'm curious, Dana, what part of my love and support for you as a friend offended you most?

The Two Times I Overcame a Block

No images and no apologies.  It's on-topic, and it's a piece I'm proud of.

The second was pretty undramatic, just flexing muscle memory.  I had a photo of Jesseca that I wanted to draw...funny, all this time later, I know longer recall how I was going to render it except that it specifically was not going to be pencil.  Probably pen and ink, simple lines and  blocks.  The point was specifically not pencil because - ugh - too long away, too daunting.  But I got to the folds of the jacket she was wearing and...juuuuuuuuust couldn't help getting drawn in by them, really, really wanted to dive in and explore them.  So I ended up with the first finished pencil drawing since probably Franklin.  Let's see, that was (I think) 2009.   That's a hell of a block.  25 years.  But I did it.

The first time, though...that's another story.  I warn you right now that it's very uncomfortable, very private and personal.  Intimate.  I offer it to the depressed, the hurt,  the lonely, the blocked, to any who may be helped by it...but above all I offer this to Dana Cooper, an enigma and beloved friend, cherished and badly missed. I write this as a spell from my soul and set it free unto to the world, may it heal where it needs to heal.  May it find Dana's heart.

As high school came to a close, I didn't know that I had depression.  Neither did anyone else, so I got yelled at  a lot for the piles of homework I didn't do.  No one could say I wasn't paying attention in class, because I aced the tests and knew the material, but when it came to transforming a blank page with the info in my mind it always worked the other way around. (Tryin' to keep this short and give you the basics, but I do need to set the stage.)

By the end of '84, Dana had left for L.A. via a holiday in Europe.  She sent a few postcards, and I discovered that when I tried to write her the same thing happened as with the homework.  I  couldn't make it happen.  It was about this time I fully admitted to myself that I was head-over-heels in love with her, and wondered how I'd managed to keep that squelched.  In love?  I wanted to marry her!

I did a handful of plays, including an independent sci-fi bit in which I met and fell in love with Lori Hamilton, who by strange coincidence I had never know at Franklin.  She was class of '83.  By the end of that year, 1985, Lori also was gone - just packed up and vanished, no word to anyone, no way to reach her.

I was still attempting to draw, less and less, and never finishing anything.  I did a small painting, and several pen and ink works - posters for plays, print ads for White's Collectibles.

In 1986 I had an unusual dream.  I dreamt of an acquaintance from school.  She was a ta a mall (in the dream), we met and said hello.  This was someone I had never seen anywhere save one class in one year of school, and never expect to see her again.  The very next day I went to a different mall from than the one in the dream.  She was there, we met, said, hello, and that was that.

My friend Jesseca would say that was a testing of the signal to see if I was tuned in and paying attention.  A number of minor incidents of the same sort followed, inconsequential but fun.  Skeptics of ESP like to argue that believers who've experienced it have a prior bias: they want to believe it because it's fun.  The barrage of dreams that lasted throughout 1986 were neither wanted nor fun, and I desperately tried to believe that ESP was not real.

I will not detail these dreams (that's you knocked over with a feather, right?) except to say that they all took place in L.A.  Some were about Dana, and gave me no real information at all except that she was miserable and apparently isolated.  The rest were about Lori, and those were rich in details.  There was also an evolving and consistent narrative concerning the nature of the scene she was immersed in and the company she was keeping. 

These were not normal dreams.  They had an intensity like few I'd  ever had before.  I'd awaken fully from them, convinced that they were actually taking place.  The dreams were not strictly literal - that is, they still had bits of dream-embroidery about them - but the meat of them was overwhelmingly real.  A mutual friend of Lori's, Robert, began to appear in the dreams.  He would try to persuade her to save herself from the situation, and she'd laugh him off.

My friends, these two women I was madly in love with, were in trouble and I had no way to help them.  I made more attempts to write to Dana but the block was firmly in place.  Lori, I had no one to contact to find her.  I began trying distance myself from the dreams.  I mean...they're just dreams.  Be real.   Lori could be anywhere in the world, why would she pick L.A.?  And then another dream would hit.  It was irrational how guilty I felt.  Dreams, really.

A pattern began early that year.  I began to lose sleep.  Those hated dreams, I tried to stay awake days at a time to avoid having dreams.  I would raid a local video rental outlet for movies of all sorts to binge-watch.  I could make it awake for the better part of a week.

But still the dreams would come.  All year for a year. 1986.   Then I stopped having them.
1987 was uneventful until nearing the end, Winter, when I had a surprise phone call from Robert.  I asked if he'd heard any news of Lori, and he said "Man, you better sit down..."  When Lori had left Portland at end of '85 she'd gone to Los Angeles.  From there Robert proceeded to lay out her story, what he knew of it.  The details were the same as from my dreams, with a few variations.  Lori had been in trouble, willfully, self-destructively, and when Robert arrived on the scene and tried to persuade her to help herself, she laughed and ignored him.  Eventually, though, she did come to a sense of herself and extracted herself from all of it.  That was around the time my nightmares had stopped coming.

I could not have known any of this...but I had.  It all came to me in my sleep.
(So...the dreams of Dana?  They were real too?  But they had told me nothing, I didn't know what had troubled her so!  And were they too resolved, if no more bad dreams called to me?)

Lori had returned to Portland.  She was having trouble meeting with most of her old friends for personal reasons, but she was doing  well.  I asked where I met leave a letter for her and was told she often came to her father's house.  I wrote her a letter - in itself a huge breakthrough but not the one I'm building toward.  My art was long gone by then, no longer even trying. 

I didn't hear back from Lori.  Which is...about as far as I care to delineate that memory.  It triggered the depression that had been growing in me.  It was perfectly reasonable for her part, I must have been an association to a past she wasn't ready to engage with yet.  But for my psyche it was too much.  I'd spent a year terrified for her and she couldn't even say 'hello'.  I crashed. 

I began having fantasies about my death, about how she might feel when she learned. These became suicide fantasies.

Now...it's one thing to read or hear about depression clinically, or even anecdotally, as I had many time before.  It's another thing to be inside it.  It wasn't something I recognized.  Part of me kept thinking there must be something wrong with me, but I kept that brutally crushed.  There are people out there with REAL problems!  How dare I claim to have a problem?  How privileged!  Besides, I'm just...fantasizing.  I'm just indulging in a little fantasy, the way someone might do putting on a sad movie when they're down.  (No.  People, no.  Readers...no.)  Or the way you can't leave a loose tooth alone but keep nagging it with your tongue.

This is how the brain-chemistry imbalance feeds itself, pushing the balance even further out of alignment until it reaches a critical point.  Listen, please, if you reading this recognize yourself in what I've written, if you're there now - whatever you do, you must stop those thoughts.  Do whatever you can to distract your brain.  And tell someone.  Your thoughts will kill you. Literally.  Stop feeding the imbalance.  Right the boat.  They're not just fantasies, and you do have the absolute right to claim this problem for yourself.  You're not alone.  Plenty of us have been there. 
I'm reaching the nadir.

I had heard of a phenomenon called the "suicidal urge".  It's not a general leaning but an explicit impulse.  Talk is that if you've never felt it, you cant know just how primal it is.   That's the kind of things that sounds like hyperbole to everyone else.  One night in February 1988 I found out for myself. 

I had taken to sitting in my room for hours at a time, inanimate, overwhelmed with longing and rejection and pain and a loss for answers.  My mind wandered.  My mind was numbed.  My mind was battered.  Then, suddenly, for a moment, my mind was sharp, clear - get up.  go to the kitchen, get a knife, bring it back, put it to my wrists.  It wasn't how I wanted to go, but...I could do it.  Easily.  Right now.  Middle of the night, no one will see and ask questions.  What is this clarity, is this what they call the "suicidal urge"?  It's like my brain has produced a batch of chemical imperative and flooded my system with it, an "off-switch" message stored in the lizard brain and invoked when things pass  a critical point of no return.  Before it had been speculative, fantasy, but I could.  Right now.  But it would have to be right now because I've heard that the urge is fleeting, that it only lasts a moment and then is gone.  That's probably right, the chemical "shut down" command would break  down quickly, dissipate, so if I'm going to it needs to be right now.  I don't want to be walking back to my room with a knife in my hand and then not be able to use it, that would be humiliating.   I want this, this relief, finally, I don't have to go through this anymore.  I can actually feel my right arm plunging itself toward my left forearm and elbow!  This is fascinating, my body is locked and won't move but I can feel the tension of my right arm struggling to be free and use a knife I never went and got.  I can't make myself stand up.  None of my muscles will move.

And then it was over.  As intense as it had been, I was in a dense fog again.  I remember thinking absolutely nothing, just getting out of the chair and walking to my bed, laying down and falling into a dreamless sleep.

I don't know how many days it was after that that I ran across a lecture on PBS about depression.  I put it on as background noise while I did something else.  It's a marvel how the mind works...sometimes it will do something that's brilliant in a Homer Simpson kinda way.  As I listened, I recognized myself as the subject.  Hey!  This thing I've been telling myself isn't a real problem?  It's got a name!  It's a diagnosis!  I'm not imagining it after all!  Here's the 'D'oh!' part of it: it was such a relief that a great lot of the depression lifted!

Part of what had kept me from writing to Dana all those years was the fear of having to explain to her why I had remained silent for so long.  Simply, I couldn't.  I didn't have the understanding of it.  Learning that I had depression solved a lot of that.  It unlocked something.

There was a night when I was walking one of my nieces home in the dark, and we talked about things...I spoke about Lori and about Dana...and as I was talking I became aware that in the back of my mind I had already made the decision to write to her.  More, that I was fully capable of it.  The letter wouldn't be perfect and didn't have to be.  She might reject my explanation and my apology, but that would be okay.  If she didn't get it, I did and would have made the effort.  When I got home, I wrote to Dana that very night.  It came back undeliverable a week and a half later, but I took it to her former address here and tried again.  Her father Ralph met me at the door and said he'd pass it along to her.  By that point I had already written a  second letter, and put them both in the same envelope.  It was a review of the D.O.A. remake that had just been released.  Dennis Quaid finds out he's been poisoned and has days to live.

She wrote me back, happy to hear from me.  I didn't tell her that I was on love with her.  Or that I'd been suicidal, or about Lori, or about the ESP.  Dana keep asking me if...how did she put it?  I have the letters but it hurts to look at them...she kept thinking I was holding something back and urged me to open up.  When I finally did it was too late.  I think in hindsight, when she sensed me hiding something she was  thinking of something else  entirely.  But I wouldn't know about that for a few months yet.


*******
For Dana Marie Cooper, with deepest love and admiration
12:34 AM
11/26/2017

Ties

Dana spoke of loss and darkness in her life.  I don't  know who  she lost.  A child, or her parents, or a husband...I wish I had been there for her.  Several of my dreams suggested it would be her father who finally brings her to speak with me.   How do I win her trust?  How do I show her that she can speak with me on things that are deeply personal?  I'm wanting tonight to offer something of my own that is personal, that is painful or private.  I did that all the time in the no-longer-extant former blog  years ago in which I could post anonymously.  But not knowing Dana's heart or her story I don't know if anything I could offer feels right.   I was suicidal once,  only weeks before Dana and I began to write each other in '88.  Should I write about that?  It's personal and private, is the point - that I can open up about it... but I don't think it's relevant.  I don't know that anything would be.  I'm not making a  sympathy play, that's not it.  It's an offering I want to make, not a sacrifice.  There have been a few occasions where talking about my depression openly online  helped strangers to get through the same thing.  Sharing makes a difference, even here.  Maybe, if I could find something like that, even if it's utterly unrelated to anything Dana has struggled through...maybe just the effort would mean something.  I'm just at a loss as to what to write about.  I'm still trying my best not to feel anything.  Just coast.  Just float.

Still don't know if I have to go to New York.

I took mom's bedclothes out to the  garage tonight, ready to donate to a place that helps women trying to escape abuse.  Seeing them in a heap like that being discarded hurt more than most of what I've been having to lose.  I held the blankets and cried some.  I keep  feeling as if mom is just gone out of town.  It isn't sinking in because when it threatens to it overwhelms.  I made a peanut butter pie a week ago and realized it's the last one I'll ever make in this house.  I  tried it with brown sugar this time.  Wasn't strong enough to make a difference but either way mom wasn't here to try it.

I held mom's hand in the hospital.  For a long time.  She had wanted me home, not there,  so I left the hospital.  I was told later what time she passed.  It  was during the  ride home. During that ride, at the hour I was later told of, I'd had a sudden and vivid sense memory for a moment of holding her hand. 
The  one sister that lives here moved in about two years ago to help take care of my parents.  She's not  openly hostile to me most of the time but doesn't mind making things as difficult as possible, throwing up new roadblocks to me sorting my stuff while pushing me to get it done and passive-aggressively cutting me down...insisting we sell the house before I can ready a place to go is the worst part of it, scares the shit out of me and she knows it (doesn't care).  The tension is there and some days worsens.  The night after one of those damned 'family meetings' I dreamt that we had  caused mom to retreat to her bed crying.  We did that, we caused that.

Mom had had two children by her  second husband before me.  I was the one that lived.  I had never heard of them from her and never knew until many years later.  One, a girl,  was told me by one of my sisters.  The loss had put mom in a  clinic.  The other I learned of by accident when I was looking through some magazines being thrown out.  Hidden among them had been a birth certificate for a brother born not much more than a year before I was.  I never wanted to hurt mom by asking so I put the certificate back in hiding and soon it was gone.  To my lasting shame I can't remember the name on the paper, what my brother's name was.  I've never asked anyone else in the family and never will.

I remember my first Christmas - it had to be, because I remember not being able to walk, just crawl.  I recall the living room in Vallejo, the tree towering in the corner with the blown-glass onion-shaped ornaments in all colors.  I have an impression (but is it mis-shapen by what I have learned since?)  of the many smiling adults who kept urging me to play with an  arrangement of toys on the floor, and being reluctant to do so because I knew they weren't mine but belonged to another child.  I was the only child there.

I  had a nephew Tony,  who was a year older than me.  he died a few years ago after a troubled life of drug abuse and homelessness.  I used to believe that he had visited us down there, but everyone swore up and down that he never left Portland.  See, I thought Tony had been with us on this one occasion I remember of my father  taking me to play at a park in Vallejo.  I  remember a structure with holes and tubes to climb through, which I and the other boy with me really enjoyed.  He was only a little older than I was, about a year.  I felt he was family somehow - why not, as he rode in the car home with us?  But everyone swears that I was the only child on that trip. 

Mmmff.  None of these are what I'm looking for.  Personal struggles over hard choices.  I've only two of those and I'm not free to write either of them - they involve other people's private stories.

Not sure just now what other memories to write about.  There are many good ones.  Some  from the Franklin Green Room,  the one time I felt truly part of a family, like I belonged.  Walking the three miles home in a gentle rain after a rehearsal, one of the most blissfully peaceful experiences I've ever had.  Or going across the back campus for crinkle-cut fries at Dairy Queen in the evening when I was on the makeup crew.  Falling in love for the first time when I never questioned that it wasn't my place to even speak to her (Kris), or the second time when she (Diane S.) was the first girl who ever spoke to me like it mattered to her that I was the one listening.  Or discovering sex, or always feeling like the perpetual outsider.  I have memories about Dana.  I've shared most of them before, some of them here and some under pseudonyms.  I would like the chance to share them with her personally.   Even the awkward or bad ones.  I'd wish to share hers.  Speaking literally, I wonder if I ever appear in her dreams, and whether she remembers them when she wakes in the morning. 

Hope I fall asleep tonight.  Started watching Backstairs at the White House, 1979 miniseries now on YouTube.  Me and mom watched it together in '79.  It holds up well.



NOT Dana:

Quick ballpoint doodle while I was waiting on a job interview.  Not meant to look like anyone in particular but a few elements of Dana did appear.  The mouth might be a little more...Joanna Lumley, New Avengers era?  She often had that expression.

(edit, 11/25)  Hypnagogic flash of Dana yesterday evening, I won't describe.  Could be imagination, could be her reacting to the PM I just sent.  She reacted badly, but I don't know if she blames me or herself. I needed her to reassure me about her intentions, that she's not shut the door again.

(edit)(sent.  a few hours later, hypnagogic flash of Dana in what looks like a park or playground, seen from across the grounds.  She has her hair long, straight, and copper, wears a baggy black sweatshirt, and tan pants.  She has two or three female friends with her, dressed the same. They are trying to restrain her as she is in hysterics, crying and raging, seems like she wants to hit or destroy something but there's nothing to destroy. don't know if this was psychic or imagination.)
(the above flash was on the 25th.  Dana was on FB on the 25th, she posted and she blocked me from messaging.)

'I Bet My Life'.  No, Dana, you bet mine.  And I lost.  Put this right. I don't want you hurt.  But you're still bent on hurting me - over a mistaken belief you've built a world on - and instead of making amends you want to keep hurting me, justify hurting me, twist it into something noble...and you actually want and expect me to be okay with it.  And that's fucked.  I wonder if you see just how selfish  and cruel that is.  It's not okay.  It'll never be okay.  Or forgiven, if you let it stand.   How could you think I'd just sit and take that?


That vision, I think Shiva just put a finger on Dana's world.  She was counting on me playing along instead of having to treat me like a real human being.

So her typo, 'free me', I know what that meant now.  She had no intention of trying to be a friend.  I can't free her, because the cage isn't what she thinks it is. She made that cage herself, it's her own fear of talking to me.  I could move to Siberia and she'd never be free of it.  Only when she confronts her fear will she be free of that cage.

Sorting and Packing

If I make it through this I may be able to post actual created work again.  Imagine that.


Looking at air fare to New York.  One way ticket, don't think I could ever come back.  Portland is my home, and this house.  Born in Vallejo, first four years there, but this is my home.  Can't afford it here.  At least one person in my family I never want to see again, too.  Trying to buy some time before I have to go.  May have as little as a month left.  Hopefully more.  Wanted to see Dana again in person.

Hoping to go to Franklin again on Sunday, see if the dedication plaque is up yet.  Try to get a  photo to post.  'Buy-a-Brick" campaign.  Dana's name is on it, and Lori Hamilton's.  I found my Franklin Class of 1984 sweater with all the names on it.  Still have the Kellogg yearbooks.  Dracula poster signed by everyone.

My high school timeline gets muddy in memory now.  When did I draw Kristina Burley?  I think I was already falling for Dana, though I'd been deeply in love with Kris since 5th grade (Mr. Sherrel's homeroom, the portable out back of the  school).  A lot of people knew I was drawing Kristina, but it was only Dana who intuited that I chose Kris because I felt something for her.   I remember her asking me, "You like her, don't you?"  "Yeah.  I do."  "No, I mean...you like her."  "...yeah."

I also think it was around then I was overhearing the girls in another class talking about how Dana was impressing them in The Music Man rehearsals, and I felt a mix of...I'm not sure what exactly, except that I was proud for her.   Or maybe it was a little later I drew Kris, when I had taken a part in The Time of Your Life, if for some reason I had similarly won a spot on Dana's radar.

Kristina still appears in my dreams from time to time, but then she would as she was the first I ever fell in love with and so she became part of the dream-vocabulary of my subconscious.  I was over her a long time ago but the fondness and warm memories are there.  She's a kind of avatar for those feelings.  Sometimes she appears as a proxy.  I dreamt of her a few months ago...as the dream was fading out, she asked me how I was doing.  She didn't look much like Kris anymore by that point in the dream, though.  She was looking a lot like Dana. 

There was a woman who looked a bit like Kris at the Franklin re-opening.  Her eyes, especially.  Kris had the face of an angel.

I recall one time in February '88 that Lori Hamilton was going to come see me to talk to me about her disappearance and her time in L.A.   I had been severely depressed, suicidal.  Hadn't seen Lori for some three years.  An hour or so before she was meant to arrive I was standing at street's edge to cross for the mail.  In my peripheral awareness a car was passing, driving too slow to be regular traffic, but then sped up as it came abreast of me... and I'd have sworn the woman driving was looking at me - and looked like Lori.  But it was only a fleeting impression.  And I still wonder whether she saw me standing there and got spooked.  Maybe it wasn't her at all.  Anyway, she never showed up that day or after.  She didn't call to say she'd try again.

I saw Lori just once more after that time she did or didn't drive past.  Bobby Jackson's band Blind Push was playing a gig at a bar and he invited me.  Lori was there.  She was happy to see me, and she knew I was happy to see her...but I gave her the space to walk over and talk to me.  She didn't.   That was the last I ever saw or heard from her.  I loved her too, I fell pretty hard.  I'd still like to have her in my life again as a friend, and I wonder what it would be like to spend an afternoon talking with her.  She was a spiritual nomad, I wonder where her life has taken her.

******************
(Dream, morning, October 26th)  I'm in  a public diner or cafeteria, sitting at the center of one side of a long table which is filling as the members of a specific group arrive.  Our table is in the corner of the place, so we are surrounded on two sides by glass walls.  It's daylight, in an urban or suburban setting, business district, all concrete paving.  The group has already been in existence for a short time without me, has met several times, but some of them are longtime friends and they have always considered me a member of the group from the beginning even in my absence.   Someone new arrives, invited to join.  He is very neat, dapper,  with dark short wavy/curly hair, very much a business type, and when he sits he begins a dialog with me.  He's bright, outgoing, cheerful.  I can't recall any of the conversation.  He sits at the end of the table to my left, either on the opposite side or literally at the table's end.  We shake hands, he gives his name which I don't catch, and I offer mine.  He says "Name?" as if I've confused him.  I say, "Well, you can use anything you want, really."  By this I mean he can apply my name to whatever he likes, but realize he might hear that as he  can call me anything.

There is a shift in time, more have arrived and the table is just about full.  I have moved to the right end of the table to make room.  A sign in front of me on the table indicates that the group is launching a podcast.  The new guy at the left end is saying something (I no longer remember) about his nature being malleable, that he changes.  He then goes outside, and I watch him through the windows as he begins to dance in ways that seems out of character.  He seems to enjoy his dancing.  No one but me is paying any attention, but I point him out to a female friend sitting at my immediate left and say that I think this guy is going to be really interesting - as long as he's not turning into someone hostile.

The guy comes back in and looks completely different.  He's shorter, younger, rounder of face, hair is longer and straight, now more red than brown.  His clothing has changed, very Mediaeval peasant, loose-fitting (suggestive of a very artsy stereotype).  He sits directly opposite me at the far right end of the table and his demeanor is markedly hostile - though like before he devotes his attention solely to me, like I present a problem he needs to understand.  Again, too much of the conversation is lost, but he challenges me with remarks and I try to address them openly and in a non-combative way.  I tell him that when he  said his nature is fluid I believed him.  He says to me that mine is not, both a statement and a question.  I reply, "Probably".  He's not sure if he's right, and I'm not sure what the question refers to - what specifically he needs to know.  Then his demeanor changes. He's been defiant, but I see this now as defensive, as he willfully drops his guard and asks if he can ask a question.  Now he looks uncertain and vulnerable.  He asks me, "Could I get your heart wrong?"  Dream ends there.

I'm sure I heard "Could I get", not the more sensible "Did I get".  Maybe 'could I have gotten'?  Any number of things point to this person being Dana, the most tangible being the hair.  Still, didn't get a sense of her presence while dreaming so it's probably an extrapolation from inside my own imagination. I wish I could recall the rest of what was said, it might have been important. 

Did she get my heart wrong?  Only she knows.  She's never told me what it is she sees in my heart - malice, love, compassion, weakness, I don't know.  It doesn't look like she's ever going to tell me. That too makes it hurt worse: I lost her and I will never even really know why.  Will she get my heart wrong?

As coincidences go I keep getting nods to one of the other reconciliation dreams, including motifs of dancing, rooms lit in red, and a piano. That dream of long ago has been very much on my mind, so I'm very sensitive to any iteration of those elements.  If they appear, I'm going to spot them and magnify them in my awareness. That leads to hope, which is killing me.  Dana's rebreaking my heart all over again.

I've been getting the feeling Dana hasn't even been looking at her FB account at all, never even saw my replies.  I think the dream of the woman on the ocean liner* re-enforced a notion that Dana had to get away.  Immediately prior to this dream I had a dreamlet flash of a PM someone sent (not necessarily to me) which consisted of three words, the only clear one being HOME.  Emphasized, was seeing it in all caps.  I think another was 'again'.  Suggestion was 'arrived home again'.  Wondered if home meant California or Portland.

*In personal notes, not posted.

Fuck the Past

It's been two weeks.  Time is messing with my head.  With mom I wonder how it could have been two weeks already, it feels like yesterday.  But with Dana every passing day feels like weeks.  It had to take a lot for her to say anything, so I know maybe she'd need time to let that register before she'd even want to see if I responded.  I get that intellectually but emotionally it's eating me alive.  I think she still wants that distance, and I think she wants it permanently.

Moony might be coming over towards the end of the week unless something comes up he needs to attend to.

Scott's having trouble too.  I don't want to take his attention away from home, he's needed there.  Jesseca is needed with her mom.  I'm here for them for as much help as I can be.  Seems like moral support is the best I can do right now, just be here for them to sound off to.

I keep fearing Dana will say that the moment for a reconciliation has passed and we missed it.  I want to say fuck the past, I want to be a part of her present and her in mine.

Did I mention already?  Mom enjoyed watching auto racing.  A week ago from last weekend my sister was getting up from a chair in the living room (remote not in hand) when the TV turned itself on, switched to a channel with NASCAR.

Keep feeling like I'm having a blood-sugar low but my numbers are always okay when I check.

I've had three more pieces of major bad news tonight.  I don't want to elaborate.  One involves the husband of a niece. 

Just been told - er, the upshot is no more art of any kind until this is settled.  Unbelieveable.  It's not natural the way this keeps piling up.  Can't help noticing, it's everyone who might be able to help me get out of this alive that gets hurt.

**********
Had a dream of a frog that spoke to me. Jesseca advises that frogs are a big thing in Modern-Tradition British Witchcraft and that I may have been contacted by a spirit guide.  The frog said "Look out for the broken one".  "Look out for" can be interpreted not as a warning but as an instruction to be protective or compassionate.  Within moments of our exchange, a post popped up on Jesseca's FB feed proclaiming "I'm not as O.K. as I pretend to be."  It came from a site titled "Broken", and the poster was not someone she knows directly.  I can't help but wonder if I'm being advised to be extra careful with Dana, though I never thought of her as broken.  I've always felt protective toward her, but I've also always wondered if she doesn't much care for people taking that attitude.  She's very private.

There are other aspects of the dream symbolism I need to consider, introducing much ambiguity, but none of it apparently indicates Dana.

Edit: My sister just described herself as "emotionally broken".  She wants to sell the house quickly and doesn't think I should keep my belongings.  Worse, I suspect she thinks my stuff should be sold along with everything else, the profits of which are to  be divided.  That can't be right.  So, yeah, I do have to look out for my own future.  I want my stuff but if it has to be sold, dammit, that's my money to live off of - as little as it will last!

Tried a melatonin pill last night.  Dropped off right away but slept less.

***********
I sent Dana a friend request.  Was going to wait 'til she gave me permission, but she's breaking my heart all over  again.  I noticed the last time she posted to FB was early June.  What was the date?  The 8th or something like that.  I just noticed from my own notes that the last time Dana appeared in any of my dreams  was the 8th of June.  Cutting and pasting:  "Thursday, June 8th.  Three hypnagogic flashes.  One was of Dana's face, beaming with joy.  She was wearing a crown (slightly tilted to her right), and she seemed to be looking at me.  This was quickly followed to by more of her face, in close proximity to me,  happy and without the crown."  Tiara doesn't make sense.  Detail points to Tammy, not Dana.

She had appeared a few days earlier: "Saturday, June 3rd.  Had a dream I was at a shopping mall with Dana.  She had short hair and a mid-light blue outfit that included a short jacket, tight  at the waist, in a checked pattern.  First we were in a music store, I bought four LPs - one of the album jackets folded out to become an actual wearable jacket.  (Hmm,  lot of emphasis on jackets here...) , then we headed into the crowd and down a narrow flight of stairs where she chose a restaurant and took a booth.  We were both having a good time."

On July 24th I dreamt of Lori Hamilton, and couldn't tell if it was meant to be Lori or a proxy for Dana.  "This morning (July 24th) I dreamt of Lori Hamilton (who looked like herself throughout, wearing faded jeans and running shoes).   We sat on the kitchen floor together, her leaning back against the oven.  Funny thing was, from her POV I was only there as a psychic transmission in her mind.  She could hear me though she didn't speak.  She held a large, hardbound book, and I had to guide her to hold it so that I could see the pages.  Across the pages was a live moving image of her as she sat before me, holding the book (imagine the book as a laptop, I guess, and my eyes the camera feeding it the image).  Then I was sitting closer and the book was gone, and maybe she was aware of my corporeal presence...she raised her right foot and rested her ankle on my shoulder, leg to my cheek, her left around my other side.  Her silence and expression were melancholic.  I gently kissed her leg, and caressed the outside of her left.  It was a profoundly intimate moment, and I wanted to make my caresses more erotic but was afraid of doing the wrong thing by her.  Her gesture contained an inherent eroticism but it seemed half-hearted, her mood seemed more sad than anything, like I was on her mind and she missed me."

The Bonfire of Inanities

Have prepped a page to draw or sketch Ilhan Omar.   Think I wanna do it in pencil, but it's in a sketchbook so not quality paper for a finished work.  I'll try to consciously be less detail-strict and focus on the feeling, the textures.  Small so it's less intimidating.  Finished a painting for one of my sisters, but not my kinda thing.    Working on a platform for cone incense, because they won't burn if air is cut off from the bottom.  I've taken some screening and wired it to a plumbing slip nut.  Over that I've baked some Pluffy.  That's uneven but can be made to look nice by dding asymmetrical details in putty - say, vines/leaves and clusters of grapes, or leaves and ladybugs.  You could do that with clay in the appropriate colors, I'd prefer grey putty and enamel paints.  Because the mesh allows ash to fall through, it can be set on a brass platform for candles.

I'm moving out of one darkness a little (my broken friendship with Dana, having at least finally been able to say to her the most important things), have faced the second (my mom passing), and am still in the middle of the third (fearing for a roof over my head).  As for the first two, I'm still alive.   When I do get a little sleep at night most of my dreams are dull and innocuous.  No Dana in them.  But then I wake up and I suddenly remember that mom is gone, and remember the situation.   The shelter of the room and blankets no longer feel real.  Most nights are like that now, I get more sleep only when my body forces it.  Most nights dreams are forgettable and neutral.  Tuesday or Wednesday night was puntuated by miserable nightmares of loss, one each of the four times I slept.  Fucking long night. 

I am - maybe?  sorta? - at a place where I'm thinking this is survivable.  I just don't see anything good coming.  Nothing that will be worth it.  Just more whitling away at my life.  New York is so far off.  Meanwhile I keep trying to part with things are a part of me.  Things my mom gave me, things I created, aspirations I'd had and have been trying to achieve. 

I'm not suicidal, which is surprising.  Wish I'd get hit by a car, though.  Struck by lightning maybe.  Just scared and dealing with grief a moment at a time.  Wishing I didn't have a greedy, grasping, lying brother making this as difficult as he possibly can...his behavior is bordering on sociopathy.  I think he wants us to sell the house so he can buy it in order to either flip it or give it to one or both of his own kids.  Anything to get us out of it.  Family meeting had some choice word for and about him.  I tried telling him on the phone yesterday, and he refused to hear it: however he thinks he's coming across, he's not*.  He's got a perception problem, and it stems from himself.  No one in the family can figure him out, we all think he's crazy.  If what he hears doesn't suit the narrative he wants to cling to, it's fake news and we're all lying and out to get him.  Sounds a lot like a certain criminal POS he voted for.  (That's not a right or left thing, ANY of the other candidates would have made more sense.)

*I imagine Dana could say the same of me, exept that I'm willing to listen.

I do still hope Dana will share with me what she's been through and tell me of her path out of it.   I want to hear that things are good for her now, and it would be so good to hear it right from her.  I want to see her smile.


Well, whatever happens Dana did right by me.  She saved my life, I think, and she did finally reach out to me.    I'm not abandoning hope of her doing it again.  And I'm not falling out of love with her.  I wouldn't know how.

Will have new glasses finally in ten days.  Progressive lenses, never had before so will take getting used to.

Haircut is growing out.  Instead of looking like one of Trump's thugs, now I look like a muppet.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Edit, Saturday morning.  One of my nieces has bi-polar disorder.  Between the loss of her adoring grandparents and the abuse of her so-called boyfriend, she had a bad low last night and called out to Karla for help.  As of this morning I haven't heard word back yet.  Karen said she might have to go to the hospital.

Her young daughter Katie fell out of a playground swing the very day mom passed, broke both her forearms.  My friend Scott, his father was badly injured a few days go (recovering).  Jesseca's mom's car flipped over a few days ago.  I have urged Jesseca several times to please do a protection spell for herself.  I'm not kidding about it.

***********************
My niece is...I don't know, it's too early to say she's doing better but she's still with us.  She's considering her options on how to proceed for the next few weeks.  Another close one.  No one in my family is getting much of a break, no day to rest, to wrap ourselves in a semblence of peace. 

I'll try to work on Ilhan tonight.
 
Time has become inconstant.  At least I'm not Billy Pilgrim.

I dreamt a prophecy, dreamt it over and over.  Dreamt of the recconciliation before there ever was a rift.  A few weeks ago I heard a hypnapompic voice in my halfsleep say "It's coming true".  I didn't know if it referred to Dana coming back to me.

If this was it, if this is all shell give me, then the prophecy was a broken promise.

Most of those dreams came while she was still in Portland.  One was a day or so before Thanksgiving, a year in the early Nineties.  In the dream, I am home by myself as my parents are elsewhere.  A car pulls u the driveway, the one Dana used to drive to school.  her father is driving.  I  step  out on the porch and we meet there face to face.  The dream ends before we speak, as the first snow of the year is falling. 

I was always half afraid of that dream because the universal interpretation of snowfall as a metaphor is death.

The night before mom died I dreamt that she and I could see the snowstorm arriving.

Dana reached out as the snow fell.  But I don't sense her presence anymore.  I think she's chosen to be gone again.  I thought for a moment, for a day or two, that the pageview stats might mean her, but now I'm crashing again.  I think some good friends from Dark Discussions might have looked in. (waves!) (I wonder where Mr. E 2 Me is these days?)

Dana, you asked me not to rob "us" of my gift.  You are a gift, your friendship, your presence...you.  So I ask the same.  That's fair, isn't it?  Don't ask of me what you are not willing to give.   I've never accepted you as  anything other than you.  Don't be afraid to let me know you.  

I know you believe in yourself, and I'm so proud of you.  I don't have the first clue what you had to pay to win that.  I hope it wasn't so much that you have no room in your heart to let me believe in you too, at your side. You opened the door once already.  You don't have to run away before the person on the other side can see you.

Whatever your darkness you spoke of or your demons, I can take them.  If that's the problem. That's one of my strengths.  Trust me that much.   Don't rob me of everything else over fear of those.  That's such a tragic waste.  I am your friend above all else.

(ugh.  There's a reason I'm crashing.  It's a song I was listening to a few hours ago, 'I Bet My Life'.  "Remember when I broke you down to tears ...
never in my wildest dreams
Would I come running home to you"
I never want to hear that song again.  Fuck.  This is a song written by someone who just plain ran, who didn't bother to find out what his lover could accept or even thought.  Someone who never lent an ounce of trust.)

(later)  I get that the song is a plea for understanding, but...you don't get to have it both ways.  If your plan is to leave the person you hurt in hell, then stop acting as if you care.  You  don't get forgivenes just so you can keep on hurting someone.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Jesus, Central Eastern Multnomah County is under a flash flood warning and are being told to evacuate.  I'm in SE Multnomah, somewhat higher elevation and should be safe.  Hope those people are okay.

Restarting Ilhan, the page got a bad crease in it.  Maybe I could use it to practice watercolor pencils though.  Pretty thin paper for it but it's just a practice piece.

Dana, you did help at the darkest hour of my life. More than you'll ever know.  I know It was heartfelt.  I must mean something to you.  You reached out, and you meant it.  Please don't disappear again, I'm still in the middle of this.

Being loved really does frighten you, doesn't it?  God I wish I understood you.  Please let me try to understand you.

And - well, I mean, sticking with my understanding that may be way wrong - you're so sure I wanted no part of it.  That I wouldn't have backed you, or would have chosen not to be at your side good and bad.  Biggest fucking facepalm in history and you don't even know it.  Because you didn't ask, Dana, you never dared to find out.  I get that you couldn't then.  But  you're still not asking me anything now.  Don't you have questions?  Do you think you have it all figured out?  Cuz i sure the fuck don't.


You told me to keep reaching out.  You probably meant in general, but I'm hoping you also meant keep reaching out to you.

Still writing books, aren't I?  You called the letters I used to write books.  I'd love one from you. ❤


Hey...y'know, I'm in pretty bad need of money, you could commission a drawing...? Not  a terrible  way to break the ice, get past the wall.  I love your hair in copper, btw.

There have been times I wasn't sure if you were worth all this.  I know it now, you are.  Please put this right.