(no post title)

First, please help me/my family with the GoFundMe in the post below.  No one has been willing to do so.  We're barely holding on and I d not see a way out.  I don't see us  surviving.

Okay.  Per art: I think in this time of desperation my block is lifting.  My last client says he loves the portrait I did for him.  I'm now twenty hours into a 14x17 family portrait that may take some fifty hours.  Price is up in the air, depending on what the guy who commissioned it can work out with his brothers.  I might make minimum wage for the first time...or I might get seriously underpaid.

The first was scanned, the second was from a photograph (cleaned up by Jesseca) second one is not up to date as I have begin the next brother and added the boat that's behind them.  I will not be drawing the ground beneath them, and will add the background only with the barest, most representative lines.  There are four brothers in the image.

So...my block had lifted and it may be too late.  When I work I feel a despair that it's not worth it, that it can never add up.  People don't want to pay minimum wage, they want a flat rate.  Ten bucks an hour?  They balk. And, ya know what, In the past two weeks I've come to really value what I do on so many levels.  This is not entry-level stuff.  It ain't washing dishes.  It deserves more than ten bucks an hour.

I've trapped myself  by teaching myself to use a mechanical pencil.  I need to try to incorporate regular pencils for areas of shading.  That's a scary thought - mechanical get me a level of subtlety and clarity that I consider to be a part of my signature.  I am loathe to compromise that.  Besides...it not being my voice, I kight just suck at regular pencil work.  The quality  may suffer significantly, my voice may disappear.

I managed a full 8-hour workday drawing a week ago.  No headache either, so I know I can do it.  I've done 15 hours over the course of Monday and Tuesday (the family portrait and the Sharon Mitchell pic), even with everything else happening. - but I did manage to give myself a  headache yesterday. My nerves are shot and I pace the house.  I'm unsteady at shading until I can calm justa  little, and that's nearly impossible.  My mom and sister spend all day every day on the phone and internet trying to find anyone  in authority who will help.   I'm  becoming  dependent on Xanax, though I'm taking only a quarter pill at a time.  Last night it only afforded me 90 minutes sleep.  haven't had any more yet.  I'm fucking  terrified for my future.  Jesseca and my mom are the only reasons I'm even trying to hold out - I don't want to hurt either of them.  But I'm so fucking tired, and tired of being afraid, and tired of the depression.  I do not want to talk  to anyone about it, and I don't want to be medicated.  This is now my permanent state of existence, I've been this way for a month or more now.

Dana is gone.  She has been since 1988.  I can no longer afford to believe in her.  My dreams - well, the hopeful ones anyway - were hollow self-delusion. 

I feel like I'm in a jungle, alone, in quicksand.  My arm is stretched out and every now and then  someone comes along and stretches their own out to me...and instead of grasping my wrist and pulling, they pat me on the head and wish me encouragement, then go along their way.  There have  only been two or three exceptions, and one I know genuinely couldn't help who would have if he wasn't also sinking.

 To those who have shared my posts, who have expressed a genuine concern, and especially those three or four who have helped my family financially inside and outside GoFundMe... to them I cannot express my gratitude strongly enough. I am in your debt bigtime.

Please Help My Family - Emergency

https://www.gofundme.com/2zv2npek

Going Under

Right now I'm wishing that Dana really did have ties to the mafia.  We are in desperate need of an aggressive lawyer and maybe some muscle.  Our money is gone, the two weeks of having someone look after my father (badly) is half over, the primary care physician is dedicated to blocking us.

My branch of the family is drawing to a close.  For the past month I've been getting  two to three hours of sleep a night.  I never did learn how to survive on my own, and honestly I have no real desire to survive anyway.  Was already having a hard time dealing with depression before all this. 

Trying not to take Xanax.  It's been offered.  Would be so easy to depend on it.  Can't relax, mind running marathons whether I'm laying abed or not.

My art is not going to move fast  enough to conjure up any money, but I have to try.  Hoping to find someone who will pay for a drawing.  I've been talking to artists at Saturday market, but everything requires initial investments funds I don't have.

I'd bet that Dana would make a great agent/manager.  We'd be a good team.  If ever she is going to offer me a kind word, it has to be now.

I have Moony's drawing done, hoping to hear from him in the next day or so.  I have a drawing for Scott traced lout and prepared  to begin.  It won't bring in enough, but I'll take what I can get.

I also have three images of Marilyn Monroe traced out.  Now...I do not have the money to have prints made.   Obviously you can't sell a print for the same price as an original, but you can sell more copies.  The original I can only sell once.  So is it  worth the time?

What should I be doing?

Dana, if you're out there, please help me.

Latest

Cannot work on drawing.   The situation is deteriorating, we need a lawyer though we cannot afford one.  We had a glimmer of hope yesterday,  finally got a doctor involved who has a clue and wants to help.  Sadly, he is under the thumb of the primary care physician, a big name with Providence, who is determined to block any care or help.  My father is beyond our capacity to help and keeping him in our care is a dna\\anger to him and to my mother.  Every time he is sent home he is worse, every time he has an episode he gets worse.  they know this, but refuse to keep hi, or even offere diagnosis.  If they did that, Medicare would kick in and they would be fined for the number of times they sent him home untreated.

Medicare will not help.  The VA will not help.  Providence has formed a human  wall to block to block care.  They  forcing us to pay out of pocket.  This will leave us homeless and penniless in under a month.


* * * * * * * * *

Edit:  I did finish my drawing of Dana, and have scanned it.  The scan doesn't quite capture the work - for instance, the light bounces off it badly on her elbow where I heavily shaded her jacket.  Tomorrow if I get a chance I will try to photograph it.

We've got my father placed for two weeks in a care facility, and that will  cost us some three-fourths of what money we have left.  I can qa least finish Moony's drawing now.

Caring for my father takes at least three people watching him 24/7, sometimes needing us to call a neighbor for help when he has an episode.  We are frayed to our end, exhausted and undone.  Two months ago he was out back chopping wood.

Untitled

I'm so close to having completed my first fairly large drawing, granting that only a portion of the page is being utilized. I've tried going large before, this will be the first one I didn't abandon. Smaller might end up being my thing after all.

However, I have not been able to work on it for two weeks now. A family situation has arisen that has everyone struggling to cope. There's not going to be a happy resolution to it. It's a slow-motion unraveling that no one is prepared for. The issue at hand is a medical one centering on my father. The hospital and various insurance agencies are determined not to render care, and are trying to take our every last cent. I do not wish to discuss it here, nor with anyone. Jesseca knows. I have no intention of announcing it on Facebook as...well, I hope this doesn't sound dickish but people will want to be kind and wish us the best. And it means a lot, it does, but I can't deal with that now and have no intention of inviting it. This is a very bad time for everyone involved, and I do not see how it works out.

The drawing I am working on has two small areas left to complete. One should be easy. The other I attempted twice the same night and found that I was not on my game: after trying two different approaches and erasing both, I was in danger of ruining the paper for future efforts.

* * * * * * * * *

Some progress today.  Worked about two and a half, three hours on this.  Stopped hopefully before a headache could set in.  Because this is a sketch, I'm not being overly carefyl on precise details of hair or the folds of her jacket.  I also will not be adding her earrings: she is wearing earrings in the source image but I cannot make out the details.  Maybe when the rest is done I'll find a pair online and fake it.  It would add a nuance that's missing.

Also did an hour on a color (ink)version crude and overly vivid.  Not a display piece, I hope to blend it with the pencil work in an  art program, see what I come up with.  there are at least two other variations I would like to try, and perhaps blend each of them.  If it the final blend turns out well, I'd like to get it printed on that metal paper I haven't looked into yet.  It does not yield a  metallic image, rather something about the base lends itself to images that are more colorful and have deeper black levels than regular photographic prints.  Entries in the Gresham Art Committee showings have been done on this paper, and I'm eager to try it out. 

I would like even once to be even half as much a surprise to Dana – a positive one – as she has been a constant surprise to me throughout my life.

She once wrote in a letter to me that remembered how cruel kids at school could be. I don't know what it might have been that prompted her to say that, something I wrote maybe...but I wondered at the idea that she had been targeted for that. I'd certainly had my share of it, but Dana – wasn't she one of the popular kids? Not one who got treated that way, I'd have bet. Many years later I spoke to someone who remembered her, and he related that Dana had been the one treating him that way. So maybe she was speaking ruefully from the other perspective

As presumptuous as it is to imagine I know anything at all o what's going in in Dana's head...fuck it, she's given me free license to think whatever I want. Why not? She's hardly objecting, is she?

What I think is this: when she imagined in me certain biases, I think she was projecting on me the beliefs she herself had grown up with. Maybe, possibly, she even saw herself that way – someone who had done wrong, someone who'd earned condemnation. And when I happened across her, it never occurred to her that I could see her any differently then what she was seeing. So she burned me before I could burn her. But if she was afraid of me judging her then, I sometimes think that ever since she has been even more afraid that I won't judge her – that I will accept her with love for whoever she really is.

I don't know what's left to say about Dana. There are more dreams I would like to place in context but nothing I care to make public for various reasons. I'd like to say that it will never be too late for her to talk with me, but...it's pretty late. I can't even see my own future let alone whether anything she has to say would make any difference later.

Should Dana want to write me, she can get my home address from Moony. Moon is on FB, she can reach him there. He also has my phone number, though I'd advise that all calls are screened and she'll get an answering machine first...that, and I really don't like talking on phones. I would love to have a letter from her.

If it's the last thing I ever say publicly about her (unlikely but ya never know), let it be that I'm proud of being her friend.

This is not acceptance of the loss. This is just saying I can't do any more.

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.