communcation & heartbreak & my return

I haven’t used this blog at all since I moved, since the end of august, since right before everything happened...for all these reasons…huge amounts of life turmoil takes up a lot of time, quiet time like right now where I'm getting to sit alone in my house with a glass of wine and write at the kitchen table, with no one needing me or caring that I'm hanging out drinking and doing this. Right after I got this apartment I had also no internet for a long time, so I couldn't even if I wanted to, and there were a lot of things going on which were very private, and which didn’t belong on the internet. Both because they were very intense and personal, and because they were secret, too.

In moments of crisis I tend to not be very contemplative, I just move ahead very very fast, and don’t stop to think. I just don't breathe, I just push ahead. Not that this is a good thing, at all. But sometimes it's the only was I know to survive.

As I’ve been calming down, and spending a more reasonable amount of alone time, I've been just writing in my sketchbook a lot, more then I have in years, and I haven’t felt any need to write here.

First I was in a period where I was with people all the time, because I had nowhere to live, and was staying with friends, and life became constantly social. Any self reflection at all had to be done in these brief stolen moments, on breaks at work, trying to find private space, and so my sketchbook become really really important, like it was the only private space I had.

I think one of the memories I will always retain from september and early october of 2008 is me on the bench by the bike trail out back at work, writing, trying so hard to make sense of it all. It always seemed to be incredibly beautiful and clear and blue and gold and perfectly fall, and I was always so confused.

I think also, if you spend no time alone, you really really don't need a blog, because sometimes a person really needs to stop communicating and be alone.

This still has a lot to do with then stuff that’s private that’s been going on, because that’s what I really feel the need to write about. I was thinking that I wouldn’t do this anymore. Because in order to make it through the past few weeks, I've really needed to write constantly, and it's not anything I would ever want anyone to read. Except for some of the art stuff. Which also doesn't belong here, I don't think.

One of the reasons that I always did like to do this was my obsessive need to document things like objects I find and see, and meals and tastes I create, views from windows and the way light looks at certain times of day. And maybe some of that stuff is different from my more personal weird writing, and certainly separate from how I’m feeling.

Real importance of ordinary, tiny specific concrete details to any creative medium.

The other night, in the midst of a horrible, horrible, completely heartbreaking and soul shattering phone conversation, I was drunkenly ranting and raving about communication, and how it was fundamentally the thing my work was about. Even in the midst of all the ridiculousnesss and anger and sadness that was going on in the conversation, I recognized something I was saying as really really true and important.

"horrible, horrible, completely heartbreaking and soul shattering phone conversation" makes me embarrassed to write because it's so over the top, but it was bad enough to really shake me up, and although I've been sad ever since it happened, in some ways I've been better than I've been in a while, because it was bad enough to make me really pause and think about what I've been doing recently.

I've been thinking about communication ever since. rin and I talked about it last night. It is what my work is about.