Bett's Blog

2012-02-11T06:19:00.001-08:00

picture of trimmed tree taken from bed through window plastic

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2012-02-10T20:43:00.001-08:00

this cottonwood was half dead and dramatically and creakily failing above the house and the apricot tree. today a friend came and cut off the dead branches. i am lying here exhausted but not exhausted as she must feel in my body i resonate with the weight of branches as they fell to the ground hard releasing and upward light an explosion of empty space left behind. this was a sacred thing she did so well.

2012-02-10T20:39:00.001-08:00

before

2012-02-10T07:37:00.001-08:00

frost on horse manure covered garden bed

2012-02-09T13:44:00.001-08:00

assembling a grill. it is intensely difficult. i love the brutal faith in the directions its lack of idiot compassion it somehow knows i am capable.

2012-02-08T10:40:00.001-08:00

yesterday i built this and also got some manure from the stables and dumped it in a pile in the yard for the garden

2012-02-08T10:19:00.001-08:00

got roof?

2012-02-07T14:33:00.001-08:00

coop in progress

2012-02-07T14:32:00.002-08:00

2012-02-07T14:31:00.001-08:00

2012-02-06T16:58:00.001-08:00

i just put this floor in with recycled vinyl tile

2012-02-06T15:19:00.001-08:00

Last night I dreamed I voraciously ate a barbecued human being, starting with the head and shoulders, it tasted like chicken but sweeter.

2012-02-05T15:42:00.001-08:00

2012-02-05T15:41:00.001-08:00

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2012-02-01T18:32:00.001-08:00

2012-02-01T16:42:00.001-08:00

dianes black valentine

emilys black valentine

2012-02-01T16:29:00.001-08:00

god is alive..

2012-01-31T12:43:00.000-08:00

i needed worms. ariana was like, "worms are free."

i though nah, you have to buy the worms in the worm store.

i doubted but a mother came over last night and said, if you need worms i have worms so there you are.

concrete blocks. i needed to get rid of some. advertised in free section of craigslist.

the man who arrived came with two lovely women and a young man and one of the young women came with a copy of my book the wrestling party wanting me to sign it.

the blocks are going to be used in a play. they make up the women's locker room the place of the fallen wrestlers. where the porn stars show up.

am i dreaming?

filed under - gambling songs

2012-01-30T08:39:00.001-08:00

“We are following a middle road, neither upbeat nor downbeat. And I am more and more convinced that upbeat tends to constellate its counter, so before wishing for recovery in the old sense, one should think twice. It's what's going on now and not what the imagination conjures regarding a so-called future. I am dying yet in fact, I could not be more engaged in living. One thing I'm learning is how impossible it is to lay out a border between so-called ‘living’ and ‘dying’.” - James Hillman, dictated to his wife a few weeks before he died.

2012-01-29T08:01:00.001-08:00

This is a drawer I found at the Albuquerque Re-Store. I will use it as the nest in the chicken coop I am going to build. My body is taking on density from working with the stones and rubble in the yard, preparing the farm. Both my parents grew up on farms. My mother, towards the end of her life longed to return to it and read, like, seven times, Don't Let Us Go to the Dogs Tonight, about a woman's childhood on a farm in Africa. She loved Africa in that difficult way - of coffee table books and knick-knacks, but when I bought her Sabastiao Salgado's book on Africa that is romantic but also more stark and honest in it's images than the Taschen books on groovy African interior design, she lost interest.

My father still owns the farm he grew up on. The farm his family lost in the depression and had to buy back. Now it is run by another family and my father receives the paperwork and a check for the yields from the Montsano corn. When I told him I was studying gardening, it wasn't disinterest that emanated from him on the other end of the phone - but fright and disgust.

I picked up the 50 lbs. of Elk from Joe in the parking lot of Sportsman's Werehouse in Albuquerque. He told me the elk, shot by his wife, came from the area down south, the area of the Very Large Array. My sacred road. I've seen the elk there.

Frank from the lodge won't eat elk.

"Elk are too crazy," he says.

With the elk in the trunk I felt dizzy with the high of acquisition and high tailed to the Re-Store for more of a fix. I had to pee and wandered into a blood bank to use the bathroom. It was packed tighter than a DMV with people waiting. The smell entered me and triggered an animal fright. I disassociated from it but can't quite shake it still. The smell of poor people bleeding for cash mixed with the smells on them that were part of what brought them to that waiting room to begin with.

Begin with that room.

plastic bottles

2012-01-28T22:39:00.000-08:00

more HERE

thai restaurant across from jumbos clown room los angeles...pic by jen

2012-01-26T16:52:00.000-08:00

my hand in donald judd's swimming pool marfa tx, sept. 2011

2012-01-26T16:51:00.002-08:00

home

2012-01-26T16:51:00.001-08:00

2012-01-26T07:37:00.000-08:00

I was shitting and checking my phone messages. The saved messages from a particular date offered themselves up for review like they do, always to my annoyance. I have saved birthday messages from a hugely famous singer, a semi-famous writer and a legend her own head social justice photographer. I keep the messages as the only artifacts of these people I have, I keep them because they are artifacts themselves, from people who are to me "persona" above all else. But the messages are like shit, waste products from a past digestion. They stink the way personality removed from the animal soul and godheart stinks like shit. It's no fault of theirs, I made them that as much as they let me. I should erase them.

Still shitting, I listened to my new message. It was from a guy I used to hang out in a donut shop with nearly every morning in L.A. He's a character right out of the Godfather, from Brooklyn, always working some money scheme, he said as a child he sold egg cartons on the street and made enough to live, that Jackie O. found him somehow, and recruited him to teach little Johnny Spanish. He knew Spanish, he said, because he lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood.

He called because he saw me on HBO in the episode that focuses on me and my wrestling parties. The episode was good, but lives now as shit because it is a digested empty artifact, but his message wasn't shit. It was food.

2012-01-24T06:44:00.000-08:00

chinese new year. yesterday i was like a rubick's cube sitting in the dirt and a child picked me up with genius hands and thwacked me into rightness, all colors in the right place. but the sound i made, the crack creaking, it felt like it sounded.

last night p was in my dream. she had on her phone films i had made in fits of rage towards her. i thought wow, she must have dug down deep into the internet to find them. she was being charming but she had an agenda. she wanted me to sign a legal document that i would never show the films anywhere. i was overly friendly because of the shame i felt about the films, the raw expression in them, the bad art of them. i was not myself at all and when she left i knew i'd sold myself out in our exchange.

at this moment i am tying frankie's rainbow sneakers.

in the dream i knew that telling p about emily and frankie would set right the shame i was feeling but i withheld mostly, as if the information were precious, needed to be held close and not shared in such war-like circumstances.

2012-01-21T16:08:00.000-08:00

i made this today and also some kind of coven is forming that gathers in our kitchen today we wrote about our ancestors and it felt like the first time i had truly written well in years i think i come from a lineage that experienced great famine but maybe we all have come this far eating our way or not through the centuries

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2012-01-21T08:23:00.001-08:00

wake up 360 rattles by richard glazer- danay

2012-01-21T08:22:00.001-08:00

2012-01-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

the hot springs in ruidosa the lady who ran it died young of alcoholism she made a life size sculpture of elvis made out of resin and when her liver was terminally failing she would not accept that it was the gallon of vodka a day she said - it's the resin. it's the resin.

people who work at hot springs are always ill in some way.

water can make you sick.

water spirits require some very specific rituals and modes of behavior the mermaid can totally ruin your life.

so frankie and i went to the pool. the one for young people. "kiddie pool." frog slide. whirlpool. lights on. readheaded girl who only spoke in sign language. she held onto my arm for an instant, lost in some moment. two sisters wanted to take frankie under their wing but they were also tough like they could start trouble and also boys were in the water, the water was warm warm weird warm and we stayed in it an hour magically. a world.

then we got home and we were a mess. frankie was inconsolably sad. i was sick sick maybe because i ran out of my hydroxyzine or something but smelling like chlorine we were all wrong and needed help. water needs to be taken more seriously. there is the correct time of day. attitude. "kiddie pool." immersion. urine.

dog house converted to chicken coop(not mine) covetous. doable. right?

2012-01-19T09:17:00.000-08:00

FWD:

2012-01-17T16:40:00.000-08:00

2012-01-17T08:10:00.001-08:00

below. contraption spotted at anthropologie.
material...electrical conduit pipe...screen...canvas and white paint.
me and it met and became friendly.

the ride to the airport four days ago...
three thirty woke and sweat and had a feeling i should check my battery and so i did it was dead so i had to take the truck to albuquerque.
first i had to remove the freezer in the back. did that noisily in every dimension.
then at santo domingo pueblo i checked for gas and yeah empty.
but i couldnt find the gas key.
oh...no heat in the truck. 20 degrees so im cold..
i am trying to show you my devotion.
walking around the gas station at night asking the workers
"i know this is an awkward question to hear in the middle of the night. but do you have a crowbar? or a hammer?"
a drunk helped me when no one else would. but he got tired and just watched after a while. i surgically removed the gas cap cranking the maw 360 degrees until it was plucked out and thrown like a plum on the concrete emily is so worried a spark on the road will catch a splash from the tank. we can fix it with duct tape i said. we will get some before driving home.

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2012-01-17T07:58:00.001-08:00

2012-01-17T07:57:00.001-08:00

2012-01-17T07:56:00.001-08:00

2012-01-17T07:55:00.001-08:00

2012-01-17T07:54:00.001-08:00

jen. fashion plate. our dear jen.

2012-01-17T06:52:00.001-08:00

the silence of the last days on the blog has been so right. that last post i didnt know it was the anniversary of the earthquake. so many people say 911 was a pivotal point that changed their lives forever. for me it was the earthquake in haiti. i spent days on the internet because that was the world i inhabited and i went further in. inside out and now that symbolic world is a real world i walk around in.

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rubble

2012-01-12T07:08:00.001-08:00

I demolished the James Baca barbeque, lest a wild hair arrives and I want to turn it into a second sauna or something. The rubble made me instantly think of Haiti and I wondered if I was being hysteric then I googled "Uses for Concrete Rubble" and an article on Haiti came up third. One of the things I remember most of all the media rushing after the Earthquake was about the bad quality of the concrete and how the amount of rubble was beyond comprehension. Some deal between first world concrete companies and the country was hinted at.

Rubble is a terrifying thing. What do you do with it? This is just what's left of the Baca barbecue. Half of it I used to fill in a gaping hole in the yard that once housed a concrete slab. The slab I moved with the help of a day laborer, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow into the pricey dumpster in the driveway. I filled the hole left behind with more concrete rubble from the barbecue, then put dirt and gravel on top of it. The rest of the barbecue rubble here I will have to move with a wheelbarrow into my truck and take to the dump but I don't think I can bear this. Something that weighs as much as this and takes up this much space I can't conceive of as "waste."

I think I will have to do something like this. Make raised beds and dump the concrete rubble on the first layer, before dirt is added.

2012-01-11T10:36:00.001-08:00

i just really love this picture

2012-01-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

dawn. the moon is out. the contraption i made is heating up and i am about to go in for the first time. there are lava rocks all over the land at the emily house. i brought a few more over from when thomas and i gathered them along a dirt road far away, offering tobacco and praying over each one, seeing that it had a face. the ones that thomas and i got were the only ones that would break to get small enough to go in the heating contraption it breaks my heart how willing and generous we and they are. i wanted the anonymous rocks to go in first because i didn't want to ask too much of the blessed rocks with faces.

angel, in the lodge said, pay attention to the rocks as they come in. some of you had your eyes closed. they all have faces.

i have come to an understanding that is cerebral but still important. struggle, addiction, dissonance within, weird shit with food, and other people or whatever, a kind of mental disorder that sets the gage into a different zone in the body head that screams out something is wrong what the....

we need this because it is what tells us it is ceremony time, other time. we are needed. oh oh the things we would do. i have been watching this past week a kind of crazy within that is dense and hidden from anyone but powerful in its insistence.

"we just want to make a world that we can live in." she said.

2012-01-10T19:36:00.001-08:00

Happy Birthday Emily on your 39th. A formal trumpet sound and image that makes me think of you. Okay I will also repeat the cat in bra image from this morning's Facebook not just because of the repetition of the orange of our mysterious orisha.

I got her this thing, put it in the pocket of a visiting genius gay elf who came for Christmas who later gave it to her today while she is at school in Vermont.

She said to me, "I am having a hard time explaining what 'Free Stuff' means to my friends."

See, it was explained this way. No, not explained. Divined while stoned in a hammock at La Paloma hot springs in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico at the full rush of our falling in love.

"Just be cryptic and say Chicago. Dumpster. Thirteen(or something). People gave me free stuff," I said.

2012-01-07T15:58:00.001-08:00

raking leaves, kicking down the barbecue to use the cinder blocks in garden bedding, the church nearby rang out this song. just right out in the middle of the afternoon like they had a right to the air. we three kings.

i want to be a bell ringer.

what greater vocation than to echo brass tones into the bright day for those outside pausing, or working.

oh, here is blondie singing the song so much about frankincense and myrrh.

2012-01-07T10:28:00.000-08:00

it's an annual thing i can count on. this time every year for three years now, ever since the anemia and almost bleeding to death year, i think about wild game meat. i think about hoarding it, keeping it near. last year i ordered meat from elkusa.com. this year i found a guy who has an extra 100 pounds of elk he's willing to sell me at a crazy low price, "that his wife shot," "some that his son shot." the call from him came when i was in the bath, making it ever more clear my bathtub cowboy magic powers. also in the bath was the book emily gave me on gardening in the southwest. i am planning a small farm. collard greens, kale, broccolini are to be grown in the shade. i must build.

2012-01-06T16:42:00.001-08:00

opening

2012-01-06T08:37:00.001-08:00

2012-01-06T06:43:00.000-08:00

new year's resolution.

just inhabit the spaces i have already created.

2012-01-05T08:45:00.001-08:00

driving home from the airport after dropping e off for her flight i am struck by an answer, not a question for a change but an answer, the gift here in new mexico is the spaciousness of having foreground, then background. priceless. oh my these structuring hills in the big sky. and her legs.

2012-01-02T18:10:00.001-08:00

i am building a sumerian sauna inspired by the 8 pointed star of inanna. it will be heated by a contraption i got off ebay. i have a good feeling about this.

first i drew the star on the ground with chalk, then i built the star for the ceiling

2012-01-02T18:08:00.000-08:00

two sides of the star have slanted walls so you can comfortably lean back

2012-01-02T18:07:00.000-08:00

i built the frame with recycled lumber from the restore with "incense" cedar for back rests from lowes

2012-01-02T18:05:00.000-08:00

then i covered the frame with canvas drop cloths, later it will be covered in a layer of insulation, "green" plastic, then another layer of canvas

2012-01-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

temple grandin needs her squeeze machine, spanky needs her dirt hole, i need a place to get very very hot

2012-01-02T18:01:00.000-08:00

covered, i went inside and burned some sage

2012-01-02T18:00:00.001-08:00

2012-01-01T11:18:00.001-08:00

happy new year and all that

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2011-12-31T17:00:00.001-08:00

I have just pulled into the smiths grocery where i get food for after the sweat happy new years all of you.

nomy asked me before she left...do you talk to your mother?

no...i should but i dont the seers and psychics say i need to light candles for her she always wanted me to have a child and a home with classic lines...it is impossible to live without the concept that she is watching...my mother speaks to me in cabinets and chairs is what i told nomy.

a horse force
smell fear and how it turns to sour leather motorcycled into the sun
you can turn anything
into something else
so many helpers

we say thank you
tears and fuck
and thank you

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2011-12-29T07:59:00.001-08:00

i dreamed joan halifax went fascist and i was meditating at her buddhist center and soon realized all members were required to shave their heads once a month. i looked around at the shortish hair of all the women and thought, fuck, i am never going to do anything right here.

2011-12-28T08:37:00.001-08:00

This is a picture of me and Frankie at Chanukah on Ice. Life is so mysterious. You wake up in the morning having no idea of what the day holds in store and then fate propels you into Chanukah on Ice. We went to the rec center in town because Nomy wanted to go swimming. In the car we talked a bit about a piece of writing I did 15 years ago in which Nomy was a character in a non-fiction essay. I didn't know her personally then. There was a harshness in my writing that was unnecessary, though it seemed right at the time. Something in the text has needed righting, an action to move it from sickness into health, it still does, but now it is happening. It's been happening for a while. You wake up in the morning and the human arrives through roads and time to show you again the error inside the text, and the seeing blows the roof off the lodge, revealing so many stars it's impossible to take it all in. It's so beautiful.

hacked.

2011-12-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

ha!
love you baby.

2011-12-27T12:54:00.001-08:00

i dreamed i found a way to feed all the hungry people in town. it was like a cafeteria and i got nice restaurants to donate and then there was a healthy heaping of crap food and i remember the visceral sensation of sadness when food becomes a meal, a packaged consumer object, an almost medical thing. but people were fed. and even a small bite of the lamb stew was enough to transmit a thing of genuine worth and quality. i told my friend, very proudly, that we had broken even. she seemed to think i was wasting my time and should give the project up.

i dreamed spanky was possessed and started talking about a "witch hand."

i dreamed i was hanging out with kim gordon. she didn't like me much. but she liked my friend and listened to whatever ideas she had about anything. before she went onstage she asked me, "is it gluten free."

the devil and christmas day

2011-12-26T11:44:00.000-08:00

first christmas with emily but mostly frankie, a four year old's christmas is the real mythology. people streamed through all day and i never left the house. my favorite part of the night was listening to nomy and emily sing jewish songs in the kitchen that's when the light was born inside, then at the very end of the night we danced to a recording of emily singing whole lotta love. nomy is a keeper of songs and we circled around our love for hoyt axton. this song is one of my favorites of his and nomy sang the whole thing in the kitchen. i love this song because the devil becomes real, not some cheesy christian fantasy, but some force you have to deal with in the dirt of everyday life. and there are high stakes. "the devil is a joker and he don't want you alive." yikes.

2011-12-24T17:16:00.001-08:00

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2011-12-24T16:39:00.001-08:00

on my way to sweat and that when i think about you i touch myself song just came on i love my life

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2011-12-24T13:25:00.000-08:00

just put on the long johns emily gave me to go with the pair of jeans i took home from my father's house, ripped and patched ones from the 70's i remember seeing in a photograph of him and me on a ski trip. i am not allowed in emily's room where she is wrapping presents with frankie. the dolly parton and kenny rodger's christmas album is on the turntable and nomy lamm is on the road from flagstaff. spanky's been to the park already, speeding through the snow.

2011-12-22T14:02:00.001-08:00

this post is the equivalent of falling off the horse and getting right back on it. if i don't a bad case of the blog willies could ensue. every now and then i get completely clouded and nearly every interaction and communication is tinged with an ill wind. i am so grateful for emily and my family and friends who are so patient with my moods, arrogance and not quite so adult behavior, allowing a part of me to shine through that i can genuinely be proud of. it is a testament to my own self forgiveness that kindness triumphs over cruelty now, and forgiveness over self punishing. that true love is not a vague concept i am reaching for but something as real as water now. if i was left to my own devices, without the grace of spirit and these people, i would surely have orchestrated some melodramatic demise by now.

2011-12-21T23:16:00.000-08:00

Cant sleep. longest night. this time last year i was in a peyote lodge. this lodge burns almost as hot. nightmares last night. it rained and the roof fell in then some guys came the next day to fix it and i realized they destroyed it in the night...the roof...just to get the job of fixing it. emilys vibrator cord went whacko and got tangled in my truck heater system setting the truck on fire. and spanky was a horse. i was worried now that the fence was gone from rain and fire she would wander with the neighborhood dogs and get hit by a car.

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2011-12-20T07:33:00.001-08:00

in the dream a volcano happened changing everything. it started in the most ordinary spaces, in-between the rocks in people's gardens came smoke.

we continued as humans on the planet, though by the look of it, only those with money were left.

they had quantified and isolated the part of the body that rushed sex and love feelings and found it was something separate from the body. invisible.

at the nightclub was where i saw the new humans for the first time. all their flesh was gone. better to stream this invisible thing they found. they kept their ribs and other bones, but only for cosmetic reasons, for the sculptural and dramatic effect, the rest was machinery but covered in black cloth or leather. we watched them in awe and slight irritation. they had the attitude of los angeles lesbians who think they are the best looking ones.

there was lots of flirtation. many people you could sleep with if you wanted to. i was intimidated by the new humans and instead was caught in some very junior high school lesbian drama with who i was going to make out with.

a woman with red hair in her fifties, one of the doctors. i watch her become insecure. she tells the others she wants to begin the process of changing her body into the other kind of human and as she talks her face becomes ugly. older but more like a childs. she rants off a long list of all the things she wants to accomplish that she is afraid will never happen if she doesn't change. she says something about "of course, everyone wants to look like a native american."

even though she is a doctor of some sort i get a sense there is a struggle around money. she can't really afford to become the other kind of human. things are going to go badly for her and she will lose the face she had.

2011-12-19T21:10:00.001-08:00

i am as stark and as blank as this sea though now it is night and i wander through the homeless in the grass to the waters edge. i want a world to live in. i cant do it alone. stop. your friend is writing you. look at her and then the sea.

2011-12-19T09:29:00.001-08:00

photo os spanky taken by emily this morning...i am homesick as hell.

2011-12-19T09:21:00.001-08:00

2011-12-19T09:05:00.001-08:00

2011-12-16T13:02:00.001-08:00

Just cleaned out my Dad's garage and found this painting he did long ago. It's quite beautiful. My Dad said he was transfixed by the idea of this white table. Staying close to home on this trip but managed to escape to Culver City for a dreamy afternoon/evening with Dodie. I drove us to Venice and we wandered around the boardwalk and Abbot Kinney area like two bewildered deer. More deer HERE.

2011-12-16T09:52:00.001-08:00

the way clothes hang on these guys. awesome.

2011-12-15T07:49:00.001-08:00

Holiday cheer at my Dad's consists of this sort of thing. Objects I have gotten for him. That find their place where he put them years ago, and there they remain, year after year. I dreamed of beach killer whales, sand and lightbulb glass on the beach, the lightbulb glass washed up like jellyfish some with their lights put out. I am homesick for Emily and Frankie, sleeping is the only drug.

2011-12-15T07:48:00.001-08:00

2011-12-15T07:46:00.001-08:00

2011-12-15T07:45:00.001-08:00

rumblings of greatness

2011-12-14T10:17:00.001-08:00

2011-12-14T08:02:00.000-08:00

a reader of the blog brought to attention this post from late summer. Good because I am empty this morning, typing near my father as he watches TV.

Midnight. i was walking with a headache down a suburban type street and there were no cars just streetlights. then a semi rolling behind me. slowly. it was red and as it passed along side of me i saw it was carrying crushed cars.

my book.
my book has crushed cars in the middle of it.

the semi stopped at a stop sign. didnt go. the driver got out walked around to the sidewalk towards me i audibly sighed so he could hear my frustration and fear

dont be afraid
im just lost
where is agua fria
he said

2011-12-12T11:36:00.000-08:00

It's been a solid few weeks of decent behavior, house work and soul work, now off to California to visit my Dad. Been wanting to sleep and sleep. I'm nervous about this trip a little. Tonight Emily and I are making dinner for a mutual friend, someone who is one of the first people I ever met when I moved to Santa Fe. Last Wednesday she had a gathering at her house to discuss the occupy movement. The dashing Lucy Lippard was there with her adorable dog that licked the soup bowls clean when no one was looking.

2011-12-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

The dream last night was a gallery girl friend of mine from L.A. had made a movie about vomiting. Because she was from L.A. she had friends in high places. Nina Simone did the soundtrack to her movie and was present at the opening, which was held in a ruinous expanse of graffiti'd cement.

My favorite line in the movie was this - "The act of vomiting is a male signifier."

2011-12-09T07:15:00.001-08:00

I have a fear of crafts. $18.00 notebooks with whimsical cartoon animals on them send me spiraling into grief and then self-loathing. Because everybody should like crafts because the people who make them are always really really nice. Emily thinks it's related to my lizard heart somehow. I am trying to be a better person. So imagine my surprise when I get an email in response to my blog post yesterday from someone related to the internet borg of all things craft related - Etse.com. She saw my (stolen)bathtub cowboys and wanted to know if I wanted to link up with this amazing creator of cow skull art. I feel stalked by this object in a good way. I will gladly be an ally of this and other cow skulls created by this woman, praying that they find homes this holiday season. If you don't buy this here cow skull, remember to buy your christmas presents from real humans who make things with their hands.

Last night's dreams were very generic war scenes, bullets flying. We shot a bad guy and he fell back into the sewer and we were privy to a vision of his gruesome slow death, felt our karma permanently fucked by it.

Then all of us were stumbling along after battle and came to a place that was familiar to me. A place that shows up in my dreams often - a sprawling catacomb housing Egyptian and other artifacts from ancient cultures, Mesopotamia maybe, lots of hieroglyphics. I pleaded for my weary and reluctant comrades to come see it with me, they would not be disappointed. Some agreed, including Kathy Izzo and we descended.

It wasn't how it used to be. Instead, was a vast and sprawling military marketplace selling tents, clothing and toiletries that were painted, stitched or marked with a flag much like this one and in my gut I knew they represented all the Native American ancestors killed in battle with white people. This art installation of sorts was a raging stark rallying cry.

bathtub cowboy

2011-12-08T11:56:00.000-08:00

Indeed I pay good money so a therapist can help me find my true self, my core archetypal identity upon which my destiny hangs in the balance, the hero's journey or the way of the householder, the warrior or the father...

I now know my true self.

I am a bathtub cowboy.

on a dream in which my prison is seen

2011-12-06T07:47:00.000-08:00

My dream last night was infused with the book My Antonia by Willa Cather. I wasn't reading the book in the dream, it simply infused every object and scene to where my mind would always return to My Antonia, My Antonia, this book about a woman of the land of Nebraska, written in the most romantic and clear headed prose. I've found some quotes...

"More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood."

"As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running."

What was happening in my My Antonia dream was this - I was trapped on a yacht with a raping psychopath. He had my wallet and my most important suitcase of clothes. I was left with a box of trinkets, plastic things that I tried to hold were of value but were not. I showed ugly hobby lobby fake branches to my friend in bondage.

"I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."

The yacht was a prison of decadence. It smelled of California and promenades with bars serving ten dollar martinis. I would have to do some horrible thing to get my wallet and then get off the yacht, something like a sexual favor that would result in violence I was sure.

My Antonia, My Antonia. I wonder if this dream is about Emily's mother Antoinette, I thought in the dream.

"I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem....

"Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share-black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun."

"Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie."

2011-12-04T09:17:00.001-08:00

This is a needlepoint done by my mother. It hung in the kitchen all through my childhood years. I would look at it warily, creeped out to the core by what my mother described as Goldilocks and one of the three bears. Trying to wrap my head around the small golden animal as bear was disturbing enough, but then my mother would often say, "This will be yours someday because I always think of you as that little bear and Goldilocks as me."

It's been sitting in the rafters for two years gathering dust and now hangs in the kitchen at the Emily house. I love it for the first time. Its creepiness is balanced by a complex set of new factors - Emily's ancestral knick knack love, the ghosts of the family that was here since 1949 until just now, a pocket of kitchen wall reserved for a last supper etching now gone, this thing has traveled all this way for this perfect spot of ancestral resonance.

It makes me think of Dodie Bellamy's clowns given to her by her mother.

Went to the sweat last night. There is something huge in the committed return. Anything novel or "other" about the ceremony is slowly being washed(sweated) away. I find I talk about it less and less. It has become fully part of my life, the central container for all my days and nights to...

My dreams last night were Virgoan, all about infrastructures, sewers, shopping malls with floors so slippery I flew across rooms. The art museums were in the mall, the art behind thick glass like an aquarium, a gadget placed in a sewer line under thick foam, the neighbors all gathering to help.

2011-12-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

I mean, give me a reason to get out of bed at all. When dreams are like this its the dreaming that becomes the world. I am thinking the dreams must be related to this medication I have been taking. It's called hydroxyzine and it's an antihystamine similar to benadryl. The thing is I've been taking it for a few weeks and only this week have the dreams come.

Last night was Africa where there were so many people from all around the world, so many white faces defining what "Africa" was, and I was a film-maker. I was in a jail that was swank. Upstairs was a library with books I could only find there - books about the kabbalah, pop music and africa. Not as separate topics. The books were about all these things at once.

I was filming a music video. The band, The Lovers, posed underneath elephants, their faces painted white.

On to steel. The vast Kenyan plains. Workers making steel balls with their hands along a railroad track. Suddenly I am high in the air swinging from a steel rope with my camera, so terrified. I am not cut out for this job.

A black woman from America is here with her camera. She tells me the weight of it is killing her. And those people making the steel, they are always in a fight between two tribes, she says. It's all so wretched.

I want to get back in the jail because of the books. They only let me in as far as the bar where I order a double Jose Cuervo. I am rethinking how wise my plan is of making a film. It's all very complicated.

I am led to a great cement expanse in front of a temple. Thomas is there. He says something about the priests who live there, how they are the only people in the world who truly do nothing. They stand, maybe wander a few feet, are fed by the tourists. I can tell he envies them. They are all so gray, and weighted down by talismanic objects that seem so dead.

then something about a blonde woman from the band The Runaways...

2011-12-01T07:00:00.001-08:00

The medicine dreams keep coming. This time it was the women. All four nations from all four directions rocking out a cavernous space with body and sound. So many specific faces. Women citified and also ancient. Then a smaller lodge with a few friends. The center altar was malachite floating surrounded by silver and a voice that explained that setting stones is difficult meticulous work. Two lovers brought El Salvadoran food for us to share. The bread around the meat was thick. The inside was Vietnamese. An Irish priest in an Ecuadorian shaman's jacket walked in and out of the ceremonies trying to figure ways to stop us, but we could not be stopped. And T wrote me a letter of apology.

the warriors

2011-11-30T10:11:00.000-08:00

It's been five nights of powerful dreams and it makes me think of Kyoso taking notice of how when I blog about medicine dreams something monumental usually follows, so I am bracing myself I guess.

The past two nights the dreams were of warriors suicidally offering themselves to the fight. First was a Nordic-type guy. The metal objects he threatened to slice himself and others with took on a heavy talismanic vibration and I woke, trying to wrap myself around the idea of metal and blood. Claire Danes was his lover, her pink suede ballet slipper hung next to the metal object of his warrior-ness. But the center of the dream, the place where the power emanated, remains elusive.

Last night the dream was of an African American boxer. He was to fight until he died. It makes me think of the play Death and the King's Horsemen, by Wole Soyinka, in which a ritual suicide of the horseman of an important chief is prevented by colonial authorities. He is to die by dancing. In the dream, his fight was not so much with others but with himself and it was witnessed on a massive scale covered by media all over, he fights and fights reaching to cross the threshold into death. In the same dream I saw books that I would read, that were yet to be written, the titles and graphics on the covers of the books proclaimed a new era.

2011-11-29T10:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Frankie put on a Rod Stewart album that has this song and I have been playing it over and over. The sound is not this sound, because the sound came from vinyl and then out of big speakers, so the base in the song has bunny fur, and you are transported to all the Los Angeles bars with bands that rocked like this, Canter's Deli, Molly Malone's, house bands echoing a Sunset Boulevard sound. This makes me miss all things L.A. I love how he opens with this whole broke guy pose, singing that he will never be a millionaire, then later in the song he sings about his rich Dad who wants to buy him a car. Rod is so wonderfully mediocre in this video, like the Glen Campbell of rock and roll. He can hardly move.

blue devil

2011-11-28T20:35:00.000-08:00

1.	blue devil - a coarse prickly European weed with spikes of blue flowers; naturalized in United States blue thistle, blueweed, Echium vulgare, viper's bugloss herb, herbaceous plant - a plant lacking a permanent woody stem; many are flowering garden plants or potherbs; some having medicinal properties; some are pests Echium, genus Echium - a genus of bristly herbs and shrubs of the family Boraginaceae
	2.	blue devil - the sodium salt of amobarbital that is used as a barbiturate; used as a sedative and a hypnotic amobarbital sodium, Amytal, blue angel, blue amobarbital - a barbiturate with sedative and hypnotic effects; used to relieve insomnia and as an anticonvulsant

2011-11-28T20:22:00.000-08:00

Just finished a bowl of turkey broth with tabasco sauce. I've had that and green shakes only for two days now and I feel clear yet vulnerable.

dreams were crazy last night. these voudou dolls, headless bodies that were made of meat, human meat like a kind of human head cheese, everyone in the village had one. i remember now how in Palo, each person is a keeper of the dead, that's what it was like, so i guess the head i was looking into, that was mostly dust in the dirt but still there with hair and some bones, was my head, my own dead person and i saw a candle in the shape of a blue devil in the head and when i saw it the remains of the head made a sound like rustling leaves and the devil got up and ran. other stuff in the dream like crackered out white guys making rap music and surfing floodwaters in new orleans. a plow that was first silver jewelry then a real plow i rode in, i was a black woman on a date with one of the crackered out white guys, we rode the plow, pulled through fields by...

2011-11-27T19:31:00.000-08:00

it's a kingdom of tasks that define me painting cleaning loving the other/s

at 43 i begin a life in which i am no longer the most important person in the room i keep hoping cleaning painting loving the other/s will make it all seem real and not a dream, seriously, it's the texture of reality i reach for...sitting in the rocking chair in the room of 30 plus people

i am here

2011-11-26T08:05:00.000-08:00

Thirty or so people came to thanksgiving - five children, four dogs, two fold out tables in the living room with the vinyl record player and the fire. Two turkeys. Five pies. I haven't blogged because I had a vision of a clean kitchen and I've been tasmanian devil since the night of...but found a moment for stoned watching of princess bride in the back of the house before midnight came, us all cuddled up, my friend Diane, the elder, came back with a post it note she was tickled with and said it will be the name of her next art show. It read, "Beth Hill can't eat this." *

*allergy to pine nuts.

2011-11-24T07:12:00.001-08:00

first thanksgiving with the altar to emilys sicilian grandma antoinette

2011-11-20T14:28:00.000-08:00

some yellow, and red and watermelon. i make friends with a stuffed bunny on the counter. painted today.

2011-11-20T14:16:00.001-08:00

2011-11-20T14:15:00.001-08:00

2011-11-20T14:14:00.003-08:00