Drop the f-bomb. Drop all the fucking bombs.

Val muses about the fear of beginning something new … AGAIN!

It is infinitely easier to create from a blank canvas than to rework an already failed canvas.  Reassembling a lifetime of work, false starts, years of drawing, paintings, ideas, piles of sketchbooks, completed series that were good, exhibited and put aside, series of works that were completed, then exhibited, selling only the strongest piece and then it is gone, undocumented. Acknowledging that you’ve “done this already”, gone down this road before, been there, done that, with excitement, success in the studio, a few nods of acknowledgement, yes always living in the far off distant unreachable neighborhood, always alienating someone maybe because this bristly personality was just too bristly. 

I'm starting fresh with way too much stuff. Like pieces of dead wood, crowding the basement and the forest floor, dead, falling down destroying our very hard won shelter so that it is unrecognizable, irretrievable, absolutely overwhelming clusters of stuff, crowding out the emptiness, mucking up the clarity, it isn’t findable. Smothered and strangled out by piles of shit, piles of old failures and old successes, trials and tribulations.

Tractor trailers are clogging the arteries to the Smithsonian. Clogging our arteries everywhere. Making stickiness in the insides of our blood vessels, our vessels our blood. Clogging the drain. Then exploding. Piles of shit spewing out and stinking and fouling everything that is possible, all that is good, all that is hope. 

early in 2022 • TRUCKERS BLOCKED EVERYTHING!

Pandora’s box slams shut… gets padlocked and the key is thrown into the sea. The sea that will soon rise and drown and destroy beautiful homelands and life forms that evolved over the centuries. A cluster fuck of a country, a cluster fuck of a life. Another country being bombed and destroyed right before the eyes of the world, everything coming down at once. A deafening barrage of clamoring noise.. noise being a small word… like being in the middle of the percussion section of a symphony orchestra during Beethovens ninth. Deafening. 

I want to burn it all down into a huge pile of ash. I am breaking. 

Reinvent a lifetime? Impossible…is it possible? Does it need to be destroyed completely and let the lightest most buoyant parts rise to the surface? Or mined for the treasures first? What is possible? 

We are all fucking hoarders. Hoarders of stuff, hoarders of memories rotting and falling through the cracks of our brain. We are all fucking hoarders. Hoarders of news and food and family. We are all fucking hoarders. 

Drop the f-bomb. 

Drop all the fucking bombs.