Better than fruit salad

Spike really likes singing.

He hasn’t shown a particular dislike to any music I’ve played, but he will curl up with his eyes and ears heavy with contentment when I play, say, “It’s a Big World”. The soundtrack to “Once” is having a similar effect.

He likes acoustic guitar and simple voices. He likes clear harmonies — thirds, not seconds. He particularly likes live singing. Mom’s old songs as I sing them when I do dishes sometimes in the late evening. I sing Mom’s songs and I sing what I know of Grandpa’s songs and then I switch to God’s songs — hymns I’ve known since before I could read from when I would sit under folding tables during choir practice — and now I sing “It’s a Big World” and whatever that first song is. It’s nice to have an actual being to ask.

Are you a beach? Are you the sand? Are you the wave that washes up upon the land?

He also has been enjoying the audiobooks at night. During the Drawing Hour I sit and listen to 90ish minutes of “The Hummingbird’s Daughter,” (which is read by the author and very good — it helps to have someone who knows how to pronounce the Spanish and say it as it should be said,) and he will lay on the bed or sit with me sometimes on the stool and listen.

Something must resonate in the voice, in a cross-species sort of way. There is something about hearing auralizations that is somehow correct. At first I thought that it may just be that his first house had far more ruckus than he gets here, but it isn’t just noise. He doesn’t really respond to movies — pictures or scripted words set to music. But bare-voiced singing and talking in long unbroken strips seem to captivate him in a very interesting way. So there must be something there. Something deep and True.

I forget sometimes that he is barely two years old. His health certificate says he was 18 months in July, but I actually think he was born in May, not January. We were hand-feeding his litter during a graduation party — May ‘07 — and they were only a few weeks old. So that would actually mean he is closer to 16 months right now. It certainly matches his temperament — he swings wildly between being almost terminally sedate to running feverish laps around my tiny apartment. Last night he spent two hours putting an acorn cap under the rug and taking it out again. He is never, ever bored and I’m glad he’s not a sullen self-loathing sort of cat, despite the occasional scrape in the thigh when he doesn’t quite make his hairpin turn from couch to window sill.

LATELY

1. Work has been awesome then terrible then awesome then terrible. I am doing my very best to simply Not Care — no small task for the Ceaselessly Empathetic, but some art upswing has helped the big syrupy spoonful of Fuck-it go down.

2. I had a bit of a breakdown last Sunday about the art stuff. It’s too much, there’s too much to do, I never finish anything, and so on. I saw this breakdown coming and had enlisted Anthony a week before to be my sort of deadline holder. At the beginning of the week I have to announce some project, send him progress reports through the week, and then finish something by Sunday. But then Sunday came and I hadn’t finished anything and OH MY GOD WHAT’S THE POINT. This was coinciding with contact from a certain lovely someone at creativeshake.com. When a simple question of “do you have 15-20 pieces you feel are strong” was answered first with a timid, “I only feel strongly about two pieces,” I sort of lost it. How will this every get off the ground. I haven’t DONE anything in so long. Blah blah blah.

Anthony essentially had to talk me into my own art. Not a proud moment for me. But helpful, ultimately. It somehow got me back into the groove, now that I’m “allowed” to paint and call the easy-and-fun-to-do-fruits a portfolio piece. I’m still not sure that’s a good way to go as far as portfolio stuff goes, but once I sort of broke that seal it wasn’t long before I was drawing every night just like I’m supposed to be.

3. WordPress has a new feature in the “add media” portion of the entry-input thing. The icon looks a lot like a single breast. I had to mouse-over to figure out what it was. “Add Poll”. Well, okay. Except you have to sign up with their “sister website”. No thanks.

But I’d already thought of a question, so I thought I’d ask you anyway. The following was an actual extra credit question on my Shakespeare final Junior year.

Q: What is the greatest Shakespeare play ever written?
a. The Merchant of Venice
b. Brideshead Revisited
c. Richard III
d. A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Answer: b.Brideshead Revisited. That was a semi-secret nobody-showed-up-in-class-today-let’s-make-a-crazy-extra-credit-question-for-the-final type of thing.

Tonight I had some stuff I could have worked on. There’s a paper due next Friday that I need to pull together, and there’s some stuff that should get read and done with. Instead, I set up camp in the art room like I haven’t done in too long, and painted a picture of the blank blue wall I was looking at from the coffee shop window yesterday.

I hadn’t sat down to a start-finish picture for a long time and it felt nice. Nothing dramatic or meaningful really, just a snapshot from yesterday, and it was nice to do.

I seem to have lost my ability to sleep.

I get this way sometimes for no reason. I have vivid memories at age five laying my my bed crying to myself because I was, as my mother put it, too tired to fall asleep. All the experts tell you to get up and do something if you can’t fall asleep but this was a practice I could never cultivate as a child. Parents have rules about that sort of thing. A bedtime is a bedtime.

For someone as loose and carefree as I seem, I do tend to be a bit too hard on myself. As do I get upset at a disrupted routine — particularly if it’s not being disrupted by something fun — so these nights became (and have always been) excruciating. For weeks I would toss and turn, sometimes squeezing my eyes shut, sometimes imagining myself as weightless, sometimes just staring blindly at nothing at all. Later I could sit up and read with a light, but this seemed to just aggravate the problem. I was often too tired to sit up and focus on the words and I had not yet accustomed myself to a stack of light reading, nor would I allow myself at that time to indulge in picture books.

When I was six and Mom wasn’t home I blamed it on the crickets outside. Dad told me to imagine they were singing a lullaby to me. Aside from urging me to move to Portland once I graduate, this was the most fatherly thing he’s ever done for me, and it worked. When I was twelveish, Mom told me to run through a movie from start to finish, and that also helped. In my late teens, Mom confided that sometimes she would pray the rosary while lying awake at night, and I’ve kept one looped on my headboard ever since.

I never thought seriously about insomnia until this year. Of course, being a college student does not really encourage one to cultivate good sleeping habits. Now when I can’t sleep it’s for a real reason — I can’t let myself go to class without reading this article, or I’ve procrastinated on this paper for too long, or I’ve stayed up so many nights in a row that when left with no papers to write I still wander around my darkened house wondering what is left that needs doing, or what is left unsaid. (Hi.) But this is a thing that I’ve dealt with for a long time. As I get older each previous “fix” looses its effectiveness and I need to find a new one — it’s as though my brain has wised up. I try to run through a movie now and I think to myself, this is just a ploy. I know what I’m trying to do and it’s useless to try.

Warm malted milk has been my trick lately, but when I run out it’s hard to know what to do next.

I think the other thing too is that as the Big Things get ticked off the check list (see last entry), I have to face the whole leaving thing more and more. It will be fun and good in every respect except for the Anthony thing, nad even that won’t be “bad” really. Truthfully I do kind of think some space will be good — let me get back into the art groove again and let him get back into the active seat in life, rather than just being carried along. Post-graduation time has not been good to him, its time for him to feel useful again.

We started that blog thing to kind of make a public record of some of our more creative thoughts. To have a kind of archived, searchable document, but also to start to move closer to collaboration. Many of the thoughts that come tumbling out of his head are things I find extremely ripe for illustration, or are something I have to sit and draw out so that I can figure out what he’s saying. Less often, I paint something that moves him to New Thoughts. We keep grappling for notebook paper yet never really share notes all that often, and this is one very easy way for us to do that. Anthony keeps bringing up Cristo and Jean-Claude and today while working on a TOP SECRET PROJECT, I remembered that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh are the same way. Which is comforting. We are different, but the desire to collaborate is there. And other people have done it before us. And that is, for all it’s cheese, a comforting thought.