concretekiss

Plagiarism, by Rene Magritte. Damn I wish I painted this, and gave it the same title n everything.

I been thinkin. Don't be alarmed if you smell smoke.

All day Saturday in the library until it closed, looking at books on surrealism, sketching late Jurassic and Triassic reptiles, desperately wanting to be inspired. My Rachel says that if I used this downtime to paint like crazy, if I could make at least $500 a month from artwork, along with an unemployment check I could match my previous income, thereby sustaining myself and mine. I dream. By the time unemployment runs out, I could have a healthy respectable portfolio. The self-saboteur in me says no one needs art in times like these, that my talents are superfluous commodities. My heart says that I would be a fool not to at least try. My head says my heart has cried wolf a time too many.

Keuhneosaurus glides from tree to tree. His ribs elongate and fan out from his torso, connected by a thin membrane like a bat's phalanges. He lost them somehow on the way to now. Do the green anoles dream of flying? We love to think that evolution creates possibilities, or that everything needs wings. Keuhneosaurus disagrees.

Poor gentle giant, Leedsichthys Problematicus was the largest fish that ever lived, estimated to have grown to 80ft. long, with 40,000 teeth. A filter eater, but he was too large and slow to defend himself, so that bullies like Liopleurodon and Kronosaurus, smaller (thought not 'small' reptiles by any means) and faster, would take bites out of him. He was a floating buffet.

Our ladies of perpetual sorrow are not endangered. The most talented make fame of great tragedy. Frida Kahlo began to resemble Lady Day the more I poured over her photographs. They share the same faraway look, the smoldering eyes. Perhaps they are of the same suborder, Femina Tristis?
Billie Holiday's grandmother died while holding Billie in the night. By morning the rigor mortis had set in so that Billie was caught in the woman's embrace like a bony cage. The mortician had to break the grandmother's arms to set her free.
Frida found her husband, Diego Rivera, to be conducting an affair with her sister (It was not the first infidelity, by far, but the most painful) and would not stop even after she confronted him, even after she suffered her third miscarriage, and even after she had parts of her foot removed from gangrene, due to complications from spina bifida and polio. "When I loved a woman, I wanted to hurt her the more I loved her; Frida was the most evident victim of this despicable character trait of mine," said Diego.
So, I was the one stunned in the stacks by my insistent tears.

Today I made a necklace, beef stroganoff for dinner, groomed plants on the balcony, painted a golden ribbon in the mouth of a stone lion, surgically scrubbed my bathroom to ranchera music.

Staying home, hoarding money, I'm forced to amuse myself with all of the silly things I bought back when the pay was steady. I didn't realize I had so much jewelry, or half completed projects, yoga videos, skirts that need hems, unstarted books, undeveloped ideas, unkept promises to myself. It's arresting to think that I could spend months just finishing all the tasks I frivolously, wishfully set for a girl more accomplished, less exhausted than myself. All these good intentions, all these unhatched thoughts to count.