dear anonymous blog reader whom i do not know and will never meet,

here's the thing:
i don't really really trust you. because i don't really know you. this essentially comes down to a lack of faith in myself, but i am going to project a little for now, so humor me or find somewhere else to browse.
i have had a problem with writing about how i feel. truthfully writing. i'm not quite sure where it comes from. it is easy to ramble on about something. to get words down on a white screen and hit PUBLISH and feel like you are writing, but anyone can do that. i started doing this because i wanted to write and vent and purge and have cathartic release. well, whatever it is that i have been doing has failed to effect that result. i've been putting pictures in with the words as i take them. they are loosely associated with words if at all. more often than not, i am actually just happy to put the pictures up. the photos have an anonymous energy that is more effective than the words anyways. they are safe.
those who have ventured close to my heart have often told me that near to it lies an impenetrable box. some have used the word fortress, some have used the word chest, and someone told me it was a room with no doors that hides something that she so wished with all her heart that she could see.
i knew the whole time that i had a sense of what they were all talking about, but i was unable to define it then, just as i am unable to define it now.
heather sometimes scratches at my chest as she lies up next to me and whispers "let me in, let me in" if it is particularly conspicuous. all the while i feel as if i am laid open and bare to the whole world, and especially her.
this blog will never tell you who i am. it may reveal what i am thinking at a moment. it may show you a glimpse of my beliefs or how my mind works, but it will likely never define the box.
this is most likely because i keep it closed for a reason, whatever that reason may be. for the time, it seems, i keep it closed even to myself.
while i say that it is you that i don't trust, really it seems that it is myself whom i need to convince.
i don't really trust me, because i'm not really sure how much i know me right now

one third

i'm driving myself a little bit crazy today. i've got loads of things to do but the only thing i've been doing is breathing. i made a pizza earlier. it was beautiful, with asparagus, eggplant, peppers, and other assorted vegetables. quite enjoyable. i think i just needed a day to decompress. My folks have been visiting for the last week with my cousin Sara. it has been awesome to have them out here in our home. it's a funny thing when one moves out of the parental housing unit and into their own. granted, it happened to me a long time ago, but nonetheless, i still remark on it. the big day is when they finally visit and you find yourself going into the rooms and turning off lights after people leave. you catch yourself closing the front door when you find it wide open, and you laugh to yourself when you find the milk on the counter and you put it back in the fridge.
my dad said this day would come, but i still can't admit that i'm a grown up. i'm not yet. i still count my age in fractions... eight and a half... seventeen and five sixths... twenty nine and forty-seven fiftieths...
i figure no adult would count their age in fractions... so i'm safe.
what's the big idea anyways. it's not like i'm afraid of being old. i've got twice again as long to live as i already have... and i can barely remember the beginning of that. that's a long time.
with all of that time left i guess i just needed a little of it to myself.

and she is gone

i was remiss in my failure to report that the era of gina is now behind us. heather and i were oh so very lucky to have had her stay with us for the last few months. we had set up a little room for her downstairs. not only would she cook fantastic culinary delights on demand, but she would also tidy up a bit around the house, as well as help the heather with her errands and chores. her pay was reasonable... room and board, as well as art supplies and the odd little travel adventure (amongst which i count sleeping in a soccer field for octoberfest in munich, three days in amsterdam, and one crazy halloween party)

overall, i think the arrangement suited all involved. she is a fantastic woman and she is most incredibly missed already.

we love you ginabug

rain

it's raining today. we are currently under a weather watch, with a warning of over 2 inches of rain within 12 hours. now, that's a lot of rain for here, but i'm not sure if i would qualify it at weather watch worthy. there doesn't seem to be a lot of wind or lightning associated with the perilous precipitation, just the threat of 0.166 inches of rain per hour for the next half day.

nonetheless, being the properly prepared person that i am, i decided to build a fire in our humble wood burning stove downstairs, in case the impending rain happened to knock out all the electricity in our house... as our circuit breaker has the tendency to pop off on it's own anyways. that way, if the electrical did happen to go out, we could still wake up in a nice and comfy little house in the morning.

so that's our evening. not particularly dangerous or exciting. we just sat down on the couch downstairs, heather made a egg-nogg and rum drink for herself and an egg-nogg and RUM drink for me, we put our feet up to the fire and listened to the rain for a little while.

trash

so i left out the front door to go to work today and realized that when we had put the garbage outside the front door (because it smelled and it was not yet garbage day) we had neglected to put it in any kind of fiddle proof container and the roving band of feral cats that rules our particular neighborhood had managed to find it. faithfully representing their particular style of behavior, they had managed to tear open an entire side of the bag and then shed its contents onto our front porch.

i calmly went back inside to grab a secondary refuse satchel (as if i had loads of time to spare) and proceeded to rebag a bunch of week old thanksgiving leftovers and bonsai potatoes. at that point i realized that i needed to dispose of this garbage myself, since the secondary bagging technique was not going to survive another cat raping.

so i proceeded down the lawn to our jeep. our jeep has the back seat removed and has become our designated "pick up type vehicle" (since i sold my truck) and therefore is the proper vehicle for transporting the odd bag of garbage to the dumpster at my work.

much to my chagrin however, was the realization that my handy dandy little remote gate opener was neither handy, nor dandy, NOR did is open our gate! i was locked in my own backyard (it was somewhat embarrasing)

that's about it...that and i went to belgium today. it was nice.

the easy way

i rarely do things the easy way, and i'm coming to realize that it is because i enjoy difficulty and struggle. not necessarily overwhelmingly so, but a little discomfort and small obstacles on a regular basis is rather comforting tp me in some strange way. call it the bohemian part of me that enjoyed sleeping in my truck (when i had one) and who prefers to start on a cross country drive without a map. call it the search for seasoning and perspective that led me from the path of art, creation, and imagination into my present and most disparate occupation for a while. i enjoy wanting and yearning. i love the pure joy of being reunited with friends and family, and in it's anticipation, i love the sting of distance and time between us.

if i were to universalize my feelings about being an artist to encompass all artists, i would say that the balancing of bitter and sweet is the greatest struggle.

i would say that i love a splintery chair, because it reminds me of how much i love to stand.

if i were a tree...

when there was water, i would want it to come in driving rains carried on cold bitter gusty winds. when there was sun, i would want it to bake down on to my branches and try to pull the moisture out of my bones. when there was autumn, i would hold onto my leaves as long as i could and i would laugh at the winds and the storms. when there was winter, i would want to feel the weight of the snow on my naked branches until i feared they would snap. when there was spring, i would painfully thrust out green shoots into the air and unfurl them until i was exhausted. when there was summer, i would stretch up into the air and sing to the clouds. i would yell their names and cry that i could not be with them, my friends. when there was night, i would sleep and dream, leaning into my weight and creaking down into the core of the earth.

quiet

it's halfway up the mountain outside a village where i've never heard the locals speak. it overlooks the entire valley all the way out to the sea.
the plot itself is not very large or impressive. each of the sixty or so gravestones has a small porcelain likeness of the person near the top, and each gravestone has the name Mezzorobba. there are some exceptions, but for the most part, the graveyard seems to have been in use primarily by that one family for more than two hundred years. brothers share graves with brothers, parents with their babies, and every single grave has flowers; some silken and some living. the small stonewalled plot explodes with headstones, lit candles, and flowers.
it was an overcast day and i didn't have many words, but my mind was flowing with the overwhelming feeling of family, permanence, belonging, and eternity. The photos of each of the deceased date back to the turn of the 20th century and they all seem to look at each other in detached exchange.
across the street there are a few trees in a field that overlook the valley and the sea to the south.

friend ramble

i’m not sure if my old friends truly appreciate the amount of love that is out there for them. it’s a serious love. a brotherhood. a friendship of fantastic proportions. there is a caring about their livelihood that cannot be explained or undermined. i can go for years without hearing from one of my friends and yet within an instant of the phone ringing, the kindship is back as if we had hung out the day before. I respect them. I admire them. I wish to emulate their better qualities and I wish to be there for their weaker moments, so they have someone to lean on, if needed. They are friends. They are family. They are my beloved.

 

Talking with Heather the other day, we both realized that we both individually need time on our own in order to be the least bit productive. I’ve got a business trip coming up, and I’m pretty excited. I feel like she’s finally going to get some time to figure stuff out and work on her projects... and hopefully i’ll be able to follow along with her meanderings as well as start my own.

 

we shall see.

 

much love

paddy

typical bbq at kenny's

This is a typical BBQ at kenny's place:
people show up around 6:30pm or so. some people are late but not the ones who want the choice beer. kenny flew in a couple of cases of good belgian beer (like Chimay Blue for example) and so i was there at 6:29pm. By the time people are showing up, there is already a fire going in his little fire pit and the BBQ is all warmed up. As people show up they bring their burnables to the rear of the house where there is a sizeable pile of "things-to-be-burned."
There is a huge spread of eatables that go along very well with the drinkables... my favorite was the chicken and peppercini bites wrapped in bacon when they were fresh off the BBQ and it burned your tounge so you had to kick back a healthy swig of some choice belgian drinkable.
At some point in time there is a major push to the pile of burnables. It starts simply as an idea, but then the momentum builds and people are pulled into the gravity of the event and they are unable to escape. The grand pile is lovingly prepared with flammable liquids and a fuse of sorts is set. When it comes time for the ignition, usually some young fearless pre-teen is nominated for the job while all older and wiser typpes back off to a safe distance.
The fires are never short of spectacular. NASA mistakes them for solar flares and they sometimes knock geosynchronous satellites out of orbit.
Once the fire begins to die back below 15 feet or so, the explodables come out to play.
Highly illegal in most developed countries, they appear from nowhere in every conceivable size, shape, and purpose. They are stuck in the ground, tossed in the fire, lit with sparklers, and deposited into containers... like pumpkins.
The larger explosions look something like this...



and there is much rejoicing.