harold_maude's journal

I admit it. I love color. Everyone. There isn't a color I haven't met that I don't want to explore, dance around in and play with. It's the biggest major addiction in my life. I want to taste what it feels like to be that color...make it melt into nothingness and then re-surface how ever it will.
I tend to see white as something that's asleep and waiting for some passing color to wake it up, like sleeping beauty or Rip Van Winkle...it's amazing when you see it happen.
For as long as I can remember I've been like this. I would get lost in pine trees when the frost would come and get as close to the patterns of white of various shades of olive just to see the layers of color and what was going on and why the white made the olive almost disapear at times.
I get lost in sunset because it's a once in a life time show that's never the same. It can be dangerous though, especially when your standing in a parking lot with cars driving around you.
Sunrise is like watching this indgio velvet that's got diamonds all over it unfold and become this saphire elixer that keeps changing until the sun makes it's appearance...then it just gets more and more electric and there are yellows and everything from pale sea green to pink and that morning blue, good enough to drink from....unless there are clouds that go from purple to a deep misty gray...
When I'm driving, I feel kind of cheated sometimes because when your addicted to color being a passanger is the best seat in the car. It leaves room for drinking color in and when something comes into view that takes your breath away, you can get eye drunk and it's ok, except unless you stop and get out so you can explore, it only lasts so long.
When I read books on color they seem almost clinical, like your disecting them, like their just these things that have no life, no emotion, no anything. I guess I have a hard time understanding why anyone would view color as just a thing...but that's just me I guess.
Color is better than icecream or chocolate, and I have a passion for chocolate too, and it's better than money. Money has never danced the way color does, money has no music in it's surface or even inside the linen paper on which it's printed...color will romance you and draw you and make you do things that seem strange, like mixing over 900 different colors because I couldn't find the perfect pallet of watercolor...it makes the music that's inside where the artist's dreams and songs hide come out to be seen and heard, and calls the fire to the surface, and it makes your tears seem more than just tears...it has a voice, each color does in fact have it's own voice, music for the eyes, wispers to the soul of what is there, and when you answer it, and let it take you where it will, then the whole world can listen too.

I was watching the trees this morning. Their branches and leaves dancing to the music of the wind. Just going with the invisible flow that was all around them. I kind of got lost watching and what I began to notice is that in someplaces the trees seemed absoulty still, while in other places the leaves and branches were shaking so violently that some of the leaves left the tress to dance in the breath of the wind...an invisable timeless melody that I wish someone would translate into more reconizable notes...poetry in the sky that dips down and brushes the face of the earth. I suspect that we only get to see part of this living creative process. We get to feel it when we walk outside and a breeze catches us off gaurd and kisses us softly and giggles as it wraps and then unwraps it's self around us...and we just go on with life.
Our thoughts sometimes are like that too, in that place between deep sleep and awake time. When everything of the waking world is more still and the place where anything can happens starts to become more and more clear...I love that place, where the speed at which immages and ideas arn't road blocked by the things you have to get done. It's the place where often the answers to questions and problems present themselves, and where the surreal becomes reality. I love it when I'm there and someone is talking to me and I'm able to talk to them about what I'm seeing and experiencing.
Remembering dreams is too hard sometimes. Even after you first wake up, they seem to disapate so fast, except for thoese dreams that want to be remembered. Then you remember them. But most of the time I only seem to remember parts of dreams, but in that place in between, when some one talks to me, I seem to remember more, and it all moves at the speed of my thoughts...it's an awesome place...I think the wind lives there and the trees too, and the rest of nature. I thing they all live there and watch us as we scurry about our busy day, thinking to themselves, that we are missing most of the good stuff that happens.....that we're growing old and missing the best parts of life, both good and bad....and I think secretly they love it when we sleep, because I think that's when they can talk to us, and tell us stories, and we're caught there, and caught up....moving at the speed of the thoughts of the entire universe. No wonder I would rather stay asleep than be in the waking world.

I heard familiar voices this morning when I woke up. It was a pleasant sound to wake up to. My brothers, outside talking about things. I couldn't understand all of what they were saying, but still it was a nice way to wake up.
My brothers. I have 3 now that are mine by choice. I've chosen them because they are the best kind of people I know. They're calm and easy going most of the time. They do have their moments, but it's not often and when they do, they don't scream or shout or throw things, or get all weird about stuff.
Their just really cool people.
It's not like it was growning up with a house full of angry people who got violent at times, formed aliences and were unsafe to be around.
I know there are thousands of people who grow up in worse situations than I did, but still it's hard when it's you.
The amazing thing about all it is that when you get old enough you can choose who your family are, the people you meet who change your life, friends that become part of your life, and no matter what happens they're there.
No matter where life takes me the guys in this house will always be my family, and if I out live them, I will feel the loss deeply, and grieve for them as if they are my blood brothers.
I wish they had been my brothers growing up. Things would have been different I'm sure, but I do know this, I wouldn't have made alot of the crazy bad choices I did, because they would have been there to listen and help.
I'm glad I have the family I do now, it makes all the hard things in life I've come up against easier, and that makes all the difference in the world.

I got rid of my on line store, and in the words of Forest Gump "one less thing to worry about."
The rest of the day will be spent in one of the following ways: on the road putting in applications, knowing that most of them if not all of them will end up being a waste of time, in the bathroom, doing all the various things associated with that room, eating, and wishing some rich crazy person would come up to me and offer to become a patron for my art.
So much for monday...at this point the rest of the week looks to be about the same.

Everytime I get a job it closes quickly. It's been a source of frustration.
Every door seems to be so shut tight that the fear of ending up living on the streets again has been a constant.
Through all of this there has been one constant thing that is the best thing, and that's doing art.
I love it. I've been doing art all my life. For the last 5 years I've been studing watercolor and from all the people who have seen it who have been intimidated by the medium they tell me that I'm doing things with it that are unique.
I had one person tell me that watercolor shouldn't look like that.
When I paint everything else goes away, all the crazy thoughts, the wild over flow that sends me to writing in several journals stop. Everything becomes this wonderful flow that I can and do loose hours in.
The only problem is with all of this is that even though everyone who has seen my work and even with thoes who have bought peices and paid me more than I was asking because they said I wasn't asking enough, the income from it is so far and few between that I've had to take other jobs just to keep from homeless. Not that that's a bad thing. Artists before me have done it and ones who are up and comming will do the same thing.
The trouble is that I don't want to do anything but art.
I don't want to have to deal with doing the monkey dance anymore. It's a pathetic ritual that makes me crazy and makes me want to strangle something, anything close at hand. And the other thing that keeps happening is every door that I keep trying to walk through so that I have a roof over my head keeps shutting with in a few weeks. It's been making me nuts.
Sometimes I feel like I should just stop and if I die outside doing art, then so be it.
But if I did that then there are people out there who would kill me a second time just because I did the stupid thing.
But their not living in these shoes!
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that art is the thing that flows through my veins. I guess part of the art life is being tortured in someway. There is no escape if the art in you is what you do to survive. Survival here has nothing to do with money. It's the blood that flows through me, and what makes me sane. I can't help that the doors keep shutting and that no windows are open. But to not do art is a sin against my soul, and I can't not create. That will kill me faster than living out on the streets or eating out of dumpsters.
Funny thing about all of this is that I really don't care if my work sells or not...that doesn't matter. It's nice when it does and it always shocks the crap out of me because it's just something I do. But the point is that I have to do, I don't have a choice. I think I had a choice a long time ago. At one point in my life I was willing to completely walk away from it for my faith, but it got handed back to me, and my destiny was sealed. I was created to create art. I'm done arguing.
No matter what happens now, art is the road I'm on even if it means I die doing it.

It's about 6:40 a.m. and I just woke up. My head is full of bits of the dreams I had last night.
They were crazy dreams about giant penises turning blue and nuns running around in business suits and all kinds of other things that are quickly fading away. I think that's a good thing I can't remember most of what I dreampt about last night.
What I do remember was that it was all pretty disturbing. In fact the last three nights I've had dreams that have been pretty disturbing, and after weeks and weeks with no dreams, to all of a sudden have three nights of dreams that are in color, I think has some kind of major significance.
The other two, I do remember.
The first one started out with my husband telling me he wanted to see more of the country. Which in it's self is strange, since he is very settled here and when we go some place new he gets sick with flu-like symptoms.
So anyway we are going west and we end up in Oregon and we're on our way to Crater lake and there is major construction going on. They are building a 5 lane super-highway through virgin forest, it's all dirt, even the on ramps and people are driving on them, going 60 and 75 miles and hour on these unfinished roads and we end up driving on them too, and we are in the mountians and we get to the edge of what apears to be a cliff and the road just stops and I get out of the car and go to the edge and the rogue river is filled to the top with crushed coal and there are buffalo running down the filled up river bed.
All of a sudden we're at crater lake and it's gone too, and there are buffalo walking around on the filled up lake surface. Then I woke up.
The next night in my dream, my husband are driving again, and we're in the mountians again, and we come to a large city, something about the size of Boise Idaho, and we're talking and all of a sudden someone comes up along side the car and starts shooting at my husband. They shoot him about nine times. There is nothing I can do to help him. I manage to get him to a hospital and they can remove all but 2 of the bullets and he's dying. Then I have two more dreams right after that are in different settings but in all of them he gets shot.
Then there was last night. And thankfully all I can remember about what I dreamed about was these giant penises that started out normal. They weren't attached to any bodies, they were just there, and all of the sudden I could see the veins in them and they just got more and more defined and then the penises started turning blue and getting bigger and bigger, like they were going to blow up or somthing, and the other part I remember was all these nuns running around in three peice suits and carring brief cases and the reason I know they were nuns is because they were wearing the veils that nuns wear.
I woke up and it was still dark down here, our room is in the basement of a farm house, and had this overwhelming need to write.
Everything for the last month has been very uncertian. There is no direction and neither of us can find work. We've gotten some help from family, but that will only carry us through the next month and then we are homeless again.
I've been in a state of on and off wanting to commit sucide, and I know that alot of people at one time or another have thought about the idea for one reason or another. But this has been really different. It's been terrifying. There is such a blackness that comes with the desire to die that it's a fight to not do it.
When it's not there, my head is on over load, trying to figure things out, and when that's not happening, we're putting in applications all over the place trying to find work. And there is nothing opening up.
I've been trying to stay busy so I can get so exausted that I can sleep peacefully at night, and up until three nights ago that seemed to work.
Now it feels like the unrest has invaded my sleep and the dreams are disturbing. I don't know what to make of the dreams, except that in them it what is going on isn't good and there is no happy ending. And that scares me. It's like everything in life is a hopeless state of existance and it's so much that now I'm dreaming about it.
I wish there was someone out there who could see things from a clearer perspective than I can and sit down with me and help me untangle this mess, because that's what my life feels like right now is one big mess that just keeps getting worse and worse.