Reading harold_maude's journal

Have you ever had one of those nights where you keep waking up because you think you've over slept?
The last two nights have been like that for me. I've been having these crazy dreams and I keep waking up looking at the clock to see the time.

The dreams have been disjointed pictures and sound which haven't made alot of sense. Kind of like a movie that was going along fine and all of the sudden the everything goes haywire.

Out of sinc, out of time, like a circus where everything is backwards, even the music. Kind of like life right now. Everyday is still a struggle. I'm making slow progression from the two weeks where everything was black and there was nothing.
At least now I'm having dreams, how ever crazy they are.

Everything seems distorted lately. How fast the days go, or how hard I work and how slow time goes, how time seems to be doing this strange dance and can't make up her or his mind.
It's like watching a woman with too little money or too much money go shopping. They pick up everything, and then as they figure out what they want or don't want, things are disgarded along the way.

It's comical actually, and when their done, and I'm standing right behind them at the check out, they can be heard muttering about having to get to here or there, and being late. And there is always a sense of impatients when this kind of shopper is done going through and making a mess of racks of clothes and shoes and what ever else.

I used to work for an invantory service. It was facinating to watch the shopping habbits of these women. Both young and old alike. Men are different when they go shopping. They, for the most part spent time wandering, looking rather lost and some of them, if they came with their wives or girl friends would get this look in their eyes, a mixture of fear and impatients, and you knew that what they were wanting was out of there.

Everthing we do as humans seems to make time change from our perspective. If we love what we're doing than there never is enough time. If we hate it or find it distasteful, time drags on and on. No matter how busy we are in what we're doing.

But time is time. As a person ages time goes faster. It's kind of difficult to deal with because as you get older there are realizations that make you wish you could turn back the hands of time and regain time again so you could have more time, more focused time, so that you could have the strength of youth and the stamenia while having the wisdom from the life lessons you have in the present, or the increased expertise of something learned so you could finally accomplish something worth while. Or create the perfect master peice. Without your hands or eyes getting tired from concentrating so hard.

it seems just a few short years ago I would spend sixteen to eighteen hours painting, taking a break only after being lost for hours in color and motion. The passage of time was marked by the night sky growing light and how tired my body and mind were getting. I would do this for months. I had between seven and ten paintings going at the same time all the time.
As a result I have a huge portfolio, even with all the paintings that are now in different places in the world.

Last year when we spent four months house sitting in a small town where there was no work, time changed again, there were no clocks in this house, as there was no electricty for three and a half of thoes four months, so time was almost non existant for me. The only changes I was aware of was the movement of the sun and the moon. As far as the days of the week, it got to the point where I couldn't tell because of being clock deprived.

Over the last few months I've found myself wishing that I could go back to when I was nineteen again. Know everything I know now, and spend another strong twenty some years more learning about art. There is never enough time, and now I can feel the effects of age on my bones. I feel like I'm racing against time and what it's doing and taking from me. It's kind of a crazy mad dash to accomplish something, don't quite know what yet, but the need to do is strong, or was until about two months ago when everything went black.

Now I'm finding that as I'm struggling day to day to hang on to life, making that choice everyday, that time is not my enemy, but rather like an alarm clock, that I can't shut off.

I've been working on a new painting. Well it's more of an act of discipline right now, the point is to keep painting, exercising the skill so that it doesn't get rusty. Thinking back to when I was nineteen I didn't understand that when things get hard you have to do things simply as a matter of choice. I was more driven by mood and insperation.

Inspiration is very rare, most of it's disiplined action that makes a talent good. Writers are that way too, the ones who are really accomplished and can write cold, write everyday, even if what their writing is not so good in the middle of writers block. Artists get artists block, and musicians get musicians block as well. Nothing is comming out of what was only a few short days ago, so it seems, a flood of ideas and this wonderous stuff. Now the thing is damn near dry and terror sets in that you've lost it.

Learning to work through things is part of age too, I think, maybe even a gift of time. Through all of this I've opted not to drink to try and make things go away. I know that it would be easy to drink and get so shitt faced that I would become a bithering idot and wake up with a raging hang over.
Then guilt would set in and I would spend time beating myself up for my stupidity.

So I've come to the conclusion to just ride it all out, and to keep doing things. To work inspite of how much I would love to just stay in bed and sleep the days away. It's painful most of the time. But this pain will subside, at least that's what I'm hopeing for. Even if it doesn't I know for now anyway that I won't be guilty of wasting time.

And that maybe is the point of going through all of this.
Not to waste what is so fleeting, to make the most of it, even when you don't want to and don't care about much of anything.
Maybe that's the life lesson I've been being taught...could be.
Maybe. I hope that's it.

It only looks that way because your standing on your head.