for the highest.

Yellow daisy behind her right ear
Black pen in mouth, blank pages in her lap,
Her only power now is her words.

If she could, she would camp out on the steep roof of that old brick house
Hold a vigil for hope, prove herself to be new
On this, the first day of summer
She would lift her eyes to the sun and let it blind her
Wash away the past two months, the ones that broke her down.

She can't, she knows that.
What she can do is wash color across page
Draw and draw and draw and wait. Rip out the page. nail it to the smudged, white door.
A record of wrongs.

All we can do in this life
Is do what we do well, do it earnestly and prolifically.
And those things we don't do well?
Those things are puzzles that we are challenged to solve, to better ourselves.
All we can do is be kind and open, hope for the highest.

the river james.

If I had a sunflower scepter
Skeletal and black
I could change this all, I think.

If it were possible to deliver a sermon
To my own soul
And to Jack's soul-- to anyone else who would listen
I think I could just float
Up above the slippery, hazy grime of these early summer days
That are slowly breaking me down.

I went to the river to submerge, to go completely under, break the heat
But having never swam in the river, I didn't understand.
That in this River City, the swimmers don't mean swimming --
They mean standing, wading, the water isn't safe.
Nothing here is completely safe.

We sat on the shore, four of us sharing one beer, tall as it was
The herons stared from across the water, and they looked frozen
I wanted to stand up and shout --
"We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive..."

...But i'm always the one who looks crazy, so I gave it a rest.
Smoked a cigarette, drank the dregs
Walked the pipeline home.

Good morning, Bushwick

What they say

They say
That once you release your toes' grip on the edge
that once you do a swan dive
Off of a bridge into dark water
You realize it was wrong

That it wasn't the answer you hoped it would be
That falling, fleeing, is never the end of the sentence.
It's the confusing punctuation, the semicolon.
What now?

When you hit water
When bones shatter
They say you don't know which way is up.

Maybe if I just float here
If I just am still
I will drift to the surface.

filling in the gaps.

There's nothing poetic about endings.

There is only the twisting, grinding, ear-scraping noise of
Unraveling rusted steel cable, wound tightly. Not meant to come apart.
It was never meant to come apart.
There is only the flat smell of hastily packed cardboard boxes
the strangeness of new, empty beds.
The dark, where unfamiliar.

There's nothing easy about the telling.
About watching the eyes of people who know you
Realize that they know you less, with cables now unraveled.

There is only a pair of eyes, set northward.
And hands, unwaivering, gripping the wheel.

pretty!

We bought our house in June last year, so we had no idea that all of these flowers existed...
What an awesome surprise!

Saturday night

A drunk neck shaving party.

THE LETTERPRESS IS HERE!

Not bad for a sick day

Stockin up, three shows in a row coming up!

THERE IS A PUPPY IN OUR OFFICE.

Pete made this.

Season 6 trailer from Pete Cartwright on Vimeo.

Morning bird bake

They're waiting to be lovely little rings.

Byo pony

Ponies will not be provided.

Holy hell

Youngest in the room.

i've never completed a sketchbook.

It is so hard for me to do one thing
More than a handful of times
When there are so many things to do
So very many types of things and actions and sounds I can make, ways to speak, books to draw in...
It's hard to excuse repeating.

It is clear to me that this is a fault as much as it is a strength.

After 17 hours of traveling west through the night, the sun rose in my rearview mirror for the first time in my life, passing through Santa Claus, Indiana. I love the first times of my life.

from the archives. which is archies, but with a v .

She is floating, it seems.

The distance between the soles of her shoes
and the cracked asphalt is so small really that
even ants detour around her flip-flops,
seeing no hope of continuing
forward in their original direction.

So no one can tell, but she is floating.
And the days are flying by
while she laughs them off as temporal things
With a linger aftertaste of salt
and ink.

For all of the times she has stood,
black-mouthed in front of a press and laughing
For late night faulterings that deposit ink or paint into the mouth
When two hands weren't enough to hold everything
and the wrong end of the brush was held between the teeth.

For all of those times, the taste was stronger today,
As she locked her studio door and her eyes lingered
over her own clean hands
Busy with other things, and the worse for it.

--

I wrote this in 2006, as my time as a professional art student was coming to an end, and I remember so clearly the fear that I was about to end my life as an artist out of necessity: entering the real world, having bills to pay and no time to be what i pretended during college years I could be.

As I clean and pack up my workspace at my art center job and prepare to travel to St. Louis to sell the things I make to people, making a living at being a creative person and an artist, I am so amazed and thankful.

NY Times on facebook

The Way We Live Now-- NY TIMES

Growing Up on Facebook

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

Published: March 15, 2009

Can you forge your future self when you never leave the present?

Read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15wwln-lede-t.html

I posted this obnoxiously long comment on Michael's facebook when he posted this article, and then realized I'd like to see what other people think so I am posting it here, too, with some added stuff at the end:

Here's what I think: The lady who wrote this article is a mom, and the moms in our life got on Facebook with a different understanding of what it's purpose was. When I first started on Facebook, the only people I was friends with on it were friends from my current life, college. It was an umbrella communication tool. Back then it was like, once every couple of months someone you remembered from somewhere else would friend you, and it was a huge surprise and a little weird.

Once my mom's generation got on it, they had to understand it in the context of their life, a much less digital existence, and so the shape it took was not social networking, but connecting with the past. I sort of think it probably had a lot to do with the constant pop-up ads for years that everyone got from classmates.com, telling you to reconnect with people you went to high school with. That was way more palatable to someone who didn't grow up on AIM chat.

So while I don't disagree that Facebook may change the way people reminisce, I also think that it's not necessary to be lonely to grow, and it's not necessarily healthy reinforce the old idea that you need to keep growing and changing into different versions of yourself while no one is watching...Wouldn't it actually be refreshing if we just evolved in front of each other and learned to understand each other as self-improving humans? Or no?

I just feel like every generation we fall into this same trap of looking at the younger generation as "doing it wrong" or messing up growing up, or whatever. All I know is, I'm in the group they are talking about but I am happy, thoughtful, and feel like I'm doing it right. Even updated my Facebook status with mangled syntax such as "Jackie is indie craft show."

What do you think?

Mmmmhm.

Got a new hairdo.

Spring is here!

Last year the softening of skin, and this one the loosening of ground.

Pete made those cedar boxes for me, and now the rest is up to me.

Whaddya know!

Snow in the dirty south!