I've started working on "grown up" dry pastel thingies. Am using some of the photographs that aren't very well executed (or some that are really well executed, not to be unjust to Porty...).. Did my autoportrait as a warm up. I think it's kind of great: pretty ladies are SO easy to draw :D Ha ha :P

    Not to mention pretty ladies sell best of all. Pity I'm such a fan of asymetrical, unconventional males. In theory. ;)

LoL.. I actually dreamt I was about to be slaughtered by redneck canibals...

How exactly I got myself into that mess I don't know, but a young guy and me were being taken to some small farm on a rim of some small village a little bit up in the hills - otherwise a very idyllic, picturesque scenery. We were just pushed into a pig sty and considering mama redneck was just slaughtering one of the pigs and son redneck #3 was making sausages from freshly washed small intestine, the guy and I could pretty much tell what was going on.

      For two days we were kept and they threw food at us and demanded we eat everything. There were five or six people - three sons to a couple and the father's brother or friend or something. I think they were even bargaining about selling me or us to a further customer. Oddly enough, as absurdly horrific our situation was, I could not bring myself to be particularly desperate. Nor did I feel like I need to rescue the guy, whose condition was rapidly deteriorating. Best I could do was lead by example.

      I used one hand to eat some food so as not to get too weak, but I used the other to shove the rest under the old pig shit and thus hide it. I did a lot of squats, running on the spot and, as much as I could, sleeping. On the third day some other people came, most of them with hunting rifles (but I noticed they are buck shots and thus used mostly for overall close range) and we were taken back towards the woods and the cars. I was considering hitting or stabbing someone and thinking if perhaps I'll be lucky enough for an opportunity to present itself and give me a head start, but I knew, from Rincewind's doctrine, that running is something you start at any given time and don't stop for anything. If things will happen to you, they'll catch up on you of their own inspiration. You just run.

       Hoping the guy will do the same, and hoping he'll get far enough to save himself, I simply charged into the shrubbery, blindly, almost hysterically and apathetically at the same time pushing people off, falling, rolling, running again, hearing gunfire, angry shouts, some drunken laughter, lots of pursuit and constantly wondering if maybe I've already been shot and the adrenaline decided to keep that detail from me. But I found enough strength (cheers to doggy walking..) to run uphil and then across a clearing, throwing myself around a lot, using the terrain's mementum, avoiding bullets. For some reason, somehow, I was getting enough maneuvering advantage to get to a road and chose to follow it, telling myself now is really not the time to be out of shape. I actually hated remembering the first rule of Zombierland: Cardio. In the back of my mind I was also very glad Starbark was not with me at the time of abduction, because she would have slowed me down but I couldn't simply leave her behind. Dog meat is as good as man meat.

      I reached a village, and was very careful about (not) being seen. For all I knew villagers were all on their side. In the center there was some sort of a happening and firemen and officials were celebrating something and I saw that the guy imprisoned with me was here also, dirty and breathless like me, hiding behind the fire fighter's building (the only official building and used for any old purposes.). We paired up to find some clothes and were noticed by a family, which turned out to be okay. They took us in and allowed us to wash and gave us normal food and water. But there wasn't anyone we could call yet. In fact so far in the dream nobody was really speaking. There was a nice girl in the family and the guy, though still in shock, found some comfort by socializing with her. A moment came, however, when they, too, were slaughtering pigs and he just lost it. He made such a ruckus that our pursuers heard about us and came looking. I fled again, this time more carefully, ultimately ending up in an old woman's house in a village further up the hills, but also closer to the city, which lay behind the ridge..

         She was very nice and the house was bright and homely, although small and poor and it was the sort of place I could easily see myself being adopted into. She also had a daughter and we talked a lot, cooking, fixing about the place and selling some garden veggies on Saturday. I even told them what's happened to me, but the old lady didn't believe me - she said they wouldn't have eaten me, they would probably just want to marry me to one of their inbred sons, but she was sure it must have looked like cannibalism to me. The way she said it made me doubt what really happened and I thought perhaps she was right. But I never for one second let down my guard.

        The dream ended with the arrival of the old woman's second daughter, who was almost albinous and blind, but as radiant and pretty as the house. And happy too, for she was thrilled about having a house guest and a friend. I intuitively made noises for her to feel more relaxed around me, hoping it would not seem condescending. I told her what happened to make me come here, but she didn't think it entirely as bad either.

       Then I just woke up. Feeling kind of rejuvenated, really. Outrunning crazed hunter redneck cannibals and finding new friends, all in one run. :p

An old button and tiny candy in my wallet; dog asleep

Five am and the doggie is scooped up and taken down to the lawn, me praying nobody else is awake to see me without my bra, in old shorts, uncombed hair, unbrushed teeth and slippers that don't fit (and have been eaten.) No poo? Okay. I don't have time for this... Back up we go..

Five fifteen and the General is done with his bathroom time, bright and awake, looking sharp in his work clothes and freshly shaven head. My poor mismatched pumpkin - his face is still badly swollen from the tooth infection. I grab him and kiss his tummy violently, until he manages to shake me off, plant a kiss on my forhead and run to work. The dawg has stolen my shoe during and took it to the 'den corner'.

I put some food, fresh water in the bowls and wipe the kennel so it's not a pond of pee. This dog pees for every thirty paces. While she eats, I get my bathroom time to get myself half way to presentable.

Five thirty and we're officially doggy walking. The long main street is morning-cool, empty and asleep. Not even the light is propper yet. It's chilly, refreshingly. The newspaper delivery people, the bakery, the deiry, the restaurants delivery trucks are scarce and I decide not to have her on a leash for a change. Her neck is already like that of a Namibian princess from how she pulls me. Off leash she walks nearly perfectly aligned to my step.

We walk for an hour, almost entirely off leash, but by six:thirty streets are already stirring. It's been refreshing, although it feels like it hasn't happened at all, like I just woke up. We get home, I change my shoes and put her on her cushion; she falls asleep. Lucky sod.

Having stopped making my ice coffees (since the time one got me sick, probably from an OD), I am now filling my thermos bottles with icy lemonade + caramel extract (tastes like vanilla, actually, the final product.) Borrowing the money from work cash register, I buy myself a hot dog and a bagel for later and then hurry to work.

Upon my arrival, the office is dead quiet, stuffy and dim. Alarms first, even before I put my bag down. Then lights, windows and blinds. I sweep the doorstep just a little, water one plant that's fickle and pick up the newspaper samples that have been delivered directly over night. These are the most basic, rutinous, solitary tasks- setting the daily papers on the conference table, turning on the computer and cash register, getting the press seals, checking the messages left just for me..

After that, after I eat and check what's up with the world, before everyone else starts coming, employees and customers, that's my morning. The rest is (at least sometime up until seven or eight pm) everybody else's day.

The good the bad and the over easy..

Weird morning. Slightly revealing, tho. Benjamin Franklin announced it. He is said to have said the saying: Ambition is just dreams with work clothes on :D hehe, I like that. And maybe, just maybe, I could do the fashion for once ;)

          The letter from an ex spouse made me feel approximately as flattered as a rape victim receiving a photo of her rapist jerking off, saying 'thinking of you'. I did read a few lines, hoping against all hope he'll be asking for a bone marrow or a kidney or something :D Alas.. Then again what would it say about *my* mental state, if to someone whom *I* cheated on and was ashamed of being seen in public with and having dumped them ultimately, reasoning it's for the career, I wrote telling them how very well I'm doing? No idea what the fuck he wanted, but I'm glad he's overpaying whatever he's smoking.. 

           At the same time I was talking to Pat (all hail to the time difference - my absurd morning hours are simply early party time down in the Oz) and he distracted me by describing in detail his trip with the lady, making a lush circle from Harlem to Treme, to Key Largo and back again to Waldorf Astoria, NY. We got to talking about money and how being a businessman isn't simply making good old doe - and who doesn't want that - but also being directly in the fast lane.. Art may change the world indeed and I may have tendencies to be an anthropologist or a journalist, but art changes the world in a hundred years whereas progressive, aggressive business project may do it a lot faster. I am a creature of creation, so suddenly, having it all except ability to make money, I've planted a seed that makes me want to open a Starbucks in my country or invent a retro trend that'll steer the culture a little more to where I want the world to be :D

             Then the general made breakfast and the world was perfect again :D
             Off to walk the nutty mutt and then it'll be too hot to do anything but WoW.. Ahhhh, dear Saturdays :D

....Hmmm, should I write a short story about a woman who is in love with July? Waiting all year for it, the distant lover, dressing up, having long walks with slow conversations and sweaty skin with fragrant warm  breeze in the bedroom?.... Hmmm...

Three stories: Hermes vs. my photography career

In the dark days, during my divorce, feeling more bad for longer than ever before, I decided to try and send a few photos to a visual contest. I chose six of the most suitable ones, pasted them neatly to posh carton, made a good envelope and went to the post office with money I borrowed from family. There I learned - even though the address was of a local PO Box and for all intents and purposes I could touch the damn thing - I learned then that all mail has to travel to a distribution center and then comes back over night. I found this to be ridiculous, so I asked the man behind the counter to simply stamp it and push it into the PO Box two meters to the left. 

                Time went by and no word from the committee - not only I did not win but they didn't even send me a catalogue, meaning I didn't even come up to the best 400. Finally seeing the exhibition, I got so incredibly sad, so fiercely disappointed (just seeing the sort of shots that won was bad enough to literally want to make me kill myself, as I needed little encouragement on the subject at the time.), my mum and dad said they knew I didn't qualify months ago, but didn't want to tell me. All of that mess falling onto me, I survived only by luck of the draw. And then some more luck. 

               March came and I hadn't touched my camera in the while. I did, however, begin to feel the benevolent lure of a spring season and around then a postman rode his moped pass where I was sitting. He seemed so cheerful and having a good time, delivering bills and newspapers and picturesque spam... It suddenly felt like something one, whose brain is switched off for self-preservation reasons, might try to do for a little while. I walked into the main post office and asked if I can do that and - obviously someone upstairs thinking it's a good idea - I was hired faster than most people in history. It took me less than a week to do all the medical exams, read Going Postal and decide how fiercely to bullshit about my moped skills. (It was a blunt prerogative, yet I've never even seen one up close before.) Needless to repeat that the first person I met, being given my moped and asked to drive it right then and there, was the General (so large and so good looking in that business suit I temporarily forgot I was supposed to feel all alone in the world.)

              For half a year I felt incredibly good most of the time: I was a mail maid and as silly and basic as it was, my existence was getting stabilized. I began seeing a guy that turned out to be pretty amazing, I started photographing again, I started getting emotional about things that had nothing to do with history. More importantly, however, Hermes - patron God of my hitchhiking - let me in on a little secret: about that portfolio nobody cared about?... It came back to me, some day, with a short note saying: "Hello, this envelope was mistakenly put into my PO Box some time ago.." 

              That guy, trying to do me a favor, put into the PO Box beneath the one that was for the competition.

Three short stories: how I got over the fabric-of-reality-ripping pain of divorce

Perhaps the most dangerous part of loss is underestimating the brain's will to stop working. Never mind the heart - heart is a hungry vampire, it only needs a drop of blood to stay alive - but the brain hates the heart and the it makes every other part of the body wage war on the red hot muscle. Lucky for me I really suck at suicide. That much about my brain.

             Having loved profoundly - and basically planned to love until I died (that part was, ironically, pretty to the point) - my mind still works by association - not because I'd think, but because I'd remember. Being the creature of stories, a powerful love affair fed me stories to last me decades. I didn't plan on having to deal with them. It was impossible to shake them in a hurry - the best ones still nag sometimes. I did, however, trick the brain into not giving up on the heart while those were rotting in my skull.

             At some point I was passionate about watching Cowboy Bebop - passionate enough to play on-line chess and gamble to get in debt (and not even just because it had a sociopath white-haired villain) - but nearing the end, I began to realize unlike the Champloo magic, this one isn't going to end so well. I read upon it and I was proved right: the damn idiots actually manage to kill each-other. I couldn't watch it - somehow, because of all that was happening to me, that just depressed me into ran-over grapes.

             So, in the brain, I created a  hatch bypass. So that I wouldn't think about divorce - and I thought about it all the time - so much so that even my parents took turns in trying to cheer me up for a couple of weeks - I would instead of the ex, instantly start thinking about the death of Vicious and Spike.  It took a little practice and that was all I had. To me at the time that was equally tragic - but every time the next moment, the brain would go: wait a minute. Why the fuck are you crying over a cartoon??... and so, brain being brain, it steered clear of it a little. Just a little. A micro inch. Every time. Slowly but surely. Towards the end, a few years later, I look back upon the three - Spike, Vicious and the ex and see an old story that didn't end well. And now the brain has new problems and the heart is free to roam :p

          

Three short stories: my first Starbucks coffee

After 6 months in Africa, Europe proved to be clean, lonely and expensive. Hitchhiking was a bitch and so was taking photos - simply exotic no longer cut it, I'd actually have to clean my lens for a change. I did, however, get published and by the time I reached Madrid, I already had something like a 100 euros on my card. I decided to invest into few things precious: first I mailed all the excess baggage back to then-husband, but prohibiting him to open the parcel as it contained prezzies. The postage left me with a little more than a ticket to the Prado museum. Prado's artifacts exhibited were so incredibly beautiful, that after all the strain to find some sign of culture in the desert, I stood in the first basement room, staring at the Roman statues, weeping like a 5-year old without an ice-cream. 

               Towards the end of the day I was really tired and very hungry. Getting food in Europe isn't exactly as willingly offered affair as it is in the old continent. Not to mention an ice coffee would cost me the better sum of my remaining five euros. 

               Up until then, I have only heard of Starbucks and bar McDonald's, I didn't know anything about it except that it is a large corporation, American and very pishy-poshy. Half a litre of their frappuccino seemed obscenely costly... but it was hot, I needed caramel and I had so much tea in the past half-year, I was seriously considering coffee as a rude change in life. So I bought the damn thing, sat down in the middle of the magnificent Madrid and started slurping.

               It was the beginning of a life-long love affair..