Category Archives: diary

We went out last night. I didn’t get drunk. Still, I only managed to get to bed at 3, which would have been fine. Fine for what I wanted to do today, which was sleep in a bit, until 9 maybe.

“yes!” I thought. “I can do what I want tomorrow!”
I was looking forward to feeling “all fresh” the next time I turned up at the office.

But Ideal Brown and Mike sat up until nearly 7am talking. They both talk really loudly. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. I didn’t get any sleep. At 6am I asked them to give it up. They said yes, that they would, but they didn’t. I lay awake, with the sun coming up, hoping that it would take them less than an hour to wrap things up. It didn’t.

Ideal Brown creeps upstairs. He takes his boots off outside our room, so he doesn’t wake me. I can hear him staggering out of them clumsily, like a cunt who sat up drinking all night. He comes into our room and tries to undress as quietly as he can, which means he sets about taking his clothing off at a dragging, glacial pace. I don’t want to say anything because he’ll start TALKING. I don’t want him to TALK to me. I want him to get it all over with. But I know that as soon as he gets in bed, he’ll fall asleep instantly, breathing like a dying man. So. There’s nothing to do but wait.

I want to cry and hit him, but I just lie there instead thinking “the cats will want to be fed now” thinking “imagine you had a pop tent?” thinking “you’ll never sleep, you’re too angry” and finally, as if it’s something sacred “this is no way to start your day off. Consider it gone”

Downstairs, Stan starts yowling for his Kitecat.

I started to think that I should just come to work and sleep on the sofa at the office, but I knew that so close to The Start Of The Day, I would wake up enough to be too awake to sleep, but not so awake that I could do any real work.

I’m so tired I could cry. Again. I’m at work, but I’m not working. There was nowhere in the house for me to go to where I would feel like I could make a noise and not wear my pants. The only thing I could think to do was come to work, which isn’t so bad because I like it, when I can do it, which I can’t. So it’s not so good. It’s more bad. And, having not accomplished a whole day’s work, I’ll be back tomorrow too. And every other day. I won’t get that day off this weekend after all.

You should see my black eyes. I’m sort of marveling at them. I’ve never had such good, ripe ones before. I thought I’d need to be on my second child before I would be able to sport these fuckers, but I’m there already. It looks like if the skin on my face blackens any further, that it will just slough off in the wind. That wouldn’t be so bad. It grows back, right?

I wish I had my sleeping bag. I think I could go to sleep now. It’s as cold as a fucking morgue in this place, so I’d need the bag. But I don’t, so I can’t, which is why I wrote this, I guess, but it hasn’t helped.

Christ, I’m tired.

I saw them.

Yesterday. They’re alive. In a nest, with two big birds looking over them. I like to think that Mom and Dad were the big birds, but it was more likely Mom and Dad’s Really Good Friend.

Shame about that other one though.

This didn’t all happen this morning, but for the last two months or so I’ve been at work almost every day. Time turns into soup, so I can’t say if I took a Saturday off or a Sunday, but I’ve had two days off in total.

Regardless, I’ve been going to gym in the mornings before work, to ensure that I get going early and also, if I’m not taking any days off, giving myself a day off gym has the placebo effect of having given myself a break: in this case, a morning off gym as opposed to a weekend off work.

Opposite the church and before the scaffolding, but not yet past the parking garage, I found a big dead pigeon in an open pizza box. Its wings were spread, which felt different. Combing the topsoil of my mind, that’s the best word I can use. Different.

As soon as I saw the bird “right there, next to my foot, all of a sudden right there! I looked away – as you do (or maybe don’t. I don’t know. Do you?) It’s a stupid thing to do anyway because I record the wrong information and my partial facts only serve to worry me and present themselves as most likely incorrect “clues” to “what happened”.

From my flinching glance everything appeared in tact. There was red, but not a lot and I can’t remember where. Whatever I tried not to see made me think that the thing had died from sudden force. It wasn’t squashed or torn or punctured or anything. It was just slightly deflated, with the remnants (precisely one small rejected bite) of pizza at the 2 o’ clock position of the box.

I immediately felt sickened because it was a Sunday and that pizza OBVIOUSLY belonged to a drunk person who might have only just split a mere 2 hours before I turned up. Also, a person eating a pizza where this box lay could only have had a bad night, because you OBVIOUSLY wouldn’t be there for anything but sulking. OBVIOUSLY. And a bad night and alcohol (which this person had OBVIOUSLY been drinking because drunk people buy pizzas) might lead to violence and maybe this dumb bird bore the brunt of a he-said-she-said spat. Maybe OBVIOUSLY. Maybe it was kicked.

So there. I walked past a dead bird in an open pizza box on Sunday morning and again on Monday morning. On Tuesday morning it was gone, but today, as I neared the spot (opposite the church and before the scaffolding, but not yet past the parking garage) I heard the furious peeping of baby birds.

Sick, I started to wonder if those miracles of nature ever occurred in the realm of urban fowl in the case of motherless, exposed young. Would another bird start feeding them?

I tweeted (as I do) and received 3 messages, all from my mother, to say that I should notify someone. My mom is annoying as fuck when she gets her teeth into something and won’t let go- but the idea of anything just waiting to expire (whilst SCREAMING TO THE WORLD as best it can) is enough to irk me to the extent that I’ll awake at 3am and wonder how much they’re suffering.

If you’re scoffing over birds starving to death, I get it. Some of you are just tough and have that “way of the world” wisdom. Baby birds, mice, rabbits, kittens, puppies. Whatever. Things die of hunger. It’s just that I can’t help picturing it. I know some people who shrug at photos of starving babies without feeling anything as they go about their Christmas shopping, so, so what? An AIDS baby is as diseased as a pigeon baby and people try to save them all the time.

I phoned the RSPCA.

I pressed 2 “for calls relating to wildlife”…I won’t lie. I hesitated. Wildlife? Or pests? No pest option.
The next five choices pertained to animals that are sick/stuck/suffering cruelty/alive but stuck in the road/young.
I pressed 5 for “young”.
Then I pressed 3 for “bird” and all the while I was getting nervously embarrassed for when the phone might be picked up by a human who would laugh McVities crumbs at my report that “there are some baby birds that may or may not have a mother”.
Then I pressed “2 for pigeons” and felt reassured, because for pigeons to come in second – well, it means the volume of calls about pigeons ratifies an entire category!

Alas. What I learned was that a lot of racing pigeons will stop and rest for days at a time. Most will sport a ring on their neck or leg, under or around which you can find a number, which will indentify the bird or its owner. Do not report the bird unless it is obviously injured. No word on the regular gutter variety. End of recording.

So basically, with limited time and resources, the RSPCA can’t afford to address calls about pigeons. Even if they are young and motherless and peeping. I understand that. It even makes me feel better to know that I tried and that the birds aren’t being left to whatever hell awaits because nobody cared. It’s because of other, more pressing reasons that probably include “suffering pigeons aren’t as rare or upsetting to people in general than say, anything prettier or less prevalent, like a fox, squirrel or “nice” birds that won’t readily pick through warm vomit”

Whatever. They probably weren’t pigeons, or if they are, they may only have been making a noise because their mom was feeding them.

Dying babies are always upsetting; irrespective of how feathered/horned/slimy/tailed/winged/scaled/bald they are.

If I hear them tomorrow I’ll assume that they’re still hungry and neglected. And if I don’t, I’ll conclude that they’re dead. Lose lose.

“I should do an update. I should. I know it’s totally droll and of little interest despite the topical nature of the post, but the fact is that it’s relevant and. I should do an update.”

I plug all my shit into to twitter all day long. I love it, but I love it guiltily. “it’s not SO bad, but it’s fun”

Like cocaine. Or cupcakes. Select as applicable.

Anyway, the point (and I know I’ve mentioned it before) is that twitter sucks up all my bullshit. The little runaway thought that would sometimes lead to a rambling blog post is now exorcised in 140 characters or less.

What that means is I’ll suddenly realise that I have “an update” but most of the time I take a step back to regard it as too boring to write about, let alone read.

However, since *something is better than nothing: I moved studio. Or office. Whatever. that’s the update. I moved. Last November. I moved from “my room” in the house (turquoise wooden floors) to Ideal Brown’s office in town (just regular wooden floors).

What used to be the “crap room” is now my office. I have to put on a bra and leave the house. I Say “hello” and “goodbye” to humans with faces.

I used to get frustrated when people thought that my job was something I was just doing until I went full time with art. I never wanted to do it full time. “I’d go fucking insane” I used to say. I wanted to protect what I had. And I never wanted to turn into such an isolated mental stew pot that I stopped enjoying painting. I didn’t want the two to go hand in hand as they inevitably would.

It was fine at first and then it wasn’t.

I felt listless and anxious all the time and there was no packing up and going home for the night. It was becoming a problem.

So I moved in and I thought “I should do an update” but I had to get straight on with work and then time passed and I was still working and it looked like a bomb scare and while I know some people think that the level of mess an artist creates is directly proportional to how good they are, I like to keep my mess and its details (size, shape, contents) to myself.

So if you would, picture a bright room with minimalist shelving made from salvaged wood; several lush pot plants, a glowing MacBook without any apparent power supply and some typical alternative collectibles; tin toys, anatomical models, taxidermy, vintage crap – whatever- all purposefully cluttered. I mean that’s not my studio, but if you could picture it that way, go right ahead. I’ve seen enough photos of studios to know that mine isn’t remarkable. There are no windows, but there is a heater and wooden floors. And some plants which visit the main room’s window on a rota.

So there. There’s a post containing nothing. The thing about shit blog posts is this: most blog posts are shit. Most of them happen, just to happen. They’re like the conversations you have at a wedding around a table with people you don’t know. They happen because someone thinks they must and they’re mostly shit. Mostly.

Sometimes you get a good one, but really, anything above this selection of social media waste is a win:

what-you’re-eating-now
where-you’ve-just-arrived
it’s-friday-yay
it’s-sunday-boo

Thank you for visiting the abyss. Be sure to check in, photo-document, complain about it on twitter, approve of it on twitter or Like it on facebook. We’re all dying.

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*that’s a complete and utter lie. I wish most people would just shut the fuck up. Myself included