And The Wisdom To Know The Difference

This time last year, I stood at the corner of Eglinton and Yonge, looking up into the general direction of the cosmos, and saying to myself, "This time next year, I want to be SOMEWHERE ELSE. Preferably somewhere unbearably cool, like New York or Los Angeles, but I will even take Rhode Island, I want to be studying at an art atelier and I want to be NOT HERE."

Yesterday, I found myself not quite at the same corner, but still at the corner where I used to live in downtown Toronto, looking around me and thinking about change and stasis.

This time last year feels about a million years ago, and it's true what they say about stepping twice into the same river. Going to Los Angeles was kind of like a journey to the desert, something you undertake in order to return a different creature or not return at all. Of course, when I set out, I had no idea it would be this way, because nobody ever truly has any idea of what they are doing and what ripples will flow out from them doing it.

It used to be said that being a stranger in a strange land is a position of vulnerability second only to being an orphan or a widow. Times may change, but the truth of it holds. I have never been so in need of help as when I left for LA, and it drove me completely nuts, because if there is one thing I truly hate, it's being unable to fix my problems by myself. I took pride in this stance (you know, pride, the one that comes before the fall), because I thought that it was a sign of maturity, independence and competence. But I think what it actually was, was a form of self-loathing. We are all at the mercy of the universe, and to think that it is a condition to be greeted with contempt is to be merciless to every living creature, including yourself.

What a rich and different landscape opened to me in the middle of the desert. As I flailed helplessly through LA - on a student budget and bereft of valid driver's license, trying to get to my classes through a gauntlet of street harrassment, danger, burning sun and buses that come 2 hours late, jumping through flaming hoops of job interviews and visa applications, and then crashing quite spectacularly - so many people came to my aid, completely contrary to my expectations. People gave me rides, dishes and dining chairs; people drove me from and to the airport; my landlady commissioned a painting from me, just to help me out; people I have never met in person cheered me on and reached out to comfort me; people offered me places to stay and spoiled my cat rotten; acts of kindness poured from the sky around my astonished ears. The biggest discovery I have made is that it's OK to fall on your ass sometimes because when that happens, people who were heretofore strangers become friends.

There is something right about this; pretending that all is normal means expecting everyone else to pretend that all is normal too. The more we keep our real, fumbling, sometimes-dumb, sometimes-simply-unlucky selves locked away, the less we can know other people because they can't know us.

I thought about all this when I was waiting for my connecting flight in Chicago. It was an English pub with a huge window. Dusk was coming fast, because the sky was leaden with cloud cover, something that had become an exotic and rare event to me after several months in LA. Meeka was resolutely hidden behind the pub's radiator, where she stood solemn guard over a piece of hamburger. Something clicked in my head, and a Hallmark Card Voice From The Sky said to me, "Maybe it's not where you are that makes the difference. Maybe it's who you are with. Maybe it's the kind of relationships you have. Maybe it's not the snow that made you miserable. Maybe it was the company you kept."

I was so stuck on figuring out where to go after LA, but I think the main question is actually who inhabits the landscape. The landscape itself is secondary.

A Welcome Sagging!

That is, sagging with relief! Well, it's not all completely over until the lab spits out the results, which I am told can take up to six weeks. (Are they kidding? Six weeks to wonder whether you have a bomb ticking in your boob? Six weeks to envision your children as orphans if you happen to have children, and cat orphans if you happen to have cats? Six weeks to look into the spectre of Grisly Painful Death, Potentially? They have got to be fucking kidding.)

But in my case, the probability is very high that the results will be "you are fine, now go have a life", because the lump was a cyst and cysts are almost always non-cancerous and basically exist to keep us from getting complacent. But we will get the lab to read the tea leaves analyze the tissue, and I do get a just-in-case ultrasound in two weeks.

This is where I stop to thank The Man With The Cat for letting me and Meeka invade his peaceful residence and make a temporary HQ there while I sort out my various aggravations. He is hereby made Honorary Professor of Spatula University and Governor of Fork Island. Honours also go to the Cat, named Charlie, who kindly allows Meeka to eat out of his dish, and does nothing more drastic than looking disappointed when Meeka tries to beat him senseless for attempting to sniff her butt.

Meeka has not been meek at all, and growls in a manner I never considered possible from the Sad Little Matchgirl Who Only Gets Fed Thrice A Day And Was Forced To Fly On An Airplane And Nobody Loves Her and She Doesn't Even Have A Diamond Studded Collar, Not A Single One.

Biopsy Monday

That's about it. Job hunting in the a.m., having a needle stuck in my boob in the p.m.

Stressed and scared. Not much energy to say anything else.

Berlin And Manhattan As Yet Remain Untook

And Now, Depressing Russian Poetry Hour!

The last few days, I've had this line from a poem by Joseph Brodsky stuck in my head: "Here are your pills on the plastic tray, Your disappointing, crisp x-ray..."

The things is, I used to really like this poem and find it hilarious and apt and wise. So many lines in it ring true, which is when art is at its best. But the line about the x-ray used to seem like something that only happens to other people. Now that I am reading the poem through different eyes, I notice something I never paid attention to before, where it comes to Joseph Brodsky - how deeply bitter and nihilistic his work is, how much of it is not only rage, but rage that is so contemptuous and hollow.

Strange that he is one of the most revered poets in the history of Russian literature - and English, because he wrote some of his original work in English, and translated his own work back and forth. Do we hold artists accountable for the moral tenor of their work, and not just for the flourish with which it's executed? If their metaphors seem true, does it mean they are?

I don't know. Brodsky wrote the poem in a period when he was struggling with the health problems that would eventually cause his death, so I can see where his bitterness comes from. But I don't think I share it. Here is the poem, and well, it's good, but there are better ones. I do think the quality of the artist's vision matters, not just whether they can convey the vision nicely. A man who can only see through a nihilistic lens strikes me as perpetually stuck in adolescence. For all his mastery, I feel mostly sorry for him after reading this again recently.

Here's your Mom, here's your Dad.
Welcome to being their flesh and blood.
Why do you look so sad?

Here's your food, here's your drink.
Also some thoughts, if you care to think.
Welcome to everything.

Here's your practically clean slate.
Welcome to it, though it's kind of late.
Welcome at any rate.

---

Here's your paycheck, here's your rent.
Money is nature's fifth element.
Welcome to every cent.

Here's your swarm and your huge beehive.
Welcome to that there's roughly five
billion like you alive.

Welcome to the phone book that stars your name
Digits are democracy's secret aim.
Welcome to your claim to fame.

Here's your marriage, and here's divorce.
Now that's the order you can't reverse.
Welcome to it; up yours.

Here's your blade, here's your wrist.
Welcome to playing your own terrorist;
call this your Middle East.

Here's your mirror, your dental gleam.
Here's an octopus in your dream.
Why do you try to scream?

---

Here's your corn-cob, your TV set.
Your candidate suffering an upset.
Welcome to what he said.

Here's your porch, see the cars pass by.
Here's your shitting dog's guilty eye.
Welcome to its alibi.

Here are your cicadas, then a chickadee,
the bulb's dry tear in your lemon tea.
Welcome to infinity.

Here are your pills on the plastic tray,
Your disappointing, crisp X-ray.
You are welcome to pray.

Here's your cemetery, a well kept glen.
Welcome to a voice that says, "Amen."
The end of the rope, old man.

Here's your will, and here's a few
takers. Here's an empty pew.
Here's life after you.

--

And here are your stars which appear still keen
on shining as though you had never been.
They might have a point, old bean.

Here's your afterlife, with no trace
of you, especially of your face.
Welcome, and call it space.

Welcome to where one cannot breathe.
This way, space resembles what's underneath
and Saturn holds the wreath.

Heart-You Haiku

West Hollywood Mammography
Your is the most polite and friendly receptionist
On the entire freaking planet.
She rocks so hard.

Through A Mammogram, Darkly

Nothing to lift the spirits like Mammogram Results Day. The radiologist (the person who reads the tea leaves goat entrails x-ray film) says that my breasts are dense. Dense! What impertinence! Now that I think of it, they have never done well in math exams, but I ask you: is this any way to talk to a lady?

$120 and an agonizing week of waiting later, the medical shamans are as confused as ever. The report contains all sorts of fancy terms, like "craniocaudal" and "lesion" and "bilateral", but what it boils down to is "that thar is something, I got no clue what, could be a dirigible, could be a sheep".

The next step is an ultrasound, but if the sonography whisperer finds anything solid, I won't find out what that solid is until a biopsy. I have been told on the breastcancer.org forums that the waiting is the worst part, and that many strong, brave and freaked out women, and their equally commendable and freaked out men, have spent the waiting time maniacally cleaning house, exercising and installing aluminum siding. Some of the best maintained interiors of the industrialized world owe their sparkly existence to cancer testing.

The past week has been a learning experience, to say the least. This whole year has been about confronting various fears and living with a high degree of uncertainty, which is very challenging for a person who likes to write a schedule even when on vacation, and has been known to write things like "two hours of fun and restorative activities" in her calendar. The Inner Project Manager is very angry and threatening to demand a stress leave.

I have never been an alcoholic, though my Internet addiction probably does not bear close scrutiny. Actually, forget "probably" - it's more of a "definitely". But I have never had an addiction that sucked me dry the way alcohol can empty out people, and so everything I know about Alcoholics Anonymous comes from television drama and the novel Infinite Jest. Nevertheless, I know of a few of their tenets that have been extremely useful to me during this excitement-filled year, and one of them is keeping me afloat now: "One day at a time". I have no clue what's going on in my delinquent boobs. I have no idea how soon I will find work and whether or not I will be able to perform it. The next few months are a snowy blizzard not at all unlike the mediolateral thingamabobby I stared at this afternoon in a fruitless effort to discern my immediate future.

But all I have to deal with is today, and today contains several hours of quiet studio time, in the company of my furry love. That there is a really good day.

A Fresher Hell

In my native city of Odessa, people tell an old Jewish parable called "Remove The Goat". It goes like this:

A man comes to a rabbi and complains of having a small and uncomfortable home. The rabbi tells him, "Have your mother-in-law come and live with you, and then see me in a few months." The man is doubtful, but he follows the advice.

As he checks in later, the rabbi asks how things are now. "To be honest, I don't know what I was expecting, but everything is worse! It's even more uncomfortable, and we all get on each others' nerves." The rabbi nods, and tells the man, "Have your brother and his wife and their children come and live with you, and then see me in a few months." The man is even more doubtful, but he follows the advice.

As he checks in later, the rabbi asks how things are now. "Rabbi! I can't take this torture! I am ready to kill someone!" The rabbi nods and tells the man, "Now get a goat to come and live with you, and then see me in a few months." The man thinks that the rabbi is totally insane, but the rabbi is revered in the community, and the man still follows his advice.

As he checks in later, the rabbi asks how things are now. "Rabbi! I am ready to kill myself! Please, take pity on me!" The rabbi says, "And now, remove the goat."

The next time the man and the rabbi met, the man was glowing with happiness.

***
Last week, I was filled with worry, because I was moving to a new city and having to look for work on uncomfortably depleted savings. That was last week.

This week, what moved in is not a goat, but what a nice West Hollywood doctor from Odessa called "distinctly palpable masses", in the superior lateral aspect of my right breast. The results of the mammogram will be available next Friday, and will show whether the masses are cystic or whether they are growths.

I think I am ready to go home real soon. Part of me is sitting back and laughing in incredulity: what will go wrong next? Seriously, my sojourn to the American Desert is starting to resemble the Book of Job!

The rest of me is this close {} to soiling my pants. According to what I have read so far, most breast lumps in women my age turn out to be benign. Knowing this is of no help with the pants-soiling issue whatsoever.

Heart-You Haiku

It's in my nature to seek balance, either because I am a Libra, or because of the complex interplay of genetic and environmental influences that shape the nature of a person. Or maybe because of the invisible elves.

In any case, the Screw-You Haiku series now has a happy twin, Heart-You Haiku. Heart-You Haiku doesn't follow the proper haiku meter either, because it's too happy to care.

The debut entry, to no one's great surprise, is written for my cat.

***

Dear Cat,
You are beggy and have no shame
But I love that you always ask
So nicely.

I would be glad to feed you
Every time you ask,
But it would make you
Fat
Which is
Unhealhy.

Otherwise,
I totally would.
Trust me.

Unusual Thing That Just Happened In LA

Me: What just happened?

LAPD Person: A guy shot this other guy...

Me: O.O

LAPD Person: ...and is now hiding on this block.

Me: O.O

LAPD Person: What is your business in this vicinity, ma'am?

Me: I live in that building over there.

LAPD Person: I'll refrain from asking why.

Me: And yet I will think about the answer in some depth.

LAPD Helicopter: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

~fin~

Oh, the unusual thing is that both of the people in this conversation were wet on account of it raining all day. That just about never happens here.

Screw-You Haiku

Dear neighbours
Who play loud music
And watch spy movies
Late at night:

Please imagine I sent you
A very large and epic
Flaming-Poo-O-Gram.

Now I Just Have To Do Manhattan And Berlin

I spotted a group of tourists taking each other's photos in front of this sign, and gleefully joined in the fun. I love wandering about in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, because I can just take pictures to my heart's content without anyone raising an eyebrow, on account of how every other person is doing the same thing.

On the Santa Monica beach, this jadedness is a big help, because I have been snapping reference photos for future paintings and sneaking up on all sorts of people and their kids, without anyone becoming alarmed and giving me a shiner difficulties.


Observe the accessories: on my right wrist is a new bottle of pepper spray. The rubber doohickey that chains it to my wrist is color-coordinated with my pink jacket and my dreadful-looking yet orthopedically blissful Croc shoes. Don't get me started on the Crocs - after blowing hundreds of dollars on swell and highly engineered shoes from Merrill, Naot and the like, I discovered that the longest I can walk without being angry and in pain is in $7 CrocBlight from the drug store.

Give Peas A Chance

How did it get to be fall already? This is the question I ask myself every fall, because every fall, I want to plan something spiffy for my birthday, and make an elaborate Halloween costume, and every fall catches me with my pants down, because once again I got too busy for my own good.

Does this happen to anyone else? And does anyone else feel the urge to make the mother of all resolutions, which is, "I will cease being too busy and too preoccupied to notice that the seasons are changing until frost bite is imminent"?

On one hand, one can boast about something like this, because ours is a culture that rewards being Busy And Important, but on the other hand, one is quite fed up, and by one, one means me. I wish to notice the passage of time. I wish to not be too tired and preoccupied and overwhelmed with stuff to plan and execute a birthday celebration. I wish to make a costume out of an exact replica of the most elaborate dress ever worn by Marie Antoinette, and then wear it to a party on a tall ship, with a replica of the ship stuck into my hair.

There. Now let me get something else off my chest: I hate the situation in which I now find myself. I hate the butterflies in my stomach. I hate the way I jolt bolt upright in my bed every night, well past midnight, firmly convinced that Meeka and I will be homeless in approximately 3 months, which will be January and a really inconvenient time to be introduced to homelessness.

I knew when I came to LA that I was taking a financial risk, and my biggest worry was not finding work, what with the economic abyss and all. On the other hand, I was not that worried, because my recruiter agency loves me right down to my socks, and has a huge division in LA, and their internal bulletin, to which I hold a magical access key, has a buttload of LA job listings even in these dark times. I seriously did not think that once I found a job, I would then be prohibited from performing it by the Satanic dominion known as the INS. Isn't a Canadian passport an equally magical key? Answer: no, not to Satan, dummy.

I have been reading the biography of Remedios Varo, and an interesting and obvious thing strikes me. Varo spent her 20s and 30s having an extremely busy and dramatic life. She was married to a prominent Surrealist poet, she hung about Paris with the artistic avant-garde, doing avant-garde things and earning a highly sporadic living, she had multiple love affairs in a social circle small enough that one of her lovers accidentally took out the eye of another in a drunken bar fight. And that was all BEFORE she had to flee the Nazis with a crowd of refugees across the South of France, and then be rescued by an international save-the-intelligentsia committee and shipped over to Mexico so as not to get shipped over to Buchenwald instead.

Once in Mexico, she worked six bazillion different jobs to support her employability-challenged poet husband who gave her a hard time over whether or not she was sufficiently rigorous in her intellectual approach to art, while sipping the espresso she earned, bought and made for him. Then the poet exits stage left, makes room for a pilot with an honest-to-god moustache, and Remedios follows the pilot to Venezuela, possibly to hunt giant cockroaches with a spear.

Her biography during this period is interesting as hell. It's like every insane Hollywood movie rolled into one person. But note this, ye readers, and despair: her biography during this period is also almost completely devoid of finished paintings.

A long-in-the-offing reversal takes place in Remedios's 40s, when she ditches the poets and the dashing pilots, and shacks up with a quiet man who is not at all pilot- or poet-like, but who *is* supportive and does not interrogate her over espresso or any other beverage. Settled down into a safe and steady existence, Remedios makes a small mountain of genius paintings until she dies. Curtain, bow, finis. That part of her biography takes about ten pages, because really, there isn't that much going on aside from "Remedios is in the studio, working and humming to herself in what sounds like total happiness; also, there are cats."

The lesson here is that the less drama and adventure in the life of the artist, the more actual art happens. This, the boring, the safe and the steady is what I am now after, both for art reasons and because I need safe, steady and quiet, much like a dying man in the desert needs a cold, tall glass of Orangina. No more career shifts. No more clever-sounding people who leave my life and my inner landscape looking like Warsaw in 1945. No more big, dramatic changes, of landscape or methodology. All I want is a part-time job and a place that's mine, even if it's just one room. If somewhere snowy is what it takes, then let it fucking snow.

I learned what I came to LA to learn, and I am glad I made this pilgrimage. I'll be using the skills I learned for the rest of my life. But the cost has been very, very high. It has been 7 months of huge stress and uncertainty, and that's pretty much the opposite of what I want my life to be.

I am terribly worried that I will run out of money before I find work. And I never want to worry about that again. If I sit bolt upright at night, I want it to be because I just had an awesome idea that I need to write down in my sketchbook. Or because Meeka is playing with my foot. Those are the only reasons I want to have for not sleeping at night.

And that is now what I am working on. In moving somewhere where I can live on a part-time income without such a life being a horrible hell, I have the means to make peace, quiet and ample studio time happen. As soon as I find a job. Until then, it's Warsaw in 1939, which is not a good feeling.

View From The School Cafeteria

For the fall term, I am taking a course at the Art Center College of Design. It is a fancypants well-known and nose-bleedingly expensive well-regarded school. It's on a big ole hill in Pasadena and I love it! I love the energy of the place - it can't help but be energizing, what with all the young people in weird clothes and insane hair, running to and fro with big drawing pads and wood-cutting tools and Apple laptops, and announcements about every manner of exciting things fluttering on every spare bit of the walls!

But my most favourite aspect is the sheer beauty of the landscape. I am completely totally literal about this being the view from the cafeteria! I was lost in a gastronomic nirvana, and then I looked out the window and just about choked on my pasta salad. I relish the Monday journeys to Pasadena, bus and all, and when I admired the ride out loud, the bus driver grinned and shouted, "Me too!"

This week, I saw deer running around on campus - hoofs and horns and everything. I am hoping for mountain lions next. Being art school mountain lions, they'll probably be stoned and in the middle of debating cultural theory.

Also, I am kinda sorta pretty sure I have come to this hill before, in a dream I had a couple of years ago. In the dream, I was waiting for the bus while chilling on top of a chain-link fence, because the bus stop was, in fact, patrolled by a pair of mountain lions. Even though I thought they were there in a spirit guide type of capacity, still, I climbed up the fence, because who wants to find out the hard way?

Location, Location, Location

Given my being so torn between all these interesting places to live, I think I know the solution. Move to Ottavancoutreal, a Frenglish-speaking city on the Weast coast! I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner.