nervous blood

 blood feels nervous and so do my muscles

everything feels tense like someone is running an electrical current through my veins

like I'm being very gently tased

theres a superpower that's often used in media, in fables, in tales, stories: seeing into the future. I would like to see into the future, but just the way normal people see. Five year plans, desires, hopes. Sometimes I get a premonition, but it's of being old and poor, like when I see an elderly person struggling up the stairs in the subway. 

I was thinking of the word, "insatiable" today. Usually it's used to describe someone sex-crazed or obsessed with food, or action. But what about a static insatiability? Like no matter how much she sleeps she is never satisfied, she is insatiable. No matter how much she tries it is not enough, the void is insatiable. No matter what luck drops in her lap it is not good enough for her, she is insatiable. Yes she lives alone but the light is bad. Yes she has a good job, but she wants more money. more more more. insatiable 

Soft Launch of a Soft Landing

Josie is sobbing upstairs. Wailing and screaming in a way that, with the noise canceling headphones on, (but not playing anything) I can't quite tell when it's her sometimes or a fire engine going by. Poor kid, she reminds me of me, in the worst ways. Sleep away camp was supposed to end this weekend but her moms had to drive up yesterday to pick her up early- kicked out, for stealing. Twice. Right now is the reckoning, Both Ali and Rachel are talking to her about The Incident, and I don't think she's taking it well.

I'm in the apartment I was supposed to move into, on the garden level. I don't know how long it will last, and honestly, being down here, I don't think a year in here would be good for me. Its a studio, but there's not a real door- just barn doors, swinging with an inch of visibility into the room even when they're "closed". Which would be okay but for the fact that Ali also has her studio down here, and just breezes in and out when she pleases. Can a girl get A Room With A Door? How far we have fallen from A Room With A View. I suppose I have settled with A Room of One's Own.  One day I hope to have A Home With A View And A Door, Of My Own- A Clean Well Lighted Place. 

I'm ignoring texts again. I don't know why I do it, I just don't respond to some things. Even to people I love, or to things which are important. Or that I want to answer. It feels... pathological. 

I have to go to work soon. There's a student at work who farms at Brooklyn Grange, and she brings me vegetables. Today: a bundle of rosemary, three hot peppers, a basket of cherry tomatoes, and a tiny, perfect, garlic. I was singing to myself the other day about how shitty garlic in NYC is, how I've never lived somewhere (except maybe Iceland) where it was so hit or miss on whether you'd get a good or rotten clove. So, that little fresh garlic, secreted away in the cherry tomatoes, nearly makes me want to cry. 

MORE RANTING, I'M SORRY

Oh, and part of my deal for living here has been that I help her organize her storage unit, which never actually happens party because neither of us really want to do it. Today we were supposed to try again, but it didn't happen, and she said it'll be easier once she figures out when she's moving because she'll know what she wants to keep and get rid of. 

...

GODDAMNIT WOMAN: once you are moving I ALSO MUST MOVE. And I'm not making millions in profit from selling my house and I'm not moving into a 2.3 million dollar apartment two blocks away. I will be spending all of my money trying to move into a horrible apartment probably 5 miles from everyone I know. I feel like I'm going crazy, she encouraged me for a year to just stay with her so I could find a perfect apartment, but then she essentially told me to stop looking because she was going to rent me out her garden apartment, and now that that's not happening she's acting like I'm not SOBBING IN PUBLIC about it. I was going to pay $1000 tops to live here and now I am facing a market where the baseline is $2000. 

She's also so nice, like she's trying to help me get my meds. But I'm also so ANGRY. 

Pretty Things

 

Housing problems, again

I've been staying with a friend for nearly a year, her kindness is unimaginable. I stopped looking for other housing because she said I could move into the studio apartment in the basement for one more year. But now, boom, she hates owning a house and is going to sell the house exactly right after I would have moved in downstairs. I turned down two sublets that would have been pretty affordable ("affordable" according to Brooklyn) and now I'm going to absolutely eat shit out here in the real world. 

I don't want to be uncomfortable, but also I don't think I deserve comfort. I don't work hard for it. My credit is awful and I owe so much money everywhere. It's just so hard to do things until the shit is about to hit the fan. Or until it already has. Emergencies make my brain work and otherwise I can't 1) pay bills 2) respond to people 3) get out of bed 4) anything. I feel like I'm working all the time but at the same time I know I'm not working hard enough. I wish I earned $100,000 a year, but I also don't deserve that? 

How many cups would I have to sell to make $100,000?   

oh, actually only 1666. I can make 60 a month maybe. That only a little over 720 a year. That's $50,000. I can only actually half of what I want. yikes. 

Maybe if I make 40 a month and sell them for 60 and the store takes half I can make $1200 a month. In addition to what I make then I could maybe 

My studio is also being taken away. No where for me to hang my humble hat. 

I've been sort of just waiting out these last few months, I just wanted to live alone for the second time in my life (the first outside the dorms) and just have my evenings to myself, just be able to do my hair without worrying about the dog. To be able to save more money. to cook and store it in the fridge without taking up space. To work on project and leave it out overnight. Now I'll be spending $2200 a month to live far away a studio apartment. 

I don't know. The department of education has been gutted, the EPA is being gutted. The secret police has been funded beyond imagination. I'll never make a paycheck on my own that is equal to what our secret police is being paid. I want to leave but I can't even think of how. What the hell do I have to offer the world. I feel like there's no way to be in the world without being worthy. I believe that and somehow chose to be an artist. Why, because I like it? I should have done something else, dear god I don't deserve to live. 

Everything feels like, like my sinuses and neck, and chest are made out of the sleeve that goes around your arm when they take your blood pressure. It just feels like someone is pumping up the inside of my body, not to bursting point but just enough to feel it, all the time. I laughed a lot today but I can't remember the last time I was happy. 

Dead Outlaw

Back on days of yore, early 2020, I determined that it would be my Year of Theatre. I went to see one, maybe two shows (one being the really quite amazing Hamlet starring Ruth Negga at St. Ann's Place) (she crawled out into the audience, and I wish I had bought a seat closer to the stage so she could have climbed near me) (I've loved her since Breakfast on Pluto. There weren't many half black half white women in the media back then, so it was easy to fall in love quick) before the pandemic hit, and there were no shows to see. And then I just didn't buy another ticket for awhile. I've decided to change that, I bought a ticket to go see Dead Outlaw on its very final performance. The line was around the block, which didn't make me nervous- I had a seat and time to spare. I bought a ($20) cocktail and a bottle of water, peed, and found my (frankly, perfect) seat in the mezzanine. The woman in front of me was tiny, and I had a full view of the stage. My leg did its little involuntary kick early on which means I'm enjoying myself, and I cried at the end. This being the last show, the director (I think?) came out on stage to say thank you and express how much he loved his cast and crew, and then did an encore. It was amazing, I want to see more. Why not see everything if you live in New York, right?  

Wood Fire 2025

 

I don't know why I love this dithering tool  but I really enjoy putting photos into it and seeing it turn into a relic. Somehow it makes the photo feel authentic? Like it was in the paper? 

I'm back in Germantown, firing the anagama kiln at Oki Doki. This time the crew is Cor and Em, Lilian and Chala, and of course, me. Maybe it's being a small fish in a new pond, maybe it's having time away from my life to reflect on myself,  but every time I come up here I start to feel deeply useless. I adore Lilian but it's sort of the same feeling I have being around my brother- they are so charming and capable that I fade into the background. I've got this bubble that I live in at Gasworks, and I am used to being a source of information and knowledge. I'm used to being capable there, and needed. And here I am pretty ignored, and I try and show my enthusiasm for the process, but it's not as big as Lilian's and Andrew keeps giving her fun little things to do, or people turn to her for advice or conversation. I feel like a bug. 

It also doesn't help that I never know what's going on with kilns until I do it maybe 10 times.  It was like this in college, it was like this with the gas kiln at New Clay Studio, it's like this with wood. How Lilian retains the information when it's been 9 months since the last firing, I'll never know. It's the same with most processes, it just doesn't stick to my brain. It's like trying to stick a piece of paper to a dusty wall using masking tape that was ripped off a cardboard box- it just sort of doesn't adhere. I went to the firing last night jus to observe and it was like a dog trying to follow a phonics lesson. And it's frustrating- I seem to be asking the wrong questions or asking them badly; I feel like I have to ask the same thing over and over. 

I'm not feeling suicidal right now actually, which is nice, but I've had this idea in my head, this plan for years and years now that when I turn 40 I'll jump off a bridge. I don't see a future for myself, and this is sort of a way to keep one foot in front of the other. An out, but not yet. Anyways, I don't know which bridge, but there's plenty in New York. You know when you're getting to one when you see signs on the road promoting mental health hotlines. I've start a google spreadsheet as we were passing over a bridge yesterday. It's only got that one entry, but it's a good one. Walking path, low guardrail, feels like it's a mile high, right over the Hudson. The only issue with jumping is that I've heard you might change your mind on the way down.  enough time passes between the act of jumping and the moment of hitting the grounf that you have time to think about your choice. There's that guy who survived who said something like, "I realized that all the problems in my life were solvable, except the problem of me having just jumped off a bridge," and I don't want to experience that. I suppose the other issue with jumping is that you die. 

I brought way too many things to the woodfire, and I feel a little guilt about it, but also we didn't have enough work to fill the kiln. So I kept bringing out mugs and bringing out vases. It would be terribly embarrassing to fill the whole kiln to the brim with so much of my work and have it all look like shit.  But fuck it, I'm really excited about my mugs, and my vases, and my faces, and my apples. There's a lot of shinos and wood ash glazes, and an apple absolutely covered in woodash (in a way that might be problematic when I have to clean it up... time to invest in dremel bits.)