For the Love of Palimpsest

I am most guilty of one thing: erasing. I put something down, only to erase the majority, which is also erased eventually. Why I have such committal issues to blank pages, will I ever really know? Probably not. I do however find these scraps of paper lying about my archives with layer upon layer upon layer of erased lines and words. I find so many in fact that my latest psychoanalysis is that I may simply love the ghost image of ideas layered in discord on top of one another. It may just be as simple as that. In which case, the ideas were never really meant to be read but solely for the act of writing and erasing.

"A palimpsest is a manuscript page, whether from scroll or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again." However, it can also be architectural, artistic, geological, astrological, even forensic. In my freshman year art history course at UT I had the joy of being taken down to the basement vaults of the art history departments and placed in front of an illuminated manuscript from the 5th century. You could see lines, indentations, and marks that didn't make it to the final inking. Ghost marks of his frustration, penance, exactness, viewable only by tilting your head just right to catch the light. As an artist I look for those marks. I look for the slightly misshapen eye brow, toe, corner of a building that shows me the spot where said artist just couldn't get it right, until finally they did. Almost, good enough for the final print. While that is not a physically evident palimpsest, it implies that one lies just below the paint itself.

I did it

I cleaned it all up. The final stage of thyroid chaos clean up is now complete, the rest is gravy. I spent all of my yesterday trudging through my monument of inefficiency. Before I began the process I imagined that this would be comparable to one large and very tangled ball of yarn. One hundred square feet of tangled yarn. My assertion was correct, and this was the first time in my entire life that I have been able to stay on task so diligently and completely.

When I was quitting smoking last year, my glorious hypnotist spent a lot of time with me searching for guilty pleasures. Things to do when one's reward system starts to become more detrimental to improvement. For example, after my first hypnotist session, all I wanted was a very full and very cold pint of beer. I could actually feel the beer in my body, as if I were drinking it in reality. The completeness of visualization that I was able to create was so impulsive, immediate and wholly effective, that I felt confident it could become my greatest tool. Alcohol wasn't the best thing to be gravitated towards, but it's a very typical response. Now that I am having to excommunicate certain foods and drink from my diet again, I spend a lot of time visualizing eating those foods until the urge has passed. I call it "quieting my inner brat."

My reward after completing the daunting task of thyroid chaos cleanup was being able to sit and draw at my work station, a nice and very long hot shower, followed by watching some series on HBO. I recognized that this would have been the perfect time for a nice, large glass of red wine. Possibly paired with the sloppiest Tex-Mex I could find at 10PM, a large queso and saltiest bag of corn chips on the face of the planet.

I had a huge glass of water instead and put my aching body to bed. Who gets a gold star?

Workout of the day: 5 burpees, 20 pushups, 50 squats, 50 sit ups full range, no med ball

An old favorite

100 burpee challenge and some info on the diatoms

I've decided to do the CrossFit 100 burpee challenge. The goal is to do 100 burpees after 100 days. One burpee the first day, two the next, three today, four tomorrow, etc. My muscles are growing back. Thyroid hormone degrades muscle tissue in the shoulders, thighs and hip flexors. I did 5 real box jumps yesterday. Pretty damn special.

For those of you who are new to the world of diatoms, I have gathered some information for you...




There are more than 200 genera of living diatoms, and it is estimated that there are approximately 100,000 extant species[1][2]. Diatoms are a widespread group and can be found in the oceans, in freshwater, in soils and on damp surfaces. Most live pelagically in open water, although some live as surface films at the water-sediment interface (benthic), or even under damp atmospheric conditions. They are especially important in oceans, where they are estimated to contribute up to 45% of the total oceanic primary production[3]. Although usually microscopic, some species of diatoms can reach up to 2 millimetres in length. (Wiki)

Basically, these little guys are algae, freshwater and saltwater. Yes it gets more complicated with classification, but that's as far as I will go into the specifics right now. Yes I'm being very general.




My scanner is broken right now, so there isn't much I can show you from my end, but do trust that I'm getting sketches done.
This picture here is just amazing, and too large to post within the confines of the little google blog. Everything about this photo makes my heart beat fast (in a good way), and I just get lost. Isn't it, well, infinite?

Garbage can punch dreams

I'm serious. My dreams as of late have been multi faceted concoctions of attraction and repulsion. Last night was no exception. Raucaus parties in the woods cost me my new watch, two cats, and upon wake up on the floor of my mother's house, hung over, mostly naked and barely alive, Tony is missing in the woods. "He went out for a walk" my mother says, standing in the middle of our dirt road in a white robe, eyes wide with fear, helicopters and search teams swarming around us. "We knew something was wrong when his water bottle washed up on to the road. The cats followed you and your friends into the woods and never returned Erika. You were supposed to be helping. Did you fall off the waterfall already?" The danger was the heat was rolling in, and the likelihood of us never finding him was becoming a clear reality. However, I had been doing drugs and had already fallen off the waterfall that needed to be used in some way to find him. I transported my memory through the forest that was behind the pasture tree line, past the parts that I used to sneak away to as a child, looking for Tony and looking for the gray and black cat. I couldn't find him. I couldn't find the cats, I couldn't sense them in the darkness. We were worried about him being shot by nervous, unnecessary militia men, Tony didn't have anything bright to distinguish himself as human, and that was the fear. Mom proclaimed "we didn't think he needed to be illuminated."

Tony stumbled back in the arms of our dear friend Jim, covered in barnacles and dust. The cats and my shiny new watch that could have been used to help him were no where to be found, and my memory of the entire night was blacked out by shame. Mom looked at me and said "Erika your inability to scale our troubles is a terrible thing. The cats were counting on you." The grass in the pasture rolled like waves and deposited trash on the road. I recognized styrofoam pieces from Tamale House Migas, and other refuse that was obviously mine. I couldn't clean it up because the garbage can would just blow up again.
******

The only thing worse than dreaming about work in my opinion, is my subconscious being overly obvious and basically one big cliche. Yes, thank you reptile brain.....I get it. Can I dream about flying and miniature ponies tonight please? Not the miniature ponies that bit me over and over again like you gave me last week. I'd like to not explore the balance in the universe all of the time. Sometimes I like more fluff, and less garbage can punch.

Atenolol? Nope, I'm good.

Hooray! Today is my first full day of no blood pressure meds in my body! Hooray! I know you are probably just as excited as I am now that I am returning to an age appropriate way of living. I am supposed to get my thyroid meds this evening, and start them in the morning, but all is not lost. I feel pretty fantastic today, the level of clarity that this lack of thyroid hormone has provided is delightful, and those of you who have known me for a long time will agree.

Look at these two cutie pies chatting it up. So adorable....

A Few Bedtime Diatoms

to close our evening, I leave you with Dolphin Diatom. Such a pretty guy.

It's really not about rhymes

It's really difficult to discuss life-heavy situations without dancing around a paradox. So I will just come right out and tell you my wants before I break them down into what is really needed:

I want my step father's cancer to have a rhyme, so I can predict the future and tell he and my mother that it's going to be resolved. A rhyme to be deciphered. I want the cancer to have a set path, a humility about where it is, a human sensibility, a boundary to provide some structure. I want for him to set up a phalanx of expectation, and for that phalanx to protect him against himself. Or a rhyme to help him just sleep the next six weeks away.

However, this lung cancer isn't about rhymes and the more we look to the pattern the more impossible it becomes to see. We trick our minds to focus on one solution; witty one liners in the form of tubes and chemicals to trick this griffin into letting us slit his throat.

No rhymes, no riddles, it just is. Surrendering to that idea releases everyone from blame, from responsibility, from guilt, and allows us to focus on what really needs to be done. We need to help him survive.


It is your turn now,
you waited, you were patient.
The time has come,
for us to polish you.
We will transform your inner pearl
into a house of fire.
You're a gold mine.
Did you know that,
hidden in the dirt of the earth?
It is your turn now,
to be placed in fire.
Let us cremate your impurities.

Rumi.

Last blog name lost its relevancy, onto a new horizon

Well, I started drinking coffee again, hence "redefining decaf" wasn't really relevant anymore. My little heart can take the coffee juice now in small doses, which is nice on rainy days like these. I also started drawing again for the first time in a long time last night after exercising, and I was not drinking alcohol which is a definite change from what the habits used to be.

Cigarette in one hand, glass of red in the other, and several pens and pencils stuffed in a bun on the back of my head.

My friend Catherine and I started a Magnificent Corpse drawing a few months back and I should probably rephrase that on my part. I just started it last night to be exact. I've been staring at a lot of diatoms lately, and really being drawn into the symplicity and symmetry of their design.



I'll post my drawing later tonight....maybe. Depends on how sushi night with the ladeez goes.