Notebooks 8/11/18
Category: art
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Notebooks 8/11/18
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The Pacific Ocean Is beautiful today, blue that goes on forever in the distance. I’m at Point Reyes Sea Shore. A bubble flies by me from Fiona’s bubble gun. My dogs panting and trying to get on my picnic blanket. I think the sand must be hot today. Alan, Jack, and Fiona are sitting in a roofless hut constructed of driftwood. Billy, my dog keeps whining, I try to ignore her and listen to the waves crash. It’s a breezy, warm, day at the beach. The sun warms my blue jeans as I gaze, relaxed at the horizon line. Nothing else matters at that moment. I am thankful for my short blip on Earth. My time to be alive. I notice Billy’s cyst is getting larger, I notice how she has slowed down, she’s getting old. I mention to Jack and Fiona that Billy’s not going to live forever. Later that night, when Jack and I are doing Story time;
“I don’t want Billy to die”. Jack says.
“I know, neither do I but everyone and everything dies.” I say.
I look at his legs, little, chubby, three-year old legs. Even him, I realize, even my young children are just a blip in the history of Earth. We all just come and go and really our time is microscopic here.
As I was sitting outside today, listening to the birds chirping, trying to ignore the weed blower, that seemed to go on forever. Which I thought, in a way, weed blowers do go on forever. When we have such a short time here the amount of time spent listening to weed blowers is too much. But they clean the ground, sparkle clean. And we enjoy that, right?
Yesterday I was at Mc. Nears beach park with Jack and Fiona. The grass was bright green with tiny daisy flowers scattered like baby blankets. There were geese with babies, and along with that comes geese poop.
Jack, Fiona, and I have a spot under a tree. I am reading a story to my kids and the park ranger pulls up on his motorized buggy.
“Sorry for the noise” The Park ranger said to me.
“It’s totally fine” I said.
“This park’s really clean” I said. “I was at Stafford Lake the other day and there was so much Goose poop.”
“Yeah, there’s been a population explosion this year” He said. “It’s a full-time job keeping it clean”
“Does the weed blower clean goose poop?” I asked.
“Yeah, you just angle it the right way and it blasts it off into the grass” He said.
I love weed blowers for that capability, that’s for sure.
The kids and I had a great day. I planned and achieved to give them my full attention. Jack rode his bike and Fiona rode her scooter. I took some pictures and a video but wasn’t preoccupied with my phone or another person. It was just the three of us. It was very relaxing, we all enjoyed it.
I got so mad the other night when I heard the news, these latest findings about Trumps lawyer, his company that he started, right before the election. The companies that paid Cohen hoping they could get access to the government.
I was so sickened I wanted to shut down my Facebook account because I know now I’m going to waste too much time there, sharing political articles. I am so disturbed, and it disturbs me more when other people don’t seem to notice the seriousness of what’s going on. When I feel like this I start sharing things about Volcano’s and tectonic plates and saving our libraries.
When I heard Putin said:
“the nation that leads in AI, will be the ruler of the world”
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/4/16251226/russia-ai-putin-rule-the-world
I got freaked out. I watch a lot of sci-fi and zombie shows, maybe my mind is warped. But AI scares the crap out of me and the thugs in power are so corrupt I can’t imagine what kind of AI they would want to create. Pure death machines.
I read about the loss of Net Neutrality today. That made me want to cancel my Facebook account. It’s just going to be advertisements and propaganda. Most the people on there won’t even be real anymore.
The good news is I cleaned my studio and am working. I am an artist. I fear our future, I am scared of our leaders, I am scared of wars and exploding volcanos. But I have a space to be creative, I have a voice. I have beer, and tomorrows Friday, I have a babysitter for the day and a clean studio to work in.
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I walked into my studio this afternoon after thinking about my polish ancestors all morning. I stepped on a chair and reached for a box I thought the pictures of my ancestors were in. I heard a loud thump and looked down. I was shocked, there was a hammer that had hit the top of a painting on panel that was in a milk crate. All morning I thought about how my maternal great grandmother probably died quite young too, my mom never told us stories about her grandma, my dad never met my mom’s grandparents, so they must have died early. I wanted to go through the pictures in my studio to find more clues. The hammer narrowly grazed my head. I couldn’t believe I put a hammer on top of that box like that. I couldn’t believe I had almost just been severely injured. I got the box of old pictures down and got myself down safely. I grabbed some of the photos, one was a picture of a young girl with blonde hair. There were pictures of her at several ages, in more than one photo my grandpa held her, as if she were his own child. One, when the child was older, on the back of the photo was written “Our Darling”. There was one where this girl looked to be in a hospital dress, but she was sitting outside somewhere on a grass hillside. I wondered if my mom had an older sister who died who she was never told about. My mom always told me she was an only child. I painted with black gouache and white acrylic paint and charcoal. I went through phases of the pictures looking interesting to something in between. The murky past seeping into my studio today. The messy lines of ancestry, where do I intersect? Where do my kids intersect?
I wish I knew more about the journey my maternal great grandmother made from Poland to America. If I didn’t know what I do now about my family history, how would that change how I view my world? My life? My life expectancy. Knowing that heart attacks has killed my mom, her mom, and probably my mom’s mom has stoked my anxiety. I have little kids. I want more time. I am doing things to try to get more time, like changing my eating habits, but it’s difficult to be extremely strict, like I need to probably be to add years to my life. Today I started panicking about a mark on my arm that I’m worried is skin cancer. I almost got hit on the head by a hammer. How can a simple LDL blood test cause all this anxiety in myself? How come I’m always moved by mortality? Is it because that is our inevitability? Today I noticed a kid’s bible story book was left in my Husbands office. I read the first paragraph and it said that, the world was made, and God made the fish and the clouds, and many other things. I said to myself, wouldn’t that be nice? That God made everything, it was just that simple.
“I’d like to believe in something” My mom said once. To know that when we die we go somewhere. That this life wasn’t all there was. I would like to believe that too, that life wasn’t so short, that my time with Jack and Fiona will be so short, compared to the years I’ve already lived. I hope I’ll live a lot longer than my maternal lineage, I really do. I want to live a healthy life though, and disease is hard to evade. The confusion of this life is hard to figure out, it’s hard to know what moderation really is, how much we should fight our own genetics, how important genetics are at all. But we are our mother’s daughters. I looked at pictures of my mom and her mom, their bodies the same. Both were heavy, both carried weight in the same way. Neither would ever be skinny no matter what they did.
I was glad I made it into the studio today. I am glad I can see my pattern of anxiety; a bad test result sends me over the edge. I need to work in my studio to process this much emotion. I can’t help but think about my age and being an older mother. I’m glad alcohol gives me a headache or I would drink too much.
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 