A Year In Images (And their stories) -Part One-

I found myself in San Francisco in November, 2015 and my car was broken but I was there...with all my canvases and art and no money. I painted this in Portland earlier in the year and my friend drove down from Olympia after flying out from Cincinnati and we drove across the country together...not after I left this in Golden Gate Park for winter hippies and street people to enjoy. It pained me to release it, especially after someone offered to purchase it, but what I needed immediately was space and the ability to travel

Will I be a successful artist someday? If I think about it from a certain perspective, I already am. Isn't that the point of art?

I'm on the way to Cininnati... Somewhat of a rescue mission out of purgatory. Dead of Winter and very tired, I slept most of the way through though looking forward to the opportunities on the East Coast.

My friend worked for a circus there and wanted me to try out to be a performer for them. We had the option if it all worked out well enough to go around to children's hospitals around the country and maybe the world and perform for them if we were certified in Clown School. Clowning seemed like a perfectly viable option for someone like me, who could never take anything serious, serious long enough to make a legacy in it or accrue any tenure...As it turned out, because I can't always land backflips and didn't "talk with children the right way," I ended up there...just, there...

A foreshadowing image, you might say

Prior to this, I'd been having a wonderful time, working with artists and farmers in Santa Cruz area in California. The work season dried up, and so did my will to stay there, so I searched for my place in the world yet again. Not before being gifted (and promptly losing) this beautiful piece of jewelry by my good friend at Angel Alchemy.

I went down to Los Angeles after coming back to the West Coast from Cincinnati. It was a year of a lot of bizarre, random trips. This was the library, that was hardly helpful when I got to Southern California. It was beautiful though and reminded me a lot of the library in Seattle, architecturally.

Back to Santa Cruz, these were some beautiful pelicans that would frequent in long, enduring single files across the beach.

Upping our Halloween game with dremels and jewelry-making tools in Santa Cruz.

A...children's(?) book...

A Free book in Berkeley. I feel like Bert most of the time, including a sporadic unibrow and unexpressed homosexuality.

Someone at the folk festival in San Francisco had HAD it, fabulously.

A random host in Berkeley was adamant about something, but I wasn't usually sure what it was.

I found this guide very helpful in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Someone was trying to send me a message in Santa Cruz by putting this skull on my bike, but I had no idea what it was.

OK, so the itinerary goes as follows: November 2015: Las Vegas with Encore Brand Lacrosse // December: Berkeley& San Francisco // December: Cincinnati, OH with my friend Samuel Elijah // December 24, 2015: Olympia, Washington... At some point went back to Portland, then south again to San Francisco. My car died in San Diego in the summer, but I was delivered back to Los Angeles and the south (why??? This begins the portion of the journey that deviates from Reason a bit).

A guy, we'll call him Jon, paid me $50 to take him to Los Angeles. I think the reason that I wanted to go back to San Diego was to recover my belongings from staying there for weeks with another rideshare who was a beautiful surfer boy in North Park. He went across the country with me last year to recover a Dodge Sprinter from Vermont, and mostly what we did was climb rocks and ponder life.

Anyway, long story short, I was living in my car when I got back to L.A. I didn't really have a plan but I just "was" in whatever way I was. Why not? Why not throw myself at the mercy of the universe that was determined to break down whatever was started. A lot of good things started, and they were all killed prematurely. Why? I don't know, I'm studying the i ching currently to try to understand.

It feels a lot like a conspiracy, or some kind of karma. What I thought was confirmed by a businessman I met recently, who said, "What the rest of your life is determined by is what you decided in your 20s," Well, the year I turn 25 and start to take life seriously, I make ONE mistake and it changes the course of EVERYTHING. The man I took back to LA from San Francisco let me dog sit for his mother while she was out of town- a task assigned to him but that he traded me for room and board for a few days while I figured out my situation. I still don't know how I was able to figure out that whole situation.

Well, I was impoverished less than three hours from Mexico- NOT a good place to be. As it turns out, my moral compass is not entirely pointed due north, and shortly after I arrived at her sweet little townhome not far from Hollywood, I was eating her food and that night, trying to fend off the small Iranian Jew that thought that all his magnanimous-ness had earned him a spot betwixt my thighs, or at the very least inside my mouth. I REALLY needed a place to stay, and so I kept my tact intact: "I'm just so, so tired, it's a really long drive!" ...Though in truth, it had been quite enjoyable and I had hoped he'd liked me. But also in truth, I felt the size of his penis as he dry-humped me and the way that his poky tongue scourged my teeth for love was provocative of the opposite sentiment. Also, in truth, I was dead exhausted. He offered me a towel and showed me to the guest room, where I fell upon the bed in disbelief that I was in such a pathetic state of being. The townhome was beautiful, and I wondered what his mother looked like. I had pictured someone with a slight frame and quiet features like his, and then when I discovered that she was a buxom woman with a taste for the lavish and no spare thoughts for waste, it occurred to me that he might have been changing his own appearance and demeanor to match my own understated quality.

I had no intention of committing any illicit or illegal acts, but I was ready and willing to sell whatever of myself would stave hunger for the foreseeable. I pandered Craigslist, hoping to find some easy, trashy gig that would give me enough money to release me from subservience to an arrogant and pervasive section of the city that needed no reminders that they were superior and deserving to control the world's majority of resources. The first night was fine, we ate and I slept. When the next two days proved to be anxiety-inducing and without abundant income, I began to feel desperate as the gas gauge on my car dipped below the E line and the last few of my dollars were reluctantly given over to tip it barely above it again. I made the appointment across town on time the first day and almost an hour late on the second day (I think that I was trying to sell some of the clothing that had accumulated in my vehicle to help support myself a little. My phone bill was coming up, too. Jeez, since when did merely existing in this world become such a dramatic endeavor? Back to the stone ages for me, I suppose...

Finally, on Wednesday, the 3rd day of my stay there, I'd had enough. This woman was an affluent, foreign divorcee and I wanted to know what her secrets were. I entertained the idea that maybe "God" delivered me to this situation to help me overcome the obstacles in opulence that I was facing. Every day, hunger. Every day, sinking lower and lower in the rungs of society. Wishing, hoping for deliverance. The expectation of experience that I'd had seemed ridiculous now. Why had I thought that I would find fame and recognition and glamour without selling and promoting the sale of my own soul? I was demoted to the role of beggar, asking more and more of this man who I had promised a safe delivery, whose environment had bred him to expect privilege and special treatment... what hurt more was not the fact that I was asking him for help (OH, I might need a little more gas...I won't get food because I'm broke...) (He eventually bought a flute from me and it gained me a little bit of ground) but that I was going from one affluent place to another and showing that I couldn't provide for myself, apparently and the way he treated me gradually changed to reflect my lowly place. OK so I'm here in his mom's house and the guest room is full of nice-looking wares: a Fender guitar, Coach wallets, the drawers are full of designer clothes that it doesn't look like she wears. This is God: the poor are justified in their taking for their own provision, and nothing more. I found this picture of what looks like Divine, the cross-dressing performer and entertainer from the 70s. It was sitting amidst a bevy of family pictures and I felt sad for these people's lives. I pictured a holy, intellectual family that I would feel right at home with (maybe the sexual tension that lacked between me and the son was just indicative of greater belonging?)

I gathered up a few things of value and tried to sell them at a thrift store down the road. They wanted none. I wore black stretch pants I found from the closet and a soft red sleeveless shirt that looked expensive. The two together looked a bit off, but I was the most comfortable in these things and it looked to be on the up and up. I parked the car and took a long time getting out, feeling out of place and like a virus in a hospital. Walking down the swank street in east LA, everybody had airs of pretense and money. Everyone clearly wanted to impress everyone else but they didn't seem to be caring that their humanity was so naked. It was the realization of the most civil war of social standing. There was energy in the air though no joy. I walked past a pawn shop and slowed to look inside and someone within a small pack of people looked at me and said, "Whore." What else would I do, feeling so small and ugly and poor? I looked at him and smiled as if we were friends and he was complimenting me and then I kept walking, standing up straighter and strutting a little harder. So this is how the game is played here. Turn your attacks into tools or be eaten.

I took a ring that looked expensive but then all the thoughts of being caught stealing caught up with me and in the end, I just took them all back and rearranged them in her closet. My conscience set in when I realized that I was making up a terrible person in my head that deserved to be stolen from. When in reality, who was asking me to be in LA? The place felt like a putrid toilet to me, no matter where I went. The greed and deep well of emptiness that I'm sure its inhabitants all experienced simmered in me like bouillon dissolving into boiling water. My days were spent alone, penniless and scraping for food. Where was my enlightenment, where was my joy, where was my purpose and love? This is just purgatory and the only consolation prize for our limbo is nice cars and shoes?!

I searched and searched, the public libraries once again my best friends. Eventually my ride-turned-friend offered me more dogwalking work but the walks were awkward and low-paying. I eventually found out that his family were up-and-coming photographers working closely with the Disney Corporation, and when I expressed my perspective on the waning appreciation for the organization due to their insidious impositions about women's standards of appearance and role, I essentially cut off any amicable communication and condemned myself to the outside of the circle. Finally, something broke the surface. It was hostile and offensive but it was also righteous for me to speak the truth about the effects that these people were having on an entire population of people. When I broke this man's last attempt at impressing me (and I felt, ultimately getting me to cooperate in the oppressive dynasty of wealth) by slaughtering the ethical ground on which his career was based, I knew it was time to say goodbye to the City of Angels (rather, Pharisees) and head eastward, maybe to find hope with the Hopi.