“Obama Bright” a portrait of Barack Obama in acrylics and graphite with Swarovski crystals that apparently didn’t please our leader…Or he doesn’t have the common courtesy to thank me for it.
I am serious. I sent this portrait of Barack Obama to the White House in January 2014, and only just received a small form card, saying nothing personal, only that the “gift was received” from the American people, thank you very much…and Obama and Michelle’s signatures scrawled on the bottom, as if that means anything to me. He clearly didn’t send it to me personally to thank me for any portrait. WTF. I spent HOURS drawing that very closely detailed portrait, first in graphite, then I had to copy it, before I hand painted the background and certain details over the copy. I am really really upset. EVERYONE i know here loved that portrait and encouraged me to send it to Obama, but I was worried that he wouldn’t like it or perhaps it would be destroyed by the Secret Service because of looking for anthrax or something stupid like that under the swarovski crystal that are glued on the background. Like i said, WTF. I am never sending anyone important any of my artwork again. The wealthy and important clearly don’t get the rules of common courtesy, do they?
What the voices tell me to do, set myself on fire…In art therapy I was supposed to just play with the paint, do a blob and a line to get started. I got carried away with the child’s paints and this is what resulted…
I also finished a good drawing of a house in Tuscany, Italy and a painting of a child I started a long time ago, which I will post here. (The house drawing is at the framers, where it is being matted because it is too large for a precut mat. I am sorry that I have posted the painting with little faked watermarks on it, but I do not like the fact that people can simply print out my pictures otherwise and not have to pay me for the prints or the paintings…)
Acrylic portrait of African American Child in red watch cap and lavender sweatshirt…
As for the rest, I am coping, that is all I can say. I try to “fake it till I will be able to make it” — meaning that I do not tell people how difficult it is, most of the time, because that only makes it harder. If I can try to ignore as much as possible what is going on that is all for the best. And when I cannot, I stay by myself and try to deal with it. Or i see someone, my therapist or a person I have hired to stay with me. Or I simply tough it out as best I can. Things could be worse. After all, I am not in the hospital and I have to keep telling myself that! 8)
In the meantime, I don’t have a lot to say. Doing art takes all my time and energy, and the rest is spent simply dealing with things and coping. Forgive me. I will be back. I just wanted to post this to allay anyone’s fear that I was back in the bin.
And now for something really different. Cartoons that tell you about my life these days.
Pam’s Having Car trouble
Hope you can make out the text okay…It is a little difficult,. granted. But I tried to photograph the pages clearly as possible.
The next morning she retrieves the car and finds the same problems remain…Why?
She’s GOt all the dates Wrong and so much more…
Fear is ONLY an Almond…the amygdala in the brain is the NUT that makes us nuts!
Gargantua is the name of a book, and a character in the book. In it someone says, Appetite comes with eating. It helps me to think about that when I find i cannot find a way to put food enough in my mouth to keep going…I need to eat on schedule if only to keep my strength up.
It cannot be Pam Pam Pam al the time. No, he has to start to share of himself or the relationship is off. She CARES about him and it isn’t all about HER!
Meanwhile I am not in a good state at all. Bill wanted to talk about an email I sent him saying as much as the above, but I am much too shaky to be able to deal with it. I just cannot use him to talk TO alone…I have friends with whom we have shared equally all along, and so I do not feel a burden now when I am in trouble. But Bill has ceased talking about himself a long while ago, and I am to blame for letting him withdraw. I felt slighted but felt that perhaps he was reserved and saved his intimate moments for his girlfriend…But no more. I cannot be using HIM as a pair of ears and feel that he shares nothing back. THen I feel guilty and a selfish user! That isn’t fair to me let alone to him…It won’t happen. It won’t be. Not any longer. Hear that, Bill? YOU are an important part of our friendship, as a person,. and if you don’t want to be a person, I do not want a NON-person as a friend.
Enough. I feel like I am going to die. And now even the doc doesn’t want to suggest that I take even a sliver of Abilify now that I am off it…So I am really up a creek..Up a creek because I dunno how long I can tolerate this. I smell rot rising inside me, smell it for real., Like my body is rotting from within…Where is it coming from? I brush my teeth several times a day (unusual for me!) but still the rot smell persists!
I am not a praying person, but I know many of you are. I am in such deep shit. I will be going to art therapy today, perhaps that will bring some relief. in the meantime, if you feel prayer can help, pray for me…?
Thank you , all of you, for hanging in with me. I am NOT a quitter, I am not a quitter!
As I have been having a hard time dealing with things, I do art and do art and do art…It is as good a way to cope as any other I suppose. Anyhow, I hope to get back to writing here soon. In the meantime, I am investigating more about temporal lobe epilepsy and schizophrenia/bipolar illness. It seems to me very significant, and at the same time strange that so many people who bear the diagnosis of schizophrenia and/or bipolar are also supposedly burdened with yet another condition that is so tricky to pinpoint, so I may also be posting more about that in the future as well.
The more I read the less I am convinced that schizophrenia, as an entity, exists, one, and two, that if there is any such thing as “schizophrenia” no one has yet figured out what it is. Which is the same thing as saying it is an imaginary/artificial illness. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that mental suffering and psychosis do not exist, only that no one has proven, not to my satisfaction, that there is any such illness constellation that can go by the name of schizophrenia and be recognized as such by a preponderance of physicians world-wide… That offers a lot of leeway by the way. I don’t ask for a lab test or even a set of hard signs. Only a reasonable way for psychiatrists around the world to agree on symptoms that constitutes a recognizable disease that is the same thing no matter where you go, just as measles is measles and the flu is the flu…
But there won’t be any agreement, as we know. Because schizophrenia is a cultural construct. It is imaginary and largely meaningless. Except within the society that uses it as a concept in order to disapprove of and stigmatize certain ways of being, speaking or thinking. In that sense schizophrenia is more than just a construct or concept it is a social tool. It is a weapon used to keep people in line. In western society, if one doesn’t keep to the obligatory path, some semi-acceptable social role, the result is the withdrawal of social approvals and the substitution of punishment — think drugs, hospitals, seclusion, restraints — in their place. And yet, in other cultures, the very same “out of bounds” thinking or behavior, rather than being labelled schizophrenic or “crazy” is regarded as the mystic’s path and spiritual, highly regarded rather than anathematized.
This is nothing new. It has been observed before. So why do we keep going back to beating the same old same old drum: “We need better drugs to treat mental illness.” “We need better diagnostic methods to pinpoint mental illness. ” “We need better interventions to help the “mentally ill” who cannot or will not help themselves.”…YOWCH! Yada yada yada. Maybe we continue to bark up the same wrong, wrong, wrong tree. Maybe there is NO SUCH THING AS MENTAL ILLNESS, perhaps all along there has always only been physical illness. Perhaps much suffering, emotional and mental though it may be, is not illness, just part of the human condition, and while we want to ameliorate it, we call it illness at our peril.
WAGblog: Dum Spiro Spero 