Faucet Repair

A good bruise goes a long way because it remembers a Hereditary outburst. And straining for a low pass knob. And a fart first impression. And legal action by association. And pouring nuclear hot sauce all over its food with a broom to its head. And hearing gunshots at the front door and then hiding in its bedroom only to step in dog shit in the dark. And when laundry was too expensive, getting on its hands and knees to wring it in a dirty bathtub. And a cop’s flashlight like a tunnel to the passenger seat. And losing some scalp getting out of the car under barbed wire. And fighting the Anima under the spell of dark matter. And the rush of illegal dumping within legshot of a ranger. And a shadow downing beer after beer because it was the only cold thing. And mini escapes to the coffee shop shackle, the cotton mouth walk. And an army of tiny knives carving into its ribs. And laughing detonations outside its bedroom window. And Marvin Gaye with no curtains. And demons crawling out of its night stomach. And an inability to keep time. And permanent ongoing renovations. And shaving a circle down to a single molecular point. And a broken axle road trip. And a looking glass living room. And waves of dried sweat marking hat circumference. And garaging detritus. And a clean mirror in a familiar bathroom. And sleep in the shape of a fetus. And the sun on a pulley in the morning.

Enuresis / Using A Dating App

As I slip underneath my sheets, I remember being told in a doctor’s office that it would stop happening if I stopped thinking about it.

“Take a date night, for example. A case of how your brain benefits from distraction.

You’re cuddled up on a couch in the living room of a foreign flat. A depleted candle has thickened the air with cinnamon. Earlier you went to a bar for watery cocktails, which you’ve since chased with two barely refrigerated beers. A shaky internet connection brings a romantic comedy in and out of focus at irregular intervals. During quiet scenes, you can hear your nostrils.

As the end credits roll, you zombie through a hallway into a low-ceilinged bedroom with a mirrored wardrobe facing the bed. You’re pulled into pillows and remember taking a salsa class years ago where you were told to lead on the first day. You flip over and catch a glimpse of your idiot silhouette contorting in the mirror. An air conditioning unit sputters and pops into gear, coating the room with a loud, deep-throated exhale. Two dogs trade barks and snarls somewhere down the street, sparking hysteria in another one next door. Upstairs a toilet flushes and sends water scattering through plumbing in the walls like blood pumping through a vast capillary network, followed by thuds and thuds and thuds and thuds of iron soles above a booming string arrangement swelling from the living room as a white light shoots into the hallway, an algorithm starting another film you might like.

You wake up first. You stretch your legs and clock the sweetest friction. You deflate into a new day.”

After three years of espousing the virtues of an absolute indifference to thematic cohesion across one’s body of work, I’ve found myself working in a series for the first time.

Oddly, the planet that has exploded into thousands of smaller islands is the world of rock climbing. Specifically, indoor rock climbing gyms. Even more precisely, Sender One in Los Angeles, where Grey climbs. It only took one visit—I went with him and Tessa for a couple hours earlier this month and the floodgates opened.

Firstly, the visuals. If big rock candy mountains shooting towards the sky with tons of planar changes along the way weren’t dramatic enough, they’re pocked with hundreds of multicolored holds ranging from tiny pink gumdrops to suitcase-sized black monoliths. Marked with tags identifying the difficulty of color-coordinated routes, they’re a chromatic choose-your-own-adventure-to-the-summit display. The fact that everyone can see your choice as you stand under these rainbow proposals lays a core question bare: will you choose the comfortable path or risk public failure (perhaps even humiliation) on the more challenging one?

These limb ledges are also fascinating for their truly psychedelic geometry. There’s such a diversity of designs, from oblong red hourglasses to giant lemon wedges to lime green knolls. And their shapes shift as bodies interact with them—one image since imprinted is of a focused climber’s downcast profile next to an amoeba-like splotch of blue with a protrusion that echoed his nose. Like a taxidermied Blue Meanie.

Then there’s the element of body language (my one true love). Never have I been somewhere with so many people voluntarily contorting at once. Watching strangers pretzel themselves onto precarious perches (sorry), I daydreamed about their walks of life. Was the guy mountain goating a microscopic dot in a crucified pose an OB-GYN in bloody scrubs an hour before? Was the woman peering down between her split legs an accountant who just finished crunching her client’s numbers? These were the city’s bipedal sidewalk stoics brought onto all fours and inverted.

What this leads to is an environment that feels like a Ministry of Silly Walks on the y-axis, but there’s also the palpable texture of desire in the air. What I mean by this has less to do with spandex-accentuated bodies and more with constant reaching and reaching and reaching. I’m fixated on this part of it, of arms and then hands and then fingers like spiders straining and grasping for those last few centimeters. Like a defibrillator to my melodramatic heart are the moments where the next move is just beyond the wingspan, so the only choice left is to jump.

But to do so, climbers are legally required to be strapped into a harness connected to a trained someone on the ground who is responsible for their safety. A fascinating dynamic where one person’s ascension is literally bound to another’s humble support. In my case it was Grey who knotted me up and gave me the green light. On the highest climb I did that day, I remember his voice offering tips and reminders as I pulled myself up onto the first set of pegs. These turned to affirmations as I found my rhythm, then faint mutters as I climbed higher still.

In the final push to the top, I remember the sounds below falling away entirely. Being left with my own heaving breaths and a deep focus on one choice at a time was utterly meditative (not unlike pitching, actually), and for a few flowy minutes I took great pleasure in meeting myself where I was. Then it was time to come down.

Incision Inventory:

The most recent one is a tiny crater carved out of my left ring finger. Last night I had Punch Drunk Love blaring from my computer on the kitchen counter while I made dinner, and as I was peeling potatoes for a mash, a loud noise in the film yanked my glance away from the spuds and punctuated a sharp sting. Of note: blood pooling on the cutting board while Jeremy Blake’s abstractions floated in and out of focus.

Next is a slightly smaller poke, almost perfectly round, situated smack in the middle of the webbing between my left index and middle fingers. It was a few days ago while sitting in the front seat of the upstairs section on the 295 bus. Someone had left an empty energy drink can on the ground, and between stops it was rolling back and forth in front of my toes trying to get my attention. It did, so I reached into my backpack to grab a pencil. I keep all of them in a tightly-packed internal pocket and make sure they’re oriented points-down for these situations, but somehow one of them had flipped in transit and decided to bite me when I plunged my digits into its nest.

Third-freshest was a tick-sized blister on my right middle finger that stealthily popped while I was vigorously jamming power chords in my room one night last week. The song in question was MJ Lenderman’s “SUV,” (I prefer the version from his November ‘23 live album), an absolute banger that has enchanted my millions of imaginary fans and kept my neighbors awake regularly over the past couple of weeks.

Flip my right hand over and we meet crime scene number four, another skin balloon that burst on a toes-to-bar skill training day at Crossfit. I purchased some apathetically-reviewed, Amazon-recommended grips to prevent this very thing from happening, but alas, the gear/chalk powder/correct technique precautions still did not prevent my moisturized epidermis from surrendering to the weight of my body.

Same goes for one in the exact same spot on the other hand that happened just days earlier.

Rounding out this handsome group of red reminders is a shooting scar arcing across the dorsal plane of my left wrist. It happened last month on a wet afternoon: I had just hopped off the bus in Shepherd’s Bush to receive treatment for an ear infection at my GP’s office, my backpack’s handle clenched in one claw like a briefcase, when I approached the clinic’s entryway and attempted to hoist the bag onto my shoulders. In doing so, I somehow grated my wrist against the building’s stucco wall. Checking in with the receptionist, I told her I was there for an ear appointment but also wanted to request treatment for the open wound that was dripping on her linoleum.

How The West Was One—the tug of what could exist or the tree branch hallucination above the active hurricane. Slices of life in the circle island petri dishes, but they’re contained by the canvas like an epitaph on a tombstone due to a constant barrage of reminders everydayeverydayeverydayeveryday; I was reading about the beginnings of the Portuguese Empire in the 15th century and then it went 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 in my head and here I am for my dash showing my ass to the world in oil.

Or my passport’s Great Golden Seal forking over $100m in fresh tank ammunition to Israel without congressional review as the death toll in Gaza nears twenty thousand. This just after vetoing the UN’s ceasefire resolution. What color is the tie at the party again? Journalists targeted on a quiet hill—Issam Abdallah’s blackened camera, Al Jazeera’s burning vehicle.

Or an embrace. Of the subconscious, of the baring impulse, towards trust in background updates and shadow syntheses and how “Any thought could be the beginning of / The brand new tangled web you’re spinning / Anyone could be a brand new love.” Maybe a blonde occipital blip on a lavender-gray day.

Or Mom and Dad’s documentary on medical aid in dying, the public service of seeing it all go down in real time. Over many dinners we’ve discussed our hemisphere’s enduring phobia of the cosmic seasons. So there it is stripping us down to our structure.

Or our constructed chapters as records to revisit while we can. All hits no skips, even the duds.

I'm telling myself the story of my life Stranger than song or fiction We start with the joyful mysteries Before the appearance of ether Trying to capture the elusive The farm where the crippled horses heal The woods where autumn is reversed And the longing for bliss in the arms Of some beloved from the past

Second Coming

“He became a truck driver for Heartland Freighters after the war,” Mary said, splitting her microwave enchilada down the middle with the side of her fork. “Drove the rest of his life. That’s how his face became a half moon.” She pointed to her favorite portrait of him, propped upright at the end of the table where he had eaten her dinners for half a century. “I used to tease him that I was the only one who could see his dark side.”

Blake kept his eyes lowered while he poked at sticky remnants of melted cheese. By now, however, Mary knew better than to take offense at his indifference—this was her fourth consecutive summer hosting college baseball players for the local scout team, (her daughter had suggested it after her husband passed), and she had learned that the arrangement was like fostering pit bulls: the amount of attention she received from these young men was usually correlated to their appetites.

“You may be dismissed, darling,” Mary said, acknowledging Blake’s empty plate. “Are you sure?” he said, rising from his chair before the end of the question to grab his luggage. “Yes dear. Leave it there, I’ll wash up,” she said. “Okay, thank you,” he said, his heavy feet debossing tufted carpet as he made his way across the living room toward the bedroom Mary had readied for his arrival. As he passed the fireplace, she saw him double take in the direction of an old picture on the mantel of her posing next to her longtime pastor.

Dropping his bags and closing the door behind him, Blake deflated onto the room’s lone twin bed with a sigh, the bedsprings moaning under his weight, and in doing so noticed an antique bedside table next to the headboard. Inside its top drawer he found a glossy nest of 5x7 inch photos, one of which caught his eye—a young woman in a yellow bikini, in repose on a beach with her back to the camera, head turned slightly so that her profile was concealed but for the tip of her nose by long strands of wet hair.

“Blake? Are you decent?” he heard Mary suddenly call from outside the bedroom door. Startled, he threw the photo back in the drawer and slammed it shut.

“Uh, what?” he blurted, unfamiliar with the expression.

She glanced at the photo from the mantel, now cradled in her hands. “Never mind darling,” she answered, “I’ll come back once you’ve had some time.” It wasn’t too late, and there were dirty dishes in the kitchen she could take care of until he was ready for the story.

(From 21 July 2023)

Hitched to the rattling bumper of McDonald & Giles’s “Suite in C” at Equipment Room, I felt that thin band of warm silence hugging the music for the first time in ages. Deep listening is sacred to ears numbed by urban dissonance, and it re-tuned my antenna for the rest of my nomadic month. To tweaking SEPTA-sapiens recognizing one of their own aloud, to the STM assistant coating my bus in just enough French to catch it, to my name blooming from a 2:00am tongue—such frequencies are vital. But on more than one couch surfed, I was warned of those ducking them. An old friend on a new acquaintance: “He didn’t seem to register any of my answers.” This sounded like a mirror to our modern deficit (or how being heard=being seen), and later made a sponge propped on palms between long glasses of wine feel like love. It probably was.

After reconnecting with Ria through her new Substack, I found myself reminiscing on her Instagram profile and tapped on an image I remembered her posting. Turns out it was from 2018 and I had commented “ey cool” on it. Pretty innocuous, sure, but seeing my name attached to a version of myself that I don’t remember sent a bit of a shiver down my spine.

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon a lot this week as I’ve been battling through my annual immune system failure—lots of time to ruminate when you’re stuck horizontal. Mostly about how I really don’t feel like I was conscious in the years before I committed to my art practice.

Kali and I talked about something similar on the phone the other day after he mentioned that he was working through some postpartum gloom while polishing his first album. I empathized with reference to my experience of making paintings. There’s not a more womblike state of mind than when your train is latched to the tracks of a project and you’re picking up speed—the hours of the day become sacred. The morning shower might bring clarity to color, the journal might grab a few sound bites from the bus to the studio, the friend-recommended album might throw you a new tone, a face in the bar might send your imagination cycling into a white picket future.

I’m currently reading Dylan’s Chronicles. There’s a bit where he talks about starting out in coffee houses with thousands of other folk hopefuls having just moved to New York. He explains the importance of getting the song across rather than yourself, which for me is a big part of what makes the whole creative process so cathartic. As an idea appears, it ideally separates itself from the ego and floats in the brain with a postcard from the ether. And it becomes our job as artists to welcome it, bring it offerings, distract it, and sometimes ignore it as we attempt to teach it how to exist on Earth. A mode of gathering and giving, inhaling and exhaling that has nothing and everything to do with us.

So when it’s time to let it run free, gray skies are only natural. Being in service of the work means an attention to detail, to energy, to love, to life itself. The few times that I’ve been able to revisit a painting after a significant amount of time, (which is rare since I’ve only been doing this for a little while), the flood of past sensations that arrives is almost unbearably dense. But they’re there in luminous high-definition. It’s a mirror to a mirror, a self-reflexive miracle. Something to remind me that I was and will be as alive as I am today.

Scott Walker’s “The Girls From The Streets” has flooded my daily course through wintering London in a radioactive blacklight this month. Alchemizing with the finger-freezing temperatures to illuminate steaming beacons of human collision around the city: buses, pubs, tube trains, Tescos. Pheromonal mirages to dissolve in.

My addiction to the palpable tension between empathy and self-preserving survival instincts in these spaces is nothing new, but as I soak in it longer and longer each day, I’m discovering how malleable it is. How much softer its edges can become. I think it’s the orchestral chorus that has been coloring it with blues and reds, purples and pinks. Cold and warm coexisting.

There’s a dull but prickly guilt that accompanies such an intense sonderlust, which the song’s impish angle amplified in me at first. But it slowly revealed an obvious freedom in stomping where I had been tiptoeing. It wasn’t hiding the fangs in its smile or encrypting its urges. It just ripped down the road with a big mirror on its back and dared me to follow.

So I did, and walls began to dissolve. My sketchbook replaced my camera and my pencil became a magnet. For flattered excitement or mild discomfort and all walks of laughter. For oblivious engines or double-eye daggers. Or in the case of a fishbowled conversation that screeched into my view from the Lillie Road curb, for a glance that pierced the glass and recognized itself before gliding back into the mortal current.

(From 9 October 23)

Sifting through headlines on the escalation of the Israel-Gaza conflict has sent me down deep. I know that one inevitably runs into distressing footage when trying to keep up to date with cataclysmic events like this via the internet, but some of the imagery I've come across has been singed into my mind all day.

In one Independent article I was reading about how Hamas ducked Israeli intelligence to launch their initial attack, a video embedded in the text that was deemed “unauthenticated but plausible-looking” showed an apparently captive woman being yanked out of the trunk of a Jeep being driven by militants in the middle of a Gaza street.

As she unfolds from the rear of the car, hands bound behind her back, an armed man drags her by the hair to the side of the vehicle and shoves her back inside through a passenger door. It's extremely difficult to stomach all of the visual information conveyed in those few seconds where she's visible to the camera. Her face is panic-stricken, blood snakes down the back of one of her arms, her hands and bare feet are stained red, and the seat of her pants looks soiled with either blood, feces, or both. Multiple men pile into the car after her once she's pushed in, and that's the last time she's visible in the video.

There was a time, maybe three or four years ago (my dark ages), when I used to seek out this kind of visual trauma. Borderline snuff in the deepest recesses of NSFW Reddit, that sort of thing. My chemically confused brain's twisted logic reasoned that continued exposure to this sort of stimuli would make me a warrior in the face of life's most brutal truths. The King of the Desensitized.

What it actually did, however, was scar me in a way that still stings when I read news centered on violence and death, of which there is obviously quite a bit each day no matter where I look.

I'm not mentioning this in an attempt to recuse myself from actively engaging with what is going on in the Middle East right now, but rather to note that the once-familiar feeling is back. The inescapable undertow of all that races through my head after witnessing brutality. How numbing it must be to feel your fate land in the sinister hands of evil (a hostage pleading as she's whisked away from the Supernova music festival on a motorbike). How many milliseconds you have in your bedroom to comprehend what is happening before Nothing (rockets hitting an apartment building in Gaza). Or how exactly it is that at the end of this sentence I will close my laptop, brush my teeth, and slip under my freshly cleaned sheets to try to get some sleep.