Faucet Repair

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.

A bag of marshmallows, Benton clouds, Tooker's Repose (embossing on heavy cream paper, 1976), glowing white linen curtains in my room gently billowing (acid memory), running and jumping off the top of a giant sugary dune at White Sands, the sun searing my glasses while lying supine on Santa Monica Beach, the Meuniers' boat at high speed (mixed with Chaos in the CBD), the special trick sound effect in the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, a Q-tip swirled around the ear canal, a tongue swirled around the ear canal, a bar of dove soap, soft-close toilet seats, h hunt's Playing Piano For Dad, rocking Tessa to sleep as a newborn, gesso, Titanium White, the first snowfall of the year on Loftus Road last December (muffled evening, so quiet), Smartfood white cheddar popcorn, the smell of a Major League baseball, Wes's first BMW, Wes's second BMW, “To send a little money home / From here to the moon,” Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out, North light, honeysuckle vines, a box of hot Krispy Kreme glazed donuts fresh off the belt, Spanky, the idea of Rick Rubin, a long hug, The White Album, Dad's Strat, Mom playing “Für Elise” on the Steinway in the living room while I'm in bed, Dad's pastel drawing of a Calla lily, staring at the stars with “Homeless” from a jacuzzi in Joshua Tree on mushrooms, getting a hot stone massage high (weed memory), meeting the white wizard after a great workout, asking for help, a fat stack of 8x11 printer paper.

I usually start by cleaning my room. Vacuum the carpet if it needs it, put any stray clothes away, make my bed. Then I prop open a window, dim the lights, and burn some incense. Right now I have a bundle of Black Coconut sticks from an Ethiopian goods stall in Shepherd's Bush Market.

I then sit on the edge of my bed, palms on my knees, feet flat on the floor, comfortable but solid posture. For the past year or so, I was in the habit of starting my routine with a head to toe body scan, but recently that began to feel a bit hollow and rushed, so now I go directly into a simple breathing pattern. This is really just an inhale/exhale rhythm in small increments—”box breathing,” I think it’s called. In two seconds, hold two seconds, out two seconds, rest two seconds. In three seconds, hold three seconds, out three seconds, rest three seconds, etc.

Then I have a few checkpoints that help me drop the anchor: smooth my brow if it's scrunched (I like to imagine my skin like a baby's), loosen my jaw, and relax my tongue. Basically checking that all of the controls in the cockpit are functioning properly before takeoff. From there, it's a drift into my mind guided by the ambient sounds around me. I try to hear them in a detached way that bypasses my brain's desire to immediately label them, but I can almost always recall what I’ve heard hours later regardless. This morning was the swelling Doppler roars of a few planes, lots of delicate bird chirps, pop music from passing cars, front gates squeaking open, and some distant dialogue between what seemed like a mother and her young children getting ready to leave their home.

During particularly deep meditations, this mode of listening leads to a gentle toggle between two states. The first state is the aforementioned active listening combined with attention turned towards my breath. When the sounds, my breathing, and sometimes even my pulse all harmonize, it's like a cold freshwater river calmly flowing through a lush forest (coupled with the unshakeable sensation that my hands have become massive, for some reason). But this pleasure inevitably gets interrupted by the second state, which I envision as a conveyor belt of sequential thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts are related to topical anxieties but can often be quite abstract. This morning, I remember thinking of a stick insect, a lemon bar, and a past sexual experience before toggling back to the first state. The strange paradox of this practice for me is that when I'm really tapped in, I can let go of the thoughts on the conveyor belt almost as soon as they materialize, and yet the imagery associated with them frequently returns when I open my eyes. There are even some scenes that have shown up as nearly fully-formed painting ideas that have gone right to my sketchbook.

Fischl said “I paint to tell myself about myself.” Athena and I talked about that idea recently—about coming to the canvas or the stage as a one to one melding with the work through a natural movement inward. Where intensity of focus flows with an ease fueled by your molten center, your uninhibited truth. I adored how she spoke about her commitment to embodying the complex emotional pulse of Suddenly, Shockwave Delay for her performance in Istanbul last week. She reminded me that the choice is essentially binary; will you or won't you?

Which reminds me, I front squatted like a million kilos this morning at Redline. I think it was the first time I had lifted relatively heavy since, I don't know, 2016? An endorphin fountain at the end of that workout. Was smiling at babies and offering to buy random people coffees.

Then paint paint paint paint paint paint paint and a wet walk home around 17:00. At one point I was drafting a couple who were holding hands through Chelsea Harbour. A man, beard, probably thirties, tight blue jeans, gray vest over blue flannel. A woman, long amber hair whipping in the wind, probably thirties, tight blue jeans, black puffer jacket. There weren't any other humans on the horizon ahead of them. While I couldn't hear their conversation (Music For Psychedelic Therapy in my ears), they probably thought they were alone, because the man abruptly stopped at a roundabout and gave the woman's left asscheek an extended five-finger squeeze. She reacted like a dog forced through a garden hose rinse.

Feels like the right time to turn on the faucet as I remember yesterday's boots stomping through Chelsea Harbor to the beat of the gurgling bass in “Fly” by Low. Accelerated past a mother pushing her baby in a stroller, baby's cries punctuating each loop of “fly-eye-eye-eyeee.” I liked that groove, fly to cry to fly to cry to fly to cry. That little potato will want his wings one day.

Then tonight, after six hours tending the bar and a McDonald's double cheeseburger (with sweet curry sauce, thank you Calvin), the choral kaleidoscope of Sufjan's “Now That I'm Older” weaved a helix as I sat on the night bus and watched the reflection of a woman's fingers dance in BSL to her friend on FaceTime.

How about Golden chain? The title is from “Spinning Away” by Eno and Cale:

Up on a hill, as the day dissolves With my pencil turning moments into line High above in the violet sky A silent silver plane, it draws a golden chain

Maybe a descent into the world these kids are being handed? Both a radioactive dumpster fire and an incomprehensibly vast petri dish of regenerating sublimity. Have also been thinking about children as vessels for truth. My niece at the full family dinner table: “Daddy made mommy cry.” If she didn't say it, nobody else would have. When, why, and how do we learn to plug those interjections?

A new painting is based on a little girl I was sitting next to on a bench outside of a coffee shop the other day. She was turned away from the harsh morning light, carefully dipping her pinky finger through wooden slats into the long shadow it threw next to her. That nanosecond before the first foray into darkness deserves a long freeze. When flailing one's arms while yodeling to the hydraulic hiss of the bus doors first attaches itself to the sting of annoyed glares. Or, (back to Golden chain), when one can fling open a burning portal to the heavens in the middle of the night on an international red eye because its pull is just too magnetic to resist.