The Great Spirit (The Connection of Everything to Everything Else)

Haven't written a post since September.
>Makes me wonder how archival these information transmissions are, makes me think about the mutability of the phenomenal world and the Ten Thousand Things and the possibility that the Universe is, in fact, a computer simulation.<

So I'll put my heart and soul into this one.

I don't know when exactly the seizures started.  (There has been described in medical literature a "temporal lobe personality" characterized by zealous spiritual conviction, emotional extremes, slightly superior attitudes, and a predilection for high-falutin' proclamations, admonitions and confessions.  Dammit.) It was about the time I moved into the studio at Ford Street and sub-let my apartment to Luke.  I was dating Maya and working part-time tending bar at Anastasia's restaurant.  I remember an early one I was laying in the little loft looking at the rafters of my art studio-perhaps it was raining-moments after waking up one morning and the feeling came over me that I a. had no idea where I was or why I was there and b. had lived that exact moment an infinite number of times before, in every possible permutation of the universe, and that I would continue to live that exact moment ad infinitum, trapped, doomed, destined, what have you.

They are always small moments.

Often, they happen around other people.  Social and virtually social (Facebook is a trigger) situations seem to intensify them.  The mind reels to explain why the others, there, them, you, are complicit in my entrapment on the wheel of time, the circle of being, the samsara of my cyst.

It feels as if some plot is afoot.

I concluded that it was my own mind deciding to invent the moment.  I scrawled it on sheet rock I hung in the garage of my grandmother's house when I began to paint there, in late 2011, five years now.  The trip was: I died, or was in a coma, rather, and I was inventing everything that was, based on the electrons I was absorbing through my skin and maybe re-runs of Cheers or Home Improvement that the nurses were playing in my hospital room.  That is still the trip, kinda.  The Deja Vu's were just the rumblings in coma reality of my mine of something loud in the real world.  Kind of like the Hodor thing.  I started to paint the trap.  The whole thing was designed to test the theory.  The plays within the play.  My soul (not my mind), stretching, following the water and the nutrients through the cracks in the crust of reality (my mind).  My hands knew the way.  Only them.

Status Epilepticus.  To be touched.

Then I herniated that disc in my back, and I had to sink into my body in a way that maybe everybody should have to.  (as I write this, I pull my belly button towards my spine, my pelvis tilts closer to neutral, my eyes tear up, not a seizure but what the fuck, and I contemplate leaving the coffee shop and running across the street and holding my babe so tight.  But I'd never get my seat back.  And I'd loose the rhythm.  She knows.  I know she knows, at any rate.)

And you can read about all that back business on this blog.

But the deja vu's kept coming.  I asked everybody I knew if they had them.  I really wanted to catch somebody, as if they might come clean upon being confronted, say whoah, you got us man, we all just live in your head, none of this is real, you're in a coma, or, perhaps, you're living in a computer simulation designed to cause you to generate your crazy paintings, your bloody and muddy and messy and desperate paintings, your obsession with the apocalypse, you obsession with the old stories, is the key to the universe, will break the circle of the samsara of your cyst.

I asked everyone I knew.  Nobody ever came clean.

Epilepsy-to be taken hold of.  When I called my mom and told her about what they called the "scar tissue" (now it's called a cyst) that did, in fact, show up on the MRI, in my right anterior temporal lobe, the first thing out of her mouth was "fucking football".  Maybe she's right.  I always have had a desperate need to prove my physical courage.  Maybe from having the monsters animus, the dream demons and the dad demons, but since I was little I would never back down and I would never look down and if I needed to I would slam into things repeatedly with my body because my body could take it (or it could not) and because fuck them, that's why.  The ocean has helped teach me that it's not the impact, but the movement.  And painting.  And laying on the floor doing PT for three years. And making hundreds and hundreds of paintings that no gallery or grad school program wants any part of (but the people do want them, and want to pay me for them, so I build my own galleries, and fuck them, that's why.) Maybe there's no such thing as a lesson learned too late.

It was my birthday.  34th birthday, I think (the math is tricky, because it is so late in the year) Nov 13, 1981. Nov 13, 2015.  Fridays.

See why I could think it's just a movie script sometimes?

But the paintings feel free.  They feel, when I make them, when I'm working, like a high wire, like a totally authentic experience, because I don't know where they end.  I barely know where they start.

There is meaning in them, and that meaning is freedom.  It's a smile at my cyst.  It's the intuition that tells you to just keep going.

Just keep going.

Love.