AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

I've been holding back many entries because I think they're stupid, and I wanted to make them not sound so stupid before posting them. But that's a pretty stupid thing to do, because the whole point of this thing is to be honest and uncalculating, to let a Gestalt emerge from the fragments of ideas I put out. So here come the fragments - let's throw 'em against the wall and see what sticks!

August 9, 2006 9am

Angular poetry revolving down jagged slopes. Absinthe splash and flow through shattered goblet.

We feel fine.

Music and mutterings and shouting and laughter. Pigments foot-smeared cross hardwood floor. Frayed paintings melt into one another.

Hangman. The answer is "flatulence".

Cashed bowls, slashed canvas and broken glass. Strange kisses, uncomfortable hugs, dizzy goodbyes. A creaky fire escape and a very well behaved rabbit.

Here is the love.

A quarter of a lifetime's drawings, photography, and paintings, scattered and trampled. The debris of the new season.

August 1st, 2006

The city is full of strange, alluring places to go at night. I don't mean nightclubs and "hotspots", I mean the edge of the river where the white geese sleep, or the dark, trash-strewn alleyways. Places of wonder and fear.

Places that people don't go - except that people do go there - and who are these people?

Whenever I cross the BU bridge, there is a part of me that leaps over the guardrail - that railing with a perfect spiderweb in each gap between its bars - I leap over it and into the river below.

For the longest time, I've had this vision, but never knew where that part of me went once it landed in the river. Last night, after being chased from the riverbank by a flock of snowy geese with their open wings and arched necks glowing in the moonlight, I was crossing the bridge and I finally saw where that other part of me goes.

25 July 2006

3:45 pm

seven, nine, twelve, fourteen, seventeen. These are the sacred numbers that rule my life.

seven, nine, twelve, two, five. These are the numbers in my prayers.

25 July 2006

2:15pm. Here we are once again. 2 and a half hours to go, and I don't know if I can make it. The din of the shop. My coworkers are in high spirits, talking about muscle cars and how they like their espresso. That gurgling troll of a machinist makes his usual mucus noises interspersed with dog-like, whimpering laughter at his own jokes. Lathes and drill presses hum and whirr, torches hiss, and beautiful things are made by ugly creatures with skilled hands.

I am reminded of the Dwarves of Norse legend and Tolkein novels. Fat, stocky, crude creatures that live underground, out of the sun, out of the world. They eat too much and they drink too much and they enjoy little in life, but they craft objects of unrivaled beauty and workmanship.

Tuesday, July 25 2006

8:10am. Eight O'clock. Hate O'clock. Time to spend the next eight and a half hours hating myself or else zoning out until I forget who I am.

11am. Imaginary conversations. things I should have said to so and so back when something happened. Revenge fantasy. Things I'd like to say to so and so if I ever see hir again. Responses to anticipated questions from so and so if I ever brought up the topic of such and such. Counter-arguments to declarations made by so and so about - whatever. What I'll do if such and such ever happens again.

Schemes and quests and projects, the labor given as little thought as a sports movie montage sequence, the fruits of my imaginary efforts envisioned in glory and perfection. The triumph of the future self in some golden parallel universe. MVP of failure.

Monday, 24 July 2006 12:30pm

I hate you. I fucking hate you. You are a withered elephant with a flaccid penis for a trunk and a hollow, rotten squash for a head. Butternut. Every time I walk past you I feel an urge to cave your rotten melon with my fist - an urge so strong that I actually see a translucent 'ghost' of my own hand come out of my body and clock you in your gurgling, whimpering skull. I can even feel the moment of contact. There are parallel universes. In one of those parallel universes there is a man with a bloody, broken hand. He has just lost his job, and he is about to be arrested.

Monday, 24 July 2006
8:45. I can't believe it's the 24th of July already. I can't really remember anything that happened this month - that I did, that anyone did.

I didn't make anything - it's insane. It's absolutely insane and terrifying that I can just blow through 24 days with nothing to show when I come out the other side.

And what really happened last month, for that matter? Well OK, last month was a wonderful and memorable time to say the least, but it was all stress and hedonism. There was no creation going on then either. At least I made it to my studio. Once.

It feels like being perpetually on the edge of something. For three years now I've been eternally 'almost ready to get started'. There's always been just one more duty I need to fulfill, or thing I need to get set up, or tool/material I need to acquire, and then I'll really be able to do what I want to do. Then I can get my life started.

19 July 2006

4:15 p.m.

Fifteen minutes to go. It's amazing how hard it is for me to do this job without an iPod. I can't even really think anymore. It's like the monotonous repetition of tasks, combined with no outside stimulus, has deadened my brain. This must be how my fellow employees became such sad sacks of nothing.

Usually this job makes me feel irritable and restless. Right now I just feel hopeless.

Always is. Always was. Always will be.
I really hope I can get this thing fixed.

No thoughts. All I can think about is that I have no thoughts. Did the fire go out? Maybe it went out long ago, and I'm only just coming to realize it, as the last heat radiates from the hearth, leaving cold stone and ash?

19 July 2006 8:30 am

It happened again. Or rather, it didn't happen again. I came home from work, and from that moment on, I may as well have been asleep, because nothing really happened. I made dinner and watched a movie that I didn't really need to see. Then I surfed the internet for a while, and went to bed.

There was the most beautiful electrical storm going on outside. For the longest time, no rain or thunder, just blue arcs of lightning in the clouds.

So bright. So blue. So quiet. And then the first crack of thunder as the sky broke and rain came down in sheets, tapping out its staccato on the air conditioner sticking out of our bedroom window.