Untitled Triptych, Mixed Media on Panel, 2012

That is a fitting description of how this phase of my life feels right now. I have finished stripping things away. What is left now is to get back to work and see what I might make out of all this.

Early morning are times where I can accomplish quite a bit, yet I would recoil if someone said I was a morning person. Morning people are cheerful, interactive, optimistic and just love to talk and they drive me crazy. I wake up very slowly and I relish quiet in the mornings. I let the dogs out, start the coffee and check email as I begin the slow slide into wakefulness. This morning I noticed that ants I am sharing my kitchen with had been up for a while and congregating at a dog food lid I mistakenly left out the night before. I cleaned this up and the found two or three other small things that needed relocating, wiped or arranging. All the while I am turning over in my mind the things I need to do or want to do in the day ahead. I love mornings, but I just don’t want to have to talk about them.

This week has been a delicious mix of productivity and recreant deviancy. I have ambled from activity to activity without any organizing plan or agenda. There were some things I knew I wanted to get done this week and I did them in no particular order. I took the section of fence that was removed to make room for the motorcycle garage and re-purposed the fence boards into a table. I spent a morning in the new studio with Tom clearing out space and building a new painting table. We re-worked a shelving area in the new space and pretty much whipped the studio into a condition I start to work in. While I was there working with Tom, I discovered one dollar tacos.

As I was dragging a piece of lumber I heard Tom say “Now that is a good sound.” I had missed whatever he had heard and said “What sound?” Tom replied “The sound of one dollar tacos.”

There are a lot of migrant workers in Richmond whether people realize it or not and many of them are Hispanic. The new studio is located near two or three construction projects and there are scores of Hispanic workers. The silver trimmed lunch truck of my youth has morphed into the Taco Wagon. We decided to wander down the two blocks to where the lunch trucks had wedged themselves between two buildings so that I could discover the joys of one dollar Tacos.

They are served on small soft burritos with your choice of meat and there is a large selection of toppings to choose from. It was a simple arrangement but I can attest to the joys of one dollar tacos. There was something mildly subversive about eating open faced tacos mid-morning surrounded by people who spoke jovially in a language I understand poorly and knowing that I was standing in what was once the the heart of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis would be horrified and that thought delights me.

I am in one those pesky phases where I am reinventing my life again. The ink has been dry on my divorce for almost eighteen months now and I am settled into a quiet routine as a single man again. I have been rigorously simplifying my life, purging unwanted or unneeded possessions and jettisoning anything I can identify as extraneous or that doesn’t work as it is designed. This process of simplifying has been going on for over a year now and is nearing the end.

I moved into half of a duplex that I own, the sole remaining property I possess following the financial collapse of 2008. It is considerably smaller than the house I lived in until last year and about a third smaller than the temporary house I was renting this winter. It suits me though; it is compact and comfortable and easy to maintain. It is and will be my home for the foreseeable future.

Beyond purging my life of the unnecessary, I have been working on creating a space for myself. I rented a painting studio that I will soon occupy and I set up a large storage building on my property that I will use to house my growing collection of motorcycles. I have cleared out much of the debris in the yard and I can see the skeletal outlines of what will eventually become my garden.

There are ideas turning over in my mind like a restless child who cannot embrace sleep. Right now they are jumbled and indiscernible. But I feel them kicking at the sheets. I know that I don’t really need to do anything except to pay attention and continue to put things in order.

There are some things that are quite clear to me right now. My life is going to be slower and more deliberate going forward. I have no desire to live recklessly or impulsively any more. As I recently told a friend, “There are no do-overs in life. Take the extra time and try to get it right the first time.” It is also certain that I will paint again. I am determined to make art again and I am open to whatever evolution has taken place in my creativity during this long layoff.

The other thing of which I am certain is that I am a writer. I have always been one, but I have not always written. This brings me to a curious twist in my thinking. Once I committed to painting, I never doubted that I was a painter, even during this last break. But I have never permitted myself that same certainty of knowledge when it comes to the written word. I have some strange ideas about what it would take for me to call myself a writer. But I realize now that these ideas are one more thing that I must discard.

Last Thursday, I sat in a small circle, the air stifling and moist while my hand tore across the page. Working with only a simple prompt, the ideas streamed onto the page. And as I let those thoughts loose on the paper, I realized something that I learned long ago with painting. I don’t need to concern myself with the result. I need only commit to the process. The results will form themselves.

If I had any doubts lingering, they were swept away when I went to the NY Times and was greeted with this headline:

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects

Emptywheel has a great post breaking this down.

Despite all the legal justifications and euphimisms, what we have is a carefully crafted program of torture. Waterboarding is a war crime and the United States has prosecuted it as such. The architects of this program must be denounced and held to account.