Almost There

8 in the morning, my shading started out just the least bit inconsistent, and that was okay for doing an old man's forehead mottling.  I could have been more exact with the pellgrino but that might have distracted:  that part of the pellgrino is the least important thing about the picture.  Right now his face is what pulls your attention most, just as it should.  Everything draws the viewers' eyes to the face.
21 hours.  Barring any tweaking there's just the hand still to go.  The individual bases of the fingers are hard to tell apart, not forward to that aspect.

I had to take the photo twice, the first time he literally had a cat hair in his mouth.  (nuts, I only moved it to his sleeve.)  See how the shading on the pellegrino balances the image?  Leaving it blank Just the outline, no shading) would have been a nice artistic touch, I've seen that done by some of the artists that inspired me and I've done it myself, but the heavy shading of his other elbow necessitated giving that shoulder cape the full treatment.

I did tweak the shading on the chin, but just barely.  It's enough, his skin now does not blur into his collar the way it did.

Still not as crisp as it ought to be when you zoom in.  One of his shoulders fades out.  Think I'll try playing with the camera settings again.

It's 8"x10" on quality paper, and you see by the progression just how much it took.  How much do you think I should ask for this?  How much I'll actually get is another matter, I have no idea what that might be... but what I mean is, do you think a lifetime's worth of skills should get at least minimum wage?  People understandably do not want to pay by the hour for this kind of work, and I winder what a reasonable flat fee would be.

I was working on an image of an actress last year that came to being finished, I think it was at 18 hours in, and I believe that one to have been more labor-intensive and much more problematic in it's details.  I should be able to increase my speed when I correct my work-station :posture, consistent lighting, printed reference, etc.  Having a computer is a great help,  I can zoom and play with contrast to see details better...but it slows me down having to look farther away from the page, readjust my focus all the time.  This is the first drawing I've done entirely that way.

And the actress?  Sharon Mitchell in a leather jacket.  I hope to finish that one still, I have the ref on flash drive and I think the drawing is with the next batch Lore will send.  I called her, she is waiting for he next payday.  The only problem with the Mitchell is that I didn't rests my hand on a barrier  and one edge of the paper yellowed a little.  Maybe I can trim it.  I had an edge trimmer for papers back home but I had to abandon it.  I meant for it to go to Kevin and Katie along with other crafty off and ends, and I printed them out before I left.  I hope they didn't get thrown out as trash.

Neither I nor Jesseca knows how much it will cost to have prints made of Pope Francis.  I've not enough money left after I pay the phone this month, and I'll need to put what's left in my wallet into the account back home to pay AT&T.  Oof.  Hope that money from home comes through soon.  They were expecting June or July but would have been this month if the estate hadn't been overcharged.  How long will the refunds take?

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I mentioned to Jesseca doing images from Tetsuo: The Iron Man (my review: http://sinistersimian.blogspot.com/2015/01/tetsuo-iron-man-shinya-tsukamoto-1989.html) and she thought it might be a good idea.  I thought the audience would be too small but she says it's the niche markets that are thirsty for a market that hasn't been oversaturated.  I don't do landscapes, everyone does still lifes...anything Shinya Tsukamoto hits that venn diagram sweet spot of cult interest and my own passions.  There are three Tetsuos movies to work from (four, if you count Tsukamoto's experimental films prior to theatrical releases).  I'd be even happier to do work from A Snake of June (http://sinistersimian.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-snake-of-june-shinya-tsukamoto-2002.html).
Tsukamoto does have a following, but not as large as the group who've only seen Tetsuo.  I'd be happy to draw from all of his films... Tokyo Fist, Bullet Ballet, Gemini...I've done reviews for all of them except Kotoko and Nobi aka Fires on the Plain (still haven't seen Fires) but Snake is always my fave. 

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15 minutes, rough shading of the hand.  Falling asleep because I slept too little.  Might be from eating too, food puts me out like a knock-out drug  but I've been  doing better with that lately.  Losing weight should help bring my numbers down.  I hope someone back home finds which box my test strips are in, I would recognize what I labelled the box as if they  have it.  "Testing" or something like that.

(outside for a while)

One of the things I like about the Mitchell piece is that her hair seems to me a touch stylistic.  I want to do more like that, move more of my work in that direction.  When does a flourish add to a piece and when is it out of place?  I think that if it works, if it adds a flavor that meshes, then it isn't an addition but an integral part of the whole. It's not a flourish anymore.

I also like the leather jacket.   After many false starts, visual gibberish, and a ton of erasing it really did finally come to be a leather jacket.

Pope Francis and Sharon Mitchell both in the same post and both treated with respect and admiration.  Never thought you'd see that, didja?

 Blogger.com is not set up to mark individual posts here as NSFW, so I would have to crop the picture.  Show you her hair but not much of the jacket.  It's been almost half a year since I posted to a different blog that's NSFW, though the Mitchell drawing was the only image on it with nudity.  It's the only one I've ever done with nudity...damn, so much time wasted, one of my favorite subjects and I never did a drawing?

Here's a different example, from when I began the drawing for Scott.  I am further along than this but don't have a photo on my flash drives any further along.  This is the kind of thing I've been talking about, getting a feel for the textures and the way they fold as they hang on a body.  Feel the material, feel the way it moves.

That's from a much larger tablet, that one brother alone is a roughly the size of the Francis image.  The picture is of four brothers in front of their boat.  I have two of the brothers done and much of the boat.  You see the initial tracing for coordination, while the trace marks for the second brother have been erased almost entirely as I was about to begin drawing him.  The background should hardly be there at all in the final picture, more indicated than drawn.  We'll see.  I hope to have it in a couple of weeks so i can start in again.  It became impossible to work on it much at home.

This is the fluid kind of work I can do, that I really love to see in my own work.
Below is Sharon.  You can see the shading trail off where I was still working her sleeve.  I really like what was going on with her hair.

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Almost there, hands partly done.  22 and a quarter hours.

Edgy, or Tips on Pencils

May 13th

I heard Jesseca pounding stakes into the spot where the Oak was transplanted so that it will have re-enforcement to stand until it takes root and the soil around it repacks.  I never know when to go out and offer help...gardening is one of her passions, so it's often her alone-time.  I sit here drawing, it's the same thing.  I wouldn't want anyone to help me draw even if there was something for them to do.

(Oh, I guess it was the birch tree she was planting instead.)

I just snapped the lead on the .3mm pencil I was using.  That happens a lot, this stuff is so thin and brittle.  You'd say it's a pecil that's all point - I always say it's all point.  That's not true though.  Think of a wooden dowel.  If it's just been sawn it may have a crisp edge to the ends.  Sand them down and the're a little rounded.  .3mm isn't very large but if you look at it under a microscope you'll see that it has volume.  That end may be harsh or it may be soft.  When I'm using it for smooth shading I want it soft.  Best yet if I can keep the tip from leaving the surface of the paper at all.  That's the trick to leaving an unbroken field instead of scribbly marks.  If the tip isn't a little rounded your shading is going to be darker than you want.  Practicing how much pressure you use is another factor, but I want to warn you about the harshness of the tip itself.  Like I said, I just broke the one I was using.  A couple of clicks on the pencil and it feeds me more, but now it's got that crisp edge to it now.  If I am shading and go from using a worn tip to a freshly broken one in the middle of a field I'm going to have a noticeable difference that will have to be corrected before I can continue.  It will have to be erased and redrawn.  Worse than just producing dark lines, it may dig a physical scar in the surface of the page.  Those are hard to hide - hard to erase, harder  or impossible to fill with the correct tone once you've erased.  What you need is a bit of scrap paper handy.  Do a short scribble on it to knock that edge back off the tip, or use the new tip elsewhere where there's a spot you really do want a crisp line.   If you can see minute details (and why else would you be  using a mech with such a fine point?), you'll notice the tipe broke at an angle.  rotate the pencil so the the flat of the diagonal is parallel to the paper.

Erasers:  you'll want to take the cap off the clicky end of the pencil so that you can use the eraser.  ALWAYS put the cap right back on after, IMMEDIATELY, because using that eraser is a habit you'll perform without even looking.  You'll remove the cap only to discover the cap was already off and you've just taken out the eraser.  Oops, too late, all that lead has just spilled out of your pencil.  Some of your lead fillers/pellets have snapped, more are likely to as you go on a treasure hunt to find them all.  Have several erasers of your choice next to you, like those pink erasers.  You can use them to dab at shaded fields to sorta 'ghost' them a touch.  It will be inconsistent but lends a nice watercolory feel.  You can go with that or touch up it up with pencil to even it out a bit, but it's good to do if your shaded patch has a border that's more defined than you want it to be or you've gone just a tad too dark.

Also, you'll need clean erasers of that kind to clean up the negative space as you go and when you finish.  I've been using a barrier (practice safe drawing, kids) between my hand and the page, on areas where I did the  lightest work with hard leads, and still it has smeared the paper a but and left it kinda sooty or smoggy.  Now it looks pristine again and the image really pops.

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Well...umff.  I dunno.  20 hours, I'm getting the work in but that's not the same as getting it done.  My work is off today.  Smooth but not smooth enough, light but not light enough.  Working the pellegrino, and so far the shading just looks ugly to me.   The shades on paper are not becoming cloth that hangs on a body, just marks on paper.  Maybe I'll feel it better after I've been away from it some hours.  Feel I've nearly made a hash of that side.  I've ghosted it with an eraser, and I've used my fingertip to smear it a little, as much as I dare.  That's a trick I used to use a lot, these days I try to avoid it.  Not telling you not to, though, use every tool you can and see what works.  Just make sure your fingertips are clean as you don't want oil, pencil residue, or anything else dirtying the paper.  The 'anything else' might introduce a color stain that'll never come out!

At first glance you wouldn't notice that I'd added anything.  Well, that's better than having a glaring error.  I did knock the tone just a little more, just now, so I'm a little more okay with it.  It makes me wonder whether I shouldn't have omitted some of the shading.  That's one of the editing choices one makes.  Hmm.  There's some more to go, they will probably give the flow that's needed...or...there';s one fold I could remove, taking a risk on how that will affect the others.  Okay, leaving that side too blank would cause an imbalance toward the image's other side, with nothing to counter the sleeve and elbow.  Plus it's still light enough that it doesn't distract, even looks nearly blank until you look right at it.  As cloth goes it is unquestionably white and clean.

Better study the photo again, I  suspect the tones under the chin may need deepening to match those under the nose and nasolabial folds.  Chis doesn't look fully dimensional to me the way it is.  Uh-huh, which should probably mean to do that whether the photo indicates it or not - the drawing demands it. Put the finished image ahead of the reference.  I should have added a highlight to the left eye even though there isn't one in the photo.

Yeah, I don't think I'll take a picture of it tonight.  I hate to chalk that up as a day's work but that's where it is, been at it for some hours on and off.  Quarter after four, and I'll try to put it away for awhile.  The seas are in turmoil under the surface.

Look at that smile on his face!  I almost feel as if he's encouraging me.  Alas it's not enough to settle my current feelings. 

The 11th Hour

May 8th
Watched the  series finale of Penny Dreadful, it...did not improve my mood.  Spoiler alert, this beautiful, heartfelt, brilliant series is a fucking downer.

Anyway, this to me is the work I love, the only work that's mine.  It's all I want to do.  If only I can.  If I can make enough with it to be all I need.  I don't need to be rich, just to know I'll never be homeless.  I want my things.  I want a place for them and a place to be, and to have my own food.  To know the situation is stable and secured, and to know I'm wanted.  I wonder how long that will take and if I can get there.

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May 10th.  As expected, didn't work on this yesterday.  This morning I'm almost 11 hours in.  Overcast day, the light hasn't been the best for it but now it's a little brighter.  I'm showing this stage precisely because I do not want to show this stage.  A lesson, though for you or for me I don't know.  Point is, I've been doing my best to do the tonal changes as I see them but as I've lain them down they just seem splotchy to me.  I've yet to work them in a way that convinces me of the play on light as the fabric changes planes.  The individual patches of shading aren't adding up.  If it's a lesson for students then I guess I'm saying  that being at a point like this is okay.  That area isn't done yet  (still that last triangle at the cuff to work), so don't fret or be uncomfortable with it.  Take the time, take the space, take the detail in context with the rest.  What looks right  helps what doesn't.  You (I) might look at the photo again for that, or disregard it and try to fix the drawing disregarding the reference - whichever way your mind can make the fabric and lighting credible.  I've already taken libertines with the shading.  As long as the impression you're after comes across, it doesn't have to be an exact reproduction.   For my own sake, it may help to stare at this pic on screen instead of the actual drawing on paper.  Why that works, I don't know...psychological?

Pay attention to the seams.  Some seams are inside the fabric and you won't see hard contour of thread.  All the same, the cloth will naturally show there's another layer beneath it.  Or a seam may be too fine for the camera,  the way the cloth moves outward from that seam will still indicate it.  You don't have to draw a line!  Let your shading work for you.

Okay, the more I look at it right now the less I see how to fix it and the less I like it.  Time to do something else for a while.

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HA!  I accidentally inverted the image in Wordpad and it looks fucking awesome that way!  Makes me feel a little better with it. : )  

Have now adjusted the eyes. I had them close, you wouldn't have been able to tell.  

I wonder what would happen if I took a reference image, inverted in, drew the invert, scanned it, then inverted that back...how would that look?  Would the effect be worth pursuing as an art piece?  After all, the piece itself would remain inverted, and only the print(s) would have the finished effect I'd intended...rather rendering the piece itself as incomplete or unfinished. 

Buddy spends a lot of time sleeping on my bed now.  He's right at a corner between two windows and the weather is getting warmer.  There's also a warm thick fuzzy purple blanket.  I'm happy to have his company, but I do have to make sure he  doesn't paw before he settles in. 

Treading Water

April 29th.  Checked Etsy, small 'artist trading cards'  really do get  sold.  Many of the artists who do my kind of thing have a limited success on Etsy, seems many only make a few sales.  Jesseca's right, I need to find a market that's hungry.  Better still if I can find a subject that I feel as passionate about as my buyers.  If I stick with pencil and do my best work I can ask a fair bit more - not that the color works I'm currently doing don't take a lot of time and  effort, but I'm new at them and don't feel I'm getting the most consistent, solid results.  Prints tend to go for a few dollars each, hardly enough to cover postage, but originals of  decent work can  run better.  Eh - provided someone buys.  Some of them just sit there.  Now, Jesseca's work always sells, her page clears at a good pace...but she has made her rep in a market that was unfulfilled when she began.   She does beautiful work that's  consistent, and she has her own distinctive voice.  https://www.etsy.com/shop/ladybuckthorn

Currently working another 2.5" x 3.5", a partial nude of Sharon Mitchell laying in bed (she's just waking up in the morning), working from a low-quality screencap from a  source of even poorer visual clarity.  Not sure if I can post here when done...I don't want to mark this blog as having adult content if it means I can't "share" the post.  Will have to see if I can mark individual posts as NSFW, though it really is an innocuous image.  Then again, I've yet to see if the picture will turn out well anyway.  I'm having to interpret some of the details, and that might result in something interesting. 

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After 10 PM, same day, had to stop a few hours ago.   Have been at it since morning with a few breaks, and was on the verge of a headache.  Mostly, I hit a point where instead of improving the picture i was starting to harm it.  Now there's at least one spot that may turn out muddied.  Unff.  It will look fixable in thee morning.  See, such a small size may make it seem easy or quick - it isn't.  This one is a challenge, so I know it's worth doing.

Wondering if Tetsuo: the Iron Man drawings would sell.  I'd have to emulate the same tones, it's pretty high-contrast and grainy.  Ink would be better but pencil is what I do.  I would totally do metrogirl.  Might not be much of an American market for Tsukamoto in general, but Tetsuo is still a cult hit.

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May 4th.  The past few days have felt unproductive.  Been working on applying for assistance, and watching a lot of instructional videos on YT about painting, sculpting, and molding & casting.  Some of them have been useful, learned some techniques to try but still feels like I've just spent two or three days being utterly unproductive, wasted time.  The image of Sharon Mitchell looks good from a  distance, meaning I've worked out the shapes and shading, but will need paint to smooth out the rough areas.  I've too little experience with paint to feel up to it yet, trying to psych myself up.  Should force myself to draw instead.  Feeling weary, a little depressed.      I'm getting by, I just don't see the point. 

Never recall much of dreams, most have not been bad though none have been good or happy either.  Neutral at best but for those that remind me of what I've lost.  There have been none of Dana in any fashion: not Dana herself, no proxies, no symbolism relating to her, no hypnagogia, no anything.  : ( 
On the upside I've lost twentyfive pounds since coming to NY.  Eating habits have changed radically.  Hope it continues.

Looking for an image to post...don't like to post without images, I feel like I owe that to anyone who looks in, kind of cheating people if I don't give them at least something to look at.  Sorry.  I can't produce new stuff that quickly.  Even when I was at school it took a while to do a drawing, and that was when I was at it constantly.   

Still don't have more of my supplies yet.  The next thing I want sent is my sculpting putties and clays.  On days where I can't get into the zone for drawing or painting, I could work on psychical objects.  That would help me to not feel like I'm in a slump, keep me at something. 

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The Mitchell image is not a failure in that it is turning into an education.  As an art project, if I were a teacher I'd give it a D as it stands currently.  Here's the problem:  the trouble spot now looks smooth but has so much paint on it that it hasn't the luminosity of the rest - acrylic opposed to watercolor.  Colors still muddy, unattractive to look at.  Time to let it dry thoroughly again before I try altering the colors...and I'll have to go over the rest with acrylic as well.  I would like to do this again in watercolor later, because I really loved that luminosity.  Oh, FFS, the entire reason I liked this image was the way light played in it!  some of it is overlit to the point the details are washed out, and some of it is in deep contrasty shadow...and her face and body are right in the middle, causing interesting shadow play on her shoulder and breast, and making her facial expression enigmatic...is she sad or happy?  I can't tell. 

I've learned a technique for keeping a moist pallette.  Practice is showing me how much and how little water to use.  Some of these cards are for watercolor, and some are for acrylics and oils.  I haven't dug into them yet.  Learning not to let the page buckle from moisture, that's another trick I'll need to know for salable work. 

Normally working on art would help lift me out of a low mood, but when my art is also in a funk it makes things worse.  Can't find the zone to draw, and the painting is trouble. 

Halloween

Not sure I've ever posted this collage I did for a Halloween tape I made in the '90s (a mix of movie quotes and appropriate music).  I'd very much like to do another collage if I can gather some material to work from.   I made tapes two consecutive years, so made two collages.  This was the better of the two .  The bottom has been lost because the place that made the copy couldn't fit the full image to the dimensions allotted.  After I had the piece assembled, I printed it in B&W then hit it with watercolors.  Then I had the poster made, 11"x 17.

The first of my art supplies did arrive, however we had to guess at which box had the drawing for Scott and the reference pic I'm working from.   That box also has several finished pieces I want very much to keep, so I don't want it getting lost in the mail.   Well, it's not lost but it is still at home.  The box that arrived has one tablet is good for medium sized portraits, and I have my pencils.  I also have the smaller masonite board, so I'm figuring out what image to paint on it.  I don't have the crayons yet and don't want to wait for them.  I have some acrylics and can get more, so that's the way to go.  I have one image that I might  go with (an extra on the 80's Twilight Zone, drummer in a nightclub) but  I'm still looking for the moment.

Spent the morning watching Siouxsie and the Banshees vids in quarter time, writing down timestamps for images to draw and/or paint.  There's one interview with Siouxsie Sioux that has decent detail, enticing colors and textures.  I think I want to do several, maybe smaller portraits.  Ah...choices.  This id in hopes of a sale to a Siouxsie fan, maybe a Goth devotee.  Jesseca is thinking Goth folk could be a lucrative market if I do some Goth icons.  So, that in mind, the portrait needs to be instantly recognizable but also recognizably the spirit she projects.  "There is a fun, flippant side to me but I would much rather be known as the Ice Queen."   Do an image search on her and you'll see tons of shots of her as humorless.  Yeaaaaaaah...but I see her playful side in interviews, hear it in her lyrics, it even peeks through in performance.  She isn't a dedicated nihilist, her heart's not in it.  Honestly, I'm kinda bored with all the dour shots of her.  I have two screencaps I like that are more fun, one of them is a self-parody of her death-personification.  But would that sell as well as ...well, the usual?  Eh.  I have a few of those marked as well.

I'm getting ready to do a small Strawberry Korsakoff, see if I can get Scott to take it to the coffee shop.  I'd like to do a handful of small cards in different media and send them to Portland.    Jesseca has some Mod Podge she's not using.  Still looking for more variety in foil.   I'm more and more tempted to flat-out copy Chagall's style for Mina knowing it won't look like his anyway, though I hate to have it be a total knockoff.

There's an artist's co-op in town which would let me trade time behind the counter for a showing, provided they approve my work.  I've looked in, at the mo they have all pastoral and still life (along with jewelry and other 3D art).  I should play to my strength, which is portraits.  So what personages might sell?  I've got a Pope Francis to draw.  Marilyn Monroe, Jesseca suggested.  Man, I've  three images of her I really want to do in a book back home in Portland.  Damn.

Almost done working out the details on Hatshepsut.  Did I explain that one already recently?  It's riffing off a shot of a  ruined/reconstructed bust I saw in National Geographic.  All I need is to add a uraeus and work out the cloth of the headdress.  The face is mapped out, including resized eyes.  The bust is a bit stylized - eyes a little too large, features too smooth, no epicanthic folds.  She loses some mystique when you add those back in.  I wonder... that stylized eye makeup, was that for Egyptian art alone or did pharaohs really wear it?  Did they shave their actual eyebrows?  She's got a delicate smile, too, that could easily turn into a smirk if I'm not careful with it.  It's not an outright smile, ambiguous...could be amused or could be unhappy.  I'd include attribution to the photographer but I no longer have the issue.  I don't know what the real Hatshepsut looked like, and I don't care.  I just want to draw the person who might have been the model for this particular bust.

(edit) No, they did not shave off their eyebrows  except  when in mourning for their pet cats.  So if their actual browlines didn't match the usual dimensions seen in their art, did they adjust the makeup to fit their faces or did they cover their eyebrows with skin-colored makeup in favor of the painted brow?  And how should I approach this in  my drawing?  I certainly don't  want two sets of brows!  Nor do I care to Caesar Romero the pic.

The Two Times I Overcame a Block

The  following is a post I had written elsewhere.  It's 5:30 in the morning.  I've been laying in bed since 8 last night, wide awake, nowhere near sleep.  Can't shut off my mind.  I've been hurt and am at one of my lowest points, but I'm still going.  I'm surrounded by people who insist on believing I want to survive.  There are just one or two I wouldn't hurt for the world.  And I'm not the only one hurting.  If this can help someone, even me, I offer it.

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The second time I overcame a block was pretty undramatic, just flexing muscle memory.  I had a photo of Jesseca that I wanted to draw...funny, all this time later, I know longer recall how I was going to render it except that it specifically was not going to be pencil.  Probably pen and ink, simple lines and  blocks.  The point was specifically not pencil because - ugh - too long away, too daunting.  But I got to the folds of the jacket she was wearing and...juuuuuuuuust couldn't help getting drawn in by them, really, really wanted to dive in and explore them.  So I ended up with the first finished pencil drawing since probably Franklin.  Let's see, that was (I think) 2009.   That's a hell of a block.  25 years.  But I did it.

The first time, though...that's another story.  I warn you right now that it's very uncomfortable, very private and personal.  Intimate.  I offer it to the depressed, the hurt,  the lonely, the blocked, to any who may be helped by it...but above all I offer this to Dana Cooper, an enigma and beloved friend, cherished and badly missed. I write this as a spell from my soul and set it free unto to the world, may it heal where it needs to heal.  May it find Dana's heart.

As high school came to a close, I didn't know that I had depression.  Neither did anyone else, so I got yelled at  a lot for the piles of homework I didn't do.  No one could say I wasn't paying attention in class, because I aced the tests and knew the material, but when it came to transforming a blank page with the info in my mind it always worked the other way around. (Tryin' to keep this short and give you the basics, but I do need to set the stage.)

By the end of '84, Dana had left for L.A. via a holiday in Europe.  She sent a few postcards, and I discovered that when I tried to write her the same thing happened as with the homework.  I  couldn't make it happen.  It was about this time I fully admitted to myself that I was head-over-heels in love with her, and wondered how I'd managed to keep that squelched.  In love?  I wanted to marry her!

I did a handful of plays, including an independent sci-fi bit in which I met and fell in love with Lori Hamilton, who by strange coincidence I had never know at Franklin.  She was class of '83.  By the end of that year, 1985, Lori also was gone - just packed up and vanished, no word to anyone, no way to reach her.

I was still attempting to draw, less and less, and never finishing anything.  I did a small painting, and several pen and ink works - posters for plays, print ads for White's Collectibles.

In 1986 I had an unusual dream.  I dreamt of an acquaintance from school.  She was a ta a mall (in the dream), we met and said hello.  This was someone I had never seen anywhere save one class in one year of school, and never expect to see her again.  The very next day I went to a different mall from than the one in the dream.  She was there, we met, said, hello, and that was that.

My friend Jesseca would say that was a testing of the signal to see if I was tuned in and paying attention.  A number of minor incidents of the same sort followed, inconsequential but fun.  Skeptics of ESP like to argue that believers who've experienced it have a prior bias: they want to believe it because it's fun.  The barrage of dreams that lasted throughout 1986 were neither wanted nor fun, and I desperately tried to believe that ESP was not real.

I will not detail these dreams (that's you knocked over with a feather, right?) except to say that they all took place in L.A.  Some were about Dana, and gave me no real information at all except that she was miserable and apparently isolated.  The rest were about Lori, and those were rich in details.  There was also an evolving and consistent narrative concerning the nature of the scene she was immersed in and the company she was keeping. 

These were not normal dreams.  They had an intensity like few I'd  ever had before.  I'd awaken fully from them, convinced that they were actually taking place.  The dreams were not strictly literal - that is, they still had bits of dream-embroidery about them - but the meat of them was overwhelmingly real.  A mutual friend of Lori's, Robert, began to appear in the dreams.  He would try to persuade her to save herself from the situation, and she'd laugh him off.

My friends, these two women I was madly in love with, were in trouble and I had no way to help them.  I made more attempts to write to Dana but the block was firmly in place.  Lori, I had no one to contact to find her.  I began trying distance myself from the dreams.  I mean...they're just dreams.  Be real.   Lori could be anywhere in the world, why would she pick L.A.?  And then another dream would hit.  It was irrational how guilty I felt.  Dreams, really.

A pattern began early that year.  I began to lose sleep.  Those hated dreams, I tried to stay awake days at a time to avoid having dreams.  I would raid a local video rental outlet for movies of all sorts to binge-watch.  I could make it awake for the better part of a week.

But still the dreams would come.  All year for a year. 1986.   Then I stopped having them.
1987 was uneventful until nearing the end, Winter, when I had a surprise phone call from Robert.  I asked if he'd heard any news of Lori, and he said "Man, you better sit down..."  When Lori had left Portland at end of '85 she'd gone to Los Angeles.  From there Robert proceeded to lay out her story, what he knew of it.  The details were the same as from my dreams, with a few variations.  Lori had been in trouble, willfully, self-destructively, and when Robert arrived on the scene and tried to persuade her to help herself, she laughed and ignored him.  Eventually, though, she did come to a sense of herself and extracted herself from all of it.  That was around the time my nightmares had stopped coming.

I could not have known any of this...but I had.  It all came to me in my sleep.
(So...the dreams of Dana?  They were real too?  But they had told me nothing, I didn't know what had troubled her so!  And were they too resolved, if no more bad dreams called to me?)

Lori had returned to Portland.  She was having trouble meeting with most of her old friends for personal reasons, but she was doing  well.  I asked where I met leave a letter for her and was told she often came to her father's house.  I wrote her a letter - in itself a huge breakthrough but not the one I'm building toward.  My art was long gone by then, no longer even trying. 

I didn't hear back from Lori.  Which is...about as far as I care to delineate that memory.  It triggered the depression that had been growing in me.  It was perfectly reasonable for her part, I must have been an association to a past she wasn't ready to engage with yet.  But for my psyche it was too much.  I'd spent a year terrified for her and she couldn't even say 'hello'.  I crashed. 

I began having fantasies about my death, about how she might feel when she learned. These became suicide fantasies.

Now...it's one thing to read or hear about depression clinically, or even anecdotally, as I had many time before.  It's another thing to be inside it.  It wasn't something I recognized.  Part of me kept thinking there must be something wrong with me, but I kept that brutally crushed.  There are people out there with REAL problems!  How dare I claim to have a problem?  How privileged!  Besides, I'm just...fantasizing.  I'm just indulging in a little fantasy, the way someone might do putting on a sad movie when they're down.  (No.  People, no.  Readers...no.)  Or the way you can't leave a loose tooth alone but keep nagging it with your tongue.

This is how the brain-chemistry imbalance feeds itself, pushing the balance even further out of alignment until it reaches a critical point.  Listen, please, if you reading this recognize yourself in what I've written, if you're there now - whatever you do, you must stop those thoughts.  Do whatever you can to distract your brain.  And tell someone.  Your thoughts will kill you. Literally.  Stop feeding the imbalance.  Right the boat.  They're not just fantasies, and you do have the absolute right to claim this problem for yourself.  You're not alone.  Plenty of us have been there. 
I'm reaching the nadir.

I had heard of a phenomenon called the "suicidal urge".  It's not a general leaning but an explicit impulse.  Talk is that if you've never felt it, you cant know just how primal it is.   That's the kind of things that sounds like hyperbole to everyone else.  One night in February 1988 I found out for myself. 

I had taken to sitting in my room for hours at a time, inanimate, overwhelmed with longing and rejection and pain and a loss for answers.  My mind wandered.  My mind was numbed.  My mind was battered.  Then, suddenly, for a moment, my mind was sharp, clear - get up.  go to the kitchen, get a knife, bring it back, put it to my wrists.  It wasn't how I wanted to go, but...I could do it.  Easily.  Right now.  Middle of the night, no one will see and ask questions.  What is this clarity, is this what they call the "suicidal urge"?  It's like my brain has produced a batch of chemical imperative and flooded my system with it, an "off-switch" message stored in the lizard brain and invoked when things pass  a critical point of no return.  Before it had been speculative, fantasy, but I could.  Right now.  But it would have to be right now because I've heard that the urge is fleeting, that it only lasts a moment and then is gone.  That's probably right, the chemical "shut down" command would break  down quickly, dissipate, so if I'm going to it needs to be right now.  I don't want to be walking back to my room with a knife in my hand and then not be able to use it, that would be humiliating.   I want this, this relief, finally, I don't have to go through this anymore.  I can actually feel my right arm plunging itself toward my left forearm and elbow!  This is fascinating, my body is locked and won't move but I can feel the tension of my right arm struggling to be free and use a knife I never went and got.  I can't make myself stand up.  None of my muscles will move.

And then it was over.  As intense as it had been, I was in a dense fog again.  I remember thinking absolutely nothing, just getting out of the chair and walking to my bed, laying down and falling into a dreamless sleep.

I don't know how many days it was after that that I ran across a lecture on PBS about depression.  I put it on as background noise while I did something else.  It's a marvel how the mind works...sometimes it will do something that's brilliant in a Homer Simpson kinda way.  As I listened, I recognized myself as the subject.  Hey!  This thing I've been telling myself isn't a real problem?  It's got a name!  It's a diagnosis!  I'm not imagining it after all!  Here's the 'D'oh!' part of it: it was such a relief that a great lot of the depression lifted!

Part of what had kept me from writing to Dana all those years was the fear of having to explain to her why I had remained silent for so long.  Simply, I couldn't.  I didn't have the understanding of it.  Learning that I had depression solved a lot of that.  It unlocked something.

There was a night when I was walking one of my nieces home in the dark, and we talked about things...I spoke about Lori and about Dana...and as I was talking I became aware that in the back of my mind I had already made the decision to write to her.  More, that I was fully capable of it.  The letter wouldn't be perfect and didn't have to be.  She might reject my explanation and my apology, but that would be okay.  If she didn't get it, I did and would have made the effort.  When I got home, I wrote to Dana that very night.  It came back undeliverable a week and a half later, but I took it to her former address here and tried again.  Her father Ralph met me at the door and said he'd pass it along to her.  By that point I had already written a  second letter, and put them both in the same envelope.  It was a review of the D.O.A. remake that had just been released.  Dennis Quaid finds out he's been poisoned and has days to live.

She wrote me back, happy to hear from me.  I didn't tell her that I was on love with her.  Or that I'd been suicidal, or about Lori, or about the ESP.  Dana keep asking me if...how did she put it?  I have the letters but it hurts to look at them...she kept thinking I was holding something back and urged me to open up.  When I finally did it was too late.  I think in hindsight, when she sensed me hiding something she was  thinking of something else  entirely.  But I wouldn't know about that for a few months yet.


*******
For Dana Marie Cooper, with deepest love and admiration
12:34 AM
11/26/2017