Owie

I was feeling pretty good until I picked up one of my cats and he decided to try to disembowel me with his hind legs. I was so pissed at that cat, and he still hasn't come out of hiding. Of course the other cat is all spooked now and has been prowling around the house looking for the source of the sudden menace. More school people here.

Soggy wednesday

There are some things I could rant about, but it's pointless. With regard to the school, I am a very small voice, and as I have noted on here before, people at my son's school do their best to ignore me. I don't fit the mold. But this whole military culture is pretty weird and much of the time I find it so stifling. There are these dutiful but lonely housewives with their stupid woman's vanity, their husband soldiers off at war, big stones of men with easy smiles and big torsos, men whose broad masculine bellies will make that wide decline into middleage, their kids running around occasionally shouting obscenities at me from the buses, these kids who get served the smiling status quo every day by teachers who are mostly local people, born and raised in Hawaii. The neighborhoods are worse, filled with gossipy, nosy people, more like Tim Burton's cartoon vision of the suburbs. I don't know, definitely sick of it.

Slow slide into the holidays...

I feel like this next month or so I'll mostly need to be on automatic pilot to ge through it. Can't think too much about all this other crap. I can't remember when we have had a normal holiday. This year will be no different. My son has been happy, so I'm doing something well around here, and he's getting around some of his math kinks. Hooray!

Peeps

Just some people, like usual.

Bowie Dream

So I had this great dream the other morning. I'm in a room with David Bowie, a spacious lab warehouse thing with morning light pale blue streaming though tall windows. There are these lab tables all around, and I walk over to his table. He is happy to see me, and he cups my face in his hands, and says "you are the cosmic wonder." After that, we hoist the planet Jupiter, which is the size of a large beach ball, into a washing machine. He asks me if it's too heavy, I tell him no, but that it's like the myth of Atlas. He asks me in what way, and I say you know with the titans. There are swimming pools again, I walk over to one and dive in from a very tall iron diving board, its ornate like something out of the 19th century. When I enter the water, I become a woman astronaut making a space voyage to another solar system on the far side of a large red planet. She has to make the descent into the atmosphere which is oily and turbulent, with flashes of orange lightning which can be seen from the craft in orbit around the planet.

And thats that. I taken a few days off from the studio, feeling great. But Devin and I keep seeing the ghost around the house.

Quiet

It's the night before turkey day in the turkey-filled neighborhood and all is so quiet, quieter than it usually is, no one hacking up large chunks of phlegm from their lungs, no one revving ATV's as loud as they can, no mynah birds tittering in their sleep. There are sirens in the distance from the medical angels rushing to heart attack victims, but not much else. These are more folks from school, a very normal man doing his best to ignore me out of existence, a woman in love with her skinny self, and another woman trying hard not to be noticed while looking at me.

Easy listening left hand turns...

No questions asked...

Nothing so serious

So, I have the division dog, and some folks waiting in line for a Wii, and yes, I was waiting in line, too.

Fallnotfall

The last few days I have had terrible longings for the trees of my youth, the woods I used to explore when I lived in Tennessee. Yesterday I was talking with Devin about gullies with vines hanging over them that you could swing out across, blackberry brambles, about the haunted barn near the high school. Of course, all of that area now has been developed now, ugly suburbs where the thick brown woods used to be. I would go into those woods alot during the winter, which I don't even have the luxury of here in Hawaii, strange to talk about winter as a luxury. I guess when it's in your blood, in your past, its more of an essential thing, something to reconnect you to all that lost time.

Doctor doctor

Some folks at the doctor's office, we weren't there as long as I expected so I didn't get to draw as much as I wanted to, but Devin was happy that it was a short visit.

Pink Skies

Just another cloudy day inside...

Him and her

Just a man and a woman, I'm still tired, but Devin and I talked about the ghost today, and somehow it made us feel a little better about Faith being gone. I told Devin how it threw a crumpled napkin at my feet last night and how I saw it flitting by the kitchen this morning, and he talked about how he feels like it tucks him in sometimes at night. Faith mentioned seeing it once on the back porch and how it freaked her out, but I've never been scared by it, although one time it played peekaboo with me around a corner. That scared me a little. Most of the time it feels like having another pet around the house.

Plastic friends

For those of you who don't know, you can get these great pictures at Chucky Cheeses where the kids sit on this ride next to a plastic mouse and at some moment it spits out a photograph (the ride, not the mouse). When Faith and I took Devin to Chucky's in the states, I would collect these things, kids tossed them away and the floor around the ride was always covered in these grainy pictures of happy or bored kids. I found this one in a parking lot the other day, not anywhere near a Chucky Cheeses. It's a beautiful picture, but I definitely feel like the mouse today.

Away...

So I've been away for a few days, feeling kinda rotten. Mostly I just miss my wife, can't wait 'til I see her again. The Allison one is of my sister, got to see her ultrasound pics which were so cool, these little yellow grumpy buddhas sleeping in the darkness.