I recently got a divorce from my now ex-wife. After a year and two months she woke up one morning and decided it was over. A few days later her parents drove out from Oklahoma with a Uhaul trailer hitched to their mini-van and packed her up and took her home. This was happened just after we both graduated from college in may of 2007 and just days before we were to move to a cozy mill town outside of Baltimore, Maryland, which is where I am from and she spent months convincing me to move to.
After she left me I hung around Albuquerque, where we lived for a few months just moving through life. I worked at the news station that hired me part time after college for eight bucks an hour. That I graduated Summa Cum Laude, have six years of production experience and a certificate in video production meant nothing to them, or anyone else it seems(ed). As time passed I got a few promotions and was offered a position in the newsroom with a contract and a better wage 28 the first year 31 the second, that is thousands a year. I made twice that with no experience and no degree at the age of twenty-one.
As I spent most nights alone, my only friends in Albuquerque were men, I often thought of suicide and woke up stressed out at three a.m., thinking of how fucked up everything was. Sometimes I would cry uncontrollably when I would try to make sense of it all. Sometimes I would just pace or lay in bed, my mind running attempting to add up my life.
I kept wanting to leave Albuquerque, and I kept coming up with reasons why I shouldn’t. Many of these reasons were helped along by my friends. Some reasons had to do with my ex-wife telling me I couldn’t leave so the divorce would be finalized; others were friends and family telling me of the importance of my job or how Baltimore was the wrong place for me to go back to or how in these times just sitting still was the answer, until things got better. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
So I continued to stay, I couldn’t figure out how to move, I believed they were right. I was also fucking scared out of my mind of ending up homeless and hungry, and I had no idea where I wanted to go or how to get there. Especially, with boxes of art, a 7600 printer, 9- 5 foot by four foot prints from my thesis show and a mattress I had just bought before my wife left.
Then the day before my new promotion started I couldn’t sleep, again. My computer had just died. Just a hard drive deal, but when it died I realized all my artwork on disc, all my back up discs, all my programs had been accidentally taken to Oklahoma. My wife responded to the situation denying she had them.
As I lay in bed that night, after crying histaricly about my life. - Sometimes when I want to die I don’t even know where the pain comes from –I relized what some of the weight was, and maybe some of the problem, or the next step.
Once my wife left I had no idea who I was, in part because I had just tried to make a marriage work for a year, in part because I just graduated school, throw in being thirty and living in Albuquerque, 2300 miles from where I had spent the first 25 years of my life. All of my work for the last four years was about my identity, my identity in the landscape of America, seeing my country was somehow synonomous with with the evolution of myself, and moreover with understanding that I am who I am, where ever I am. Yet suddenly I had no idea who I was, only the feeling that I was dying. That where I was was never to get better. That I was suddenly not participating in my destiny, that fear had consumed me, that all my rejectionist ideals, the same ideals that allowed me to give a car back to a lender so I could use my money to make art, the same ideals that lead me to throw myself to the wolves and get into movie making, the same ideals that allowed me to wake up one day and move to Albuquerque, those ideals were buried, gone, forgotten. The Midwestern woman had one, she had the whole time we were married, tried to make me her middle class parents, she shunned me for being an artist even though she was one. That I believe is why she left. She didn’t think I could care for her the middle class way. And she’s right. But I am still walking around trying to assimilate.
And it is not working. So here is the next step, here is the weight. All this material crap, all this art, this bed this printer it just must go and so must I.
So I’m dropping it off on the loading dock of the Albuquerque Museum and getting in the car and driving to somewhere in the dead of winter. I just hope the car makes it. The last time I did this I made four years worth of bad ass art, which can be seen at www.colingabriel.com. This time I want a few movies along with whatever beautiful objects I can create that never fill up my house again. Attach to nothing.
I'll have my camera, maybe I'll keep my printer (doubt it)so, maybe I'll make the next "The Americans". I have always wanted too, too bad I don't have a Peggy.
As I start this journey I have no idea where I will end up. I will be receiving mail at my sisters house, cause she just bougtht it and she doesn’t have the one off gene that causes her to up and leave. I don’t know where I will go or really that I will even make it, but by next fall I hope to be in your graduate program furiously producing aesthetic pleasure that articulates an empathetic and evocative experience. And if I survive that maybe I will teach so I can have summers off an get paid to run through the landscapes of the world figuring out the human experience.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Sunday, November 25, 2007
some notes for Last Sunday
Apache glitter, 7000 feet above the sea, neal fallon screams clutch songs along the roads to nowhere, memories, thoughts, anger late mornings, too little bitterness, trapped in the desert air, wanting something else, not there, not here, sleep to appreciate the passing native lands, two dollars down to nothing, fifteen cents, but the machines won’t take change, green sea side quests crushing membranes through browns and greens blanketed with the harshest blues. No life in the barren sun soaked high desert valleys of the southwest, dreaming north shores , northwest, yippies squaking to better greendom, beliving analogies, with credit, with loans, with percentage rates, trust funds, 401ks, mutual, health care, rebel against the mainstream, in there new shiny diamond plated mainstream, white as white
Picks packed, front seat trio’s, dine grand children left to a chevy playground, elders waste away there federal aid to nowhere games, in nowhere casionos of apache glitter.
Just north as neal takes further away from anywhere haliburton sounds good to upcoming Christmas trees.
Neal fallon screams our way through seas of sage as the locals to nothing was e away there pocket change, I can’t shake my hate and anger for where I am, listening to anthems of where I’m fro, asking why
Rocks jet through the sky from seas of sage and dusty desert, arid lands of native myths games of cowboys and Indians livfe on amongst the dust and brush, landscape breaks with endless roads, dashed with ttanks and pipes, digging into the earth, sucking and filling and sucking and filling, empty nothing for hours and hours from anything near, lands of nothing in the wind, grass brown dirt blows with the trucks on the open road.
Neal fallon screams along alien landscapes far from the rivers and oceans we all once shared, no estranged twenty three hundred this way seven thousand another, up and above looking down on nothing familiar, sudden silvers and grey sling from endless brown with dots of green, a tuff green a green with no water, a green against the wind, a green battling the brown, wayning , wanting to give in but just not enough, a green of danger among dull blue patchy field s of sage
Café escrito, no doors, no windows, no gas for days that weave into weks and months and years becoming the past, shacks stand on land never wanted, nbot now, not then, not later,
Too much car, too much truck, never enough clutch, miles, hours, from anywhere at all, life lives, breaths apache casinoa, cash in the earth, cigarettes in tents, neal fallon screams across roads to nowhere, quick uturn, the head west past the café Escito, no lunch today for many days of many decades, just steel shacks, no ins, or outs, window look upon days gone by, thirty, forty back tail swings, dead ended tanker in fields of sage, seven thousasnd go hire, round and round a trail of dust, go higher. Up and up and bam, like a ton of bricks, to the west to the east, cowboy dreams of mexico and Indians, booty under tredes bad mans in band lands, sage brush and burritios, greens challenge browns, along graying b lues now all beaten by vista views.
Picks packed, front seat trio’s, dine grand children left to a chevy playground, elders waste away there federal aid to nowhere games, in nowhere casionos of apache glitter.
Just north as neal takes further away from anywhere haliburton sounds good to upcoming Christmas trees.
Neal fallon screams our way through seas of sage as the locals to nothing was e away there pocket change, I can’t shake my hate and anger for where I am, listening to anthems of where I’m fro, asking why
Rocks jet through the sky from seas of sage and dusty desert, arid lands of native myths games of cowboys and Indians livfe on amongst the dust and brush, landscape breaks with endless roads, dashed with ttanks and pipes, digging into the earth, sucking and filling and sucking and filling, empty nothing for hours and hours from anything near, lands of nothing in the wind, grass brown dirt blows with the trucks on the open road.
Neal fallon screams along alien landscapes far from the rivers and oceans we all once shared, no estranged twenty three hundred this way seven thousand another, up and above looking down on nothing familiar, sudden silvers and grey sling from endless brown with dots of green, a tuff green a green with no water, a green against the wind, a green battling the brown, wayning , wanting to give in but just not enough, a green of danger among dull blue patchy field s of sage
Café escrito, no doors, no windows, no gas for days that weave into weks and months and years becoming the past, shacks stand on land never wanted, nbot now, not then, not later,
Too much car, too much truck, never enough clutch, miles, hours, from anywhere at all, life lives, breaths apache casinoa, cash in the earth, cigarettes in tents, neal fallon screams across roads to nowhere, quick uturn, the head west past the café Escito, no lunch today for many days of many decades, just steel shacks, no ins, or outs, window look upon days gone by, thirty, forty back tail swings, dead ended tanker in fields of sage, seven thousasnd go hire, round and round a trail of dust, go higher. Up and up and bam, like a ton of bricks, to the west to the east, cowboy dreams of mexico and Indians, booty under tredes bad mans in band lands, sage brush and burritios, greens challenge browns, along graying b lues now all beaten by vista views.
last sunday draft 1
That’s the thing with the middle of nowhere. We were out, way out, far north and south and east and west of anything other than a casino in a tent. A quick left off a long road onto a path to tankers, land not mapped roads for oil, south of monuments, east of the res, no power lines, but there were homes, four walls with roofs and dogs and cars in the driveways and older cars, parts of cars, stoves and debris, even remnants of the last house, out there in the desert. But for now it’s just dirt trails to tankers, no maps, but he remembers where he went and we climb and wind up a big pile of New Mexican dirt, we rise and rise and suddenly off the map, of the road to the right and left, God. The proof that something divine exists, the proof that if you’d just get out of your own pansy fucking way, stop following each and everyday the road that’s paved, if you’d follow an aside, a path to something you just might find what you didn’t know you were looking for, what you never knew your life needed before you departed, if you just trusted and followed, went along with something that wasn’t sold to you, something that was not even in your gut,
You’d find a moment in time that was beyond your wildest dreams, and probably better than your Sunday plans anyway. So there we were, Neal Fallon screaming some clutch songs, bellowing Baltimore on some desert back road under a flag it never once acknowledged. And off to each side was a canyon grander than the grandest one in that Arizona parking lot. Rocks, hundreds of feet below teetered high up on narrow earth like Greek ruins piled in Athens. Not just a metaphor, on the edge of a cliff, rocks round; long and broken like sandstone concrete pillars.
Smooth rocks from oceans far gone scattered across the mesa that stopped and fell through formations defining spectacle, the sublime. Notions of the sublime, conversations, debates all stood in awe through the shrubs of a desert forest and across vast canyons that emptied smoothly into plains for miles to d’chay.
Hours of awe on the canyons edge, scouring roads snapping souls of indains gone by, maybe a cowboy too, into flashcard files, dust blown trails marking our path to families of Indians out in their yards, as much electricity as teeth and literacy, but pick up trucks, old and working on, each day, sure it’s not just a special Sunday after deed, new trucks pass by on roads to nowhere, no Indians but Spaniards, the modern day Marlboro man, no smokes just beer. Dusk cam down on the arroyo and we returned to south in which we cam, in which so many came, in which those early generations of Spaniards came, long before the white man, long after some Indians passed by, no predicated with ancient, only to land north and never be seen again,
You’d find a moment in time that was beyond your wildest dreams, and probably better than your Sunday plans anyway. So there we were, Neal Fallon screaming some clutch songs, bellowing Baltimore on some desert back road under a flag it never once acknowledged. And off to each side was a canyon grander than the grandest one in that Arizona parking lot. Rocks, hundreds of feet below teetered high up on narrow earth like Greek ruins piled in Athens. Not just a metaphor, on the edge of a cliff, rocks round; long and broken like sandstone concrete pillars.
Smooth rocks from oceans far gone scattered across the mesa that stopped and fell through formations defining spectacle, the sublime. Notions of the sublime, conversations, debates all stood in awe through the shrubs of a desert forest and across vast canyons that emptied smoothly into plains for miles to d’chay.
Hours of awe on the canyons edge, scouring roads snapping souls of indains gone by, maybe a cowboy too, into flashcard files, dust blown trails marking our path to families of Indians out in their yards, as much electricity as teeth and literacy, but pick up trucks, old and working on, each day, sure it’s not just a special Sunday after deed, new trucks pass by on roads to nowhere, no Indians but Spaniards, the modern day Marlboro man, no smokes just beer. Dusk cam down on the arroyo and we returned to south in which we cam, in which so many came, in which those early generations of Spaniards came, long before the white man, long after some Indians passed by, no predicated with ancient, only to land north and never be seen again,
Monday, November 12, 2007
Saturday -first draft, 1 reread
Curves and turns, twisting through mountain roads in upright modernity, small orange, almost box on four wheels the four of us, upright, crammed inside, burrito stench, breath trapped in glass, as we cross through Spain in America, handed down, occupied by the grown children of grown children of grown children, books, politics, theoretical thoughts fly through the air with memories of the last time, in the last life with that last lady, while with another lady, further through the American Spain into nowhere, remnants populated with passerby’s all traveling to nowhere in modernity, following paths followed by two legs on four legs, to remnants then modernity, of worship, conquest, the passing of information, now passed in cables and air, then where we are now, where our orange box on four wheels brought the four of us, to the remnants of information passed by two legs on four legs with swords, spears, dogs and guns to the houses where god was claimed to be the provider of information passed on by men selected to pass on selected by god to pass on information from men said to be selected by god who have given information to pass on to be said to have come from god. Across oceans, up rivers, through mesa’s and dry arid dust bowls of miles of nothing and everything fighting to be the fittest, to survive, from heavens through the sky across oceans up rivers across dirt dust and wind the with swords, slaves, trade, buildings amongst snakes they stood in a land far from their own, to pass on the word of god, in modernity, among the remnants of the word of gods travels across oceans, through deserts, up rivers, to men of other languages, men who’s gods spoke other languages, the remnants, roofless towers of dried mud, squared and stacked and stood, standing longer then the men and their information brought across oceans and up rivers, still standing in nowhere, once somewhere, but still Spain in America.
Starbucks cups amongst stacked dried squares of mud once used to claim territories for countries far from where we are now, from where I am now, from where my trash, my remnants of this morning’s consumption, lays among the remnants of many centuries old conquistadors, far from where they came from, far from where they are now. I am where they were far from them now, on a countries land, far from the country it is now. As she walks amongst us, me and the remnants, as they walk amongst us on the foreign soil of our home land, are our thoughts foreign to the soil. Does the soil remember the thoughts that were built among it by men from soil far from the soil they built upon. Were they foreign, were they thoughtless, did the soil recognize them, did it care, did the soil pick and choose, knowing who the natives were, or as the soil travels through the wind, did the soil believe the men did to, those who claimed the moving soil, stating it was here, did they blow through the wind as the soil did. Did the soil they claimed, move on, believing an American Spain was where it blew to as it landed miles away. Is Spain outstretched through miles of America, is Spain outstretched to the oceans that break on the Shores of America, did the soil of Spain in America blow to the ocean and rock away in the waves to Spain, did the soil have any reason to believe the men did not blow through the wind. D id the men blow through the wind like the soil but with words and swords and spears and dogs, boats, ships, horses, cars, planes, trains, bombs and rhetoric, are we all just blowing through the wind pausing long enough to believe we are doing something different. When we return to the soil we will blow through the wind as we always have, as our words have, as our memories have, as our conquests have, our bombs have, bullets have, hate has, love has, loneliness has, fear has, homelessness, wealth riches and gluttony, prayers and urine, sweat and sleep, these remnants stand, what is left, after what has left has blown through the wind and what stands blows through the wind as we blow through the wind upright, in upright boxes believing we are not blowing along with the wind, along with the soil.
Starbucks cups amongst stacked dried squares of mud once used to claim territories for countries far from where we are now, from where I am now, from where my trash, my remnants of this morning’s consumption, lays among the remnants of many centuries old conquistadors, far from where they came from, far from where they are now. I am where they were far from them now, on a countries land, far from the country it is now. As she walks amongst us, me and the remnants, as they walk amongst us on the foreign soil of our home land, are our thoughts foreign to the soil. Does the soil remember the thoughts that were built among it by men from soil far from the soil they built upon. Were they foreign, were they thoughtless, did the soil recognize them, did it care, did the soil pick and choose, knowing who the natives were, or as the soil travels through the wind, did the soil believe the men did to, those who claimed the moving soil, stating it was here, did they blow through the wind as the soil did. Did the soil they claimed, move on, believing an American Spain was where it blew to as it landed miles away. Is Spain outstretched through miles of America, is Spain outstretched to the oceans that break on the Shores of America, did the soil of Spain in America blow to the ocean and rock away in the waves to Spain, did the soil have any reason to believe the men did not blow through the wind. D id the men blow through the wind like the soil but with words and swords and spears and dogs, boats, ships, horses, cars, planes, trains, bombs and rhetoric, are we all just blowing through the wind pausing long enough to believe we are doing something different. When we return to the soil we will blow through the wind as we always have, as our words have, as our memories have, as our conquests have, our bombs have, bullets have, hate has, love has, loneliness has, fear has, homelessness, wealth riches and gluttony, prayers and urine, sweat and sleep, these remnants stand, what is left, after what has left has blown through the wind and what stands blows through the wind as we blow through the wind upright, in upright boxes believing we are not blowing along with the wind, along with the soil.
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