Falling Away With You.

Bitumen on board

Sold

60 x 65 cms

OK i know the title is a bit overtly romantic...but you try coming up with 300 different names for paintings that fit the images they represent reasonably well. I suppose this can only get worse as I get older, and to be honest I resort to going through all the songs on my computer and trying to find something that is cool, then changing it a bit. I think this one comes from a Mazzy Star song. Um. Not sure.
I sold this piece to a girl who knew evreything about me - in that she had read everything on my web-page. Which was flattering and a LEETLE scary, then just flattering really.
She was nice.
I invented the painting entirely - no model or even a window that looks like this, nor room nor drapery-sheet-thing.

More ranting... have been doing an awful lot of late. If you are really keen on the Catholic Church or are easily upset by profanity, I advise you NOT to read on.

2.00 am on a saturnsday morning. Saturn, of course, being the roman god of the hearth but more specifically Cronos, from whom he was adopted, chief of the titans before they were overthrown by the gods. It was foretold that one day his children would kill him, so naturally he ate them all whole, but his wife Rhea (the original earth goddess, Roman version of Gaia, also Greek) fed him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes and Zeus was raised by the centaur Chiron on far away Crete. Until he was fully grown, at which point he fed his father a potion to make him vomit up his brothers – Poseidon and Hades. There was a war between titans and gods… the gods won and the sea was given to Poseidon, the sky to Zeus, and the underworld to Hades. Then it gets complicated, but anyway that’s why we have Saturday. He was also considered a god specifically of corn so we should all eat our corn flakes on the weekend.
Though I think Cronosday would be better since the Greeks came up with it not the Romans.
Gentle light and soft chords in the night. I hereby celebrate Cronosday by eating a clonazepam. Also the feast of Saturnalia was held um lessee EXACTLY AT CHRISTMAS TIME. Which was settled on as Christ’s birth 450 years AD. I can’t imagine such a time. Such chaos and devotion, idea after idea held to the point of death, of torture, by so very, very many. The martyr’s courage does not lose its sadness nor power because I do not believe in its cause. It gains pathos, but it becomes something so exceptionally, harshly sad. From Christ’s first sacrifice. So sad. Peter crucified upside down as he felt (or was seen as) unworthy to emulate Christ. Paul offering his neck to the sword. James the great beheaded at the same time as his recanting accuser, offering the cups of their blood and skulls to the lord.

I hate this I hate to make this comparison. It is NOT a comparison but it runs lines similar sleek with pain and luminous with symbology to the point of swelling my mind with twists and flinches at the thought of such violence. Remember 1984? The book; Orwell, not the year with the ra ra skirts and torn stonewash and mullets and the school beatings. No, Orwell, who had typed out the last words of the novel in a shack in the far Hebrides without power or hot water in the freezing winter while he slid and coughed and hacked and typed and died from pneumonia.
There was a scene. I shall never forget. I shall NEVER FORGET. After torture, true torture, absolute and requisite with blood and personalised horrors… Winston Smith is asked what two plus two is. He answers “four” and is tortured. He is asked again. He answers “five” and is tortured and tortured. He tries many combinations of numbers to escape his fear; his real pain. The torture continues, is intensified. Winston Smith is beginning to lose his mind.
Finally when asked what two plus two equals, he screams out “WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE”. And he is free.

I am on seven different meds. I don’t know how high the dose is, but seven kinds the colours oh such colours. The lamotragine tastes like blueberries. I believe it is because it is used on children and not because it contains any actual blueberries. I have been on so many meds for so long that I have no idea what my personality is like if I am on NONE. If I even have one. I feel like ripping the paint from the ceiling drinking the turpentine in front of me smashing all the cups smearing truths across walls in a parody of wisdom “God made the world from the void but the void shows through” I feel like painting my ceiling with a night sky and then burning it like making intricate lines in forgotten scripts in nonsense rhymes in washing powder, like pushing my paint brush through my hand like swallowing every medication I have in the house JUST to see what happens like taking each of my paints and crafting beautiful lost runes across my innocent scarred skin. Like tearing into each of my paintings and showing SEE??? There is NOTHING BEHIND THEM.

“Babe… it seems so long… since you’ve been gone…”

Today I have gone for a run which really, really hurt, and cleaned a house. Well my house. I cleaned it to a degree of cleanliness heretofore unknown in houses of Paul, which still requires that there be paint on the fucking walls that I can’t get off and fuck the mopping I dunno where the fucking thing is anyway. There is probably some mopping secret that only clean women and gay guys know that I am unaware of. Detection of a note of wry bitterness may have entered the convolution of syntax, well fuck me perhaps it has perhaps I am perhaps acceptance is not a practice that right now I feel I can indulge in or even remotely poke with a long curved slimy stick. Fuck acceptance and fuck fighting I am settling for bitterness for today. Bitterness makes sense and makes for burned coffee and eat a lemon it’s great eat two do lines of lemon peel shove entire lemons up your nose live in a room of lemons squeeze them carefully and softly into each eye, go to the unemployment office and wring out each individual there into a bucket then drink the fucking thing. Let it dry in the weak sunlight, scrape it up and mix it with saline then shoot the fucker into your arm with a syringe.
Mind switch. Telethon appeal. I WANT to give money to TV STATIONS oh why can’t it be easier for me to give money to tv stations? And the CHURCH! I want to give money to support the propagation of the inappropriate arcane.
I think I have finally figured out why church architecture stopped developing in the 15th century. They thought it would provide an appropriate and succinct, deeply ironic (oh irony! In the face of happiness! Oh yes my favourite flavour, why is there no irony ice cream?) metaphor for the freezing of morality despite the incipient development of humanism. Nice one pope innocent whatever ix. There was one nice one who had all the birds in the Vatican killed because the noise really pissed him off. Well I say GOOD MOVE MOTHERFUCKER. More power to you. Go on go further oh but of course you did I had forgotten, lessee, how about the genocide of the Cathars, or oh yeah the crusades, that provides a nice little parallel – by the time they finally got to Jerusalem, both sides recorded the streets being ankle deep in blood.
Love
Thy
Fucking
Neighbour…
Or that the first crusade due to some whacky hermit, was actually composed of children and peasants and didn’t even make it past Constantinople before all dying. The second one was more impressive with illiterate knights actually eating an entire town. The cool thing about this was not only did they boil the fuckers up after (or as a means to) slaughtering them, and ATE them. They were actually Eastern orthodox Christians… oops. Well they couldn’t read the signs and must have got confused by the fact that they were no longer in France so therefore they must be evil and god should smite them or since he TENDS NOT TO APPEAR, particularly after the 4th c bc or so, it was up to them to boil the kiddies in a pot. All this at the pope’s behest. Oh, the one we have now must be raking his old nails down his face not to be able to do such things these days. Though more recently they did get to ignore everything the nazis got up to, and I am sure they are pretty happy about this killing of the infidel by our friends in delusion land with the guns. America America you suck so much America. Kiss my ass. I will build a bomb and explode it under my copies of life magazine now renamed fantasies r us. Or spastic approach to news or perhaps autistic reporting by a midget tied to a pony in lederhosen.
Ok I lifted that last part from south park but u get my point.

Gah sigh someone find me a point as pointy one that I can use to disembowel a mormen or two.

Enough bitterness. Enough enough. I have gone from railing history quoting bitter man to simple sad Paul, with heavy heart and limbs and world history swirled into oblivious hind brain like so much mauve paint. I just sold another painting. I have money now, and spent some of it on some new speakers, which allow me to induce with perfect and pure controllable inducements the mood I wish to enhance and hunger through. Though there is, unquestionably, something odd and hurtful, something spitefully cleanly sharply wrong with me, and my heart, my heart is broken, I find this liveable for right now once more. This morning I lay my head in my hands and sobbed out the exhaustion and pain, beat my desk and made my new speakers rattle, but there are always degrees and for now this one’s heat curves into acceptable, or should I say bearable…

“if love is a red dress, well hang me in rags.”
“if love is shelter, I’ll walk in the rain.”

And this is where I walk, edge walker, divine comedian. Though right now I don’t find anything funny. I should. There is always something funny, and I AM wearing pants with S A N E written down the side. You see, it is not just to reassure everyone, but because then I can be IN sane pants. PUNS. Fantastic, humour me, humour me, humour us as we skate into the night with our possible pasts blowing like prayer flags behind us.

“She stood in the doorway with a ghost of a smile.
Haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign.”

And time sickens me. Moments make me wretch with what they are, with their absolute sacrosanct inevitability. Make holes in the burning heart of God. I have people who do, directly, I know, pray for me. I hope that it makes a difference. Perhaps it does, perhaps not. Perhaps it is why I am still alive, and I can blame God for my suffering as I continue to live and rip through time like particles being torn to pieces on the edge of a black hole. Shiny with their last light, exploding outwards as they die. I feel like this.
When I succeed. Ah, yes… Tearing myself to pieces as I shine bright enough to scald my own eyes, extant awareness of the trap of atrophy that will swing me back to pain always, always. It is not true that what goes up must come down. It is true that a sine curve is forced upon us by the nature of life, of the universe. For every spike of brilliant brightness there WILL be an equal part, a disease of equality.
Wish Wish wish. Pray into the infinite dark, hold onto the sides of your mind and DON’T FUCKING SLIP. Some fissure in the void. Some smoke from the burning slide.