Would have beens and what actually was / Love

 

The day you joined the Christopher Street parade

The day you joined the Christopher Street parade

All the boys, young sad and gay

Collapsing in strange places

But no place to stay

Sexy at an after work party

Gay slurs while kissing 

from the cabbie

Strangers and heroes and the hot guy 

who stole your Jobriath LP

Falling over in fevers.

Looking all the way up the sidewalk, 

History between these two islands

Cold comfort and uneasy crosses

All the water afforded us, 

100 years and all the dross

Is whatever left behind

Underneath the floorboards. 

The burning building

The rotting barn

All the things we built

Collapsing into the dark place

While lonely lines keep humming

On. 

Your name here

On this watch, this name tag

Your smell on the shirts your wore

Beads from 1993 and 

Some opera swag

Another pair of slippers 

Never to experience feet

And others things you swore

Wouldn’t turn to sand

And defeat.

Should have had them check your head

Red fag after red flag

After regrets

Left you to join the Christopher Street parade,

A place where others would fade,

Now one along the line in angels to 

Exalt with joy and rage.

 

A quiet moment where my brain is open

It’s okay to be tired. You are not dead. It is not over. You are sad because you can’t share this pain with Bob. You have to do this part on your own. No one else is coming to help you. There is no safety net which will avoid this. 

For the sun to rise, long and sharp over the horizon,  for grey clouds to part, seeds to germinate on a new hillside and dreams to arise into who knows what…

You can't avoid the future. Why waste it?

  

For the fading light to lift and find me waiting. For the fog…and all the moments I’ve wanted to share getting lost in.

Its fucking awful how much I miss Bob. 

Grief sucks everything out of me each day. Hope keeps me here. There is too much potential of what was to simply waste. I will do something…with what was and is. I’m working on it. 

Not Dark Yet

Back Issues

Went in for 'surgical' guided injections on my back today. I am really hoping they work. Being in severe pain all the time and having trouble standing and walking has really wore me down (and yeah, all the other shit too, a big fat double fuck you to 'Mr Postman' - not his real name). The doctor asked me 'if I was ready to be out of pain' and I was so out of it from lack of sleep, not being able to smoke or anything that I said "From the grief? Is there something you can inject to make that go away?" He got a blank look on his face and I realized I needed to apologize and explain that I had been waiting almost a year to have this done because to took six months after my husband died to finally get through all the pre-req steps and insurance BS to get into the OR to treat the injury I got from being his caretaker for nearly a year. I was face down in a head ring a few minutes later but I heard at least two people sniffling as I went into twilight. I didn't mean to make anyone cry, but it was honest. this is why I would never play poker for money. I can hide my feelings whether I'm happy or sad. I would be the guy to loudly exclaim "Wow, I might just win this time!"

I'm venting. I'll get through this. I know the rest of the world is on fire too. I just wish I didn't feel so terrible when everything else is also terrible. All my friends are going to protests and being active at live shows, hiking, etc and I can barely stand, walk long enough to go grocery shopping or go a day without crying my eyes out. It's been a really difficult month. Why lie?

Two Terrified Men

I once described Bob and I as the two terrified men of Mill Valley, a nod to the Two Gentlemen of Verona. We were so insular in our relationship that he couldn't have done his treatment without me and I couldn't have taken care of anyone else but him. This picture was taken on our deck, Monday the week Bob passed. It is the last time he was really outside. I rearranged everything specifically so he could watch the birds with the eye he could still see out of. We ordered way too much Chinese food because he 'wanted one of everything' and even then, I knew he was having trouble swallowing and chewing. It was only a matter of time until he aspirated food and choked to death. I watched him like a hawk but he did manage to eat safely- I pestered him about taking small bites and chewing his food well. He looks angry here because by then the left side of his face was more or less paralyzed. We were still laughing and telling filthy jokes and holding hands even though he looks scowley. I would have been on his good side but I needed to make sure he didn't miss things on the side he couldn't see out of. I remember the day was warm, and it was breezy. A lovely fall day. We even opened the awning we got ourselves for our 13th annivesary, that he always wanted for the house so we could sit and watch the sun go down without me getting burned. We both sat there are nibbled the food lightly. Eventually we stopped talking and just sat there. Both of us were terrified. He was terrified of what was coming. I was terrified of what was coming after...which I now know was with good reason. We got in more than a few arguments in the last months, which we realized too late was really the fault of the Keppra, an anti seizure medication. One of them was over "how much happier I (Steve) will be when this is all over (meaning when he was dead)!" Without missing a beat I said "The real hard part for me starts the minute you die. When you're gone. I'll be alone...dealing with whatever happens without your love and support." We both started crying because he realized I was just keeping my face together all these months and it was an act. And that was the last time we argued.  I am so glad he isn't here for what is happening with the country. I am glad he is not hurting anymore. He knows all the answers to the questions he had. 

HE would have been 73 tomorrow. March 29, 2025. I miss him terribly. Grief is awful. 

Lawyer Speak / This bile had to go somewhere

 

I'm learning to read letters from lawyers. We're $50,000 in to this bullshit mindfuck. This translates loosely as: "When is Steve going to move out of the house his husband just died in 5 months ago so we can sell it and everything inside it?"

No really...that's what's happening. 

They wanted me to pay rent. While I pay 100% of the expenses. Taxes. Maintenance. On a home my late husband spent 32 years paying off - in 2019. They contacted me FOUR DAYS after Bob was buried (ignoring shiva), demanding access to our home, ALL of OUR financial records, the house, and told me that everything in the house, including everything I owned, all my artwork and property was not too be removed from the house. 

This graphic is the lawyers most recent closing response.  Guess who is about to be told to go fuck themselves?

deep breath Steve...deeeeep fucking breath.

staggered / clouds

 now...

every time I think I'm falling

I'm calling 

your name...

In this whisky bar we're rebuffed and hanging back,

I'm pursued by feet, 

an imperial beat, Can't run away fast enough

into the sun,

just like on the third day when I rose to a summer sky

and a dry dry creek.

I knew my old boy's tank was empty when we hit the sandy bank on a full moon glitch

forget it in the city / standing there skinny in the pulse-beat with your salsa  and salad conditional regret..

while IT IS not WHAT I wanted in your haunted iron ore ingenue views you return

blurred escape into the cyanide wind. The speed of the stars cuts the time out of what is already gone. Black moons call to empire 

but things are quiet and 

unseen. 

Happy something something akimbo Xmas memory something something

Random Thoughts / OOOooooo / OOOooooo

 Augusto painted the chimney. The trim is a light shade of tan with a dark wall. He was so happy we finally got to paint. We stood there and both of us started crying because we both simultaneously knew Bob wouldn’t see it and that he had been looking forward to having the party we’d planned once the repairs were finished. Cancer fucked that up this year. Last year I got married. I’m not meant to make any sense of that polarity. Confusion reigns as it must. 

The hummingbird feeders are full and buzzing. I bought expensive cheese. I was daydreaming. I bought some boxset and tissue on Amazon. All I need is a box of red wine at this point(pint?) and some peroxide. What a Loon. 

Probably.

Stuck on my shift at the death information committee.  More files and document scanning for the lawyers. $13,000 in 30 days. Heroin is probably cheaper. My feelings are mostly in a jar. I think I worry people or trouble them with my 'stuff’, even though everyone has made it clear they are here for me. I wonder what people with good self esteem feel like? bleet bleet I know I know. 

Sometimes I’m wilding and swinging and other times I feel underwater.  I bounce back and forth between despair and grace. I’m trying to look upwards and swing a broom underneath my feet at the same time. I’m on a carousel going around a rotting old oak tree…trying to reconfigure my purpose without getting hung up on what I have to do.

Thanks / Good / Bad

The below was published on FB

"Bob, 

This is the first holiday without you. And it’s Thanksgiving. A day where people stuff themselves with food-a day hopefully long divorced from the myth of Pilgrims and Indians to one of gratitude. I can barely eat or think about food. Everything tastes like cardboard. Like loneliness. The stress of missing you, the gulf of space between loving you in your absence and what I knew just over a month ago….is almost harder than getting dressed. I miss being able to tell about how excited I am about a piece I just finished, or some new music or some record I ordered from overseas, because you remembered ordering things you had to wait for. I miss trying new things you cooked, driving places we’d never been, seeing new art exhibits, and going out new restaurants you wanted to try: seeing you happy. Just holding you. Even when we were doing nothing, we had somewhere to be, to go….together.  

For 15+ years of that, I am thankful." 

(Redacted for health reasons) P.s.- I’m putting up the tree. Rick and Janice say how much they’ll miss you.*

*Rick and Janice are the owners of the Christmas Store in Santa Fe, a place Bob and I visited each year for well over a decade." 

Bad Days

So much has happened, yet I barely remember it happening. Like a book written about experiences that happened to someone else. My mind is alternately blank or filled with technicolor flashbacks to the worst moments, the ones I felt where I failed at caring for you, where I wasn’t my best. Where I couldn’t put aside how hurtful you were being because you were also scared and hurting. No amount of therapy or schooling teaches you to face your own death but its also doesn’t teach you how to manage your trauma responses while more trauma floods over you. But it’s not a flood. It’s lying to yourself about how high the water is because you’ve already run out of air watching the other person turn blue. It’s chaos. Its chewing your limb off with your bare teeth because you cannot fucking get out of the trap. Its trying to grow wings while being buried in concrete. It’s drowning. Therapist is telling me this is all normal. 

And in the midst of this…I am still here. My health stuff continues to elude me. The next two weeks are going to be fraught. I hope for nothing special but know something is…off. It’s folly to pretend otherwise. I may have put all my chips out in the front of the game over strategy, but at this point, I’m resigned. I met with lawyers today. More out of body experiences. I’ve gone from being homeless to fighting over million dollar property like chess pieces. I had to tell the lawyers to use the house to end this. The equity wasn’t worth being trapped in a haunted house. More still coming in terms of paperwork but it can't be helped. Answers soon, the future maybe. 

Decades / 24 Hours

 

I wanted it it to be perfect like before

 

And the shake of your head....

The romance of outcomes is over. Like my brain, my amp is fried. Cue Surprise! Life laughs in my face!

Two weeks straight of providing paperwork for paralegals, three weeks of isolation, 3 days of double visits from well meaning people. Followed by a week of medical appointments. 

I trick myself. Pretend it's happening to someone else, but it won't be over soon. Be hysterical and cry in private. Keening and screaming suddenly enter the lexicon. Additional terrifying lucid ghost-prompted nightmares to dispense of what is left of my operating daytime memory.  

You've seen clips of a goldfish gasping for breath right. 

I'd trade places with that goldfish in a second. At their brain stem won't remind them of regret. 

On hold, talking about death, talking self portraits stripped of color.

 

Everything Happens

 https://youtu.be/IdcN4BRpmGI?si=J-9pBWIo22kzP3xR

The waterfall / a slightly delirium

 

I came out from underneath this thing / Been sick so long with whatever it was I don't remember clinging to wreckage and yet...here is the now. 

what this was like? The bike you fell off of. The fire burns all the way up to the edge of the forest, and all the trees stand silent like outposts....The inverse of everything real is also true. The rain visits today. Yesterday was a heatwave. Yesterday Bob had been here forever, Now he's gone, the tears come down. Reality sets in. You could see all space and time, There is no one to bump into in the kitchen while regaling that while you make spaghetti, Toast instead. My unconscious mind is a hundred thousand waves of cascading white and pink noise flung against one another until all time as we know it obliterated. Or it could just be interference and clouds. 

OR this is sone new place. The next thing from now. My muse observes from some place off in the distance. We are the right pollinator and flower. We cannot be tasked with springing up for every esoteric need. 

Also...I'm grateful. My brain is so utterly traumatized when I went to 'speak' the way I felt about Bob it came out like a metaphor about having to destroy to begin again. I couldn't;t make anything new until I 'destroyed' what it was, 

I don't know where this new future is headed. I don't know where my head is. 

How does that old song go?

The Embrace

2010

 

Or Not...

 Everyone is hurting, IT cannot be undone. Time is change.a light finger on the betting wheel is wise.

2014. This is the only time I got Bob Drunk enough to dance in public. 

Fall is here. Bob is gone, but he's everywhere, Paul's heirs demanded a death certificate...I don't even have one of my own. I think about them stubbing their toe badly, and laugh while I rise to grab a half-finished margarita that's been lukewarm for hours on a dresser where I fell asleep while finagling my new Marin county vote-by-mail ballot. I meet with a rep for the lawyers office tomorrow. Something helpful, I guess. All the tie in there world, and maybe enough money...

,,,and no one to show it to...anymore. The eternal trade. 

Just point me out of these clouds, if you could, 

There a certain blue velvet quality to what is happening. Almost espionage: I have to go through things to figure out what the heck is going on while other people undermine me to try and find out first. I love games. I hate contests, and this isn't the time to experiment.   

MY brain aches to sleep but can't. Somebody calls on a telephone I don't answer: 

asking me if I did enough...and I don't know if I didn't or not. 

Untitled misery

 I'm tired.

A week that should have held me up brings down to some estate bullshit. Bob would be rolling in his grave. 

I am doing my best to be empathic and meet people's needs and still being tired and wondering if the other side of this is better. Now someone else is going to own 50% of the house I live in.. for doing nothing more than being friends with the abusive prick who was married to my late husband. I just...errr...want to go mad.

Is that ringing in my ear supposed too sound like that?

What the hell is happening? 

People are Trash

 Proof positive that people are fucking scum. Bob has been dead just short of a week. The guy called the morning AFTER bob died-before they'd ever announced it publicly, reminded me at the funeral to 'call him' and now is leaving me multiple voice mails and texts. I don't even have the fucking death certificate and they're trying see how much cash they're getting? Ever loving fuck!

Where are we now / Some other place / Somehow

4 years ago I was gearing up for my first show in 12 years, brimming with creative glue. Now, I'm a widow and scattered and feeling like I just got caned at a British boarding school. The house is empty and my the maw of my mind yawns wide...and then I see this image in my memories...it's weird having your subconscious regurgitated out to you by an algorithm. I'm talking to people. Crying in private and pressing buttons on thins and eating stuff. so many plates to make spin. 

Visual Consensus / 12 x 16 / Mixed Media + Paper