Yahrzeit / Bob Gutterman

 The rains will come and save you

You saw clouds approaching…

Let their water confront your rightness

Be happier…than you’ve been been been…

You know? Float on?

Find the right place on a ‘New’ cloud. 

You weren’t born 100 years ago. That then isn’t now. You’re tasked with handling this one. This reality. This ‘now’. 

Don’t feel hopeless. Don’t feel helpless. Float on. 

It doesn’t matter what is next. It doesn’t matter what is left. There is still now.

FLOAT on….

Two crazies, NYC / 2018

Getting hammered at my sister's wedding 2016

In the rotunda at Westfield Center 2013

Robert "Bob" Bruce Gutterman 

Today is Bob's yahrzeit. The one year anniversary of his death.

A lot has happened in that time. I'd like to say it was mostly good, but that would be untrue. The fact is that I spent the last year barely keeping my head above water, dealing with nightmarish legal issues around the estate that cratered my health, and barely preventing my eviction from a house Bob paid off in 2018. The estate executor felt generous in letting me stay if I paid market rate rent, which would have been $8,300 a month. Such a deal!

Some people need to kick a grieving widow out of the house four days after their husband (who paid for it) died in it. I didn't realize 'fiduciary responsibility' meant you gave up having a soul. I also just found out yesterday that the thousands of Bob's CDs I was forced to leave behind because they were part of 'the estate' are now being 'disposed of'.  

Are you mad yet? Did you know I had to pay more than $50,000 in legal fees to be subjected to this? I'm working with a brilliant writer friend who is going to help me tell this story with Bob's blessing. More on that in the fall. That part of the story isn't over yet.

All of this is to say that in jewish culture the year following the death of a loved one is mean to focus on the change and the absence that person's life force has left in the world. Instead, I got to play the legal hokey pokey for an entire year. The bile I have built up can't be measured. I'm trying ti find some way to write something less hostile for Facebook but its really taking all day and all night to try and write something clearly. I'm going to leave this here for now. Not sure if my thoughts are cogent enough or not for mass consumption. 

In other news The 27 pieces Bob donated to the Crocker Museum in Sacramento have been sorted and some are already on display as part of their current shows. One is a still life show, which includes the Jeanne Duval and Pamela Carroll pieces, and a separate print exhibition which includes Hockney's 'Table Flowable' print. 

He would be so happy they are there, being enjoyed. He said he was only ever a 'caretaker' of the art he had. 

God I fucking miss him. Grief is awful, starless and bible black. The void. going on forever and ever and into nothingness.

I guess that's where I'll find him.

 

Surfacing...

The spider on the ceiling
Looking down on me

Do they know what I am going through
Or do they think we’re the same?
I’ve been seeing him
For days and days and days
And I know he’s been watching me
With all eight eyes just the same.
Creatures meeting in the middle,
A riddle I left for myself in my dreams,
A fiddle that played the right music

eight times...(bridge)...
No matter how many eyes I have seen.

-------------

Landed on the other side. This is a terrible picture. I should have kept my dignity given that no human should ever have to see me in sweatpants, unless I'm hospitalized. 

Packing packing packing / Nightmares / Art Mares / etc.

 Got some good packing done today. I gave myself a goal of being almost, or just about done packing by August 1st. I probably have at least another box run (and I'm out of tape, taking tomorrow off to run errands) but I feel good about where things are at. Bittersweet goodbyes are common with things now. I packed up the remaining hummingbird feeders. I decided not to put them up for the season, but its taken 5 months to be ready to store them for who knows how long. I also packed the majority of any remaining art materials. Still feeling creative. Some really wild disturbing shit got drawn on what I had around the other night...which was the moving boxes. The movers will probably think I'm crazy, which I probably am...a little. I do this every time I have moved, drawing on the moving boxes. Just putting the boxes back together this time (I reused many of the boxes I moved to Green Street again this time), and found boxes I have now used 4 times. A few are well into the double digits. and some of those are covered in 'moving graffiti' as I'm calling it. 

I continue to have the most lucid insane dreams and massive anxiety. Looking for new housing is probably not helping. The first time I'm letting the executor for the estate into the house is either the 8th or the 11th.

I've has had trouble with uploading to my art blog the last few weeks. password issues, but I have more pressing business, so they're going here for now. The first two things are just blowouts...things my brain spits out when the juice is there, but the focus is not. I might not ever post them anyway. Exercises for the sketchbooks, or edification/damnation later? The second two are some of my first attempts at painting things with a fetish edge to them. These two were two panels for a quad-paned assembly of images. The other two feature a a half man half octopus playing a cello. They may be gone now, part of the shedding from the LAST move. My hand is naive as hell but for a first painting its not bad. This was long before art school so I didn't even know about 'technique' or even what I was doing. I bought some basic acrylics at Aaron Brothers Art Mart and a piece of rolled canvas that was marked down because it was damaged. I cut that part off and found some pallet pieces a neighbor was throwing away and stretched the canvas myself from a book I found at the library. 

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow...and some other stuff.

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