Note: I just finishhed is my essay on The Kid With A Bike. It will also be published in the weekend edition of Counterpunch. When I first started writing about this film, I was reduced to tears for an entire day. It may very well be the most autobiographical film I've ever written about. After crying my way through my personal response to the film, I was able to come back to it and write my heart out. This is my final essay on this specific film. Basically watching the movie, responding to it emotionally and then writing about it allowed me to free myself from my "hex of hope" just like Cyril does in the film. I'll be writing an article about Dardennes films in general for La Furia Umana for their next issue. I feel really good getting this written. I needed to write about this movie.

Next up -- I'm going to write about My Camping Experience By KDD. Expect lots of descriptions of The People Who Camp At The Beach.

The Kid With A Bike: Finding Magic Within The Limits of the Real

The Kid With A Bike is Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s newest cinematic slice of realism. Known for their uncompromisingly realistic portraits of people at odds with the post-industrial economy in working-class Belgian settings, the Dardennes’ films focus on a broken down social system that is as fractured as the economy. At the heart of all their work are economic choices and the repercussions that result from them. The choices include everything from selling one’s own baby son for money (L’Enfant) to selling one’s own body for citizenship (Lorna’s Silence) to selling your own kid’s bike (The Kid With A Bike).

The Dardennes do not beat their economic message over the audience’s head. Rather, in an understated realism, they focus on issues of broken families, unemployment, and immigration in a post-industrial global economy. As bleak as the economic realism of these films is, at their core we can always see the fragility of human nature and the potential for redemption in the godless world of capital. While the situations in Dardenne brothers films are uncompromisingly real, the characters who must navigate often appear as fleeting angelic spirits caught in the material world of cell phones, cash exchanges, credit cards, and traffic of all variety in a world that has little use for angels.

Enter The Kid With A Bike and the life of Cyril. Eleven year old Cyril enters the movie in the first shot and, aside from two short scenes, never leaves the screen and rarely sits still. He starts the movie desperately trying to call his father who has abandoned him in a state home for children. Cyril pushes the numbers on the phone over and over only to receive the same message that the line has been disconnected. A counselor tries to reason with Cyril and explain that his father is gone, but there is no reasoning with a boy who only wants one thing in the world – to be reunited with his dad. Cyril bolts from the home, runs through streets and takes buses through the city to the bleak public housing where he lived with his father. His father is gone. The apartment is empty. Cyril faces the empty apartment with his back to us, and in that one moment he has to swallow down reality. The rest of the film follows Cyril’s odyssey as he tries with his entire being to find his father and believe that he still loves and wants him, only to be faced with a closed door. Explaining what happens in the rest of the film, as I do in this article, may seem to spoil the plot. But a movie like The Kid With A Bike is more about giving a flash portrait of reality than providing a Hollywood-style narrative loaded with twists and turns that can be spoiled.

The Kid With A Bike is a heartbreaking tale of disenchantment, but one that eventually leads to re-enchantment as well. Playing like a fairytale for the 21st century, the movie is a quest where the imaginary world has been replaced by the world of the real, and Cyril has to come to terms with that world. Always wearing a red shirt or a red jacket, he’s like a new kind of Red Riding Hood making his way through the post-industrial forest of adults, class, heartache, and survival. He runs, fights, climbs trees, and, more than anything, rides his bike. He moves with the speed of lightning, never sitting still for a moment, as if motion itself will keep the hard truth from catching up with him. On his quest, Cyril wants nothing more than to be reunited with his father. He holds onto his belief that things will work out. But The Kid With A Bike is a coming-of-age story in an economic world where reality overrides dreams, and we watch at a heartbreaking proximity as Cyril’s dream is pulled out from under him and his father tells him he doesn’t want him anymore.

This could be a tragic tale – a child left alone in such a heartless world that he has to relinquish his innocent childhood optimism for the brutality of reality. But the Dardennes aren’t dealing with the heightened cinematic form of melodrama. They are working in emotional and economic realism. Certainly Cyril meets his share of Big Bad Wolves as he pedals and runs his way through the movie, and the movie has moments that could lead to tragedy, but in the end Cyril’s pure energy and force of will keep him going. He doesn’t have his father, but he does have his bike, and that bike is like his life’s blood. It keeps Cyril and the film hanging onto a thread of hope even while he is flying by the seat of his pants.

In his desperate state of abandonment, Cyril finds a kindred spirit in Samantha, a single working woman who owns a hair salon on the council estate where Cyril used to live with his father. When Cyril flees to the apartment building, he attempts to hide from his counselor in a clinic. In his frantic and furious flight, he bumps into a young woman and hangs onto her with all his might. He physically attaches himself to her, and from that point on, the two are united.

This is Samantha, the woman who will end up adopting Cyril. Even though Cyril grabs onto Samantha, the film quietly shows that the attachment is mutual. Samantha provides the boy an alternative family for the one who has forsaken him, but it is also clear that Cyril brings light into Samantha’s life. That they meet each other in a clinic speaks to the idea that they are both injured souls for whom finding one another serves as a kind of therapy and a chance to start a new life together.

Cyril not only runs back to the apartment looking for his father, but also because he desperately wants to find his bike. Neither are there. As in so many other Dardennes films, the bike has become a casualty of economics and bad choices; it becomes a symbol of a broken family and broken dreams. But, in this film, even more than its predecessors, the Dardennes are alert to the potential for magic in the real world and how it opportunities for redemption. The bike also becomes the vehicle for Cyril’s quest and transformation.

His bike is Cyril’s sole possession, his freedom, his connection to his father, his way of feeling like he can move in an economic world in which there aren’t a hell of a lot of places for him to go. At first the bike is the material manifestation of Cyril’s father (which Cyril desperately clings to) and the father’s abandonment of Cyril (when he dumps Cyril at the home and sells the bike). The bike then becomes a kind of vehicular force with which Cyril attempts to outrun reality, even as he continues to try to win his father back. Finally, the bike becomes a symbol of reconciliation within the terms of a reality that can’t be reconciled.

When Cyril goes to find his bike, he finds a kid on the estate riding it. Cyril runs after the boy, fights him to the ground and tries to get his bike back. The boy tells Cyril that the bike belongs to him, that Cyril’s dad sold his father the bike. Cyril refuses to believe him, and insists the boy stole the bike. Cyril walks away empty handed without the bike. But this is not a defeatist film, even in a defeating economy. The next day Samantha arrives like an angel at the state home where Cyril is living. She has Cyril’s bike. Cyril asks her where she got it, and she tells him that she bought it back for him. Cyril climbs on the bike and adamantly insists that his father didn’t sell the bike but that it was stolen. Cyril grips onto his belief that his father didn’t abandon him as tightly as he grips the handlebars on his bike. Cyril shows Samantha a few tricks and pops a wheelie. As Samantha drives off, Cyril chases her down on his bike and asks if he can stay with her weekends. A kind of fairy godmother in the landscape of the real, Samantha agrees to take him in. But Samantha isn’t a fairy or a godmother. She is just a working woman running a salon at the housing complex where Cyril lived with his dad. She is very much grounded in working reality.

With his bike back, Cyril pedals his way through his quest for his father. He goes to a gas station where he discovers a sign in the window that his father posted selling the bike. This is the moment of Cyril’s disenchantment. As the saying goes, “The writing is on the wall.” There is no denying his father’s name, phone number and description of the bike for sale. Cyril can no longer deny that his father has dumped him and his bike.

That day Cyril goes back to Samantha’s salon. He turns the faucet on in the shampoo sink and lets the water run over his hand as if he could literally wash away the reality he had to swallow when he sees that sign at the gas station. He holds his head low, his eyes glazed over, his face a study in barely contained emotion – dejection, anger, hurt, disenchantment, all pooling under the surface of his eyes as he lets the water run.

Samantha turns the sink off and says she hates wasting water. Cyril turns the water back on again in what seems like defiance but ultimately is just his way of lashing out against the hurt inside him. The sink grounds Cyril in the very real setting of Samantha’s salon, but it also represents the tears that Cyril doesn’t cry. He turns the sink faucet on because he cannot turn on his own faucet and cry tears for losing his father. In a tearless matter-of-fact voice, Cyril tells Samantha that his bike was not stolen and that his father did indeed sell the bike. His voice is dry, all his tears bottled up inside him.

Samantha joins Cyril in his quest for his father as she tracks him down and attempts to facilitate some form of reconciliation. She arranges a meeting with Cyril’s father Guy (played by Jérémie Renier from L’Enfant), but the father doesn’t show up. Not willing to concede defeat so easily, Cyril and Samantha find the restaurant where Guy works. The father plays along with Cyril, but he is clearly disengaged and bothered by the intrusion of his son. In a simple and very real scene, Cyril offers to help Guy stir sauces. Guy explains what the sauces are, and Cyril picks up a spoon in each hand stirring the sauces, his face and body a portrait of desperation – desperately trying to connect with his father and be a part of his life, desperately trying to make this a “real” father and son moment that can last. But the moment doesn’t last.

Nothing about Guy’s role in the scene is real or sincere. He is simply irritated and waiting for his son to leave. The scene is so short, so understated, and so simple, yet speaks to so much heartbreak. It represents the possibility of what could be (father and son working and doing things together) as opposed to what is (father wanting to cut all ties with son). Cyril clings to hope of reconnecting with his father as the father carelessly jots down Cyril’s mobile number on a piece of paper that we know damn well is going to end in the garbage. Guy will throw Cyril’s phone number in the trash, just like he essentially threw Cyril himself away. The scene is emotionally devastating. As we watch it unfold, we feel both sides and see what Cyril is refusing to see. We feel Cyril’s desperate hope to be with his dad, how he holds onto the possibility of hope when the situation is hopeless. We also know that Guy has no intention of giving Cyril what the kid so desperately wants. We see both through Cyril’s eyes and Guy’s eyes, but it all comes back to the effect on Cyril, and that heartbreaking effect is utterly devastating.

Guy calls Samantha aside and tells her that he doesn’t want to see his son again and that she needs to tell Cyril. Not only does Guy dump his kid and sell his bike, but he’s too spineless to tell his own son that he has no intention of calling him. When Samantha asks Cyril what Guy told him, Cyril says his dad is going to call him soon. In this moment, Samantha takes on a role that is angelic in its practical and uncompromising realism. In a strange yet productive turn, Samantha becomes Cyril’s savior by facilitating his disenchantment. She understands that as long as Cyril believes that his father is coming back, that he will be held captive by a kind of hex or evil spell – clinging to hope when there isn’t any.

Samantha forces Guy to tell Cyril that he does not want to see his son anymore. Guy does what Samantha asks, and when he shuts the door in Cyril’s face, there is no more chance for hope, no pretending that there will be reconciliation. Cyril and Samantha drive away as Cyril pounds his own head with his little fists, as if he could pound reality right out of it. The scene is absolutely heartrending, but it is also a scene that leads Cyril (and his bike) to a new place. In an ironic and complex twist that is often present in Dardennes’ films, the only way for Cyril to gain hope is to acknowledge what is hopeless and to stare hopelessness in the face. Nothing can be accomplished when one is in denial. It is only by acknowledging hopelessness that Cyril can let go of his denial and make room for the possibility of a new kind of hope.

That new kind of hope lies with Samantha and the alternative family that she provides for Cyril. Interestingly, we know very little about Samantha other than through her relationship to Cyril. The film is very much about the present, about what is happening right now in the moment. We are provided no backstory for any of the characters – Samantha, Guy, or Cyril. The only way we know about the past is through actions in the present. We know that Cyril’s father dumped him because we enter the film with the boy looking for his dad. It is through Cyril’s hunt for his bike in the present narrative that we discover that Guy sold the bike. But it is actions and not stories that reveal details. Everyone in the movie is thrown together in the immediate present, and the emotional depth of the film comes through the characters’ expressions and immediate actions.

This is not Hollywood cinema loaded to the gills with the weight of a melodramatic backstory. Samantha has no past. She is only who she is now in the moment. This makes the film so much more effective because it makes it less easy. We are not given simple answers. Instead we are given a set of circumstances – a hairdresser who decides to adopt a troubled abandoned boy – and we are left to accept their relationship on its immediate terms but also to write our own emotions onto the narrative. Cyril asks, “Why did you let me stay with you?” Samantha replies, “Because you asked.” But we want to know as badly as Cyril does. The film’s refusal to provide that sort of explanation gives us emotional responsibility. We project our own emotion onto the story, which makes the film far more effective than a typical Hollywood narrative that provides all the answers for us. Life is not full of answers. It’s full of questions. Does Samantha adopt Cyril in a genuine act of altruism, or is she somehow caring for herself while caring for the boy?

I believe it’s a little of both. Samantha’s quiet expressions lead us to believe that underneath her calm and strong exterior (the tanned and muscular Cécile De France looking like a goddess of stability), exists an emotional vulnerability, maybe her own past injuries that have not yet healed, her own need to create new hope in her life. So Cyril can provide as much hope for Samantha as Samantha does for the boy. Perhaps, Cyril and Samantha are mirrors of each other in a quiet way. Towards the end of the movie, when Cyril comes to terms with his “new life” without his father, he and Samantha go for a bike ride in the park. When they ride bikes together, Cyril is no longer alone on his bike. In fact, they stop and switch bikes – Samantha wobbling along on Cyril’s bike which is too small for her while Cyril stretches his young legs to reach the pedals on Samantha’s “grown-up” bike. Their bikes may not perfectly fit, but Cyril and Samantha have found a fit together. The scene when they switch bikes seals that bond. Even while the world around them is full of traffic, threats, heartbreak, and social, economic and emotional pitfalls, they still have each other.

Traffic of all variety is a key element in all the Dardennes’ films. Cars are everywhere, and cash is exchanged at every turn. Mostly set in the Belgium town of Seraing, an industrial town known for its steel factories and foundries which are now shut down, the Dardenne brothers’ films are largely about the new post-industrial economy at odds with an industrial past and the everyday working and lower class people trying to survive in a world moving too fast for them to get their footing. The primary exterior soundtrack for Dardennes’ films is that of automobiles rushing from here to there. Cars are parked along streets, driving along highways, turning corners, stopped at red lights. Their engines are going, and their horns are honking. Buses and freight trains rumble by. Traffic on freeways moves at high speeds. The vehicles are not romanticized cars of a bygone era. Just like the characters within the film, the cars are of the now – the present day economy. The streets are full of newish small cars from Asia and Europe, the automobiles of a new global economy. They are not rundown beaters, nor are they fancy cars. They are everyday cars for everyday working people, and they are in motion everywhere, even in The Kid With A Bike.

Situating Cyril on his bike amongst this world of moving vehicles makes him seem both vulnerable and somehow above it all, like an angel flying through the traffic. We simultaneously worry that Cyril can be hit at any moment by the dangers around him, as he furiously pedals, yet we also get the impression that he is untouchable: an angel in a red t-shirt soaring through this fast moving economy on his bike. Cyril’s furious will seems to allow him to transcend the traffic and all that it stands for in the economic world that surrounds him.

Cyril is solidly situated within the fast moving economy of other Dardenne’s films, but he is also very different. In a film like L’Enfant, every adult and child seems to be affected – or infected – by a hard cash economy. The young adult lead Bruno acts with the irresponsibility of a child, selling his own son and anything else he can get his hands on for cash. For Bruno, money is both everything and nothing. He is the embodiment of the irresponsibility and disposable nature of the new economy, driven solely by the acquisition of money which he throws away on useless junk. The kids in L’Enfant are equally driven by cash. The young boy Steve conspires with Bruno to deal in stolen goods and lift bags from unsuspecting ladies. Bruno is a kid who never grows up, his relationship to money being a manifestation of his lack of personal responsibility, while the kids in L’Enfant have grown up too soon, driven to steal and stuff their pockets with cash to be part of the world of capital and acquisition which is zooming all around them.

On the other hand, Cyril is completely naïve to the world of a cash economy. Money means nothing to him. All he wants is his dad. When Cyril gets caught up in a robbery scheme with a young gang kid Wes from the housing estate, his motivation is not cash. First and foremost, he just wants to be accepted by this older boy as a kind of surrogate father. That wish fails miserably when Cyril botches the robbery, and Wes shuts the door in Cyril’s face just like Guy does. Wes is just another component of the rest of the fast-moving world trafficking in cash, petty crime, and stolen goods. He named himself after a character in a video game (Resident Evil), and he sees life as a video game (a kind of dog-eat-dog marketplace for lower working classes) where winning means stealing whatever he can get and using anyone he can to help him. In other words, he is a character from earlier Dardennes’ films, and he would fit in perfectly with Bruno in L’Enfant – both boys who never grow up and whose drive for money overrides their drive for human compassion.

But that is not Cyril’s world. Cyril is profoundly innocent even when hard reality smacks him at every turn. After the botched robbery, Cyril has a bunch of cash, but he doesn’t run out and spend it on disposable crap like Bruno in L’Enfant. Instead, Cyril pedals his bike across town and uses the cash to try to buy the love of his father. He shoves the cash at Guy, desperately wanting his father to take the money and therefore accept and return Cyril’s love. But Guy throws the money to the ground, and Cyril leaves the cash as he pedals away defeated. Money is useless to Cyril. What he needs is the love of his father, yet his father treats him like so much disposable waste in an economy of waste.

The Kid With a Bike is like the flipside of L’Enfant. Here we see the innocent child’s perspective, and the intense focus on Cyril’s character allows for heightened emotional identification with this young desperate boy. This is a cinema of physical and emotional proximity. Other than two very brief scenes (one with Samantha when Cyril disappears to meet Wes for the robbery scheme and one with the victims of the robbery when they think Cyril is dead), the camera is constantly on Cyril. The camera zooms into the child’s face for close-ups asking us to look inside him and through his eyes. The camera tracks the kid as he moves through the streets on his bike, runs away in desperation, climbs trees, fights, and cries. We are almost always with Cyril, looking right at him, or riding along by his side, our eyes glued to his red shirt as he fights his way through the duration of the film.

The camera fluctuates between still shots focusing intently on Cyril’s emotions which are barely contained under his eleven-year-old eyes and fast tracking shots as he rides his bike, flees down stairwells, runs across grass and down sidewalks. As Cyril moves through the film, an innocent blur of motion and emotion in a grown up world driven by cash exchange that has no meaning to him, it is hard not to identify with this kid. In one early scene, the camera holds steady on Cyril’s still sleeping body. It is impossible not to recognize this child’s extreme vulnerability and innocence as his little body sleeps in the cold hard world of a state institution where he was dumped by his father simply because the boy was an economic nuisance. While the camerawork allows us intimate proximity to Cyril’s emotional life, Thomas Doret’s acting is astoundingly affective. Every nuance of his expression, twitch of his lip, glance of his eyes, or clenching of his muscles speaks oceans of emotional turbulence – his hurt and his refusal to acknowledge his hurt colliding in his young body.

Experiencing the world of the Dardennes through the innocent eyes of Cyril is what makes this film different from the brothers’ other films. While their earlier films inevitably lead the characters to a place of redemption, Cyril is not a character who needs to be redeemed. He is a young boy coping with a world that wants to strip the magic away from childhood. Experiencing the film through Cyril’s perspective allows us to experience the magic of the real. The plight, Cyril’s red shirt, and the bike make the film operate somewhat like a fairytale, but we are always reminded that this is a tale grounded in the very real world. The only fantasy in the film is the one that Cyril clings to about reconciling with his father, and that fantasy is dismantled with clean precision.

Still, because the world is seen through Cyril, there are things we don’t experience in other Dardennes’ films. Most of their films are claustrophobically bleak. They show us a Belgium suffocating in post-industrial gloom, a place where the sun doesn’t shine, grass doesn’t grow, and trees appear to have been replaced by endless rows of nondescript concrete block buildings. There is never any sound that doesn’t come directly from the narrative. All music comes from within the story (the ring of a cellphone, a radio or a CD thrown into a boombox). The reality of this world is relentless, leaving little room for magic other than the spiritual redemption that the characters find within the economic limits of their surroundings.

In The Kid With A Bike, on the other hand, Cyril climbs trees. His favorite hideout is an old empty container from a freight train (the hollow form of traffic in consumer goods) that’s nestled in the woods behind the busy road. He runs across fields of grass. The sun shines. He and Samantha actually ride their bikes through a lakeside park. These may seem like small things, but compared to earlier Dardennes’ films, they represent tremendous breaks with the style and message the filmmakers are known for. These changes indicate a shift in perspective, confirmed by the fact that Cyril maintains a kind of purity and innocence even in the harshest of circumstances, even when he is prompted to beat a newsstand man with a baseball bat. No matter what Cyril does, no matter what is done to him, he remains an innocent victim of economic circumstance. That is why there is still a potential for magic in his life (magic that is grounded in the real) even when all odds seem against him.

The other significant shift in the film is the use of music. On three separate occasions, the Dardennes use passages from Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto to heighten our experience of Cyril’s plight. All three signify moments when Cyril is forced to confront reality, but then pushes himself (and his bike) even harder so reality can’t catch up with him. The most resonant scene is when Guy throws the cash to the ground (his final act of dejection), and Cyril leaves the cash and flees on his bike. The Beethoven strikes up right as Cyril turns his back to his father and pedals off into the dark Belgian streets. But the music dissipates, and for a prolonged tracking scene, we hear nothing but Cyril’s breath and the sound of his pedals and bike tires. The music propels us into the tragic reality of Cyril’s life and provokes emotional response in the audience, but it also leads us to a place where Cyril can potentially transcend that reality.

The immediately ensuing soundtrack – Cyril’s breath and the sound of the bike – do the same thing. Those sounds ground us in Cyril’s reality, but also encourage us to flee with him as he pedals alone on his bike. We are inside his very breath as he pedals through the streets attempting to outrun the truth. We can still hear the sound of cars whooshing by, but Cyril is in his insulated world, his bike facilitating his ability to protect himself and flee reality. The fact that he is able to stay in his own world is his saving grace, along with the fact that he has his kindred spirit Samantha still waiting for him.

Cyril does eventually make it back to Samantha, and thus his bike eventually leads him to a place where he is able to accept his new life and, astonishingly, maintain his childhood innocence even after everything he has experienced. The ending of The Kid With A Bike leads us to a place that could disintegrate into melodramatic tragedy, but instead the film opts for a kind of magic reality. When Cyril is hunted down by the son of the man he robbed, he is hit with a rock and falls from a tree where he lays on the ground apparently dead. We are stunned at this abrupt ending of Cyril’s journey, at the sight of his still body lying on the grass. This body that has moved with such incessant speed throughout the film is brought down by a random throw of a rock. What a small and sad ending to a small and sad life, we can’t help but think. Though the stage is set for a tragic ending, The Kid With A Bike undoes the sentimental Hollywood coming-of-age story. Cyril’s mobile phone rings when Samantha calls, and he stirs, gets up, climbs on his bike and rides off back to the housing estate where he now lives with Samantha instead of his father.

The final scene shows Cyril turning the corner on his bike, just as he has turned a corner in his life – to a place where he can accept his new life with Samantha, and where we the audience can believe in angels and magic as long as we understand that those things are only possible in a world where we acknowledge the limits of the real. The film closes with a shot of the housing estate, firmly situating the film and the boy within the economic reality of its Belgian working-class setting. Wind blows through a single tree. The buildings of the public housing tower above garbage bins and parking lots. The sound of cars continue to move in the distance. The world is both moving and still. The traffic in Cyril’s world is still in fast motion. That’s not going to change. But Cyril has found a place where he can finally slow down. He is not alone, and he has his bike.

Hi. I'm at the beach camping with kiddo. This is me sitting in front of the campfire I built last night. It's a gorgeous day today. Heading to the beach to boogie board in a few minutes. Already went on a long run on the beach this morning. Lovely. Bean runs now too, but because she's a Teen Bean, she runs by herself. No way she's going to run with her mom!

This is my first time camping with the Teen Bean. It makes for a different kind of experience. She is much more independent. But . . . also much full of the Teenitude. Oy boy.

I've been working really hard on my essay on Kid With A Bike which I will post here this week and publish in Counterpunch at the end of the week. While I'm writing it, I am building the structure for the larger and more in depth essay I'm writing for La Furia Umana on the Dardennnes films in general. That deadline is June 23 which seemed very far off when I first committed to it, but now is right around the corner. I never go easy on myself.

Here is a quote from my essay that I want to share:

"In an ironic and complex twist that is often present in Dardennes’ films, the only way for Cyril to gain hope is to acknowledge what is hopeless and to stare hopelessness in the face. Nothing can be accomplished when one is in denial. It is only by acknowledging hopelessness that Cyril can let go of his denial and make room for the possibility of a new kind of hope."

This could be said about so many situations . . . I share this because this is kind of what I had to do when I had that huge emotional meltdown when originally writing about the movie. By watching Cyril's relationship with his father, I had to acknowledge the hopelessness of my relationship with my biological father Al. I got all those tears out, mourned my losses, and now I have moved on. I realize now that my relationship to him was as hopeless when he was alive as it is now that he's dead, but I needed to get all that grief out of myself so I could get on with life and the hope I have in it now. I drew this Pen Noise as a place to put my emotions. Just how I had to face hopelessness in the face and move onto possibilities for new hope in my life, I also had to let my drawing go. There was no going back to it once it was done. It was drawn in the moment and of the moment, so it's done.

Amazing how much I can learn and process from a movie.

Anyway, I need to get back to writing before hitting the beach. Once I'm done with Kid With A Bike, I'm going to start working on my Popcorn House Series while also writing my piece on the Dardennes.

Also, I'm ready to tell you about Empty Spaces . . . more on that later. Have to get another paragraph written before hitting the beach.

XO

K

Very busy getting ready for annual trip to camp on the beach. Too much fucking work to get ready to get there. Bean is really looking forward to it. Anyway, I had to pause from my manic getting ready (cleaning house, packing, organizing camping stuff, etc) to do something creative. I could have written about movies, written poetry, started my Waffle House Chronicles, or made art. Bean said I should make art. She’s right. Art is like anything else. I have to keep my muscles in shape or lose them, so I gave myself a quick hard art workout and made this.



Continuing to work on my large scale Film Noir Pen Noise series. It makes me happy. This one is to accompany the poem I wrote the other day. Speaking of my poem, that’s also on my list of things to do – edit my poems and put together my chapbook. I’ll add it to my ever growing list . . .

A few weeks ago, I was meeting Mark at the TTT for a trip to Globe. I pulled off the freeway and was stuck behind a very slow moving truck. I realized the truck was carrying copper and that’s why it was moving so slow.

I followed the truck into the back lot of the truck stop. I got out my camera and decided to brave the bright hot sun and photograph the truck.

When we’re out on the road, we always see these trucks hauling copper ore, but I never had a chance to photograph one sitting still.



I walked up to the truck. It was idling, so I bravely went up to the cab to let the driver know I was there. I must have looked ridiculous. I had just gotten off work, so I was wearing a dress and sandals, and was wandering out there in the middle of this sea of semi-trucks.

The driver was nowhere to be seen in the cab. I climbed up on the step to the door and knocked. A young Mexican driver emerged from the back where he was doing whatever truck drivers do in the back of their cabs when they pull into the TTT.



He looked suspicious and annoyed at the sight of me. I waved for him to open his window. (How bold was I?!) I asked if I could photograph his truck. There was no fucking way on the planet that I was going to photograph his truck without permission.

He said “sure” in a slurred, quiet, disengaged way. So I started shooting. Eventually the driver got out of the cab and asked exactly what it was I was doing. I explained our Copper Belt photography project, but it didn’t seem to interest him much, so I asked him a few questions.



While he talked to me, I certainly got the feeling that there was only so far I could go in talking to him, so that’s as far as I went. I did not ask his name, nor if I could take his photo. I knew well enough that those would not be welcome questions.

I asked how much the load of copper weighed. He said he didn’t know. I asked if he works for the mine. He said that he doesn’t work for the mine, that he’s a free agent truck driver. I asked if there’s a lot of work, and he said he’s constantly working for all the mines down here. He told me that this load came from Hayden (Ray Mine), a place where I have been many, many times. He says it’s good money, and he doesn’t have to work for anyone but himself. Period.



That’s all the info I got before I felt like I had reached the end of my question rope. I forgot to ask him where he was going with the copper.

It’s a fine line out there photographing. You have to follow your internal radar of when it’s okay to take someone’s photograph and when it’s not, when it’s okay to ask questions and when it’s not, when to keep talking and when to shut the fuck up and leave. I followed my radar that day, and what I came away with was a handful of shots of copper on a truck.



The copper business is booming here in Arizona, but it’s mostly fueled by transient workers. People drive into the mines from out of town and work for the week and then head home. Or they drive their semi-trucks to haul loads of copper ore. It’s a grab it while you can get it economy because it can collapse at any minute. This guy was grabbing it, and what he grabbed was this load of copper and the big bucks Ray Mine paid him to haul it.

The air quality here sucks so hard. The wind has been blowing for days. That means that it's a perpetual dust storm. My eyes feel like they've been raked over by sandpaper. I can't think out of the dirt inside of my head. I want to write something here today, but that's not going to happen. I'll post a Photo A Day and leave it at that.

In the meanwhile, I significantly improved my MARLEY review. It's in the weekend edition of Counterpunch. Read my article REBEL MUSIC here.

Hey I just got another art show. This one will be at Cartel Coffee Lab. I asked to hang in the fall because no one is in Tucson in summer. I'm going to hang September - November. Three months! How did this come about? Well, I had just dropped Bean off at the dojo, and I am beat up and exhausted from my hectic week, so I stopped for a cold drink and thought this space is SO COOL. Plus it's really packed all the time, so my work will be seen. So I just asked, showed my book, and voila, I've got a show. That's just how it goes. Flying by the seat of my pants. Also, I seriously revised my Marley review which will be in the weekend edition of Counterpunch tomorrow. Phew.

Anyway, maybe these cafe shows will lead to a gallery show if I ever get my shit together to send work out to galleries. I'm just happy to have my art seen.

That's Bean in the middle at her first ballet performance last Sunday. It was wonderful. That was a first. Today is a last. THE LAST DAY OF SEVENTH GRADE. Thank the gods that seventh grade is over. What a dreadful school year. Bean, however, made it through with flying colors. I am so proud of her. She worked so damn hard. So today I will take her out shopping (after all she is thirteen) so she can pick out some nice things for herself. I am so damn glad that seventh grade is over. I am so damn glad I don't have to set my alarm for 6 a.m. tomorrow.

I was going to write something about the ballet performance and also about John Woo's The Killer (what a combo), but I am so bloody pooped at this point that I'm ready to fall on my face.

Good riddance seventh grade. I am soooooo tired.

Sometimes you can find the least expected when you’re least expecting it. You find a road you didn’t know existed. You find shade and shelter from the blistering heat. You turn the corner and take a new path. The world is in a hush. Nothing matters but the sound of the breeze in trees, the rustle of old aluminum, the hand you hold inside your own. You are no longer alone, and you stand together quietly and breathe in this moment side by side.

How The Story Goes

1.
The man on the screen
is already dead. He doesn’t understand
what poison he carries. Something
radioactive. He is
turning nuclear. Too much

booze and women. A lust
he can’t define. Stumbling
between martini glasses
and legs, he whistles
while he dies. It kills him

before he even knows it.
It kills him even after he’s dead.

Through clouds, through rain,
through trees and over bluffs
waves hit rocks like bombs
while the man dies in an ocean
of trumpet and toxic sweat.

The waves are crashing, the man
is dying and we’re fucking
like there’s no tomorrow. His face
flickers between the TV
screen and the window reflecting nothing
but the black night. He faces down

his own death while sofa cushions collapse
under our weight. The whole room
muffled by our kisses and the sound
of the movie hammering home.

Life is short. Grab it as fast
and hard as you can.

The man is telling us something.
Save me. Save me. Save me.

2.
Night is long as the ocean
is wide. This sounds like a cliché but I know
it’s true. I count the minutes between
sunset and sunrise with the counter
on each frame of each film I watch.
Fast forward, rewind,
auto repeat. The sound of gunshot

wakes me in the same scene
each time. The woman screams.
She’s high on dope collapsing
in a chair. Somebody drops
dead but she’s wasted
on wealth and too much
leisure. She doesn’t give a damn.

3.
I can watch these movies with my eyes closed.
I don’t have to see what’s happening to see
what’s happening. The blind
woman falls in love with the bad
cop who claws at his own heart to see
if he can find it. Chandeliers
crash to the floor. Who needs
light anyway? We don’t

when we roll around in the dark.
The sound of the movie cuts between
static, gunfire, screaming and pleas
for mercy. Give me some fucking
mercy. Here on the edge of the world

we grab each other and listen to the soundtrack
of another noir on another night.
Trucks idling in the parking lot.
The crack of a beer opening in the next
room. Bad box springs and a loose
headboard. Our own rasping

breath as we fall
not into sleep, but into the half light
of the movie we watch with one eye
closed. The man is still

dead. No one can
save him. This frequently happens.
The man face down in the swimming pool
or the one telling the cops
This is my last day alive.

How do you spend it anyway?
Try to find a cure for the poison
that can’t be cured, or drive to that room
on the other side of town and stitch
your heart to the bed while the screen plays

another movie about another love
gone wrong and you’re trying to make love
go right. Everything is black and white

Even as the sun burns
into a 106 degree blur.
Even as that man on the street corner
holding a newspaper waves me to stop

but I can’t stop. I’m driving so fast
my tires spin like frames on the screen.
I’m some kind of femme fatale
trying to outrun my own
mortality, the fatality

of everything that has ever been.
Are we always born dead
or can we drive fast enough
to beat the final scene?

4.
I’m not sure who the bad guy is
or even if there has to be a bad guy.
Is it that woman desperate for love
her face smeared in white cream?
She can wipe her age away.

She can bring you back to her heart
with her slashed and bandaged
wrists. Come back to me Joe
she cries, her lips a curl of desperation
and ego. Or is it the man

who’s always after the girl
and the girl who wants the man?
It’s tangled in money and scams
and guns and revenge, and let’s not forget

they’re fucking when they’re smoking
those cigarettes and we know it. They’re fucking
when they’re pulling those guns
on each other and we know it.

There is love in this.
There is hate in this.
There is life and desperation.
Is it ever not desperate?

5.
Life can be a movie too.
Say it’s 9 pm and we’re standing
by the railroad tracks. Stars
sprayed across the night sky
like buckshot on black velvet.

The wind whips right through us
and we say This is brutal
but sometimes brutality
feels good. You need to be
whipped by the wind
so you know you’re alive.

A freight train cuts through
the desert. Its headlight turns our shadows
into two black streaks on a dirt path.
We startle at the sight
of our own bodies. This could be the scene

of a crime. We throw our arms
around each other as the train rumbles
with its load of lock boxes and machine
guns. It’s a machine gun train
on a machine gun night. The train clicking
by like the sound of a thousand fingers
on a thousand triggers.

It’s all noise and wind.
We count boxcars and lose track
after fifty. Our kiss lasts
that long. Somewhere in Los Angeles

in a different time and different place
a woman carries the dead body
of her husband down railroad tracks.
She catches her shoe and stumbles
but never falls.

6.
It’s another dark movie on another dark night.
It’s a way to make it to the next day.
I remember this one. I’ve been watching
it my whole life, the one where the woman

in tears says I didn’t mean to. I didn’t
mean to. The femme fatale
always says she doesn’t mean to
when you know damn well she does.
That’s how the story goes.

Before I write about Marley, the new documentary about the life and music of Bob Marley, I need to out myself as really loving the man’s music. I’m listening to him right now as I type this. I was introduced to Bob Marley in the early 1980s when I was just off the streets and trying to reconcile my “straight” life after spending my teen years in the “concrete jungle” of the streets of San Francisco. At that time, I couldn’t really look my own life in the ghetto straight in the eye. I wasn’t ready to face myself down. Instead, I directed a lot of my creative energy towards more global struggles – either on the streets around me (homeless people, junkies, prostitutes) or around the world (apartheid, etc). Marley’s music came into my life and gave me a voice I could identify with personally, but his music also allowed me to lose myself in the beauty of its sound and the global issues that it embodied. Marley is the voice of human struggle, but it also is one that is transformative, celebrates survival, love and the human spirit. I could dance to the music and celebrate life while also acknowledging that life is fucking hard and unfair a lot of the time.

Bob Marley and early Jamaican reggae and ska became a kind of 24/7 soundtrack of my life in the early 80s. It was always on the turntable. I listened to it while I painted images of people screaming and fighting under the fist of oppression. I listened to it while I wrote poetry about the suffering and inequality I saw all around me on the streets. I listened to it while I struggled to find an identity for myself after spending much of my young life just fighting to survive. I was twenty years old when I discovered Bob Marley, and I was just figuring out my place in the world after having had no place for so long.

While I have always liked all of Bob Marley’s music, I am particularly fond of his early material from the 1960s and early 70s before he hit it big. He cut his first single “Judge Not” at age 16, and that song contains so many things that Marley would follow through with as his career matured – the plight for equality, the drum and bass rhythm that is the signature backbone of reggae, and an infective spirit to lift our hearts and our voices and embrace life against all odds. Actually, as I learned from the movie, those early songs are “ska” – the “pre-reggae” music that dominated Kingston before the distinctive reggae sound was accidently found in the studio one day. The low cost production values combined with Marley’s young bursting enthusiasm make those early songs so urgent and raw and full of the streets from which he came. I’ve always been fond of the sound of Jamaican ska, the music that was carved out of the heart of the slums. This is music that isn’t highly produced in some slick music studio. Instead it was created from everything from empty metal drums covered with cow skin to an empty box with three taught strings pulled across the surface. The rawness of the streets is evident in the music, but so is the human spirit, a creative will that can make music even amidst the hardest of realities. That chord struck deep in this girl who just came from the streets and was struggling to find a song inside my own heart back in the early 1980s.

In the documentary, record producer Chris Blackwell refers to Marley’s breakthrough album Exodus as “the most pasteurized” of Marley’s albums. Indeed this album represented the turning point in Marley’s music. The songs are layered with sounds that are a result of studio technology. The pure heart of Marley is there, but it has been put through tape loops and effects, the riffs layered on top of each other to make the music more dense yet more clear at the same time. Having access to high-end equipment that could “layer” the sound gave Marley’s music the signature reggae dub effect. That doesn’t make the sound less good. It’s just more refined. Marley’s spirit and distinct sound are still alive and pulsing in his later (and most successful) albums, but the sound is definitely not the raw, unfiltered pleas that came from his voice in Trenchtown. Still, all of Marley’s music -- from his first song to his last album -- is amazingly urgent, passionate and transformative. His production values may have changed over time, but his voice, energy and message never did. The trajectory of his career – from his childhood in Trenchtown to his stadium-packing career as a musical Messiah – is fascinating. As a man, an artist, a revolutionary and a visionary songwriter and performer, Marley is a wonder. The film does his legend full service.

The documentary sheds light on many things I liked and intuited about Bob Marley, and it gave me new insight into the music and the man. Mostly the film shows the portrait of an awe-inspiring man who was a powerfully unique spirit, an exceptionally charismatic and talented person, who was ignited by an unquenchable desire to create music and change the world. He was a man whose drive to create and spread his art and voice through music was so powerful that he pumped it out of himself at full speed for his whole (and much too short) adult life. Even when his entire body was being eaten away with cancer, he got up on stage and poured every inch of his being into his songs and his performances. He was a man whose music not only inspired political change and revolt, but whose legacy has continued to ignite freedom of the human spirit across cultures, races, and countries ever since. A man of mixed race who sung his way out of the Jamaican ghetto, he poured his own personal conflicts and experience of racial and economic inequality into music that became universal cries for freedom and love.

It is pretty damn hard not to like Bob Marley’s music, and after watching this documentary, it’s pretty damn hard not to stand in awe of this man who is one of those rare spirits who lands in the world, lives too short, and gives us so much to make our lives better. I am a firm believer that in this world that sucks out the ass, we have to embrace the good that humans have to offer. Good for me comes in the form of creative expression – music, art, poetry. Bob Marley’s creative voice was a gift that changed so many people’s lives, whether providing respite in the form of some sweet music to dance to or inspiring people to revolt against the forces of racial oppression. There are few musicians who had the spiritual and political aura and the ability to incite change through music that Marley had.

The film runs 144 minutes long and is organized as a straight forward biography, starting with Marley’s birth and ending with his death. Directed by Kevin MacDonald, whose political inclinations and creative eye can be seen in The Last King of Scotland (the impeccably filmed story of Idi Amin), Marley is shot and assembled beautifully. Told through contemporary interviews and archival footage, the film isn’t just a messy hodgepodge of material with a bunch of talking heads thrown in for factoid delivery. Rather, the documentary is assembled to be a thing of beauty itself, the film evoking the spirit of Marley in content and style. Contemporary interview material includes former Wailers Jimmy Cliff and Bunny Wailer; Jamaican ska/reggae guru Lee Scratch Perry; Marley’s wife and backup singer Rita Marley; two of Marley’s children – Ziggy and Cedella; the former Miss World and one of Bob Marley’s many girlfriends – Cindy Breakspeare; and various music industry people and friends.

All the interview footage is shot with attention to aesthetics and to highlight the individuals’ personalities. The interviews are not standard talking head footage. They are situated in environments, colors and compositions that show the emotional and internal landscape of the people being interviewed and their personal relationship to Bob Marley. The cinematography evokes an emotional landscape which resurrects the spirit of Marley through the hearts of the people talking and enhances our perception of Marley the man. Rather than just providing information about Marley, the way the people are filmed allows us to see and experience Marley through their eyes and adds to the film’s sense that we really are spending 144 minutes with this man even though he is long dead and gone. Marley is in the room with the people talking. For example, as daughter Cedella is filmed with her body taught like a coiled wire in a stiff backed chair in a dark room, we are able to feel the claustrophobia of her bitterness and emotional baggage, her resentment over her father’s absence, and the lid she has clamped down on her sense of abandonment and pain over the loss of her father. On the other hand, Rita Marley bursts onto the screen in a riot of color and enthusiasm. The sun shines behind her, and she is a glowing spirit of light and color, the portrait of a woman whose spirit got her through the best of times and the worst of times. She was wife, backup singer, and Rasta Woman, but she also paid witness to Marley’s infidelities with other women, and she stood by him because she had complete faith in his art. Marley had eleven children by seven different women. All of this is revealed through interviews spliced between archival footage. Certainly Cedella shows one side of this story, but with the legacy of Marley’s music and the change that it affected in the world, it is hard to judge him. “Judge Not” as he says in that first song at age 16. And the film asks us to “judge not” as well.

Bunny Wailer and Jimmy Cliff have no end of stories about Marley. They are situated center frame, speaking as the musicians they are. When they recall their stories about Marley, we feel as if we are with the man himself as they scratch out songs at dawn, kick a soccer ball on a field together, or gather for political discussions at Marley’s house in Jamaica. Both musicians came from the trenches with Bob, and they have plenty of personal stories to tell about the evolution of Marley and his music. As they tell the stories, we really feel like Marley is with them as they evoke Bob’s spirit by making their tales so personal and full of life.



The film also provides a kind of crash course education about what it means to be a Rastafarian, including its roots in the Jamaican black descendants of slaves, its Christian background, the religious doctrine of smoking weed because the Bible says to “take in the herb,” growing dreadlocks as a sign of spiritual evolution, and the patriarchal heart of Rastafarian culture (e.g. women wear dresses and no makeup). I also learned that in the early days Jamaicans worshipped the Emperor of Ethiopa Haile Selassie who they saw as the second coming of Christ (a.k.a. Jah). Later, Bob Marley would assume that role by becoming a global musical Messiah spreading his message of peace, love and revolution. You can still find Marley’s image painted on black velvet worldwide, right next to paintings of Jesus at the Last Supper. Understanding the spiritual significance of the dreadlocks and ultimately the spiritual role that Bob Marley played in the lives of so many oppressed people, it is heartbreakingly tragic to hear the stories of how he lost his hair to cancer. First he began to lose it with chemo, but then the weight of the dreadlocks themselves were too much for his frail body to bear. The image of his hair coming off is a tragic symbol of his physical decline. It is a powerfully final and devastating symbol of the fragile mortality of this visionary man. Nevertheless, Marley may have lost his hair and his life to cancer, but his spirit lives on today.



The archival footage in the film really is what drives the energy of the documentary and cues us into the absolutely mind-bending energy of Bob Marley. Concert and interview footage with Marley himself and archival photos are spliced between interviewers with Marley’s survivors. Watching Marley speak and perform, it is clear that he was channeling major energy from some powerful source. The man had an aura that could blow the lid off any government. He seemed so casual, yet his energy was entirely focused with power and vision. That is why he was the target of assassins who attempted to still his voice with guns because he was seen both as in league with the Jamaican government but also as a source of revolt and uprising. Though he was trying to spread peace and equality, in his homeland the reception to his message was as mixed as his race.

The footage of his live performances is amazing. The film is a gift just to allow us to see such a delicious glut of material of Marley in action. This man gave all of himself every single time he performed. He never held back. In interviews and concert footage of Marley, one thing is constantly clear. The man had vision and the persistent energy to drive his vision forward. Whether writing songs at the crack of dawn, kicking a soccer ball, running on the beach, pulling chords from a guitar or dancing on stage – Marley was a fireball of creative energy and charismatic drive. He emanated energy like a solar flare, a shining force of power and light. He smoked a joint and went for a run before he wrote songs. He was fiercely athletic and furiously competitive, but like most artists, he mostly competed with himself. In the end, he both won, and he lost. He created a musical legacy that changed the world and the sound of music, but his drive also prevented him from tending to his own physical health (follow-up exams for the melanoma that he had on his toe) and he dropped dead of cancer at age 36.

His death was a sad and terrible thing. One day he was performing with his entire heart and soul. The next he was flying to Germany in a last ditch effort to survive by going to the world’s most renowned holistic healer. When Marley was in Germany, I kept thinking how sad it was, that he should be back in his home in Jamaica for his last weeks alive. But as he sings in his songs, Marley was not going to “give up the fight.” He did fight, but in the end, cancer won the battle, and the world lost a musical legend.

Rather than ending with Marley’s death, the film ends with the sound of Bob Marley’s music playing today and with footage from all over the world of people singing and dancing to his songs. In Japan, Russia, Africa, South America, the Middle East, France, his native home Jamaica, and all around the world, the filmmakers caught people on film living the spirit of Marley. It is clear in this footage, that the message and sound of Marley’s music is just effective today as it was over thirty years ago. These closing shots are hopeful and life affirming even after Marley’s death. It made me think that Bob Marley really did give us a gift that few people, regardless of age or race, can’t appreciate. I remember one time in the early 1980s when I was playing a Bob Marley record on the turntable. My mother came over to visit and asked what I was playing. I told her Bob Marley, and she said, “I like it.” She stopped in the middle of the room and began to dance. I think I’ll stop everything and dance to a Bob Marley song right now. In these hard times when the world seems to be crashing down in every corner on the globe, where the gap of inequality grows wider every day, it seems like as good a time as any to revive Bob Marley’s voice, to “get up, stand up and don’t give up the fight.” This documentary reminds us of that spirit, and that, my friends, is a good thing.

This is a Pen Noise in progress. I started it this afternoon after spending the majority of the day attempting to write about The Kid With A Bike when really I was just lost in an emotional stupor. At around 2 pm, after writing four paragraphs on the film, I completely fell apart.

I was overwhelmed with unfathomable pain that I couldn’t articulate. All I could do was sob. At one point, the pain was so bad that thoughts of “using” actually crossed my mind. For a few moments all I wanted to do was get high, get wasted, and obliterate myself. Let me just say that when I say I think of using that does not mean that I will use. It means that once you’re an addict , you are always an addict. As such, there are times in my life when the urge to use will overwhelm me. I’ll never give in. I am committed to spending the rest of my life sober – seeing, feeling, experiencing things with clean and clear eyes. Sometimes, as I’m learning, that also means experiencing things with clean and clear pain. I also know that if the thought of using crosses my mind, then something serious is going on inside me. I don’t get those thoughts from the trivial stresses of life.

I’ve been slipping down the dark path since Tuesday when I saw the movie for the second time. I have been flailing about pointing at “this” and “that” as a source of my unhappiness. Then today, as I was writing about the film, the bottom fell out of me and I collapsed into tears for two hours straight.

I couldn’t understand why I was so wrecked. The kind of emotional pain I was experiencing was coming from some place really deep inside of me. Then I thought about the movie I’m writing about. When I watched it the first time, tears rolled down my face because I identified so strongly with the kid. When I watched it the second time, I thought I had my critical distance and was watching the film solely as a critic.

But there are some things that are really hard to get distance from. In the movie, the kid’s father shuts the door in his face and tells him he doesn’t want to see him again. As many of you know, this happened to me. My biological father Al left me when I was two, and he never wanted to see me or talk to me again.

I spent a large part of my childhood and young adult life holding onto the hope that we would reconcile, that one day we would meet each other and he’d tell me he loved me and life would go on with a happy ending. There was no happy ending. He drank himself to death and died when I was twenty six years old. I almost died of an overdose shortly after. It took me years to understand that my overdose was directly related to Al’s death.

Now I’m almost fifty years old. Al died 24 years ago this past April. I know for a fact that that he was a very bad man – a sadist, a corrupt cop, a criminal and an alcoholic. He wanted nothing to do with his kids. Yet I still held onto hope, until hope was no longer possible. That’s what Cyril, the kid in the movie does – he holds onto hope until he is forced to realize there is no hope. Cyril carves out new hope. I’ve been spending my entire adult life trying to do that.

So I was writing about the movie today when all this pain came out of me. I realized I was processing the loss of my biological father – the psycho, sadistic asshole that he was. He was still my father. He still dumped me. He’s still dead.

Let me tell you about where I am in my life. Not only am clean and sober, but I have also opened up my heart. I was able to survive the very brutal things that happened to me when I was young because I disassociated myself from myself. Later, I could only experience my emotions through alcohol and drugs. When I was sober, I was tight and cold as a clam and didn’t let any emotions out. I had to get drunk to feel, but the irony is that you don’t really feel when you’re drunk. Alcohol is just a filter that distances the pain while pretending to let the pain out.

So now with a clean and sober body and a heart that is wide open, when pain comes on, IT COMES ON HARD AND DEEP. I feel it so intensely. It’s like a half century into my life, I am suddenly really truly mourning the losses in my life and feeling the pain I experienced when I was young. I did not occupy my body when I was young. I did not occupy my heart. It was too dangerous. Well, I fully occupy myself now, and as such I fully feel everything.

So what did I do when I found myself crying my eyes and heart out for two hours this afternoon? I let the tears flow. I talked about the pain. I felt stupid and dumb for feeling so much pain over something that happened so long ago. And then I did something really smart. I decided to stop writing about the movie until I found somewhere to put my personal emotions that were spilling out from watching the movie. Where is the best place for me to dump my emotions? In art. So that’s what you’re looking at here. The place where I’m putting my emotions. I’ll finish it later tonight.

One of the other things I’m really trying to learn is how to go easier on myself. It’s not going to be the end of the world if I don’t get a review in Counterpunch this week. It will be the end of the world if I die of stress.

I have had four dreams of dying this past week. One of them was incredibly brutal. In each dream, I woke up right before I died. This has frightened me. I think I really need to listen to my heart so that my heart keeps beating and feeling and loving. Even when feeling hurts like a motherfucker.

I guess this is all to say that not only is this art a work in progress, but so am I . . .

Time to finish my drawing.

Ciao.

PS: I am so lucky that I have art. Art always works to help me channel my emotions and ground myself. It's like meditation except when it's over there's an art made by me. Art makes me feel good and happy and relieves the burden inside me by putting it into cheap ass ballpoint pens. I am so lucky to have that.

I was setting up my camera in my bedroom to take a photo of something else when I looked through the viewfinder and saw this. It was so beautiful that I wanted to save it.

When I went back into my bedroom five minutes later, it was gone. The light had shifted. It was there when I needed it, like a gift from nowhere.

So busy yesterday with job and parenting and attempting to make progress on my movie review for Counterpunch that I never even had time to post my Photo A Day. So, here you go . . .

Thanks for the enthusiasm on the parenting report. Going to try to squeeze it in today but really want to get my movie review to Counterpunch because publishing makes me happy. Plus I have a big ass deadline at the day job. But I promise Parenting Report coming soon!

Today on the responsibility front, I have to work the day job and help the kiddo with end of the year school assignments. On the writing front, I need to write my essay on the Dardennes KID WITH A BIKE and finish it by end of day tomorrow to make weekend edition of Counterpunch. It makes me very happy to get my reviews in Counterpunch. I have a loyal readership there, and it always gives me a boost and inspires me to keep writing. I like boosts! (Who doesn't)

On the blog front, I'm thinking about writing a parenting post, but as working mom with little time want to make sure there's an interest before I set forth on squeezing that in. My apologies for the polls but it helps me gauge how to best spend my time. I KNOW I want to write my review for Counterpunch. I'd like to know if there is anyone who reads this lame old blog who would like to read a parenting post. Thirteen and seventh grade has been a big year. Much of my time has been spent helping my kiddo navigate it which is why I've been more absent than usual. Anyway, thanks for letting me know if you're interested!

Off I go running (or working as it were) . . .

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