Late Night Coffee Break

Saturday Night. Listening to the Grateful Dead ~ American Beauty and sipping coffee that I first brewed about five or six hours ago. I've spent most of the day in front of my computer, web surfing, getting caught up with folks on blogs and those pesky social networking sites, making imaginary travel planes to fabulous places, and looking at pictures of self-made houses. I stopped a couple of times to eat pork.

I had put in for a ban on people coming over for awhile, but I guess that was lifted and I guess I approved, although my heart wasn't in it. I've been wanting the house to be quiet and just the three of us. It is now just the three of us once again. Two Dads and our son. The one who comes and goes has gone again, and once again it did not happen gently. It happened as we were pulling into the driveway after a horrible day that ended our otherwise positive vacation.

I had a few vacation days on either end of this week, and I filled in the rest with calling in sick. I watched Aleksander Sokurov's Molokh or Moloch. Nothing says kick that depression like a moody Russian film about Hitler. I also watched a documentary on Walt Whitman, The Magnificent Seven, a documentary on Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye (which surprisingly featured my favorite actress, Isabelle Huppert) and maybe my top pick of the batch, Obscene a documentary on the life and work of Evergreen Review and Grove Press published Barney Rossett. It inspired me - but then again how can a film with Gore Vidal, John Waters, John Rechy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joan Mitchell, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Amiri Braka, Ed Sanders, John Sayles, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X and Patti Smith NOT inspire any and everyone?

Inspiration is what I most need right now. Actually, that isn't true. I need inspiration but I need motivation. I need to get my little art table set up and I need to sit there and make art. I need to move the pencils and pens I stuck in my backpack and never used out of there and into the tray on the side of the table, and I need to move my ass from the office chair and the bed into the room where my art supplies sit in boxes and I need to get out some paper and just get started. I don't need to be Picasso. I don't need to be anyone and I don't need to be good and I don't need to impress, I just need to do it.

Over and over again, my life became something I didn't expect. That's okay. Happens to the best of us. But I need to take more control of it now. I need to stop reacting to the others who come for help, and start acting on my own goals and needs.

Tomorrow I'm pushing this chair away from this desk, and I'm getting started. Tonight I'll get in some dreams.