Akrasia

  Because its human nature to just go into yourself when trauma happens

  But thats the wrong thing to do

  You gotta concentrate on getting better.

  And so since i never opened that door to ‘ok, so how really screwed up was i? poor me’ instead all i concentrated on was ok, what do i need to do next

  To see my baby? getting better so i could see my baby

  The question was always what do i need to do next? what am i working on now to go forward

  So when i learned a few months into it,that i really couldnt draw anymore

  At all

  I realized ‘what am i going to do to make money to feed my baby

  Eventually?

  Because most of my money had gone to hospital costs and just keeping me eating

  And i paid for all of these extra therapies, whatever anyone recommended to me

  Even a bunch of what i guess you would call new age or alternative healings

  Well, i couldnt hold a pencil

  Because my hands and fingers didnt work well enough yet

  So i went back on the computer.

  They actually wheeled in an old fashioned computer for me to use

  And at the time i thought huh, this looks familiar

  Well turns out it was actually just like my old computer

  My first computer from 85 or 86

  Because i was into computers way way back when i was just a kid

  There was a space shooter game and a game called life where you just placed these little dots and watched them grow

  Or watch them fizzle down to nothing

  I got to play all these old games again and it triggered something in me

  And there was a rudimentary drawing program on it as well

  So i started drawing with a mouse

  And the first thing i drew was actually mickey mouse

  The symbol for mickey mouse

  But i didnt know what it was. i knew the symbol but i didnt know what it meant at first

  And my weird cousin joked that it was the symbol for a brainwashed childhood

  And bad copyright laws

  And for some reason i could laugh at that but i didn

  Didnt know why it was funny

  But slowly slowly i started remembering everything

  And drawing as much as i could

  First on the computer and then finally on paper

  Then after more months go by i asked my doctor ok, let me start watercoloring again

  She said ok

  Then i went into oils

  And then i started sculpting for a little bit.

  And this time it was all like i told you before about most artists growing up in a nonverbal way

  This time everytime i relearn something i stop and go ok let me verbalize what that is

  Just to make that idea and memory stick in my mind as much as possible

  And so now actually because of that time

  And it was years, it was years

  And im thankful for the people who let me draw and paid me to draw during those ten years

  The first ten years of my real new life i call it

  And im thankful for people who paid for my artwork during that time, all of those mixed up pictures

  You know i really should not have been drawing

  Not professionally

  Cuz my memory was just lapsing

  In fact i only understand now this many years later that my short term memory is shot

  I didnt remember that i didnt remember, you see

  But now i know that i dont remember that i dont remember.

  Hahahaha

  There was a time where i could look at somebody for 5 seconds, put my head down and just draw it all from memory

  The entire scene

  Now i have to keep looking up and keep remembering and concentrating or it all slips away and i just zone out and freeze

  Freeze like im hypnotized by nothin

  Thats why youll see my sketchbooks now are just full of anatomy studies

  Even if im happy with what ive just drawn professionally

  I still have to keep remembering it

  Making an effort to keep remembering it in the sketchbooks between projects

  Practicing and looking back on it constantly

  But these ten years have allowed me

  Because i did it consciously and verbally

  Have allowed me to draw better than ive ever been

  And more consistently

  And to actually be able to explain and teach others to an extent

  Actually maybe im not as good of an artist as i once was

  Im not as natural

  But im more deliberate and consistent

  And i think its worth it to know what im doing for once

  Instead of just working off instinct which has its limits in so many ways

  So i am better overall even if people can point to my earlier work and say ‘that is just better natural raw talent’

  But it is a struggle

  But because of the setback i know what to do

  I know when to stop, i know when to shutdown, i know when to go sideways

  Is this stuff like what you call sideways tactics? maybe its similar

  Or a parallel

  Parallel to sideways, oh boy…haha

  Anyway i know when to go, i know when to jump

  Instead of just being frustrated with the pencil

  Or winging it and hoping that the muse takes over

  Which the muse…i dont have a muse anymore

  My muse dumped me

  People asked me how it felt when i found out and if i was angry with the doctor who lied to me

  I tell them no

  I didnt care that the doctor was lying to me

  Because what were my other options and what were the doctors options?

  Id rather just keep meeting her demands and improving myself in the process if it meant getting to see my baby, and the doctor knew that

  In order to make me keep working and come back from what i had to come back from, i had to think i was working for the person i thought was gonna be my wife eventually

  But the person i loved most then couldnt do anything for me

  So the doctor had to hide that from me so i could do it myself

  Because otherwise knowing how alone i was would have devastated me

  I wasnt allowed to realize how alone i was, and thats a good thing

  There were a few relapses along the way, so i needed a reason even more to get through them

  The doctor would have me try to draw a clock or a human face with my eyes closed

  But it would always turn out with the numbers and hands all over the place

  Not on the face

  Like it was a picasso drawing

  And you know how i have mixed feelings about picasso lol

  Well even after i started drawing again for the first 5 years or so my art was still abstract

  And pretty bad

  But i am honestly grateful for the people who bought work from me while i was recovering

  Im even grateful for the reviewers who said they liked my new style

  Like i could help it

  And it isnt like i blame the people who have criticized me now either

  I do wish they would stop asking my ex for interviews though

  Assuming some of them are still doing that

  Because i dont keep up with anything

  They remind me of people who always sort of made fun of my accent and put that into interviews i did with them

  Or maybe not made fun of it but they changed the spelling to bring out my accent

  Which i dont mind a little bit but the way they did it made me seem stupid

  I dont even think they thought i was stupid, but it made me seem stupid to myself when i would read the interview

  And they said ‘no we look up to you’

  I told them ‘you say you look up to me but
you turn me into something that i think sounds pretty stupid. and youre looking up to that?? then you have a real problem

  If youre looking up to a dumb image of me you made and think is something great to learn from

  I used to get real angry at them when i was young

  Too angry

  But people always got the wrong impression of me in a lot of ways and still do

  No matter what i say

  So i know my words look stupid and unprofessional but you know how it is and you told me you do it too

  You have to clean it up for me though

  Sometime can i show you a poem i wrote and you can clean that up too?

  It is not very long but its important to me

  But people take the things the wrong way

  Like when they looked at my horrible drawings from when i was an outpatient

  They said they were really profound versions of men as monsters and machines

  Or cyborgs or demons

  Well no they werent, they were all i could draw and they were supposed to be more or less normal people

  Maybe with a certain twist to them, thats all

  I messed my life up and can barely do anything that makes any kind of sense, and you wanna give me awards for it

  What does that say about your whole institute?

  But that kind of miscommunication is just one example and its not really what im trying to say

  Im sorry, its tough to explain

  I dont really blame the critics or museums because as many mistakes as they make in my opinion, we are still better with them than without them

  And i know you didnt ask this, and i know you said we could keep some of this out of the published version

  But i honestly dont remember what i did to my baby. that isnt just what i told reporters. i really dont remember.

  And i dont want to remember

  I dont need to remember it

  I dont want people to find out and tell me either

  And maybe i didnt do anything, maybe it was all her

  But ive gone this long

  And im not that person anymore anyway

  I almost literally have a new brain

  It is the same brain but it works differently

  Its been rebooted

  So

  I have more skills now

  And im a better person now too

  At least thats what people tell me

  Not giving anything away

  But they say that i never did anything wrong in the first place

  And i dont think thats true either, to be honest with you

  I can tell you that she had it planned before we left the islands

  I trusted her to book things because i always was too disorganized to do that stuff

  We were going to touchdown in hawaii and she had secretly got different connecting tickets

  To send me back to the islands while she went on

  She left me there and went on even after my episode

  She still went on to america

  To california i mean, cuz i was left in hawaii

  And she filed a restraining order while i was in the coma

  Even though i never touched her like that or even threatened to

  At least not that i remember and not that anyone ever told me

  You know to be perfectly honest i dont think you should put this in the article

  Do you believe that the last thing i heard from her, which she told me through someone else who works in law enforcement

  Was that if i ever looked her up to just find out where she lives or what happened to her, that could count as domestic violence

  That would automatically trigger a domestic violence charge

  Even though we arent living together or even seen each other in years and i dont see how getting information can be a form of violence

  But they said it was automated

  Huh, ‘auto-mated’

  Anyway maybe even looking that law up to find out if its true will count as some other sort of crime

  And this is from a woman who used to say the one thing she didnt like about america was feminism

  And she read tons of stuff online saying that the laws are unfair to men and that wives use them against husbands

  Which i dont even know about

  But the point is i dont think she was ever on the mans side and i think she just liked to hate women and looked for an excuse

  She used to say to me ‘girls are poison’ and that she was afraid that she was poison iv

  Ivy

  So, a woman who hates other women for whatever reason, probably because she isnt happy in herself and is jealous of women who are having a good time

  But i guess now she hates me too, so she can switch it up now and hate a man too

  Ive never been into any of this stuff man

  Good guys and bad guys

  Or good girls and bad girls

  I never looked at life that way, and maybe that makes me stupid sometimes

  Because they say if good and evil are just relative then evil will win through this confusion

  But i dont hate her anymore

  I dont even have any bad memories of her really, i could only find good ones

  Which hurt in a way

  To remember them now

  Cuz hanging over all of it is how she chose to end things with me

  Oh well

  I can always draw new babies, you know?

  I drew her before i even saw her

  I drew a woman that looked like her and then met her the next day

  Like i conjured her up

  Thats a true story they tell

  But thats another story

  I dont draw her anymore, not for a long time

  You know that a year and a half after waking up i did fly back to our old house

  And i looked for pieces of her hair and fingernails that she left in the carpets there at my familys house

  Because ivy would always bite her nails and just leave the little pieces on the floor which had a shag carpet

  So much that itd still be there even after you vacuumed

  Some was still there a couple years later, that is how much she shed and bit her nails

  And how shaggy that old carpet is lol

  Well i wanted to take some of that stuff to an old woman i knew who helped raise me actually, and she was what you could call a voodoo priestess

  It wasnt voodoo but it was what is known as a fetish religion

  I guess you could have called her a witch doctor

  But she was a very highly respected person in our town and could control almost everything and everyone

  My parents would drop me off with this woman sometimes when they were arguing, and they would argue alot

  My mother was christian but my father was not and he would smack her whenever he caught her praying

  For her own good he said to get her to stop that superstition, but then he would drop me off with the old voodoo lady so go figure

  Well from her i knew that the hair and fingernails of someone can be used to put a curse on that person

  And for a time after my coma and recovery i wanted to put a hell of a curse on my old baby

  Because i wasnt mad at first and im not mad now, but back then for a little while coming out of my setback a madness did build up inside me

  Well i found out the voodoo priestess had died a few months before i got there

  And i was talking to the womans son

  Or probably her grandson actually

  And we were talking things over and he said that my baby had actually been to see the priestess before we got on that plane

  So im thinking that for whatever reason my baby had a curse put on me

  And thats why i had the episode and the coma

  And probably it freaked her out that the curse even worked

  Because she didnt believe in that stuff

  She didn’t believe in anything

&nbsp
; But for whatever reason the voodoo priestess who was like a grandmother to me had helped her do it

  Maybe as a way to get back at me for some other shit

  Because when i was a little kid she said i was supposed to be the chosen vessel for her group

  To be possessed and a spirit would speak through me

  But i wouldnt go for it

  I said it was bullshit

  Because i was afraid it could be true and that was my destiny

  So i dont know.

  Excuse me for cursing

  Hahaha

  Hey tell me is that like a double meaning? curse words and actual cursing?

  You said spells and spelling was but i think you coulda been pullin my leg with that one

  Anyway i ended up not using the hair and fingernails though.

  I just threw them away and felt stupid

  So

  I dont know how much any of this will help you for the write up

  But there you go, it should be enough lol

  Please dont make me sound too bad lol

  I hope the article comes out ok and i hope your boss finds what hes looking for in all this, whoever he is

  Never met him yet huh?

  Weird

  Mr Nobody huh

  Oooook lol

  Anyway let me know if you have other questions or if you need more artwork for the article

  I really appreciate it my man

  Sorry again that i was late tonight

  Sometimes i just lose all track of time and take naps in my hammock

  V. The Train of Fools

  This old Train of Fools keeps rolling on steadily,

  stopping quickly to board new passengers readily

  but never letting anyone off. Only a few anyway

  ever try to exit. Thwarted, they grumble but stay.

  Almost always, the protestors are young adults.

  Unable to escape, they eventually form into cults

  based on warring theories of why they can’t leave.

  These small groups argue over what they believe

  but all contend that the door-guards are the least

  important obstacle preventing passengers’ release.

  Only one of ten riders ever joins these dissenters,

  however. We consider them crazy and off-center.

  They loudly bemoan every new family who enters

  the train and are rightly mocked by TV presenters.

  Cultists’ cries of overpopulation are pure bigotry.

  More people on the train just means more industry.

  Most of us view the boarders as a happy display.

  The families arrive with children leading the way.

  Often the older ones seem skeptical or suspicious,

  but the kids have convinced them of the auspicious

  offer our train gives them to step into the future.

  Upon boarding, each person gets a new computer

  and is asked politely if s/he’d like to be neutered.

  They are then clothed, fed, and assigned a tutor

  who teaches them the ways and means of the train.