#uncoffeed...

Porn for Writers Come on and take a ride across the border to a place that once was mine Out of focus, out of order, pictures from another time Nobody who was present will forget that perfectly-timed crack of thunder as Dan Navarro wove oral history through the opening bars of We Belong . One of the kids said it out loud: " We belong to the thunder! "  And we laughed; and we did belong, crowded under the patio roof for what became a sing-along. Lowen & Navarro's beloved hit segued into (and I'm not sure why) Steve Miller Band's The Joker , and then something I can't remember because I was overwhelmed by the night and had to pull back into the misty rain. Afterward, I found our hostess Alexandra and thanked her for creating a space where I was comfortable to be what I am, to draw pictures instead of staring at the musician, dance in dark corners. She'll email me, she said, when they have another happening. On the outside turning lighter, s...

buy Deconstructed Corvid 1 - Fibonacci Putting together an art show seems very much like putting together a music album.  Some of you-all may  not remember albums. They told stories and wore cool jackets, sometimes smoked. Dark and enigmatic, glistening in the dim light of somebody's basement while the needle danced over the grooves. God, I miss analog.  An exhibit needs to tell a story. Our brains seek patterns but like surprises. We want the A-HA! Like the words I write, my paintings blurt images in quirky detail, narrative a little jumbled like that last dream before you wake up.  As I compile my varied works to hang on the walls of Beanetics Coffee Roasters , I may find a piece doesn't fit, quite, between its compatriots. I can bend the narrative by reordering the pieces so one nuance leads gently to the next. This project wants editing like any other. A good whisky and a good perfume are the same way. The first impression may be bold; you're not sure...

It all started with a bottle cap. In those days I worked at the Holiday Inn on Sprinkle Road. I used to meet coworkers at Bell's Brewery about once a month; we called it a Front Desk Meeting even though I worked in housekeeping at the time.  Tim could no longer work or play guitar, so he spent a lot of time watching TV.  He'd usually have thoughtful questions for me by the time I got home.  This is how I could tell what he'd been watching. "If you could take any person out of history - and it can't be someone easy, like Hitler - who would it be?" He looked at me placidly, waiting for an answer. "Just a second," I said, looking at my hands still full of things brought in from the car. "I have to think. Any other clues?"  His face remained static so I went to the kitchen and put things down. I heard him respond from around the corner. "For me, it would be the guy who invented bottle caps ." So it was the History Channe...

at Macaroni Grill, Terminal 2 at ORD Today I found myself wishing I was married, or otherwise had someone I could call to come over and make me some tea. I want to stay in bed, reading. It's nice that I have time and space to do nothing but read in bed but my brain's running the list of things I should be working on, asking whether staying in bed is really appropriate. Wondering if I might be depressed.  No, brain; shut up. That's societal expectation talking. That's over-analysing. You can check, brain, but then stop checking. The answer will be the same in 2 minutes. You can't be on the hustle 24-7. Every spare minute is not an opportunity to push your agenda. Downtime is necessary and should be scheduled as part of the hustle. I really dislike the trend in self-help these days: everyone has a recipe, if a genuine sense of goodwill, and they'd like you to give them a dollar, please. I get it; just it's boring. People are boring, because they act...

Art is all about emotion - people crave emotional rides. I have more feelings than I need, but bottling them for sale challenges me.  I have to translate the emotions first, and then package them in some identifiable format, which is the part that's hardest for me to understand. I understand soup. Soup is an art form. Quality comes at base from the raw ingredients. The recipe documents the chef's labor-intensive process of finding balance between individual flavors and textures (yes, there is work in soup.) Like any other art, the ultimate reward is finding something that's good for the artist and also for the audience. Those lucky few in the chef's inner circle get to taste the soup and get excited: OMG. This is the best soup ever. You could sell this.  My taste is pretty eclectic; I try to create more of what I love so I can love more of it. If I find someone who loves what I do enough to pay for it, that shared love is more reward than money. Having m...

Austin, TX, can be a bit Tippi. After Canyon, we headed south toward San Antonio. Maz's sister lives there and said we could stay at her house while she was away. North of Sweetwater, a little before sunset, Maz made a video (which we thought was hilarious) of an Oil Crane Pump Well (which looked like a grasshopper). We didn't make it to my family's ancestral graveyard but stopped at the Ballinger intersection where we could have turned left toward Brownwood. There I picked up a rock that may have touched either foot or hoof belonging to my old settler Ewings. As we passed Paint Rock, I thought about how Southwestern petroglyphs really freak me out. Like cold to the bones and feeling nauseous freak me out. I swept slabs on construction sites in San Antonio during 1983 instead of graduating from high school. My daughter's father's father lived in Universal City, and we landed at his place for a few days before finding a trailer and getting jobs in the booming...

I came home from this road-trip to find my cat Noori hiding, crying, in the closet.  She was so well-entrenched that I couldn't even find her in the closet at first. Finally she came out and hid under the bed, still complaining. By morning she was walking on me and  yelling for breakfast as usual. She went out briefly earlier to eat some trumpet vine, and then I made her come back in.  She's sitting at the front door now, telling me to open it. I want more , she says. "You can't go out there. You're getting too brave. I need you to not be brave," I tell her, and then immediately I re-frame those words as if she were a human-child, and I feel a tinge of something akin to regret. I don't care , she says. "There are things out there that will EAT YOU." Again I flinch; but this time I know I'm telling the truth, not setting up unknown dangers to bind the child's spirit. "There are owls and foxes and stuff." There really...

I've lived in Texas twice: once in San Antonio, and once in what we call Deep East Texas. That's part one of this story. Part two started in 1997 on AOL. There I met my poet-guru, who gives away guy-secrets for free, and also Linda,who made magic out of my attempts at poetry. She squeezed my hand through the ether when life got weird, and reminded me how we'll survive it. Texas women are matriarchal by necessity, says the guru.  In one of life's best surprises, the two of them fell in love while I was away from the internet. My guru, known to some as Doc Blossom, eventually moved to Texas and made it bloom, too, for Linda. Literally and in all ways. I've been trying for the longest to go visit them in person, but logistics have been complicated. I finally went all-in and set a date, and that's when part three happened. Maz is gonna road-trip with me. I also know Maz via internet, through our mutual friend Rolb Coepmann . We talk a Venn diagram of art,...

My day-job has been insanely busy for several weeks now - not just in sheer volume, but with complex challenges. I like that; I do. And it was planned so I was able to allocate mental and spatial resources. In the coming days I have to prep for Texas . Now we're in the eye of the storm, and all my projects are still waiting. But there's no toggle switch - I can't just move over and pick up what's been tabled. Downtime is weird, especially when there isn't much of it. There's some decompression happening, some unfolding of what was packed under pressure. It makes sense, of course, but I'd forgotten to plan for the unfolding when plotting out my life.  And I should have known better:  I've been unfolding for a year and a half out here in Annandale.  I'd smoothed out some wrinkles and was cutting into the fabric to make something new, but I had to put it aside for the paycheck that keeps me free and legal. I need to not start admonishing myself...

So it annoys the [ expletive ] out of me when I pull one of my typical shenanigans, which of course was not a shenanigan when I did it but just a fact of nature, and someone says (inevitably): "Only you, Deb..." and laughs. ...because No. It's not only me. There are other people in the world who are willing to go outside the box, to eclipse convention, to take the risk. Dare to follow possibility. We do that; it's not only me. But then... Every year I go with my friend Liz to Markoff's Haunted Forest .  Please disavow any other scary thing you've been visiting in the DMV ; this is what you wanted all along. My favorite bits are the pirate ship, the Viking encampment, the dragon graveyard and the hardcore bus (it's like being in a Mad Max movie.)  I love the giant Krampus, which this year was wearing the LED counter telling you when it's your turn to enter the forest. I hope I'm not giving away too much here.  The sets are really ama...

Here's me having no concept of time, at work four hours early. I didn't mentally note when I'm to show up because we always start extra office coverage at 10 AM. Except when we don't. Thinking like this is how people die. Starbucks ground coffee was on sale at my local market, so I bought Espresso Roast for the office. There's crack in it - I never actually want Starbucks coffee until I drink it and then I think it's so great. Starbucks tastes like nostalgia*. Upon first sip I remember sitting under the palm tree outside my Palm Springs apartment with my friend, or at a table outside the Starbucks on the strip, or in my car at the drive-up window with two poodles and a dalmatian in the back seat. The SBUX employees crowded around the window; they knew the poodles and wanted to know my name. They were hard times, very real times. I love real so much. The brain is a funny thing; I can drink this coffee and conjure up the feel of sun on my skin at 7 AM i...

Abbey the Cockatiel* eyeballs me from her cage - a weird game of hide-and-seek because she wants to be afraid, label me the Debbil, but can't stand to be ignored. We know this game, yeah? Funny that non-humans play it too, or maybe no surprise. While I watch TV she navigates through the open door of her cage onto the floor, but when I acknowledge her she retreats into her safe space. I get it, Abbey; do your bird thing. Abbey's momma, Chantelle, asked how much I charged to birb-visit and whether I was willing to barter. I love barter, but I can use cash. I said I wanted a Cuban; I should have known she'd have one already. It was on the counter with the cash and a box of matches next to a list of Abbey-care instructions. I call Abbey's name and whistle as instructed; she whistles back in response. I take a risk and put my hand in the cage, knowing she might bite me. I'm surprised when she steps calmly onto my wrist like it was what she wanted all along. ...

Markoff's Haunted Forest will open soon. Come over. My sweet and bubbly personality is genuine, but so is my dark heart. I think dark may not mean the same thing to you that it does to me. My birthday is right before Halloween; the world was just beginning to die when I was born. Orion watched over me every night. I don't think that helps explain why I like bugs and lizards and bats. Especially bats. I can find an eye of calm in death metal. My favorite Christmas carol is God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen . Darkness is not creepy to me, but joyful.  I like to play with the dark things - tales, emotions, creations - because they are beautiful. Dark is the other side of the earth from the sun; it's where you can see the stars and the moon, where creatures of the desert find it safe to come out from hiding. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is ultimately a story of hope, even if the hope is strangled by humanity. Bones are organic matter allowing us to walk upright...

Not teenage me - might as well be. I spent a minute today remembering the awesome awkwardness of being a teenage girl. While I waited in the grocery parking lot to get in my car, a mother coaxed her daughter out of their SUV's back seat. The girl was lanky, blushing, unsure of the outfit that her friends probably approved. Her mom smiled behind her and winked at me as they passed. She was really happy with her girl. I was a teenage girl, you know, between the tree-climbing moments, the bookworm moments, the crazed artistic moments when I threw and broke things I'd made with my own hands. You feel yourself growing into new bones. You know other people - mostly boys and nosy aunties - are checking your front-side for bumps, signs of some imagined ripeness you can't comprehend. Sometimes you actually do feel ripe, and it's both glorious and horrible; you wonder if you should choose. You can't choose, vacillating between that thresh-hold of newness and the te...

When I arrived at my Tiny Cottage after my writers' group meeting, I found this little yellow bucket hanging from the doorknob for the second time, and I knew there would be a message therein. The bucket came to me from my daughter Alia, filled with flowers for Mother's Day. It sits on a wooden easel outside my door for no reason other than I've chosen to not deal with either one. The first time I found the bucket hanging I was unnerved (imaginary banjo music seeped into my brain) but I found a note inside from the lady who cleans the landlords' home.  She was worried about Tigger, a lanky dark orange Tabby, that was mad at her and hiding or lost in the woods.  That first time, she left her phone number in the bucket, so I called to tell her Tigger was asleep in the kitchen and just fine. Today, she left a note with orange flowers from the Trumpet Vine (which is creeping into my house through any crack it can find) and a thank-you, and a message that Tigger stil...