Flies die in so many lonely places. -Roberta Rohbeson.
If I could only turn the etch-a-sketch of my life upside down.
The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.
Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.
It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me.
I listen like mad to any conversation taking place next to me just trying to hear why this is funny. Women’s restrooms are especially great. I wash my hands twice waiting for people to come in and start talking.
I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth.
Love will make a way out of no way.
Race and class are the easiest divisions. It’s very stupid.
I’ve gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I’ve never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?
But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?
Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real.
Dear Blubbo, How is it going? It is fine here. My sisters are fine. Mom is usual. Everything is regular in life except I am still seeing the burning skull heads. Yesterday Mom took me to Sears for school clothes. I told my sisters I could see the people’s head bones. They said DO NOT tell Mom. A guy moved a trailer onto the empty lot by our house. His skull is spectacular, many colors glowing.
Some lights shine without any flashing. Others flash on and off.
There’s the drawing you are trying to make and the drawing that s actually being made- and you can’t see it until you forget what you were trying to do.
In a classroom of students with varying levels of drawing experience, this way of drawing brings us to a common starting place that is like the starting place we all share: our first drawings of people made when we were little.
In the days of Rohbeson’s Slaughterhouse, flies were everywhere, crawling up the walls like living designs. I used to fall asleep looking at them. Thinking about their world. Their society. Did they have kings? Did they steal from each other? My light fixture was black-full with bodies of them. I used to think they had feelings about certain people. People who noticed them. Certain people. Me.
How old do you have to be to make a bad drawing?
To follow a wandering mind means having to get lost. Can you stand being lost?
We crossed a wide river and then everything changed. There were no more fields, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colours were gone, all of them except brown and grey and blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just emptiness covered with short dry grass and low scrub.
In the night when the moon is large, the world spreads blue in every direction.