New Seasons

Here are some of the paintings that I am putting up in a Raleigh cafe next week. They will be up for the month of February. I decided to do a show on portraits, even though people are probably the thing I feel least comfortable painting (me, and many other artists, I'm sure). I usually stick to plants and bottles. I LOVE painting plants and bottles. And feet. Anyhow, here is the first painting I finished for the show. And then there is one that I might be about half-finished with. Everything is still apt to change. And then there are two portraits that I finished, what, two years ago now? titled "Maria" and "Christina." They are two of the gypsy girls that we took to camp in the Transylvanian mountains. I think, so far, that the three finished portraits are most well-suited for the show because I am going to use my artist's statement to educate a little about human traffiicking, and am also going to donate a percentage of any sales (in my dreams!) to a sort of half-way-home in India for victimized women. Not that the gypsies were traffickied, but I think the paintings look especially vulnerable, metaphorically gray, and feminine.

So I am largely spending all my "free time" (carved out with a chisel and mountains of determination) painting right now, and getting ready for the show. I am happy that Kevin said that he "likes what I am doing here" with it, even though he also said to "not worry about it. Do what you like." And I'm trying not to dwell on my audience but to come up with stuff that I might be able to sleep on. Between painting and Boy's sleepy-time acrobatics, I have been having disturbed dreams... the kind where you get a song or an idea stuck in your head and it keeps obsessively repeating until the morning. I hate those dreams. I hate those dreams. I hate those dreams. I hate those dreams. I hate those dreams. (See?)

But after this show is up, I am switching gears and re-engaging. I have promised myself that this is the year I finish my first novel. I have watched as others have their moments over and over through the last four years, as Benevolent (the working title) gathers computer-dust as a pretty-darn-good 150 pages. I have had enough. If I am going to be the type of person that works hard enough to publish and to publish well, I have to prove it now. I have stood by as my friend's story unfolded: as she and her husband purchased a historical fixer-upper and slowly widdled away at it and their finances over SIX YEARS! It is not even close to being finished. And I have said to her, recently, "Six years is enough! Six years tells me it might just be another six years. And then TWELVE? Do you really want to give twelve years to this? You're done. It's over." And that's similar to how I feel myself (sort of). I am not willing to go any longer without continuing the race, without fighting my way to the end. Which, fittingly, is also where I am in my Christianity. Since last year's whole anger phase and then the valley of the shadow of death, I am in a place of contending for my faith (and my marriage, and my family). For the past several months, I've been contending just enough to make it, to mature as I just eek along... barely. Again, I say, "Eight years is enough!" It's time to grow up. It's time to listen. It's time to obey. It's time to identify the Body and to intercede. It's time to fight the good fight. It's time to walk into the blessing. It's time to--and this is the best pictoral, I think--jump into this marathon and run as hard and steady as I can. Enough is enough! Enough "farting around," as I embarrasingly say way too much.

And we move on.

Following are two of the most compelling quotes from Michael Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded that I have read thus far:

"In the next twelve years alone, the world's population is expected to swell by roughly another billion people, and many of them will become new consumers and producers. When that happens, the law of large numbers starts to kick in--everything starts to add up to huge, notes David Douglas, vice president for eco-resposibility for Sun Microsystems. For instance, he asks, what if, once that newest billion are all here, we gave each of them a sixty-watt incandescent lightbulb?

"'Each bulb doesn't weigh much--roughly 0.7 ounces with the packaging--but a billion of them together weigh around 20,000 metric tons, or about the same as 15,000 Priuses,' said Douglas. 'Now let's turn them on. If they're all on at the same time, it'd be 60,000 megawatts. Luckily, [they] will only use their bulbs four hours per day, so we're down to 10,000 megawatts at any moment. Yikes! Looks like we'll still need twenty or so new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants'--just so the next billion people can turn a light on!" (p.62, large print edition)

and

"To visualize this process, the California Institute of Technology energy chemist Nate Lewis offers the following analogy: 'Imagine you are driving in your car and every mile you drive you throw a pound of trash out your window. And everyone else on the freeway in their cars and trucks is doing the exact same thing, and people driving Hummers are throwing two bags out at a time... Well, that is exactly what we are doing; you just can't see it. Only what we are throwing out is a pound of CO2--that's what goes into the atmosphere, on average, every mile we drive.

"Those bags of CO2 from our cars float up and stay in the atmosphere, along with bags of CO2 from power plants burning coal, oil, and gas, and bags of CO2 released from the burning and clearing of forests, which releases all the carbon stored in trees, plants, and soil. In fact, many people don't realize that deforestation in places like Indonesia and Brazil is responsible for more CO2 than all the world's cars, trucks, planes, ships, and trains combined--that is, about 20 percent of all global emissions. [See National Geographics's 2008 article on Borneo]

"And when we're not tossing bags of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we're throwing up other greenhouse gases, like methane (CH4) released from rice farming, petroleum drilling, coal mining, animal defecation, solid waste landfill sites, and yes, even from cattle belching." (p.68-69, large print edition)

Girl just called me from her afternoon with Aunt CiCi to tell me that she can smell candy in the shopping cart and that she can feel her "butt bone."

Good afternoon and good riddance.