| | dicey venison (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7){kind=small} dicey_venison) wrote, |
- Mood:
optimistic
Jamming
I feel a lot of inspiration.
Yesterday, I finished the card that I was making for The Mister's birthday.
I feel really good about it.
It's in three pieces.
The back of the card is made of a single piece of card stock with the golden chrysanthemum patterned paper on it.
The front of the card is composed of two panels that open up like doors. They are held together in front with gold ribbon that I looped through holes that I made with a paper punch. The pages of card are held together with string that is looped through holes on the sides, so that it opens up on hinge-like fastenings.
I glued beautiful pictures in it.
The percussion instrument turned out really well, and I've shown it off to some of my friends, who think it's a good idea that I put together.
When the Mister came home from work, we went out for a while.
We took a drive out in the country and admired the beautiful fall colors.
We stopped in at Fitz's On The Lake, a waterfront bar by Lake Wisconsin.
This was the first place that the Mister and I ever went to on a date together, when we first met.
We've been fond of this place ever since.
We came back to Madison, and the Mister wanted to go out a little bit more.
We hung out with Matt at the Ideal.
The Mister played some tunes on the juke box and I went over to the Blue Plate Diner to get us each a slice of their exquisite pie.
We ended up coming home and hanging out on the porch, despite the cold. We listened to the band, Traffic, and we sang along, playing various percussion instruments as accompaniment.
I brought out my guitar and sang a few songs.
However, when I began to pluck the Kansas song, Dust In The Wind, the Mister protested that it was too morose and he wasn't in the mood, so he quickly pressed play on the CD-player and turned up the volume to put an end to my musical offerings.
"Well. I see that my work here is done," I said, announcing that I was cold and wanted to go back inside.
I hadn't been sitting on the couch a minute, and I was rolling a cigarette, when the Mister came plodding back in, saying:
"C'mahhhhhhnnn...Come out and be with us on the porch! I wanna hang out with ya."
So, I put aside my sense of indignity and rejoined the boys out on the porch.
We had a long discussion about Salvia divinorum.
It seems to be coming up in our conversations a lot these days.
We keep relating our experiences of it, trying to find some common threads, trying to wrap our minds around exactly what it is that this...thing... does.
I've only smoked it once, and it was a good experience for the most part.
I want to remain on good terms with this entity, and so I want to approach my next visit with a prayerful attitude.
Salvia is really like a shamanic key to inter-dimensional soul travel, and in this sense, it is like taking Communion.
I really believe that Salvia has great potential as an aid to spiritual understanding and should be approached in this manner.
This morning, we got up and made ourselves ready to go to J.T. Whitneys, over on the West Side. They have a special, here, if it's your birthday, you can drink as much beer as you want.
For free.
So, we got on the bus.
It was a beautiful day.
The sky was a gorgeous azure blue, and the fall colors were brilliant.
A beautiful day.
We got out there, and soon, Spencer showed up.
Cool!
We ordered some food.
I got a Virgin Mary, and you know what?
It was really good.
Even without the booze.
We've been doing this for The Mister's birthday for years, and I felt really nostalgic for a drink.
I can remember my consciousness from previous times we did this.
I always remember it as a bleary-eyed, boozy affair, and I began craving booze.
I so closely associate the boozy state of mind with this place, that as I took leave to have a cigarette, I could recall all of the sensations I would have in the past, of getting progressively more drunk and getting all sloppy with my speech.
But this time, I was sober.
And it felt weird.
But I'm so relieved to know that I'm strong enough to go to a place that has such an alcoholic pull on me, and still I didn't break.
I feel really proud of myself.
I got cake and coffee, and enjoyed that, while the boys sampled many types of beer which are brewed on the premises.
As it turned out, they had changed their policy.
It used to be that you could get the bottomless mug of beer if it was within a week of your birthday.
Now, unbeknown to us, they've changed their policy.
You can only take advantage of the special if it is the actual date of your birthday.
When the Mister casually mentioned that it won't be his actual birthday until Monday, they cut him off.
It was fun while it lasted.
At one point, during one of my smoke breaks, I noticed that the craft store was just across the street, and I decided to go over there.
They were having a 40%-off sale on canvases, so I went over there and bought three.
I also bought a lot of stickers.
There were dragons and tigers and gold stars, and rainbow-colored musical notes and trippy mandala patterns.
I saw some really beautiful marbled paper with lovely fall colors on it, and I bought that, too.
I was exploring Arab women artists on the web a while back, and I came across one Saudi artist named Hend Al-Mansour.
She did this one painting called Women Of Arabia-13.
It's amazing.
It isn't framed.
The canvas is stretched across, held up by the corners with rope, looking like a piece of a Bedouin tent, or a Plains Indian winter-count.
The picture is of a circle of Arab women wearing abayas, looking down at the viewer. It's like being a small child, looking up at this enclosed circle of women, who are gazing down.
What's really unique about this painting is, it is done in henna.
The pigment used for the painting is henna.
This is very culturally significant, because Arab women use henna to decorate their hands, hair, and feet, as a part of celebrations.
Before her wedding, an Arab lady traditionally would have her hands and feet decorated with henna designs.
Henna is also widely used for any occasion which calls for celebration.
You have probably heard of mehndi, as it is now quite popular at music festivals.
A lot of people have taken this art form and gone wild with it, creating all kinds of beautiful and creative temporary tattoo patterns with it.
The last time I put henna designs on my hands was this last Spring.
Last April.
Jackie Greene had just come out with his most recent CD, Giving Up The Ghost, and he was coming to Chicago as part of his Spring Tour.
I was super excited!
The night before the concert in Chicago, I had painted my hands with intricate henna designs, because I was going to a very celebratory event.
I still have the henna kit, with the fine-pointed applicator.
It's perfect for doing intricate detail.
I'm curious to see how the henna paste will work on a prepared canvas.
My recent new surge of artistic inspiration is really taking off.
With my next painting, I want to do it in henna.
I have ideas just brewing in my head.
I'm so overjoyed that I got involved with the Art Surge group.
I feel like I have a direction, an outlet for my voice.
I want my art to be as Pro-Peace as it is Anti-War, and I think that a painting done in henna would have a lot of significance.
You don't see anybody really exploring this.
Hend Al-Mansour really inspired me with her henna paintings.
I just think it is an ingenious metaphorical way to explore and express the life and culture of Arab and Arab-American women.
I remember how, just this last summer, I was at a turning point.
I realized that I needed to get a life.
Big time.
I needed to find my own creative voice.
And it really started with the first Art Surge show at the Commonwealth Gallery last July/August.
And now again, I've got my paintings up in a gallery, in a show that I feel has a lot of cultural and political significance.
Art and music are now entwined in my life in a really beautiful way.
I even created a percussion instrument that I feel satisfied with.
The Mister will really be pleased with it.
I just can't wait to give it to him!
It makes me feel so good to create things that I can share with people I love, and even take it out into the larger world and send a ripple into an expanded sphere...
When we got home from J.T. Whitney's, we hung out some more with Spencer. He stayed at our house for a while.
Soon, Dawn and Thomas came over, and Thomas had brought his guitar.
We watched the Mickey Hart concert on DVD. Spencer and the Mister had gone to this concert, and there were several crowd shots where you could plainly see them both, up by the stage.
The Mister would stop the DVD and point, exclaiming,
"See?! See?! Look! There we are!!!"
It was fun.
I was happy to be seeing Dawn.
She and Thomas brought The Mister a birthday gift: Barbara Hand Clow's book, The Pleiadian Agenda: A New Cosmology For The Age Of Light.
It looks really interesting.
I tried to get through one of Clow's books, and never made it all the way through.
But I'll try again with this one.
Thomas brought out his guitar, and I got mine.
Thomas was the rhythm guitar player in the band that I was in, Primitive Feet.
We decided to sit in the kitchen and play a few songs.
Soon, the Mister came in, bringing several percussion instruments in, and we were all sitting in the kitchen, jamming.
I can't jam worth shit, as I don't know how to play guitar well enough yet. I don't know anything about scales, and that is very limiting.
But, we did a few songs, where I just strummed chords, and Thomas did the leads over it.
I played Big White Gate, with Thomas playing along. Thomas played Crazy Fingers, but I couldn't follow him, and I just sang along.
He tried to walk me through the Grateful Dead song about the monkey and the engineer, and I got lost between D and G a bunch of times, but I kept trying to pick it up.
It was really fun, and by the time we did Janis Joplin's Turtle Blues, and Neil Young's Cortez The Killer, we really were jamming!
We finished with The Beatles' Why Don't We Do It In The Road.
We decided that it was so much fun, I'm going over to their house this Wednesday night to play music again!
We're going to have dinner and then play music.
I really need to get on a more regular schedule with playing music.
I'd like to do more stuff with Richard and Cat.
They have some property up in Sparta. Richard has his new guitar player, and they do a lot of shows together up by Sparta.
They keep asking us to go up there, and we never have yet.
I hear it's a really good time.
Another great thing that I haven't done in a while is going to open mic nights.
Madison has a pretty good variety of regular open mics around town.
There's Brocach, Come Back In, and Escape Coffee House, that I know of, off the top of my head.
Open mic is fun because you only have to do two or three songs, and it's a good way to meet other like-minded people.
People play music, but others do poetry slams as well.
There's so much to do, and I really want to get busy and active this winter.
I don't ever want to re-live the horror of last winter.
Now that I've eliminated the obstacle of alcohol from my life, I can be so much more creative, and I can actually finish projects and feel the satisfaction that comes with that.
...Now, I've just got to squeeze some time in for the comic book... [ ! ]
I am truly blessed.
Amen.
Love,
Dicey
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