the waste of a mile

The women lined up for at least a mile, on either side of the road. Each woman held up a professionally-done full-color poster, at least 4 feet tall, using words like ABORTION and CHOICE and using GOD and the VIRGIN MARY, and 3 foot tall dead babies, fetuses, red and gory and malformed and partially destroyed.

One woman looked carefully at each car driving by and ran the palm of her hand over the photo of the aborted fetus, swooping wide over its bloody shoulder, its head three times as big as her own, its all-but-obliterated torso, its frail and undeveloped legs. She was in a rapture, perhaps, or some piece of absurd suburban performance art.

On both sides of the street, the posters stretched, spaced at intervals, for quite a while.

I wonder how long they stood by and watched the world pass them.

FMG and GMA

I kept telling Svet that I wanted to work on 'stuff' today, which mostly meant getting the kitchen back into manageable order, and possibly working on the stuff I never did get straightened out when I first moved into this apartment nearly eight months ago.

For some reason, I really wanted to show Svet some of the journals and other books I have of my grandmother's. I think part of it was sparked by the fact that she made a gift to me today of a set of acrylics and some paper and some paintbrushes. It was incredibly sweet and cool that she did that. This gift was sparked by a moment of anxiety I had Friday evening when we went trawling the River North galleries. We went from place to place, Svet greeting and chatting with former friends and artists she'd shown in her gallery, me tagging along and sipping at a really delicious vodka lemonade from Gruen Gallery.

When I was much younger, I was pretty much convinced that I wanted to be a painter. And I never pursued it much because I was paralytically shy and introverted, and because even then I knew pursuing something in the 'arts' wasn't practical or much of a money-making profession.

Around the time I gave up hopes of ever having my stuff displayed in the Art Institute of Chicago is when I (pretty much) accidentally got cast in a freaking Gilbert and Sullivan musical as a seventh grader. So much for being pragmatic and stuff. Frying pan, fire. Yeah. Now I call myself an actor, for whatever it's worth. (Not much, not right now)

So here I am, about to turn thirty, and I've got a nice set of acrylics and some brushes, and I've also poked through my grandmother's old paint case, and some of the tubes of oil paints are still soft and squashy, and a set of brushes is still in excellent condition in the Grumbacher paper envelope in the bottom compartment. I was thinking about her, and so I wanted to dig out the journals, the travelogs, the odometer readings, the mileage reports on her and Grandpa's "See Horse," the trailer they used to visit every possible camping site and state park they could get to.

Also in the same box as Grandma's stuff was the leather satchel I'd used for all of Eric's letters. Eric was the Magazine Guy at my old bookstore job in some old Glitter entries (not currently online). He worked in the back room for a while, and then left to go back to Grand Rapids. After a while, he traveled to Portland, to start a new life. What ended up happening was that he took his own life. I have a huge bundle of letters from him that he'd send to the bookstore. They were all fairly disturbing, but as a whole, they were a huge flashing sign of his impending suicide. I guess. We didn't know, and hindsight is 20/20, and I still really miss him.

The folded pamphlet at the front of the bundle was the program from his memorial service.

July 20, 2000, date of death.

Whew. Nice timing. I still miss you, Eric Kruse. You were fucking brilliant and you are still missed, and I wish you were still around so I could write letters to you.