But I'll stumble along for now.

It's good to be involved in art and writing no matter what. I am working on a new few songs. I think I'm not sure which way to go, trying a few things. I should really release the old stuff before I hate it completely. It's hard to bring myself to work on songs that were written four and five years ago, even if I really loved them then. I just feel so different than I did in 2002 and 2003. On one hand I want to say "no more overdubs, screw it, just put it out" and on the other hand I'm me, with all the "perfectionist" tendencies that bend me and my pieces into shape. That is to say, I can't "just put it out." I have to get right with it.

I'm on the cusp of something. I can feel it. Yes, Spring is beautiful, and once again, I'm so glad we made it. But that's not what I mean...exactly. Though it may be related (hell, it's ALL related). Some chance, some change. I can feel it. It may involve more than just my own growth. I don't know, but I feel opportunity coming at me. Aside from the handful of small projects I am working on (mostly for free, alas sighs my wallet oh wait i don't own a wallet that must be bills sighing) that afford me untold personal reward (growth, stretching the finger webs). I am approaching something. Or it approaches me. Or our orbits are colluding to collide.

Maybe it's all about the Chicken Drawing e-Mail. I woke up at 2:30 this morning (I usually wake from 4:30 to 6) and just knew I wasn't getting back to sleep. After poppin on my heavy duty Audio-Technica headphones on and gettin freaky, I scanned a few emails from people about my site, art, various things, and there was one from Germany soliciting a chicken drawing from me.

Now, dig: I am NOT knocking a non-English speaker, so don't go nurturing that notion, but some of the finer points of English words were perhaps misapplied in such a way that I found the letter absolutely hilarious. And of course had to reply that I would be happy to participate:

Dear [Nezua],

Great are your stories. They are excellent and first class.

We are a group of visual artists called Blaumeise in Braunschweig. We collect chickens on paper. That means we incite people to draw chickens on paper and sent it to us. We then show the drawing on our website. You can draw one, two or more chickens. ….. please …...please. We appreciate your chickens. We are currently trying to create a gallery for prominent people, the “ Promi-netten.” There is lack of such dignity on the site.

Thank you Three times

Okay? I just pictured them "inciting" people to draw chickens on paper and lost it. Of course I use the word "incite" in terms of fearing for arrest at protests or being accused of inspiring or instigating thisORthat with writing or talking (Welcome to the Era of Bush's Freedom)...not generally as a synonym for "invite." But I really enjoy the word usage.

And the sincere pleas coupled with the genuine appreciation for "my chickens" as WELL as the promise to remove all my dignity?update: [Jeje...I realize I was misreading that lacking of dignity sentence now.] I am so down with this that I'm bumping it up on my schedule. Damn. Thank you three times.

The really freaky part? I was just in an odd conversation last night...we are taking on a few chickens in the back yard, and I am going to build a coop. So TALK to me about Chickronicity, okay? This talk was right before bed. And then I woke up a few hours later to this email. I feel like I dreamed the damn thing into being. (I really have to start dreaming bigger.)

I have paintings in my mind, sculpture budding inside my elbow joints, I need to flesh them out. I feel work coming that will not be like other work I've done. I don't just go through this journey that I speak of in this blog. This one is part of another journey. That other journey is this same energy and desire to be free I wield here, but applied in every way possible to my mind and my hands and my feet, my self, what I say, do, am. At this time, it focuses on ethnicity-as-it-relates-to-identity. But that is not the entirety of my effort. I have always been at this. It is growth that sometimes looks like conflict. With family, school, jobs. I'm just trying to get free. First of the ties They put around me. Then, from Me.

But this is a good stretch of the path. It is a crucial one that affects many others. Like my art. Especially my writing and music and art. I can't say how. But I look at so much of my art—most of it I've taken offline—and it belongs to a different time. I mean in my life. It is distracted. Much nice to look at, but in a way, hollow. Or, no...incomplete. It's hard to communicate without the invisible comparison to what I have not yet done, but feel coming on. But some of my older work, it is nothing more than playing with lines and shadow. I feel now, well...not arrived anywhere, but as if I can actually begin to inform my work with intention. Honest intention. I'm not saying it will be Great or True or Worthy. Just that I feel now, looking back, that I may have been making too much art that was afraid of its own purpose. Or that didn't know what its own purpose was. Just random bursts of expression and glimpses into overall emotional states or perceptions that were generally hidden from even me by metaphor or incomplete arcs. I just don't feel I was even using my 'talents' well. I don't want to make a declaration of attainment. NOW I WILL MAKE GLORIOUS SELF-REALIZED CHICKEN MAJESTY. But...I've done so much seeing in the last year or two. I'm eager to flex some of it into color and shade and shape.

I've lost friends, too. Recently. I don't mean through death. I mean through them deciding they suddenly didn't care for me anymore. The dynamic itself reminds me of when I took back my first name in my late teens. My Spanish name. There was a period (18 years old?) when I tore away from the history of high school and as I did so, I took back my first name. Because, you see, coming to this point you meet me at now? It's been happening in stages. And that was one of the first big ones. Taking back my first name and braving that which I had turned away from by taking on an Anglo-moniker at eight. And I met resistance, of course. There is almost a disappointment they radiated; a disgust, as people you've known for years as something else register the name. Many thought I was "putting it on." Taking on some trippy new thing. They resented trying to pronounce it, just as They did when I was eight. They said "Well, I'll still call you 'Jack.'" They looked confused. Why on earth would I take on this foreign, impossible-to-pronounce name? Because it wasn't just resistance to a new name, which can be expected. I was veering away from one thing and toward something else, and sometimes this can upset people around us.

And like that, I've said goodbye to friends of four years or so even recently, people who couldn't deal with someone who would not remain static. (They may have other issues, but I won't go there.) As a reader/blogmigo said recently, "stay true to yourself and you can't go wrong." Something like that. It's true, and those are words I've carried with me in various shapes for all my life. Because I've changed hands and lands so many times, it feels, that there only ever remained one constant. Me. It wasn't hard to come back to myself and rely on my own inner guides and trust myself. It seems enlightened, but it was born of simple necessity. Just as trying to design my own clothes and sew them and dye/bleach them in High School may have been my awkward (and failed, I'd say, gently) attempt at style, but was necessitated by a poverty of coin that prevented me from easily blending in with brand names. Did I want to be freaky and come to school with red, raw fingers from sewing late into the night, or stinking of bleach at 14? Naw. I wanted to roll into class sporting Nikes™ and expensive jeans and all the rest. Just like Them. But you know, we got our pants in hand-me-downs and from the clearance rack at Walmart type stores. (PS, those who have been taught not to speak of class or money are generally people who don't want to wander down a dialogue about any imbalance caused by their own station or comfort, that's how you can tell the poor, they talk about how much everything costs and I'm still trying to wean myself of that habit of pointing out worth via dollar signs cause I'm rich in spirit baby)

For years in my life and now, people know me as independent-minded. Not assailable by trend or peer pressure. They have come to respect this. Life's funny like that because I sometimes feel that I only got here because when I tried to fit in, They wouldn't have me. And that not-fitting-in and being bounced back to myself hurt for a long time. Of course, now I'm glad for that pain-work. It has made me who I am. And it's an important and good habit to take on—philosophical and emotional self-reliance. Don't pop random opinions, mental dependency, advice, norms, societal mores, worldviews, philosophies or pop-psychologies into your being. That would be like walking through the forest and swallowing every bright fruit you find. You will not be healthy, you will be a collection of warring reactions, bellyfull of poison. The world, I learned young, is a fickle, dangerous, mad garden. Don't eat random berries! Leave that for the chickens.

Cock a doodle doooo! And welcome to la primavera, mis amigos. Sure is great to be here, thank you three times!

Sinceramente,
Nezua, of Der Promi-Netten Shack