12 step program (drawing)

untitled (12 step program) graphite on paper, 1995

When I moved to Chicago I had a small pile of cassette tapes and a shoe box that was full of charcoal and some gummy tubes of oil paint. I was a painter some but I came to the city for its weather. I wanted to live next to a park and have better access to public transportation. So I moved to an apartment on Augusta Boulevard. I've always kept books for drawing and writing in. They were in my backpack or on my lap when I commuted across town on the Chicago Avenue bus every day. Then when I moved from Humboldt Park to Bucktown the books traveled with me there. I was in the backseat and they sat in the trunk of the cab when I rolled by the Western Round Up for the last time. We went up Western Avenue and turned right onto North.

The apartment that AN and I were splitting was right there between Bell and Oakley. It was a smart 3 story building and my room was in the back of unit2 right over the recording studio. I slept on the floor and my books lived in 2 milk crates that I stole from a liquor store back in Michigan. I slept in a small pile of wool horse blankets that I got cheap from a thrift store earlier. At night the bass and the drums from the studio were a gentle pulse that I eventually got used to. After work I'd listen to Bitches Brew or Duane Eddy while I sat on the floor drawing pictures and diagrams in my books.

I drew this picture in one of those books around this time. The people in 12 step program are actually mirror people. They're on the Chicago Ave bus at night drinking beers on the sly during a terrible heatwave. I was in the center of the bus that night, its they're reflection that I've drawn here.

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Totem

Tonight is old. It's wett but current and bored. I'm watching nothing but stars in the often sky that happen... do... tonight is lame like old, young like song, even as blue... Equal after the sun, noon or scripted yellow you are to me... A we (as sound)

Songlet is Best

fig.0231) FizzGraf MT. "Magical, like a chorus of like minded souls in a froth of cotton fumes." Over fake doors, under refurbished ladders, gypsum board and bent yellow pipes offering us an unmade bed and a stained window. Our one chance at tomorrow. Magnetic guts from at least a thousand cassettes are strewn across the room. Hee-Haw style, fancy dress shoes cling to the floor like it's '86 all over again. Hee-Haw, goes the sound. Hee-Haw, we're closer then we were. Hee-Haw, it's hilarious. Listening for trains, leaning out over the rails like two people with no time at all. Better maps, that's what we need. We could use a melody for singing with this chorus; in whose curious presence more patients wait to be found. With hands over our heads, someone passes by and asks, "gender?" There's stars in this sweet tooth of mine and some atoms left from the sky, Tonight the whole angle of heaven sleeps without light. Ordering its coffee darkest, t

Whiskers, chanting, "swap me, swap me!"

Fig.32) Aging poorly We're just together, taking ourselves for a tidy sum of walk and now our toes are wet and cool in the Lak, beside a cool stone that could drive a modernist to their flint. There's a listening experience that feels prepared, "our's for now, ours it says! Here's the hammer and it's wrapped in its own design already. A union in time-space, this card is our greetings, our massive, our very patience is reflected in this resolve." Suddenly, there's a cut away and she's wearing the pants that I've made for her, slow blue like painted smoke . I'm thinking about her hunched over the kitchen table, something that's stuck. There's a carving knife in her hand but from here, it's the same as an old spoon. From here my computer is sitting on my guilty seat, I'm thinking about champagne and comparing it to a thick wad bees and wondering whats in it for me? It's an anxious season, filled with not enough of anythin

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