Pataphysical Fable

This is my latest piece, a little diorama called "Pataphysical Fable". It has it's impetus in a very unhappy stretch of my life around 15 years ago. I was miserable, absolutely miserable. If my life had not already been horrific at the time, my drug habit would have surely been enough to push me over the edge. If I did not already have a terrible drug habit at the time, my life would have been repulsive enough on it's own.

 Added together, these two factors made a perfect shitstorm of awful. One day, I wheeled my nasty, hemiplegic, terminally ill mother to her favourite restaurant in silverlake and cut up her breakfast for her and poured her a cup of coffee. I wandered outside to get a newspaper (remember those? Newspapers, awkward noisy things that krinkled and stained your fingers?)
I got this newspaper and continued the train of thought that had come to obsess me all the time at that point in my life:
That life was horrible and nothing surprising, good or bad, ever happened anymore. It was all just a repetive sequence of grotesque events and humiliations, and that my life had become an obligation that I no longer wanted to be a part of. I was slowly working out the logistics of suicide, how I would do it, what chain of events would have to be set into motion, how to go about shutting it all down cleanly and logically. My affairs would have to be put in order, but what did that even mean? Where would I start, and what was the checklist I had to tick off?

I got back to my mom at her jentacular table. She regarded me hatefully and I just kind of gave a little nod that acknowleged "Yeah, I hate you too." I breezily tuned out whatever crazy, stupid, cancer-patient blather she was dribbling from her mouth.
I opened up the paper and saw a story about a mama cat in the netherlands who had a litter and one of the kittens was born green, and nobody could explain why. And that shocked me, pleasantly shocked. Suddenly my whole world fractured right down the middle and revealed a bizarre, unpredictable universe that still held surprises, if only I could stick around long enough to witness these anomalies.

The placemats in the restaurant had little drawings of pies on them, and I imagined one of them bursting open and a little green kitten jumping out. I had a vision of sick, diseased, evil old birds sitting around, drooling over this pie they were going to eat, and then this vital, life-affirming green kitty jumped out and sabotaged their meal.

I decided that morning not to kill myself. Simple as that.

Months later, the same newspaper revealed that the kitten had faded to normal gray cat colours as it grew, that the whole thing was explained because the mama cat drank from a stream polluted with chemicals and dyes from a factory.

By that time, my mother had slipped into a coma from which she would never awake. I had made up my mind to get sober and develop some kind of strategy to get on with the rest of my life.

In the fifteen or so years that followed, I have wanted, again, to kill myself. And I have even tried and failed a couple of times. And I am sure that in the future, I will want to again, and eventually succeed at some big, irreversable adventure of self-destruction, and then no more blogs, no more art, and no more complaining.

But I have seen a few other things since that green kitten that were absurd and beautiful and alien and unexpected, and I was glad I stuck around to see them.

(this is me at the gallery, pretending I am the kitty jumping out of the pie)

Zvyozdny Godorok

I dreamt that I was visiting Star City in Russia, the cosmonaut training center. In my dream, it had become a big dilapidated space museum, and tourist trap of oversized junk. 
I stole a spacesuit from one of the exhibits and put it on as a disguise so I could sneak around, inconspicuous. One of those hulking, musty canvas spacesuits, clumsy and heavy and trailing hoses. I climbed up the side of a soyuz rocket... massive fucking relic, all rusting and warped like a 19th century structure, green stained copper and tarnished brass rivets, Jules Verne on steroids. The ladders creaked as I lumbered up the side.

(Did you know that soviet rockets were powered by Kerosene? I'm not making that shit up. Soviets couldn't wrap their heads around cryogenic fuel technologies, so all the great Soviet-era rockets were stuffed to bursting with kerosene.)

So I get to the capsule at the top, and inside the hatch I find this gloomy little apartment, a family watching black and white TV in the dark. Little old man in a moth-eaten sweater vest and his little old wife in a shawl, like an unsmiling matroshyka doll. Their middle-aged children sat on the couch. Along one wall, an altar with votive candles. Displayed like ikons on the altar; faded photos of Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova and Laika, first dog in space. Winking avuncular poster of Stalin giving his blessing to the dinner table.

I take the old man aside and talk to him in private... he explains that in the sixties, he and the missus and their kids were scheduled to launch as the first family to go to space together. The mission was scrubbed, but he didn't want to break the disappointing news to his family, so he locked the capsule from within and carried out an elaborate hoax to convince his wife and kids that they had launched into orbit, and they have been there ever since, living off of years of freeze-dried food and life support. 

He pasted photos of outer space  over the capsule's windows, occasionally poured buckets of gravel on the outer hull to simulate meteor showers. 
Cut off for so long from the outside world, he asked me how Russia had been, was there ever a war and if so, who won? I told him that the Soviet Union had collapsed decades ago. The new Russian government was a confusing mess of society run by gangsters, who secretly took orders from corporations, who in turn answered to bigger gangsters, who were secretly working for bigger corporations.

The old man looked crushed. He asked me what happened to the Soviet space program. Extremely successful taxi company, I told him. They pretty much did all the work of flying to and from the ISS ever since NASA lost it's balls. Whenever the russians had a chance, they flew millionaire space tourists into orbit. 
And the MIR he asked? Burned up over the Indian Ocean years ago, I said. Red star, winter orbit.

Poor old schmecker was crushed. Disillusioned and tired, he started up the rocket's self destruct sequence. I clambered down the various ladders as quickly as I could, no small feat in my bulky spacesuit. On the way down, pipes and vents on the side of the rocket smoked and rumbled are farted rusty poison. When I hit the ground I ran for cover in the main museum building, along with stampedes of tourists, amid the klaxons and creaking of the soyuz. It blew up in a vast mushroom cloud, and in the split second before he was vaporized the old man looked out of the capsules windows and glanced the curvature of the earth.

Steatopygiac

Body image can be a very touchy subject. So much more so when discussed with friends, family members, or especially lovers. So I tend to treat it as I treat any other topic which can lead to trouble: I toss out a bullshit theory that can't be proven or vetted, and I wander off mumbling to my self.
And my topic about society's taste in body type has always been a subliminal expression of humanity's fear of mortality. As in, if it is a period (damn near anything before the 20th century) where lots of people are in danger of starving to death, then curves are considered sexy. In either gender. Like renaissance odalisques their round bellies, or a plump man as a good marriage prospect. And it's still obvious in the 20th century... America is prosperous in Gatsby's 1920's, not so many people are starving in post-ww1 America, so Flappers aspire to a lithe, straight silhouette. And look at all of those  art-deco depictions of beautifully elongated/surreal women.

So this is my bullshit theory, and I have repeated it a bunch of times whenever a skinny girl talks trash on fat girls, or a chubby lady complains vice versa. I repeat my bullshit theory, and then I don't have to make any actual declaration of my choice of chubby over slender over anything else.
And then I hear the following story on the news yesterday, replete with stock footage of anonymous fat women jiggling around, shot from the waist down so the news cameraman can sidestep asking permission to take anyone's picture.

From the Washington Post:

"When men are under stress, they are more likely to find larger women’s bodies attractive.

So says a small study published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. Researchers at London’s University of Westminster and Newcastle University, both in Britain, assembled 81 white male undergraduates to test a hunch (based on previous studies) that men under psychological stress might prefer bigger-bodied women than men who aren’t stressed might choose.

After subjecting half of the group to high-stress situations, all  81 of the men were presented with a standard set of images of women that’s often used in research regarding attitudes toward body size. The series consists of 10 black-and-white frontal-view photographs of leotard-clad women (whose faces have been blocked out) whose body sizes range from very thin (or “emaciated,” in the study’s parlance) to obese. They were asked to identify which body they found most attractive, or ideal. They also were asked to identify the smallest and the largest body they found appealing.

Sure enough, the men under stress identified larger bodies as their ideal choice and as the largest they found attractive; the stress-free men chose smaller bodies as ideal and as the largest they found attractive. Those differences disappeared at the lower end of the body-size scale, with both groups making similar choices when identifying the smallest body they found attractive.

“It is now widely-acknowledged that body size ideals are, in part at least, shaped by an individual's resource security, such that heavier body sizes are preferred where or when resources are unpredictable or unavailable. This proposition highlights the fact that a primary function of adipose tissue is the storage of calories, which in turn suggests that body fat is a reliable predictor of food availability.  In situations marked by resource uncertainty, therefore, individuals should come to idealise heavier individuals, as fatness would be associated with access to resources. Conversely, thinness in such contexts may be associated with increased incidence of ill-health and, for women, ovulatory irregularities and lower capacity to support pregnancy.”

The study further notes that larger size may signal maturity, independence and other qualities tied to survival. It makes sense that a person under stress might seek out a companion with those traits."

So it wasn't exactly as simple as my theory, but there were definitely parallels.

In the interest of full disclosure, pertaining to sexual preference, I should probably share the following information about myself:

I am constantly terrified.