Memorial Flowers for Children

Photos and treatments of flowers found in 2013 on the graves of children who died in the Carrollton Bus Crash, all images Marie Monroe

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The Creative Excitement Builds Itself a Nice Little Nest & Takes a Nap

There's always a lot to do. Letters to Mr. Manny, a continuous need to eat, emails, supporting the endeavors of everyone I care about and inventing other things to do. I have the sad misfortune, and the exquisite gift, of ideas that increase with branches and twigs. I also tend to follow through on things.

That's one of the classic characteristics I have of children who did not grow up in a dysfunctional home, but because I was left to my own devices most of the time, I did learn to set goals and carry on as if everything I did would work.

I told T the other day that I am always protected and I always win. That's where my head lives. It's a pretty nice place. It doesn't matter that some folks call it magical thinking in a disparaging way because all thinking is magical. Even theirs. Why choose unfun magic? That seems to be such a waste of physics.

I'm not a very pessimistic person. I get angry sometimes and disappointed. I also have more than the average bear's dose of fear and anxiety, I'd say, but I'm wired that way. I rinsed out under the hood quite a bit, but got really tired of that. I decided to let my engine alone and work with what I've got.

I do believe in magic. That's why I write to Mr. Manny. He's given his life to stage magic. That really says something.

I'll tell you though, it's particularly hard to write an interesting letter to a magician. It requires heartfelt realities in each and every line. You have to hold back nothing and dig deeply for the edge of vulnerability and then bust through. When you're finished you have to be completely disassembled and rather teary about it.

Otherwise, there's no point and you can't mail it if it's less than. Those are the rules I've created for that correspondence. It is my contribution to his magic.

My husband brought home the strangest creature for me: a sculpture with a rabbit head that has a beak and a chicken body, legs and feet. There is a cotton tail. Finally, this object has come into my life to address the confoundedness of Easter and eggs and rabbits. It stands about 12 inches high and watches me as I type. I really love it.

I am so eager to work at the work I want to do. I wanted to be a psychotherapist years ago and continued to want to until recently. I still think I might want to do it, but really I have had the magic of it drain out my rabbit/chicken self because of nothing about therapy or clients, but more about the trappings around them that I have to machete through to find them. I'm not resentful about it. It's ok with me to morph the way I'm morphing. It's been a great ride, really. I've been able to hang out with the most fascinating people and hear the best, most exotic stories. I've been well-entertained for 30 years.

That means a lot to an only child left mostly to her own devices.

I now have a new roster of things to do. This includes learning to space just once after each period. My client in Australia noticed the residual double space of a writer who learned on typewriters. My new skill is daunting to learn, but I seem to be doing well with just one day's practice. It slows me quite a bit sometimes. I have to find the way its rhythm sounds in my head and with my cadence of sentence completion. I haven't found it yet.

Photo: Carrollton Bus Crash Sky, Marie Monroe

If Mr. Ramstead Has Anything To Do With It, Blair Witchiness Will Never Eat Mother Earth

I have the great pleasure of now roaming on tippy toe through the outback of my youth (something I’ve never let die and hence, these crampy calves). 

I am flipping through the imaginary pages of MtnMan’s portfolio. I understand he is Mark--Mark Ramstead as he has said in response to my many messages. You are able to find Mark’s no-touristy folio on Red Bubble. It tantalizes us with all mandatory sites to see along any I-40, I-10, I-80 pre-meditation to go west and stay there.

If you are to follow him around, I would recommend that you go thru San Bernardino and for gawd’s sake, Barstow. Here’s the deal on all that: in San Bernardino there is a gas station in which the guys have nothing better to do than to demean women. Now, I don’t typically recommend such sight-seeing detours, but these guys are so extraordinarily swathed in male privilege that I must. 

This may be akin to the Orange Show in Houston or the, sob, sob, Watts Towers in LA. See them before it’s too late, you see, is the point of all that weeping and odd comparison. 

And, Barstow, well, the only personal reason I have to go through there is so I may turn Mr. Thompson’s well-turned phrases over and over in my mind as I speed under the blistery sun in a rented convertible: 

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” 

I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. --Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971. 

So there I was, surfing Red Bubble, and somehow through the String and Chaos Theories of art appreciation (may we add Parallel Universe ideology?)…somewhere in there was Mark. 

I believe his love for his Mom and Dad is and always has been, outstanding in the rain, cold, heat and snow (see evidence here) and, further, I suggest that he is a draftsman incognito. 

Additionally (as they say when they do go on), there is a Cezanne-Gone-Mad latent tendency (in this portfolio at least) that may drive you mad with its tantalizing twinkle in the eye. You don’t have to watch too closely for it. 

Anyway. Given all that, Mark Mountain Man Ramstead’s vision touches me this morning as I re-visit the obligatory natural resources up and down the coastal and other-side-of-the-Divide wonders of this Woody Guthrie song. 

That these post-Adams monoliths can be so intimate is a thing. A really fine thing. 

I self-console and reconcile these younger, more electronically-bound aficionados of nature who have viewed this work and find it strangely scary because Blair Witchiness has forever estranged them from the cold morning mists of an ambling trek through old forests. 

There are people of the Rock Nation in there and Green Folk and devas all rising up to greet you, I say to them. 

Prevent matricide and restore the vision of Gaia to magic on the right-hand path! I rail in my usual mania... 

Hardly any homicide happens here beneath this canopy! The only terror you’d better fear is just a black bear’s brand of howdy. 

It ain’t no thang. 

You can clank that away with a couple of nice metal drinking cups. Huh? Oh, go to the flea market or swap meet. They used to make them with clips for your pack or belt loop.

Haunted forests are cool, so cool. 

You may find Mark Ramstead’s work on Red Bubble under the appropriate guise of MtnMan. As you might have guessed, I like it.

Archival Prints

I was thinking about the creative resume--where one lists the other accomplishments of one's life experiences in a concrete but poetical form rather than in the tedious tradition. For example:

Preschool:

Invented Idiosyncratic Language and Delegated Transcription

Swam in Air with Assorted Acrobatics

Learned to Levitate

Designed Line of Paperdoll Couture

Ages 6-8:

Confronted Tornado

Facilitated Geological Survey

Self-Taught Cursive

Wrote Screenplays

Photo: A Poetikal of Vendors, Marie Monroe

I'm Going to Go to Brooklyn to Sit on the Stoop in the Summer Rain

Rain is the best part of life. Hands down.

I started cataloging the various types of rain as a youngster. I was interested in the science of weather and doing little science projects like hydrometers made of milk cartons, but I was also interested in the poetical nomenclature of rain. This probably started somewhere in my obsession with Alaska and the weather conditions there. I read that the native peoples in Alyeska had an abundance of terms for types of snowfall. I couldn't find any such thing for rain.

I do remember Tantric Rain (as in the panic of enlightenment) and Tic Tac Rain (as in the high velocity, very fine pellets of rain on a windshield), but the others escape me now. I have an illustrated poster of my findings in deep storage: in an old suitcase on a high shelf in the laundry room, on the third floor.

Whenever I love a place and visit, I hope I get to see it in the rain. Right now, I think Brooklyn in the rain would be nice. I'm not sure why. It has just occurred to me in the last few days. I think a nice soaking summer Brooklyn rain sounds pretty good.

My dad used to leave vehicles in various places. One place was at my grandmother's where mom and I would stay from time to time when he was traveling for work. No one drove the cars but him. Mom didn't like to drive and none of the rest of us liked her to either. I would hide in the backseat and beg her to stop. I can't remember what others did to save themselves. The most driving I ever saw her do was to test out the car she changed the spark plugs on and to move the car around the block to keep it from being towed when Dad was passed out from bourbon and PTSD. Those were a Ford station wagon of some late 50's sort and a Ford Galaxy that was pledged to be mine on my 16th birthday.

When I was at my grandmother's I would ask to sit in his car--a navy blue Studebaker with suicide doors--when it rained. I loved being surrounded by the room, completely encapsulated and invisible to the world. The sound was loud and calming. It was the type of rain defined by my father's car, permission to go aboard and total sound immersion.

Photo: A Particular Type of Rain 11, Marie Monroe

Featherbeds, a Featherweight of Evidence and Light as a Feather

I was surprised to find in my 40's that I was allergic to feathers. Out went the down comforter and the featherbed and the feather pillows and my down jacket. I hung my dream catcher on the farthest wall from my desk chair. I also stopped using feathers in crafts with kids at work.

Things got better.

Strangely though, as a child I made these things. My grandmother would have me hold the ducks and stroke them gently so their feathers fell on the sheet i sat on in her yard. The ducks didn't seem to mind. I'd hold them under one arm and stroke them with the opposite hand.

We filled ticking to make featherbeds and pillows. We also fluffed up last season's beds and pillows because they would lose feathers over the year.

Now all that makes me cry.

When I worked the state psych hospital, I took an investigator job looking into patient complaints of abuse and neglect. The instructor that trained me encouraged me to look for that "featherweight" of evidence that would tip the scale from an unsubstantiated allegation to a substantiated one. I enjoyed writing up those reports. I did not enjoy the interviews with the accused or their friends, or the thoughts of feathers 

As for light as a feather...I believe that is a mindset. I remember it, and never cry about that one.

Photo: The Random Walk of My Mind and Photons of the Sun, Marie Monroe

Snagging a Gig in the Middle of the Night

Sometimes I don't sleep well--mainly because I have never really been on the world's sleep schedule. I do better without clocks. I think if we need clocks to wake us then we really aren't sleeping enough. This has been a hard and fast issue since childhood.

My poor mother would have to force my body awake by gathering me up to sit me upright and by gently tugging at my arms and guiding my lifeless body to take some steps. We did it morning after morning when I first began going to school. Finally I got the hang of awakening to clocks, but never have done it well. As an adult I often curse while reaching to turn off the alarm. When life has been arduous, I've required adaptations: put the alarm across the room, use 2 alarms, use alarms plus a relentless caller who talks me through getting up and moving around.

I obeyed last night's initiative from my unconscious, stumbled around and trolled the internet. 2 hours ago, I was notified that I am hired.

I am thrilled.

I've always put a lot of stock in dreams and sleep and mysterious mandates from my spontaneous brain. I remember Wayne Dyer talking about the awakenings from sleep as the greater powers calling for you to do some work. Happily and gratefully, my own archetypal fascinations with dreams, symbolism, art, trance, intuition, etc have always led me to mystery, faith and further fascinations. Mainly, they have made me happy and I've come to recognize that they are signposts saying hey, keep going! right path! keep going!

I think I was about 9 when I excitedly told my mom that we 'get' to sleep 1/3 of our lives. She became worried and thought perhaps I was depressed. She didn't say that, of course, but as an adult and knowing what I know now about my mental health history, I get why she looked the way she did as she examined my face with her keen eyes, looking for how in the world that little mind was working and why I loved being unconscious so much.

All it really was, I would tell her if I could, was my love of magic. If I recall correctly, I was also beginning my love for stage magic at that time. I gave it up eventually. One of my tricks required I strap industrial rubber bands along the inside of my sleeve to the back of my waistband. A few hard snaps against my arms raised whelps and so I retired.

Making cards disappear from your hand is not a painless pursuit.

Photo: On the Blues Highway and Resting in the Rain, Marie Monroe

Spiritually Fit

I woke up in the middle of the night in pain--leftovers of a 1987's MVA. Honestly, shortly after the accident, I thought I would not be able to function with this pain as I looked forward to the rest of my life. I am relieved to find that I have almost made it to the 'finish line' and though I hurt every day, I am still moving.

I wish I could remember the name of the kinesiologist that helped me when I was first injured in Houston. He was really a metaphysician, a doctor of the future. When I was distraught he would touch the center of my forehead and I would calm. My verdict then was that he was activating my frontal lobe and its executive functioning. That verdict still holds up today. It was incredibly simple and effective--along the lines of spontaneously rubbing that area when we have 'had it'.

The most wonderful thing he did for me, however, was that he advised me not to speak of my pain very much. He suggested that this would give it less power and looking back over these nearly 30 years it has.

After talking with T last night about spiritual economics I looked up Butterworth this morning online. I found his bio and then a youtube of a guy who discussed his terms. It was wonderful. I remember having found his concepts very helpful in the 80's when I dealt with my injury and pain. Here is the video.

Photo: Angel Genetix 4, Sleeve, Marie Monroe

Transcendentally As I See It

One's own kingdom is the best of ensconcement, fortification and revelry. Sleep sweet sleep and kimonos to wear, goblets to drink from; styrofoam containers in the fridge and Wagon Train in the insomniac's pre-dawn. The good always triumphs. The hell with trauma and real-time drama.

I am soon to retire from a life of "service". 30 years out it has become humdrum--not a struggle or even a challenge. I love you guys, but I tap out. I need an iced beverage and some downtime.

When I am free of drudgery I can see the big picture and so with hope in sight, I was chatting with T last night about spiritual economics. You almost feel crazy suggesting such a thing so as I always do, I referred Eric Butterworth just to grasp at some straws of credibility. In this age of glut, when it comes to 'manifestation', even Eric's burst onto virgin soil is lost under cheap paperbacks with cute, greedy little titles. His was, if I remember correctly, pre-universe and purely God. That's always been fine with me. I wholeheartedly accept that this whole event of ours is a short-sighted exercise in childlike beliefs that all of this wonderment could be all there is...or got here by accident.

I've watched a man for years now who says he finally realized a long time ago that there is no God. He is dead in the eyes and he never smiles.

He used to smile about how less than he others were, but even that seems to have lost its appeal. I would suppose, like so many others I've known (mostly in 'the chair' of my clinical office), that hatred gives way to emptiness and emptiness gives way to meaninglessness. At that lower rung it's just easier to let go and drop, but he hasn't gotten there yet. I think this may be where the concept of 'putting me out of my misery' came from. It's fascinating in a psychological rubber-necking way.

There are moments of violence sparking from him, but these seem governed at least by the constraint of some social principle when observed. I suppose there is still some shame to be had. This process of warding off shame and punishing others for his shame seems to be the devolvement of his soul even farther. You would hope that at the bottom rung of his grace that there would be surrender for mercy's sake and that lying down on the damp packed earth and letting it all be, amen, would be enticing. This isn't him yet. He still believes occassionally that harming someone else will remedy his downward and deepenng buried alive. He has over the last few months devolved toward a penchant for physicality in his attempts to torment others.

I have no compassion for him. He is addicted and at the end stages of his daughter's addiction while abstinent himself. I see his sort as the worst addicts on earth. They are the ones with the unabated disease while 'sober'. Who is sicker?

Codependency is also a fatal disease--the pathology so imprinted upon the nervous system that no chemical ignition is required. It is a sad and dangerous state.

I believe he commits acts of unrestrained violence when he can. They are his only enlivened periods, followed by self-hatred and a tedious wearing of the righteous man's facade.

Photo: Salvation, Marie Monroe