My days, nowadays, are filled with a great tremendous sadness, something like an empty pit I have fallen into except it is nearly tangible. I can feel it in the base of my diaphragm and in the labored breath that accompanies my more low energy moments. I remember this sadness and I think that maybe sadness is too strong a word...no, maybe too romantic a word. It doesn't account for the feeling of being in the middle of a large ocean and that fear in your chest as you look out and it just keep going and going.

It is a strange feeling, one that encompasses your whole being. You don't see life as a series of stitches in the larger quilt, you don't see ahead. You see now and only now. It is both selfish and narcissistic. It is young no matter how old you are. The bad part of young, the fear, not the mischievousness. Clarity seems like a lost love.

Looking at it now, from the distance if these words, of this written narrative, I can see that it contains a lot of fatigue and a lot of bad choices. Funny how you can see the path ahead, not so linear-ly, but at least a contour to guide you. The path isn't always dark. That is just some shit they sell you in lines of verse. It can be clear as day, snow covered even with a black line pointing the (maybe) way. The question is, do you walk it? Do you smoke, drink, run, hide? Do you take your pills daily? Do you do what you do? From the distance of there words, it seems clearer. It seems to take some shape....I know you stranger, don't I?

Last Monday I went with my father to get a days worth of tests. Where we went to my father knew a lot of the people from when he was a doctor, when he worked at the free public health clinic. When I was waiting to get my blood drawn, my father turns to me and says Kathleen is going to draw your blood. I say ok, dad. He shakes his head. No, you don't understand. Kathleen is going to draw your blood. About twenty years ago or more, Kathleen comes into the clinic. Man you should have seen that place. No hot water. Government gave us a free clinic and it was an old building but you use what you get. Kathleen was working the perfume counter at Walgreen's and was a single mom raising two young girls. She came in to ask for a job and she said she had no experience but everywhere she went they said you needed experience and how were you supposed to get experience without getting a job? So my dad and my aunt, Dr. B who is Filipino but is blood like my blood, looked at each other and basically said this lady's got some heart and spunk and they hired her. She had no experience and started doing lab tech work. Twenty years later, my dad says, and she went to school and is a lab tech and her girls are grown and this is her lab. Kathleen is going to draw your blood. Do you understand? And like a child magically transformed as I look at him, I say, yes, dad, I understand. And I do.

Michael Chabon's Summerland has been saving me the past few days. "A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day."

I am sorry I haven't returned phone calls and replied to emails. I seem to have been faraway. No paint, no sentences. Only a little baby starting to grope at words and crawling many miles a minute and a ten year old discovering her older self and looking at the world through seemingly new eyes. Such is life.