I’ve been home from the hospital for a couple of days now. I didn’t think I’d be this tired, but I did just have brain surgery after all. It’s a great excuse to keep going back to bed, right?

My post-op appointment isn’t until next Wednesday. Hopefully, I can get my staples out then. Yes, staples. I know, it’s creepy. It’s been hard to talk about with others because I keep feeling like I’m creeping them out. I mean, I probably am, but that’s not my intention at all. But if someone I cared about talked to me about all the recovery bits, I would feel like I was losing all the blood in my body, become a noodle, and perhaps faint.

Yeah, I’ve been feeling pretty noodley. Lots of weird things going on. I hear sounds in my head that are disturbing, i.e., clicking, squeaking, creaking, and swooshing. I’m like, what on earth?! But apparently this is all “normal.” I asked AI about when this part would be over and the answer was 3-6 months. That’s so long. At least it said that it’s gets a little less every week. So, I probably won’t wake up one morning and it will be noticeably gone. I have to be more objective and patient.

I thought a lot of things before I came home. I thought I’d be back to work this week. I don’t know why I thought that one. I can’t imagine working right now or even making myself a sandwich. I’m useless at the moment.

The best I’ve been able to do is attend a couple of Zoom meetings through Netvvrk. Yesterday I went to a painting collective meeting, and the subject matter was about the non-existent painting – the one that still hasn’t been made or keeps going through changes because it’s not successful to you/for you yet.

So, I used an older painting, a diptych, that I have only painted over half of. I really disliked how it looked when I finished it in 2011. After I painted over one side (ten years after that), I still didn’t like it. Then I took it into Photoshop and superimposed a favorite drawing of mine and started to like how it looked. I guess I’ll be using the whole image as a guide when I actually finish it for reals.

It was originally called Too Much Under the Bridge and it was about my brother being cocky in regards to his brand new Porsche. He came by our house when we lived close to Pasadena to show it off. Well, at the time, we’d recently purchased a brand new Honda Fit. It was the first year they made them. Hannah had to wait until they had one in stock so we could finally pick it up. These cars were incredibly affordable when they came out and I think we paid less than $15K for it. For a brand new car! I felt like that was something to brag about.

When I told Mike about the deal we got, he balked and said something about how just one of his tires (or rims, or some small part of his custom Porsche) cost more than $15K alone. Jeez. Woopie doo. It just made us feel icky and awkward. Mostly, it just made us feel poor. Because compared to him, we weren’t just poor; most people were. That Porsche was just one of a few cars he owned.

In this painting, I embroidered a small piece of canvas with a cartoon of him standing at his bougee car and saying the words, “My catalytic converter costs more than your whole house.” Another “thing” he owned more than one of. I think he owned three homes then.

After some years, I saw how angry this painting was, and of course, we’d broken up and gotten back together in our relationship several times in that following decade. I seriously didn’t want to stay angry at him, or feel so negative, despite the fact that he gave me/us every reason to be. I just wanted to forgive and move on. That’s hard, yet I feel like I did that so many times.

Anyway, like I said before, I painted over half of this piece, but I still didn’t like it. I took the left side, turned it upside down, and did this to it:

Not everything I wanted from it. I was left feeling unsure whether I wanted to make two pieces out of it or create a whole new piece. I only started feeling good about it when I took it into Photoshop and played with it there. This is what came to be (digitally):

This one would just be called Bridgeplay. I just didn’t know if there was too much going on in it. Since it’s a large piece, I think it’s okay to incorporate all the drawing elements. I can also keep the sewn parts in it, which is nice. I don’t really want to lose those bits. I also think I could do all of this pretty quickly because it’s not like I have to start from scratch.

But…this is not something I need to get done by any deadline. In fact, I don’t even know what I need it for…yet. I thought maybe my next series would be strictly abstracts. But that’s not a decision I’ve actually made yet. I mean, what if I actually did win the Guggenheim? In that slim-to-none chance I do, I’d have to continue the series I’m on and turn it into a film project (like I wrote about in the Project Plan of the application). That would be heaven if I had all the wherewithal to do that. I’d love to spend time on making a movie instead of having to paint another twenty paintings – whatever they might look like or whatever they were “for.”

And honestly, I’ve had plans in the back of my mind to make the movie on a shoestring budget whether I get a Guggenhiem Fellowship or not. But that would be a feat for sure. I don’t know how I would do that exactly.