March Still-Winter Notes

I don’t have enough decent material floating around in my mind for a proper post. Just bits and pieces. Everything is very in-between at the moment. 

After spending the two hours before it curled up with debilitating anxiety, feeling like my chest was being crushed, wishing I didn’t have to go and wondering if there were any possible ways I could hide in a corner or fake my identity so people wouldn’t talk to me, I survived the show. I’ve never talked to so many people nor shaken so many hands in one day before. This was a good thing of course, but it did leave me socially exhausted - likely enough for a year. There were a handful of fellow CIA alumni from years ahead of me (80’s graduates mostly) who were wonderfully supportive and kind but I couldn’t remember a single name after two minutes of meeting anyone and it continues to bother me. There were a lot of old friends that showed up, former Irish students, and a good deal of acquaintances -  many of which I never had the opportunity to thank or even say hello to because not a moment went by that I wasn’t either in a conversation or being pulled over to another, so I’m harboring guilt about that. It was an entirely new experience, all that being talked to and met. Overall I think it went well (we did nearly make back the cost of the 15 big frames), but I wouldn’t really know, my house sits too close to the work for any real perspective and I’m too privy to all the mistakes and should’ve / would’ve / could’ves. Brógan came along because I promised myself that if I managed to have a solo show while he was alive, he would be there, so there he was. He was mostly bored stiff in a sea of people just standing around and not doing anything worth his while (like feeding him their food, or throwing things, or procuring ropes to play tug with, or pools to jump in, or running), but he appreciated the pats and scratches and attention. I’ll not make him do it again, I promised. 

Now that that’s done I’m not completely sure in which direction to move forward. As a result of “choice paralysis” as far as actual work goes, and being desperate to do anything other then mope over the endless winter, I’ve managed to bite the bullet and get the bulk of my website done. It’s still missing some things, and the “About” section needs to be done, but the hardest parts are finished. 

Kamccafferty.com

Thirty came sneaking around the corner last Wednesday. I don’t know how. It sounds like such a long time for how short it has felt. A very healthy reminder to slow way down much more often. And pull my head out of my arse. 

It’s still winter, though everything but the temperature would have you thinking otherwise. The robins are back and with them their sweet songs and happy whinnies, the sun traipses higher in the sky and stays out far past her winter bedtime - cloaking everything in that beautiful warm light well into the evening, the crocuses and tulips have begun to yawn forth from their subterranean slumbers, and the skies are as clear and blue as any day in June. But the air remains spiteful and bitter, biting and stinging any skin it can find, and the snow from two weeks ago is still hanging about. We feel like we’re living in a fishbowl whose water hasn’t been changed in nearly 6 months, but I would still take this over August. There’s no real difference; suffocating heat that keeps you shut up inside or biting cold that keeps you shut up inside. At least in the cold you can wear ten layers and still go out and be warm, but there’s not much you can do for relief outside when it’s 105F with 98% humidity. 

It feels like change is hiding only just around the corner, ready but made to wait. Whether good or bad remains to be seen.

(Big thanks to Jack mo chroí for keeping me sane and grounded and healthy, Brógan for being a trooper in a sea of people just standing around and not playing fetch with him, and Joe for helping install) 

The Dregs of Late-Winter: Current Musings

Cyclical time. My grandfather's time. His father's time, his father's father's time. What was it like to wake up to the sun, only the sun - the sun as all the generations before me, before my parents, understood it, as all the blood in us once felt it, as all the trees and deer and ants and weeds still feel it. The sun set free, set wild, unobstructed by numbers - by hours, by minutes, by seconds, by slots, by schedules, by money, by appointment, by construction. A world felt and breathed and lived in, a connection deeper and older than any idea of time. A privileged freedom I have never known and ache deeply for.

Forgetting what it is to exist in the world. Screens hither and thither, everywhere; every gas pump every check-out lane every pub every house every room every wall every pocket, beckoning relentlessly, syphoning life minute by minute into a void as the world ticks on. And the way the idea of shunning these shackles receives scorn as 'weird neo-hippie hipster shit.'

For the first time since we've moved here, just eleven days over three years ago as I write this, we had a chickadee come to our feeder. Thursday, the day after Jack's 29th birthday, the second anniversary of my grandmother's passing. I won't forget it.


These two have stuck to me for a few years:

"Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like little kits trying to find a gap in the fence, try to look through the cracks in the world." -Georges Bataille (from "The Cruel Practices of Art")

"We have misunderstood the stars. Clocks make our lives a slow motion frenzy. We can't get off the screen back into a world where we could live. Every so often we hear the current of night music from the Gods who swim and fly as we once did." - Jim Harrison (I can't find the source for this, it may be a misquote, but either way.)