Addicted

I’m addicted to my living room lately. It’s funny, I decorated it a ton before everything went to shit, and then everything went to shit and I’ve only recently been able to peacefully enjoy it. I painted the walls and ceiling Stone Blue by Farrow and Ball. Years ago the New York Times put out an article on artists living in the Tangiers and showed photos of their eccentric homes. One woman painted her kitchen red and then covered the walls in Moroccan clay plates.

There’s a store up the street that sells decor imported from Latin America. They have Oaxacan white copal incense cones. I bought one on a whim and it was so therapeutic that I burned through it in one day. I’ve gone back for more and have a cone burning right now. Every time I smell it my nervous system calms down. It’s a distinct feeling too, everything stops and then my head clears.

The last week or so has been really nice. I like the cold and the dark. I’ve been skipping my coat and wearing Patagonia fleeces. I like how it feels when the wind needles through the wool and into my skin. At a party last year, someone said that this was the time of year when their depression would set in. I love it. Daytime can be chaotic, like a writhing snake. Dark falls like a knife on its neck, cleaving everything into silence.

I think a lot about my writing when I’m away from it. I want to practice my metaphors and similes, maybe experiment with the occasional allegory. Can I brag about a writing project? I want to write a book. I have the title, cover design, and structure built. I don’t have content pulled together just yet. It’s a collection of freestanding, non sequential essays on a single topic. For example, let’s say it’s called Rainbow. Each essay would be about a color in the rainbow. One day you could read about violet and then the next day, red. I’m not planning to write about colors, but that is appealing.

I looked at grants a few weeks ago to get funding for my work and it was kind of disheartening. There was a grant for female photographers that looked good, so I started putting an application together. On a whim I researched last year’s grant winners and immediately got depressed. One of the winners was a high level journalist with 10 years of experience at the BBC, and she submitted content she created in the Arctic. I feel a bit discouraged with the creative process at times.

Currently listening to Fast Crush by Mac Declos