catching up

I don't know what I felt when I did a lot of these drawings. Not until I've looked at them for a while, later. They take me right back, and I can feel myself, who I was, then, and being able to do this allows me to experience the rush of emotions and thoughts that flowed through me in those moments, that are gone now, as I sat there, maybe worrying about arriving on time to teach, or what to do about my teeth, or feeling warm in side from making love, or coming home excited to get back to work on one of my projects, or maybe numb from anxiety about resolving a fight with my son, or depressed about my age, stuff like that.

In this way I get to catch up to myself, and deal with things that came up then that maybe I didn't deal with yet. Things that are over but not really part of me yet. They happened but in many ways I wasn't there. There's always stuff to catch up to. To ground.

Paula had to go pay off a traffic ticket the 31st of August, the night I did the drawing above . It was a hundred bucks or something. We hung out together with Jacob, waiting for Paula's number to be called. I drew people. It was kind of a festive scene, with a holiday weekend hours away from kicking off and lots of jokes about driving under the influence being kicked around. It was that kind of crowd. Her license had been suspended for not paying the ticket off within a few months. Just slipped our minds and boom. No driving allowed. People are so beautiful when you draw them. You can love their appearance, their body language, their sadness, their life force. You can just love them quietly from within yourself. It's easy this way. To know them is to find their needs and your needs poking, crying and colliding and making a mess of everything. Then it's hard to love.