RAM: The Open Book

It was many years ago that I met my friend. I was nineteen and he was twenty-four. We were going to art school in Pittsburgh, finding ourselves, discovering ourselves. My friend was older, he was wiser than I. I was wise beyond my years. The love we had for each other was never spoken, until the end, but throughout our lives it was proven by our actions. When we were young, we were inseparable, we thought our friendship would endure forever. Our eighties would be spent on a front porch somewhere, sitting in rocking chairs, smoking pipefulls of weed. The dreams of young people. The expectation that life will serve me and last for us.

The pages between its covers a pristine white. The kind of white that is either terrifying or exciting. The kind of white that begs to be drawn on, written on, smeared in ink on. The pages beg to have something glued to them, stapled to them, attached to them. Drawings, notes, remarks. Journal entries. Phone numbers, addresses, the info found on the web. Photographs will soon be tucked into its pages for safe keeping. And the recipe for the Orange Cookies that my mother sent me for Christmas will also hide there.

Daily snippets, doodles, sketches.

A new sketchbook sits on the end of the bed, waiting. Waiting for me to make the first mark.

Both Painting and Music have the power to make me move. They both make me feel. They both are in the now. Once a note passes it is gone. It marks a moment in time, just like a stroke of a brush full of color. Painting is not just the stroke. Not just the color chosen to be on the end of the brush. It is also the smell of the paint and the turpentine, the texture, the stroke from beginning to end. Painting is the sound of the brush hitting the canvas with the wet paint on its end, sounding a bit like a stick hitting a gob of wet mud with a whoosh as the grass is being hit along with it. The movement of my body swinging with the motion of the brush in my hand dabbing at the palette, taking a step towards the oversized canvas, swinging my arms, splattering the paint, using my whole body to make that stroke in that one moment of time.

I listen to music on the stereo and in my mind I am Dancing. Dancing with Canvas. Dancing with Paint.