Storms are always on the sea

Today's new experience: scavenging art. On my way home from the library plus half-hour detour to visit rushthatspeaks (and gaudior, who got home about five minutes after I arrived), I found a painting on the curb of Highland Avenue. Its colors were striking and its style looked weirdly like some fictional paintings I have described. I called derspatchel to get a second opinion on whether its owner would want it back—he didn't think so; it was in the traditional location of colorful discards whose former owners are hoping someone else will have a soft spot for them—and then I carried it home by the hanging wire. It is currently propped in our stairwell while we figure out what to do with it. I have never trash-picked art before.

I think it's done in acrylics, although I would appreciate an assessment from someone with a better knowledge of paints than myself. It's signed with the initials "EH" or "EN" and the year "04" and it does not look like professional work, but I have no other idea of its provenance. It got my attention by being so heavily sculpted in wave-blues and sea-greens that the paint stands off the canvas in whorls and ridges; there is an outlined bare-bones boat-shape in black with a steamlike white plume above it and two circles underneath. The left-hand one is deep red and looks like a sun, with bits and flares of red breaking off into the sea-colored paint. The right-hand one is the problem; it is approximately the color of Silly Putty and I cannot figure out if it was an intended effect that dramatically failed or an error of judgment that the artist never amended or what even happened. The few lines of mustard-yellow spiraling within it do not help. It's not just that it's a bad color, although it is—it doesn't go with the vibrant rest of the painting at all. I am genuinely considering vandalizing the canvas by repainting it some more congruent shade (although then I'll feel stupid if the original turns out to be the equivalent of a Jackson Pollack at a yard sale).¹ I still took the whole thing home and have asked Rob to take a picture tomorrow in good light so that I can post it.

It's not that I'm having the world's most interesting dreams lately, but they are not my usual kind of boring dreams. Last night I dreamed of watching something like Game of Thrones in that it was a gritty succession struggle with multiple players and no clear winner, but the medieval-ish cultures were visibly Asian-derived and the contested territories were all islands, renamed every time they changed hands. (There were still dragons. That was pretty cool.) The night before that, I dreamed that I was working overtime for an office job, evenings and weekends, exhausted and constantly being handed new assignments, and at the end of the month I was told that the company couldn't afford to employ me any longer—too many people in the office had spent too much money ordering ice cream and I was devastated because I had never once bought ice cream with my coworkers, I brought my own lunches, I couldn't afford anything else. (A situation which bears no resemblance to my waking life, of course.) Before that, I had the very unpleasant experience of dreaming that someone I knew in real life was implicated in the disappearance of a woman in a landscape of bogs and wet forests, and it took me about a day of being awake not to feel awkward toward them. (That was more annoying than anything else.) There was one more I wanted to record, but I can't call it to mind now. It was the same kind of awkwardly mundane. Eventually I will have to start dreaming more normal things again; I always have before. I feel fundamentally better when my dreams have either a weird narrative or monumental architecture.

I really want to be writing a new story, but I feel like I don't think in fiction anymore. shweta_narayan has been very helpful in reminding me that this is the effect of stress and exhaustion on creativity, but it's still very frustrating. I owe lesser_celery a story about trees and asakiyume has recently made me think of crows.

1. Just as I was about to post this entry, I remembered a scene from Susan Cooper's Greenwitch (1974): "'I'm going,' Barney said, moving one step backwards. 'Why green, up in that top corner, though? Why not blue? Or a better kind of green?' He was distressed by a lurid zig-zag of a particularly nasty shade, a yellowy, mustard-like green which drew the eye away from the rest of the picture . . . He said to himself rebelliously, 'But that colour was all wrong.'" Rob asked if I thought the painting had a ghost when I expressed some curiosity that anyone had put it out on the curb, but it didn't occur to me to worry about spells.

To the shark and the sheering gull

My poem "Σειρήνοιϊν" is now available in the latest issue of Uncanny Magazine. The first half of the issue is already live, following the traditional first-Tuesday-of-the-month model; my poem will become freely available in August along with the rest of the second half. If you want to read it before then, subscribe! It was written for elisem. The title means "of the two Sirens" in Homeric Greek.