Today’s my birthday, and I’ve been thinking about when I turned 60 and left New York. It was a really rough year which started when my seasonal temp job at the gift shop in the Plaza Hotel ended after they’d kept me on two months longer than expected. Then there were other short term situations that culminated in August at the big Kahuna of retail madness - the Barney’s Warehouse Sale. In the meantime, I’d been sucked into a vortex involving the DA’s Office and the Parole Board Commissioner because they wanted me to testify against someone who had assaulted me decades earlier and had come up for parole. THAT is a whole other story. In fact I’ve written an unpublished memoir about it, but once it was over my landlord suddenly offered to pay me to move out of my rent controlled apartment, and in six weeks I found a job and a place to live on Cape Cod, sold almost all of my belongings and then tossed the rest into a UHaul and never looked back. 

It was as if the Cosmos had kept me in New York to testify against my assailant, then let me go. And while I don’t feel trapped like I did back then, I do feel a bit stuck at the moment here in Provincetown, given my stalled plans to move to Newcastle - but there are plenty of things to keep me busy while I wait for the Cosmos to shift again. Such as a possible promotional project for the windows installation and more big birds like the cockatoo at the top and in the screenshot taken to give you a sense of scale. There’s also the same sized parrot below. Both are charcoal on the new paper I bought, which I am currently in love with. I’d thought about adding a touch of color to each of them similar to the pink beak of Zhivago from last week’s post, but I got over that impulse once I started the work. Next one, maybe. Although, in spite of editing the series down to accommodate the gallery walls for my upcoming show, I’m running out of space. I can probably squeeze another one in, and I just got a birthday check in the mail that will cover the framing. So it’s all good, I can wait - Onward.