Reliquary

I used to smoke cigarettes and sip whiskey and sit on top of a 12-foot ladder to look at paintings stapled to the floor of my twenty-one hundred square foot studio at Third and Main. There were a bar and a liquor store below me. Screams and cursing and jukeboxes and cops in the street. Noise till two or three in the morning. Chinatown and Japantown and MOMA were a few blocks away. LA felt like home.I left. I came here. Everything cultural got smaller, less wild and less exciting. I stopped painting. I started drinking cappuccinos. My body, against my wishes, grew older. I got lost. The weft that holds together the various chronological threads of self changed into something neither rich nor strange. Something in me curled up and went to sleep.This book records my thoughts and feelings as I wake up.