Dollar Tree Balloons

Dollar Tree Balloons

My roomie and I recently went to the Douglasville, Georgia Dollar Tree. I needed razors and shaving cream. I settled for a few cheap bags of double-bladers and some raspberry foam—both of which are terribly nasty but cheap, and they will get me to my next pay day (my room-mate picked up the tab).

Of course, it is February, and so, at the front of the establishment, there are four rows of Valentine’s Day items. I am still hurting over a break-up, and suddenly, I see myself

Tie on a red RAMBO headband, strip my clothes off, M-60 the shit out of all of the rows of Valentine’s lies running towards the carnage as streamers fall and fireworks explode and go-go zombie hookers gyrate and I start fornicating with the debris of shrapnel and shredded Valentine’s merchandise emerging covered with dripping melting and boiling bubbling chocolate screaming like Wolverine coming out of the vat where they filled him with adamantium…

Ahem…(brushing flowers and chalk hearts off of my shoulders…)…

What really happened was I looked from the Valentine’s display to my right to a balloon stand. Then, I looked up—

There are all of these jettisoned balloons hanging on the ceiling of the Dollar Tree. No, not just like a regular place that sells balloons--not even a Party Central—there are dozens of them.

I started thinking about how they were really trying to escape—some of them were even in a child’s hand at one point and then got set free, right? Some of them untied their own knots? Some of them got away from an employee while he or she was trying to tie them properly to the display? Some of them are just A.I. balloons?

There are:

Get Well Soon

Christmas

Birthday

Easter

Halloween

Just Because

Congratulations

Graduation
Best Wishes

Pregnancy

Marriage

And

Valentines

Balloons up there.

Balloons all stuck in the metal stitchings of the rafters, hovering there over the check-out area.

These balloons were making their escape and got caught by the ceilings.

Still, they were still breathing up there, like strange sad Hallmark card jellyfish, and they were holding their own!

I wonder if they cried out when one of their brethren made it out the door…is that freedom when the child gets out there? Because if the kid lets you go out there, you rise into the infinite abyss—is that freedom? Is that the balloon Valkyrie moment?

Or, did these trapped balloons weep when one of theirs made it out the door just to deflate in a corner of a toddler’s bedroom? Or deflate by a graduation gown? Or get accidentally popped by a pen in a pocket or a nail on a wall?

At night, when the Dollar Tree is shut down, the Valentine’s Day balloons start making love until the Birthday balloons come over. The Get Well Soon balloons hovel with the Christmas and Easter balloons. The Halloween balloons scare the shit out of the Just Because balloons. The Congratulations balloons just jack each other off. The Best Wishes balloons sigh over the Marriage and Pregnancy balloons with disdain. The Graduation balloons stare in abject horror at all of it.

I am going to sneak in there one night and set them all free with my knife.

On Partially Watching LOVING VINCENT, the film

I was really just enjoying the rain that just stopped this morning. It tied into my partial viewing of the film LOVING VINCENT last night. There was a scene in the movie that shows, in Van Gogh brushstrokes, which are hyper-animated, Van Gogh painting in the rain—there is a lightning flash—as if to denote the inspiration, and I woke up to the rain falling this morning and felt like writing. The rain, as an ablution, has most likely always been associated with writing in that it could represent a cleansing or baptism or acceptance of the procreative soil and everything organic. Just thinking of an image of raindrops falling off of giant petals or leaves of rain forest plants is indulgent and fertile. I think that painting in the way that Van Gogh did was also a lot like “rain”, and I feel that maybe the emotional tumults he had were like storms, as such. Of course, the rain also brings flood, cataclysm, death, and possibly overwhelming psychological issues which can result in suicide.

The first time I ever went to the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw several works of Vincent Van Gogh. I remember I was in this one gallery space, and I was surrounded by thirty-or-so Japanese children, maybe a bunch of eight year olds (?) and their teacher, and I was staring into a small painting of his, and I just started crying. I am not sure where this impulse came from. I think that a lot of it had to do with the fact that I had only seen his work in art journals, textbooks, online image searches, etc. However, when you stand in front of one of his paintings, and it is small enough to fit under your shirt (because, you DO want to steal it), it becomes a very ominous and emotional stimulus. You can see the frenetic pathology in his strokes. The thickness of the paints and the textures in some movements versus the subtle moments as well. I wonder if he ever thought that little kids learning about art from Asia would be running around a room talking about his art (I think they were?) while some guy from Alabama, USA was crying over it? I have thought over the past few years about why I had that reaction. I went there to see Sigmar Polke and Jackson Pollock, but those guys did not make me weep.

The movie reminded me of this moment, which occurred I think around 2005. I think part of it also crushed me as a poet and aspiring writer. How you can just start off with a sketch, a note, a few small lines, but, if you stick it out, you end up with a lexicon, a book, and if nothing else at ALL, a new shaping of your cerebral cortex. Of course. Many “artists”, myself included, can get caught in a loop of patterns, but these patterns can also become our signatures. It is hard to figure out how not to stagnate and also how shredded your tether is to this world while you create so that you don’t just fall off of that edge.

If you watch this film, pay attention to the stars, the street lamps, the oil lamps in the rooms, the way light and shadows play on wine bottles, the way the sun plays on the painted oils on wheat fields at Arles. The over 100 artists who put this film together really captured the energy of this man whose ultimate fate is still up to debate according to the film—I have not finished it yet as I type this—so I do not even know the ending.

Ultimately, this is pathos, and what a pathos it is. In the wake of the growing transhumanist movement, and in the attempt for Van Gogh to leave Paris, for a variety of reasons, and try to heal in the countryside, I think that this movie, and his work, are metaphors for trying to hold on to the human ability to transmute or translate passion into an artifact which continues to deliver true human passion over centuries. Of course, I must acknowledge his so-called “mental illness”, and possibly he was just experiencing heavy metal poisoning from his, most-likely, lead-based paints and from malnutrition and alcoholism; however, he created delivery devices from the screams of Edvard Munch—don’t get me wrong, Vincent’s paintings still scream at times, but not with hopelessness under an exploded colonized psychedelic sky—they scream at YOU—they scream at you to experience your environment again beyond the paradigm of Modernism.

They scream at you,

“Why are you not painting?”

They scream at you,

“Your insanity is there whether you realize it or not, and if you do not embrace it, the world will exploit you for it until you become the worst kind of crazy…”

The kind of crazy where you no longer own yourself.
The kind of crazy sold back to you as a commodity by a culture that might only see you as an economic slave to a final actuarial table or data base mining exhibition.

And not even close to seeing you EVER
As a beautiful painting.