Older Chests

Big canvas painting and a work in progress, both on canvas and on human. I caught the color of my chest hair in the mirror once a couple of times ten thousand trillion and the wild wolf hairs are sprouting. One must not have been able to find a place on my chest, so it picks my eyebrows or my ear to make an entrance.

I went about my day, spent some time talking to a group of my students, who shared some impactful experiences during the pandemic.

When I spoke to them, I kept having this feeling that I was sounding like my dad. Like I just said some idiotic dad thing like “if your path demands you to walk through hell, then walk as if you own the place.” (I’d put a little Southern accent on and walked as if I was a hundred, of course, because they need to laugh. I’ve never seen a set of humans as quiet, as worried, and missing some kind of vitality that was once there. They are exhausted.)

I came home, worked out after I gave myself permission to opt out at any time without penalty. Then this work: I’m calling it OLDER CHESTS. There’s a song I happened to hear of the same name while I was holding Linus in one arm and painting this with the other. I became powerful again, but not the movie man moment powerful…. But the kind of powerful I felt when I was little and inventing things to draw or write. Check out these lyrics:

Older chests reveal themselves
Like a crack in a wall
Starting small, and grow in time
And we always seem to need the help
Of someone else
To mend that shelf
Too many books
Read me your favorite line