Found art atop our punk rock work bench, painted pink because I could. Because we are practicing doing/being whatever our hearts want to do and be here. Because most rules are arbitrary rules made to be bent and probably broken.
Should you have a care to, click image to listen to Last Chance Texaco by Rickie Lee Jones. I highly recommend listening to it as you read. I think music helps convey a feeling, tell a story. Maybe it makes your heart ache a little. If you are wired in a bittersweet way, you might understand. I feel like this sounds less than professional, and so what? I like it. I hope you do, too.

LAST CHANCE TEXICO

I’m a work in progress, and so is this website. My dreams outpace my body sometimes. Please know that I will be working to share more about my story and what has helped me along the way in hopes that it helps others.

For now, know that the shiny pictures on my home page only say so much. What you can’t see is the heartache and healing and half finished projects and money that should have gone elsewhere. I needed an old pretty light to fill a hole in me more than I needed to pay down student loan debt. Yes, I said need. You can’t see the extra work I created for myself and my husband when he already works his fingers to the bone. You can’t see my piles of notes and notebooks, empty coffee cups, and sometimes incoherent scribblings that come out of my ADD brain. You can’t see how I favor a creative outpouring over dishes that pile up endlessly and laundry that is ever-growing…along with my guilt of not being able to do more. You can’t see how I struggle with organization or how I thought those pretty pictures would add up to what I thought was my Hail Mary, part two of my life that would be written by me instead of the old messages I had accumulated. Yes, I thought they were my Last Chance Texaco as Rickie Lee Jones sings in her bluesy way. I sit here listening to it, crying to it , writing to it, in my own bluesy way.

Some images are raw and tell a story words never can. They can speak a kind of guttural truth. Other images are can trick you, lie to you, and tell you that someone really has it all together. I think about people who do. People whose car is neat and tidy, whose life fits into neat compartments, whose manicured nails match their perfect “I got my shit together” selves. That’s not me. Surviving wouldn’t allow for that kind of put-togetherness. Slow blooming during motherhood wouldn’t either, at least not for me. But now, it is a mostly more happy, purposeful chaos. It used to just be one filled with despair. The photo of the woman tangled up in old film…I resonated with that old image and made it mine. That's me, just trying to figure it all out. You know, I think I’m closer than I have ever been, but if you have it all figured out, please tell me. For now, I’m going to lean into this, because I see beauty in these messy bits, too now.

My eyes need beauty the way my lungs need air. My disorganization doesn’t help with this need, and you can understand why I might often feel I’m choking in a city with cheap money that builds without care and where green is in scarce supply. Creating in my home through my surroundings became my outlet when I had so many mornings saying, “I just have to make it to the end.” So many days crying when no one was looking. I’d slap a functionally depressed smile on my face and wonder why I always felt I was on the outside looking in.

Would you believe my world has been so small that barely any eyes see what I create? That’s why I know it was just my need…some insatiable need that even I couldn’t quite understand. I learned to smooth drywall mud on walls to get rid of too new, too uniform texture that assaulted my senses. I learned to wire lights that seemed from another era. Details are my poetry. I wanted my new home to look old. Before finishing one project, I was curbed by fatigue or too much to do or an image in my head of the next space that I had to get out of my head and into reality. Sounds a little manic, I know. All that up and down has lived inside of me like a storm. I’ve always been trying to understand myself…to understand what broke and if I can glue the pieces back together.

I understood a little more when I read the book, Sacred Spaces, by Carly Summers. The stories in her book were about people who healed through their spaces, too. This is my refuge, my little island of healing that also seems to torture me, because I’m limited by time and money and to-do’s. It’s an unfinished puzzle, a book I’ll never finish, perhaps. Loose ends never feel good. But a little cat whispered in my ear a story about love, and so I took a detour. But it’s been a lovely one, full of lovely people I didn’t know were out there before, and some too, who hurt my fragile heart.

Along the way I remembered the little girl inside me, and together, we’ve been healing and remembering who we were supposed to be. BoBo, forget the shiny, pretty pictures that aren’t real anyway. Will you be my Last Chance Texaco? I love you so. Thank you for helping me remember. Our world is on fire, but we are refined by fire, aren’t we? Tell me what will remain is something more beautiful. I’m engaging in my magical thinking... maybe our little book about love can put out a few of the flames, or at least let people know there is good in the world, too.

Last Chance Texico

Leafe Afton