E T H E R UV, acrylic, 16″ x 12″
Either Way UV, acrylic, 16″ x 12″
Comet Riders UV, acrylic, 14″ x 11″
PINKBLUE33, acrylic, 8″ x 10″
Prayers at the Belt of Venus, acrylic, 40″ x 30″, gallery wrapped
Blogtura: Where Have You Been – Campsite to Cabin
There was a run of paintings that I did, where the photographs were taken inside the vehicle. And as far as I know, not many people know that that was a thing. It’s been a good five years now, and I can’t remember how I had it set up. I know for damn sure that one important commission was photographed with the morning sun, reflecting off the surrounding area, and into the vehicle, while the vehicle was still in the shade.
My buddy’s old lady’s pops passed away, and they asked me to paint a portrait for the funeral. Turns out he was a talented artist from the Oglala area. My buddy’s always been super supportive of what I do, and she never seemed to mind either. I guess people like art more than I think.
The first few days in the backyard were a bit… I don’t know, patchwork. I never stayed in my vehicle before. We did have a fair back on the rez, once a year, I camped out in a tent most of the time. A few times I slept in the backseat of the car, but I never lived in one, and I wasn’t really sure where to start.
The internet said that I needed to insulate the windows, and my body said I needed warmth.
That meant a roll of Reflectix and a space heater. Infrared space heater to be specific. Why infrared? I don’t really remember.
Those days, I think, were the longest days I ever dealt with.
About two years later, I’d find myself in a similar situation, but by then I’d have a more reliable schedule to follow, and that made the downtime move quicker.
Showers were on a sliding scale, placed between convenience, quality, and price.
The closest shower was easily the shittiest option, with the shortest shower time, in the shittiest side of the city, at the laundromat. The next one up was the Flying J out on Deadwood Ave. That one was fine because you got an hour to do your business, and the overall space was more breathable. The laundromat showers were clearly an afterthought, as the place wasn’t designed specifically for travelers.
The big Kahuna was out east. I went and got myself a storage unit pretty early on. It wasn’t much, maybe a ten-by-five space. Maybe about fifty bucks a month or so. I lived with a strict “no more than three totes worth of shit” policy, but I still accumulated shit, and that shit went to the storage unit. The unit was relatively affordable. Meaning it was too small and too uninsulated to seriously consider sleeping in. I’ve seen plenty of people online posting their sleep setups in those 24-hour storage units. Mine wasn’t that. Mine was basically an outdoor closet.
About a two-mile drive away was the Love’s truck stop.
The Love’s truck stop was a goddamn treat, a luxury, spendy but worth the drive and the cash.
Truckers are big boys, and big boys apparently need two shower heads, one up top and one right at dong height, to wash every god damn disgusting human crevice, and to do so with ridiculously hot water, should that be what you’re looking for.
The place was well lit, clean, and expensive. I think I spent twenty bucks per shower, not to mention the travel time and gas to get out there, which was a good thirty minutes from the campsite.
I think it was worth it, which is why I only went every now and then. Maybe once a week for three weeks.
The goal was to save up some cash. Some scratch. Some frog skins. And the only way to do that was to make art. Which meant I still had to paint every fucking day, and to do that required ol’ reliable; shower curtains thrown on the ground behind the vehicle, and time.
The algorithm was lovely back then, which is a shame, seeing as I’m doing some of my better work in 2026, with a sliver of that audience. But back then I was averaging 1-2k likes per post. I didn’t know how good I had it! Every post brought more traffic and more followers. These days, not so much. It is what it is, man. It’s why I have this website, I guess.
It’s not the most hygienic but got damn did I not like using the communal shitter back at the “campsite” (some dude’s house). I hated it so much that I ended up getting a nice thermos from Wally World, to store hot water. I used that to clean up my MRSA foot, and then I’d drain the foot-tub into a big ol’ gallon jug. I imagine that’s some straight up biohazard/cross contamination nonsense, but that didn’t matter when paired with my sheer dislike of interacting with people.
If it makes you (me) feel better about the situation – I would wrap the foot tub up in plastic film, then wrap that up in a big ol’ trash bag, and then we’d hand sanitizer the fuck out of ourselves.
The name of the game was to find sympathetic places to shit in. SPSI for short. Sympathetic Places to Shit in.
Top tier – there was a mattress store/hardware store somewhere, been a long time, but the shitter was out of the way and usually very clean. Then there was the Native art store – the Prairie Edge. That one had a great shitter, and low foot traffic.
Bottom tier – pretty much everywhere else. The two nearest gas stations were just awful. High traffic areas, small bathrooms, and the bathrooms always smelled.
The Dollar Tree closest to the camping spot was also terrible.
I’d place the AirBnB campsite shitter in both top tier and bottom tier. Top for cleanliness. Bottom for having to shit in a stranger’s house.
Getting into the campsite was interesting. I met the guy out front, and he gave me the directions. Back the way I came was a turn off for a church, and instead of going into the church, I was supposed to hop the curb and drive towards his property. It didn’t have a gate, instead there was an eight-foot-wide section of fence without any pickets. And to be fair, behind the church, and into the guy’s property, was a decent chunk of nature, for being where it was.
The days were hot. Man. The days were hot. Cars get hot. The windows let in sunlight, and trap heat. Those same windows let out heat, and shit gets cold as fuck. It didn’t help that we were still in late winter/early spring. It would snow well into April. More so at the next spot than the current, but there were strings of days where the snow fell and built up a good five to ten inches.
My dad’s brothers died before I was born. They were a good ten to fifteen years his senior. Meaning their kids were closer to my dad’s age than ours. One of them was an interesting dude. A strange, strange dude, but interesting. In and out of jail, and big into being a traditional Lakota. He always had a medicine pouch around his neck and claimed to talk to tree spirits. Now, to you, that sounds spiritual as fuck, to us, who knew who the guy was, it sounded like he was huffing gas again.
Fucker loved huffing gas.
Dad had some kind of old sedan that didn’t run anymore. Buick Sable or some such. It was a nice vehicle for the time and price. But it didn’t run. Grandpa had land. Pop’s pops. Well, most of the old timers had land. It was kind of a deal that the government struck with the tribal members in the late 1880’s/early 1900’s. I think the goal was to turn us into farmers, but there wasn’t much to be farmed out there.
Grandpa’s land, the stuff out in the country, that was mule deer land. That was coyote land. It was cattle country, not farming country.
He also owned the land that his house was on. His lot, the lot next door (where one of my uncles has lived since at least the 80’s), and just below the back yard. And that’s where pop’s junked out car was. And that’s where our strange, tree talking, super Lakota cousin lived, for several years.
My dad’s oldest living brother lived beside his youngest brother’s house. Which was right across from grandpa’s house. Dad’s oldest living brother lived in a junked-out van. I’m not so sure about the years, but it was a long, long time. When dad was on his benders, he’d spend a lot of his time down there with my uncle. They used to drink in weather so cold that their beers would turn to slush. Thinking about that always turned into pop’s talking about his grandpa.
Grandpa Raymond.
Said dad’s gramps used to always have a beer glove because his beer was too dang cold.
My uncle lived in that van for years and then one day he was just gone. Turns out he found a lady at some point. Stopped being a boozer and shacked up for a long while. I wish it lasted longer than it did, maybe he’d still be alive if that were the case, but probably not. He was an old man, for a boozer, when he finally passed.
Pops and my uncle, always telling stories. Inside jokes that no one knew back then, and no one these days would understand. “Tigger said, that ah-tay (dad) said, that Tigger (one of their relatives) said that Ah-Tay (dad) said that…”
Pops let my uncle get some of the spotlight. Said that there was a little rez gang back in the day that called themselves the “Savage Seven.” Supposedly they were giving my dad some shit, so my uncle (back before he was a bum) had to regulate.
Unc said that he used to live in Texas, more than just living in Texas, said he was a ranch hand down on one of George Strait’s properties.
Bullshitting is a family skill, apparently.
Pops used to employ my uncle. Unc had to earn some free beer by taking us out to all the old hunting spots. Take us to the old hunting spots and help me haul the deer back to the vehicle, teach me how to field dress ’em. Yeah. Unc did that shit weird, man. My older relatives on my ma’s side used a saw to get through the ribs/sternum, and then they’d wedge a piece of 2×4 in the chest to open up access to the… I don’t know, organ lining.
My pop’s brother had a technique that didn’t require a saw but was messier.
He used to open the deer up down near the diaphragm and reach up and into the upper chest/throat area, and then he’d yank everything out that way.
I never did it his way.
Let the old man earn an honest day’s pay, I guess.
The church across the campsite was beautiful and massive. Lutheran church out on the south side of the city. I used to walk across the street to the pizza place to buy a sub sandwich. Then I’d make my way back towards the campground and take a stroll out in front of the church. Massive, man. Massive property. The whole area was like that though. There are literal mansions on that side of the city, and you wouldn’t know it if you never drove down some of those roads.
I fuckin hate being poor.
My uncle died a year before pops. He used to hitch hike across the rez, which would be about a three-county area. He was a real bum, an actual bum. He’d beg for cash uptown, make enough for some forty ounces, then post up across the street from the gas station, on tribal land, to get sloshed.
Big into the Sundance community but never traditional. I always thought that was strange, and I guess it’s one of the reasons why I didn’t have much reverence for it. My uncle said the quiet part out loud. He didn’t go to the Sundance for religious reasons; he went for money and White women. People would travel from all over the world to visit, and they brought smoke, money, and booze.
I knew plenty of drunks that got involved in the traditional stuff but never really changed the way they lived. One of our friends used to talk about eating peyote at ceremony, talkin’ about hearing drums and how strange it got. Wasn’t enough to save him. Not enough to keep him sober. They found his body in someone’s yard out on the rez back in 2022. Good guy. I liked him a lot. Funny guy, effortlessly funny, but also a big-time drinker.
My grandpa on my mom’s side passed away, oh I’d say in 2014 or some such. One of our cousins came back for the service, he’d been missing for a long while. I saw him one night back in 2012. I used to have a shitty van that I’d get sloshed in. My cousin popped up out of nowhere. Said he just spent the night in the drunk tank and got released about fifteen minutes prior. That was an interesting conversation. He got all traditional too.
Said he spent the last few years traveling with the local medicine man, going all over the country. Talked about eating peyote, mushrooms, and ayahuasca. And, like my uncle and my friend – it all had no real long-lasting effect on him. The night before, he ran off with the medicine man’s vehicle and drove it out west to one of those more isolated rez communities. Said the car ran out of gas or broke down, something like that, so he drank with a local bootlegger.
Ended up stealing a half gallon of Lord Calvert, walked back to town, and then blacked out. Came to in the town jail.
I got got by the corruptive nature of man, man. That cousin went traditional as hell, and when our grandpa died, he came back and started singing peyote songs while we caught up. And he was honest as hell too – they meant nothing. All they did was follow the lead of whoever was singing.
I’m sure in another life, I could give the traditional path a real walk, and find something worth sharing, but at that time, the people who got involved didn’t seem to do much better than the Christians.
Anyways, all that hitch hiking did a number on my uncle. Fucked his skin up. Ended up getting skin cancer. By the time they found it, it was too late. He deteriorated pretty quickly. Ended up living with my aunt, his sister, dad’s sister, for the last few months. And then one day he decided he wanted to drink, so he hitchhiked to the nearest town over, about a fifteen-minute drive away.
We don’t know the details, but they said he was found unresponsive. Whoever he was with left him and stole his cash and pain pills.
Pops was gone about a year later.
I still remember the painting that got me out of that spot. Got me out of the vehicle and under a roof. I don’t think I have a copy on file, but I remember the project name, some heavy band from South or Central America. “Winds of Tragedy” or the main songwriter’s side project. He bought art for both.
I didn’t do too bad on the sales front, for living, painting, and photographing from my vehicle.
Never did too bad.
Never did too good either, but we didn’t do too bad.
I think I lived in the Yukon for three and a half weeks. I know that I left early. I made enough cash from art to put a security deposit down on a cabin about twenty miles west of the city, out there in Piedmont, SD.
Blogtura: Where Have You Been – Hotel to Campsite
It’s a Shit Hole off the interstate called the Fair Value Inn. It’s been closed down for several years at this point. The neighbors seemed to have persevered despite the controversy. The Grand Gateway Hotel was right next door. They found some national attention after the owner openly banned Native Americans from the property, stating that it was too hard to tell the difference between a good Native and a bad Native.
From what I hear, a Native made another Native’s head go splat in the hotel.
I guess they had enough capital to take the long way, and the Fair Value didn’t.
I’ve stayed at many places over the last several years. It got so bad that I taught myself how to sleep on the floor without a pillow or blanket. Always moving, always. You get tired after a while, but the world ain’t exactly set up for us. And by “us” I mean poor people, at least, that Goldilocks level of poor where the government has no resources set aside for your particular set of issues, and you yourself, do not possess the needed skills, education, capital, or support system needed to move forward.
I figure most people in my situation just get worse. I can see that being the case, very easily. I was lucky. I had an unexpected well, and that was art. I built a decent following over the years, and if things got bad enough, I’d just ask for help. And usually, there’d be something there.
Never enough to catch up, never enough to be prosperous, never enough to live comfortably, but enough to survive. And I guess that’s better than the alternative.
I am very envious of my relatives and their relationship to the reservation. My cousin’s family moved out that way a few years back. They’re based about twenty minutes away from where I grew up. Their community has at most fifty people. It’s technically a town, complete with a local government, gas station, restaurant, and bar. But it’s not much. Their grandma’s buried out there.
They went through the tribe and managed to buy a good amount of land.
They’re handy people with good heads on their shoulders. They can use the area and the tribe’s resources to great effect.
I ain’t like that, and I ain’t like them.
I grew up around ghetto people. I was ghetto. I drank. I got my ass beat, got maced, walked miles barefoot, covered in puke. I got in car wrecks. The good people from when I was young all left a good fifteen years ago. The good people who raised me have been dead for just as long. Home don’t feel good to me. Home always made me nervous. Always.
Even if the family was sober – that didn’t stop some ghetto shit from happening. Didn’t stop family from fighting. Damn near every knock at the door could feel like the end of the world. I used to walk at the track field, early as hell, before the morning shift people woke up, under bright prairie stars, and the distant sounds of cars would morph into hateful words, aimed at me.
That fear never really went away when I was in the area.
But when I left? When I left, when no one I knew would ever be near me, when I was far enough from everyone, yeah. The world was peaceful again.
Living on the reservation was surprisingly, one of the best places to be, if you wanted to become a decent artist. My relatives, my generation, we weren’t much. The ones who were a bit older than me, they were in and out of jail and prison. They were dead or begging on the street. The generation above them were more or less the same if not dead. And they thinned out quick as hell after that. Not many people making it to fifty-something. Fewer still passed sixty-something.
Even the good people died. The ones you didn’t expect. My uncle was one of them. Uncle Shadow. Shadow was half Ha Sapa. Half Black, half Native. But culturally, he was more Native than most of us. On the tribal council. Used to chop a truck bed’s worth of wood for community members that really needed it. Used to pay for propane out of his pocket to keep people warm. Spoke the language fluently, him and my aunt. They were great people and they raised a good family.
And he just died out of the blue.
Died, Covid Summer. We lost four of them, but I add an additional number to it. Grandma died. Then our uncles passed not long after. One of them was always sick. Used to piss blood. I remember that about him. Always in and out of the hospital, had a kidney transplant. He lived a rough life. When Grandma left, he quit taking care of himself. One night, he just died. Organs gave out.
And about four hours later, I got another phone call. It was my ma. She said that my other uncle offed himself. Drank a jug of vodka and rolled his vehicle. Said Grandma was the only person who ever loved him and he wasn’t gonna stay around if she wasn’t here.
That’s three.
Number four was Shadow. He passed about a month after my other uncles. He was barely passed sixty. Had a heart condition. Died quickly.
And when they brought his body back from the funeral home, a drunk driver going against traffic, swerved into the procession and killed one of my uncle’s relatives.
I say we lost five to be dramatic, but if we keep it to people I knew, then it was “only” four.
Shadow married my pop’s sister. She was a dispatcher for the tribal police. The school had her come in to do a scared-straight talk about drinking and driving. Left a hell of an impression. She told us about how they were coming back from the casino one day and saw the aftermath of a head-on collision. She called it in and stayed behind when the cops showed up. She helped clean up or some such.
Said they only knew how many people died in the car because of the amount of feet they found scattered.
My other uncle, the one who offed himself in the car – yeah, he witnessed a nasty one too. Out west, near where he died, there was a little rez community. A group of girls died in a car wreck, and he was one of the first people there. One of them went to school with us. That don’t mean much to the outside world. My buddy out here in Texas graduated in a class of 500. We graduated in a class of about 40, maybe.
They said it was a full car, one of them was pregnant at the time, said that a few of them were contorted and shoved under the dash.
Lotta people dying in car wrecks. There’s one that I don’t like to think about, one that happened when I was about eighteen. We lucked out. The car got hooked to a metal culvert under the road and stopped the vehicle from smashing into a creek. Judging by the way life turned out, I can’t help but think that the life I lived since is some sort of punishment. That there’s real blood on my hands. That in a different path, we died.
Isn’t that what they say about quantum-suicide?
No one ever really dies; they just split off into an alternate reality.
June 2017, when I got in the wreck that scared me sober – we rolled out in the country. The only thing that kept us from rolling down a steep ass hill was a mound of dirt, a suspiciously placed mound of dirt that had been there for as long as I can remember. Almost as if it was placed there to act as a bumper.
Anyways.
The reservation was a good place to practice making art, because the standards were so fucking low. I was finally sober, and I wasn’t going out into the world, “actin’ a fool.”
No more fights, no more wrecks, no more drunk tanks, no more threats of suicide.
I was in my shame hovel, and in my shame hovel, I painted.
And eventually I relearned how to draw.
See, I hadn’t drawn anything since 2010. It was 2018 by the time I restarted. It took damn near a hundred pieces to find my style. Each piece took about an hour and a half to make. I’m too lazy to do the math, but it took a good while. Maybe three months. And maybe another year to refine it into something interesting, and another several years to refine it further.
My family didn’t mind if I was in my shame-hovel painting. They didn’t mind if I stayed up late reading. Didn’t mind if I left in the middle of the night to drive empty backroads. Didn’t mind if I disappeared for few days, to stay at rundown motels in the tri-county area.
I wasn’t as bad as I used to be, and that was good enough.
A few weekends at nearby hotels turned to a few months in the city, and a few months turned to a few years, and a few years in the city turned to a few years out of state. All from painting. From making art. From talking to strangers and making friends. Life is currently not easy. The future’s always shaky. Things can fall apart as quickly as tomorrow, and I’ll be stranded a thousand miles away, and if that’s the path that making art gives me, then it’s the path that I’ll walk.
So, I’m at this rundown, shit hole ass hotel called the Fair Value Inn, off of I-90, in Rapid City, SD. The front desk lady is nice. She’s not Native but Aboriginal. From either Australia or New Zealand. She has an affinity for Natives, which is a repeating pattern I’d find on my stupid little journey. Sympathy for a forgotten people.
The room was cheap as shit, and that was good, because all of my money came from painting, and it ain’t a guarantee that I’ll make any sales this week. If all it takes to have a roof over my head is one or two sales a week, then I’m gonna take that offer every time.
The lady’s husband was a Native guy from the Oglala tribe. The couple were still traditional to a fair degree, more than us. They even helped me find a local butcher to get free bones to paint.
The Oglala Sioux Tribe, our sister tribe from out west, had some funding to help with temporary housing. If it was related to the pandemic or not is not too clear to me, as this was during late-winter, and it very well could have been a program to keep at-risk families out of the cold. What this translated to, is the Fair Value Inn having a shit ton of Natives, and the types of Natives that qualified for free housing, were not the types of Natives that I’d usually associate with.
The room itself was super simple. Tv and bed in the living room, a wall that jutted outwards, behind that a sink, and a bathroom door. The place smelled like cigarettes and mold. Cold as fuck. The nice Aboriginal lady said that there was a casino nearby. After 2am, it shuts down, and the hotel gets overrun by drunks. When that happens, you should ignore the knocking at the door.
She wasn’t wrong.
I’m not actively seeking it out, but I do keep an eye out for it. I never seen my life as a Native or my life as an artist portrayed in the media, not in books or movies, or the tv. The closest I ever seen was Ask the Dust by John Fante. That dusty ass book is about a hundred years old now and has a few silly sections. Halfway through there’s an earthquake and he turns into a rubble clearing manly man out of the blue, and at the end, his lady friend turns into a reefer junky.
Those parts aren’t at all relatable.
But the guy’s hustle, now that’s something that rings true nearly a hundred years later. It’s about a smalltime author who occasionally gets work published in some sort of literary magazine. A lot of his inner monologues are about the books he’s currently working on, the work he’s planning on making, or about his editor reaching out to him, to praise him for his latest book, telling him that his work is great, telling him that there’s a check on the way.
He does get paid every now and then too.
I ended up with a few customers that became my Hackmuth (Arturo Bandini’s editor). A few good people that became angels in exchange for paintings of colorful, rotting portraits.
I ain’t ever seen a movie about an artist set up in a trap motel, with a section of his room plastic’d off with shower curtains, so he can keep his security deposit while painting. Never seen the story of a sad man, terrified of the past and the future, never seen him channel that fear into paintings of rotting horned beings. Never seen a story about an artist scared of becoming homeless so he paints every fucking day. Never seen a movie about a vagabond artist, living hotel to hotel, car to campsite, car to hotel.
I guess it ain’t much of a story.
And I guess I don’t speak in a broken enough dialect to sell that story as a “Native story.”
It’s just a bit of survival, a path that no one is ever really forced to walk.
Rent was something like two hundred a week, maybe one-fifty. I got really into gesso boards, and really into having an art supply store about a quarter of a mile away.
Used to have to wait for a week to get the mail or drive an hour-twenty to get good paint and canvas.
I’d get up to take a piss or make some coffee. It wasn’t uncommon to see police lights through the hotel peephole, from about ten feet away. That hotel was bumping. Place was packed. There were new people staying on both sides of me damn near every week. I learned pretty quickly that it didn’t matter who lived next door, they were always annoying as shit.
Always up late, always drunk as shit, always arguing and fighting.
Felt like home, felt like the rez.
That was my first spot in the city, and it only lasted about a month and a half. One week, while paying for the next week, the desk lady said that the landlords were going to start pricing people out of their rooms because the weather was getting nicer. And in a few months, tourist season was gonna start, when that happened, room prices were gonna triple. She said I needed to start planning cause things were gonna change soon.
So, I started planning.
Covid Summer. A year before. I lived in a motel in Kadoka, SD. The place was offering monthly rates at 750 bucks. All bills paid. I figured I could sell enough art to make rent. I was right, and I made some good-to-great art that year. A lot of people know a painting from an album called Mildred. That thing was made while I lived in that motel. It sold to some random Canadian for a little over a hundred bucks, and I can guarantee you that they don’t know what they have.
So, Covid Summer, the funeral home back on the rez refused to drive any bodies back. If your loved ones passed, you had to get a vehicle that could fit a coffin. I was using the family’s SUV at the time. Ma called me twice that summer to borrow the vehicle. They needed a hearse and that Yukon was big enough if you took the seats out.
That’s what they did.
They brought back a few bodies and an urn that summer.
It was that that let me know, that I could very easily live in my vehicle if I had to.
And apparently, I had to. Because I didn’t have a job yet. And the most affordable spot I could find was on AirBnB. It was some dude’s vacant lot. No fence separating his yard from the lot, so he advertised it as a campground. The asking price was ridiculously cheap. I think I paid maybe eighty bucks for the month. And in return, I got a place in the yard, an extension cord, and the use of the shitter.
Eighty bucks for a whole ass month vs 200 a week?
And all I had to do was sleep in the haunted SUV?
Fuckin, why not?
I went fishing with the big homie at some point. Still cold as shit out but the water was thawing. I had some slides, plastic slides, good slides, but slides. These things were made of some rubber/plastic combo. One of the fishing spots was a river under a bridge. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I was walking all these hills in sandals without socks. And the rubber/plastic started to rub against my skin. After a few hours and a few fishing spots, this patch on my foot got rubbed raw. And, since my skin was so damn low to the ground, it got MRSA.
I worked at a nursing home for seven years and whenever someone got MRSA, it almost always ended badly.
At the time though, I didn’t know what the fuck MRSA was. All I knew was that my foot wouldn’t heal. It leaked pus, damn near all day, every day. And after a good week, the infected patch started to hurt like a mother fucker.
I moved to Rapid City for a reason.
It was one of the few cities in the country with Native healthcare. And it was pretty close, at about two and a half hours away.
The process to sign up was pretty simple. You showed up, gave your info, and then they got on the computer and pulled your medical files from your home-reservation’s clinic. You hang out for a solid few hours, give some info, and get patched up. The pharmacy is on site, and your meds are free. Whole damn thing’s free.
I wish Americans were Native Americans, so we could all have this level of care, without making us poor.
I held my head low when they asked me for my address, because I didn’t have one.
Yeah.
I was homeless.
Or. I lived in my car.
Lived in some dude’s backyard.
They gave me some antibiotics, a plastic tub, some saline solution, bandages, and some ointment. They said I was supposed to clean it a few times a day, and to put the ointment on the outside of the infection. I guess so it didn’t spread.
Airbnb, roommates – I don’t know man. The whole thing is weird to me.
I checked into the backyard. It was on the fancy side of the city. No real businesses for at least three miles around. One gas station, and just residentials, then a small strip mall – dentist office, meat market, sports bar, car wash, pizza spot, and then nothing for another two miles. The guy was real hands off about the whole situation. Said I can use the kitchen and bathroom whenever I needed to.
He was currently renting the living room out to some random, I saw that ad online too.
I had the option to use the shitter and shower, but I did my best not to. The whole setup was just strange to me.
Damn near two months at the trap motel and I never really got any good sleep.
First night in some internet dude’s backyard?
Since we were in a heavy residential area, with big ass houses and yards, since there wasn’t a lot of businesses around, the traffic would just die after about 9pm.
The two gas stations were too far away from the ghettos, so homeless drunks weren’t incentivized to hike all the way out to bother.
It was cold as shit. Cold as shit. But it was quiet, and I was used to the cold. And it was finally quiet so I slept a good sleep.
Dream Illustration Commentary: Family Tree/Gramps
Reading is a good thing to get good at. I’m not particularly well educated, and I don’t pretend that I am. But I did eventually find reading material that resonated with my own personal interests. I had something to turn to in my down time. You can’t brain rot every day. You can’t get shit faced, every day. You have to try to make things somewhat better, sometimes. And for me, that was found through reading.
My mom gave me some of her interests. She was very much into horror movies and true crime. I never felt like reading any of her paperback novels, but I did find her copy of Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Because of her, reading was something that I knew I should work towards.
She wasn’t the only one.
My grandpa was a reader too. He had a stroke around when I was born. I don’t know who he was before the injury. I knew him as the quiet mechanic, who was always exercising his left hand and arm. Always stretching and working on his mobility.
He also read scripture every night.
His voice barely audible, going over highlighted sections in his bible.
My grandparents on my mom’s side were a big part of my life, as they only lived a few houses up the street from us. And ma dropped us off up there whenever her and pops needed a sitter/wanted to get sloshed, which happened a lot.
Grandma was very theatric in her fear of God and the end of the world. I believe she lost her firstborn to a tornado, way back in the day. I’m not too interested in reaching out to anyone to fact check that, so we’ll let my dusty memory exist on this page with an asterisk. That meant every storm was a tornado, that every big world event was a sign of the end. It was very exhausting.
I don’t think I was able to appreciate the beauty of South Dakotan rainstorm until I was older than most.
Grandpa’s presence was complimentary but silent.
Grandma drank a handful of times. She’d get drunk with my uncles and aunts. Those binges usually lasted a good four days.
I can’t remember Grandpa ever getting shit faced or acting up. I think the injury had a lot to do with that. Both of my grandpas were cut of a similar clothe. And both were a big part of my life. My dad made sure we visited his dad the summer before gramps passed away. I guess he had a feeling that things were winding down.
Both of my grandpas were the church types. Not nearly as devoted as Grandma though.
My mom’s pops – he was known to have had visions. I think it was partially due to the injury. Grandpa saw a mass exodus of people walking towards the west. Whatever else he may have seen, has been lost.
I haven’t seen him in a long, long time.
I started to dream at eighteen, and the bulk of these dreams would run until around twenty-five. They started slow. Dreams of floods, brief flashes of animals, seen the eye of God eventually.
Joseph Campbell said that if a culture lacks the resources to initiate someone into the next phase of their life, then their psyche or unconscious will attempt to compensate via the spontaneous production of mythological imagery.
It was my cursory knowledge of Jungian psychology, at that time, that made me be mindful of dreams. I wasn’t familiar with the ins-and-outs of this particular branch of psychoanalysis or their specific beliefs, but I knew from Campbell, that I should pay attention.
They said that the unconscious delights in being recognized. This is something that we hear from the lucid dreamers, too. They don’t mythologize it as much, but they say that if you want to lucid dream, you need to start a dream journal. You have to strengthen your ability to recall dreams.
The Jungians believed the same, but it was a bit more superstitious. There was a higher but silent and unseen observer walking alongside us in this life. And if we gave it the attention that it asks, then it’d allow you to see more than you were previously able to see.
Further than that, people and opportunities would show up, unseen helpers, wandering onto your path.
I don’t remember exactly when this dream happened, but it happened early on. Easily in that first year.
I think this is one of the more straightforward dreams that I have illustrated, and the commentary isn’t particularly insightful. But for who I was back then, it meant something.
The dream tells me to pray to the center of these two posts. I believe it was asking me to live in moderation. That was simply something that I wouldn’t be able to do. The years that followed were very much sloppy, drunk, and miserable. And because I couldn’t live in moderation, I was shown a demonic tree.
The imagery, yet again, is not particularly occult or hidden. It’s just the facts. And those facts are simple; a lot of my relatives on both sides of the family died young, died miserable, and died from not living in moderation. There are more sad stories in our family’s history than there is success.
The dream throws an at-the-time curveball at me, by showing gramps, who embodied characteristics that weren’t a part of my life. Gramps was a reader, a mechanic, he was disciplined, he was sober, he was a roofer before the stroke, he had visions, he was aligned with God, he was a fisherman.
Him carrying an eagle staff did and still seems strange, as he wasn’t a traditional type. I guess the importance of the staff still has some weight in our dumb ancient DNA.
It’s with this ceremonial or ritual item, and the qualities that he carried, the ones that I lacked, that he’s able to put a dent into this evil tree.
And the question is always, was what he did enough to change what this tree was – or was what he did futile.
I don’t know, probably never will. We do not live on the same timescales as trees.
Where the next generations go will not be seen by us.
ARTURA: My Work, the Crucifix, and a Dream Illustration
There are wayward elements that have collected in my work over the last decade or so. None of them were planned out. They come and go based entirely on what feels right, and what I think the piece needs. For the longest time, having a crucifix in my work felt right. These days it’s the crucifix, four horns on my rotted humanoids, animals with exposed ribs, moths, and some form of the moon.
I think it’d be safe to say that Zdzislaw played a big part in my incorporating the crosses, but I wouldn’t put all of it on simple artist worship. My connection to Christianity has been a lifelong burden of sorts and I’d like to share that strange journey here, semi-officially.
I was raised by my shithead relatives, and they weren’t good for identifying positive traits. They weren’t great at leading by example. They weren’t particularly interested in supporting anyone from a genuine place. They talked poorly of one another. Lies of omission were common. These were toxic people and I wouldn’t be able to untangle myself from them for quite some time.
We were bad people and we had nothing to bind us together. Race was the easy one. Native America was the easy one. Wearing your hair in braids and becoming a Big Lakota was easy. Easier still, was to pick out people who carried themselves well, and label them as “acting White.”
One relative was singled out in particular. None of the qualities that he fostered were shameful or destructive. The person he became would make anyone proud to have known him. My relatives who gave him shit are likely still begging on the streets.
Grandma gave us the gift of the end of the world. She gave us religious paranoia and fear. She spoke of eternal damnation and a final Armageddon. I love and miss Grandma and see where she was coming from. She was a former alcoholic, one who replaced her social circle with members of the congregation. To paint the world in black and white was to put in place a simple path for us.
The world was frightening and it would all end soon.
Our grandparents were from a different world. Their generation got put into boarding schools, they were taught to be Christians. All but one, I believe either my mom’s dad, or my dad’s dad, one of my grandpas lived so far out in the sticks that they couldn’t throw him into one of their schools.
As such, traditional Lakota spiritual practices were simply left to rot. To this day, many of our traditions mean little to our generation. I welcome anyone who wants to keep their meanings alive, as most of us were not sent to this life to enshrine the past. If you’re White and you can learn what these things mean, then go for it. If you’re Native and you practice this stuff, go for it.
I did not choose this path.
Ceremonies were talked with fear and reverence. Yuwipi wasn’t something that most of us knew about, and the mere mention of it was enough to scare some of my uncles. Tobacco ties were seen as pagan and therefore of-the-devil. The Christian mark was stamped in their minds with prejudice, and as such, our connection to a living spiritual life was effectively cut off, as seems to be the standard for all Christians, save for the strange snake dancers.
I will always remember Grandma, off the wagon for the first time in a decade, sitting in a cigarette smoke filled dining room, crying and singing a traditional Lakota song. Not telling us the meaning, only reciting from memory. Pow Wow music has never had the same impact as that one verse.
My cousin became a preacher. Our cousin that we called “White” went off to become a preacher. Went off and joined the marines, and then went to seminary, and then opened his own church while also working with the elderly. He became a good man.
And who were we? Who did we become?
Grandma raised a preacher. She also raised a strange, strange artist who claimed to see spirits, who had visions and dreams, who saw the Lamb of God with his own eyes.
I worked with my grandma for a summer back in 2016. We cleaned motel rooms. I was on the final leg of my alcoholic years. I shared my dreams and visions with her, assuming she’d see the devil in there, but instead, she wanted to hear more.
She was interested in Christian faith healing. When I was growing up, my lungs didn’t work well. We weren’t aware of just how damaging cigarette smoke was. I had scabs and sores growing on my arms and legs. Perpetually inflamed eczema that hurt when the skin stretched. Cracked with ridges and pus constantly flowing.
My long sleeve shirts would dry and stick to my infected skin.
Grandma saw how bad this body was, saw me tied to oxygen masks, saw me being taken to the hospital.
We were backwoods people. We were poor people. We didn’t travel; we didn’t have the money to travel. Once a year, when those income tax checks came through, mom and pops would round us up and take us to the city, and the city was never too far away. Pierre, Rapid City, Sioux Falls. We were poor and vacation meant staying at a hotel that had a pool.
Very few of us have seen the ocean. Not many of us have flown or vacationed. We’re “ooohn-shii-kuh” – we’re pitiful.
(Ushika)
Grandma took us to a faith healer a town over and sent me up to receive a prayer and a clean bill of health.
If only it were that easy.
When that didn’t work, she took us out to Denver to see a very famous con man, the type that would invite people on stage, who would tap them on the head and they’d fall to the ground and stand back up, healed.
That didn’t work either.
They always asked, all of my relatives asked, they were all curious about Christianity and Christ. They wondered about basic mythological ideas and motifs and were never given an adequate answer.
The preachers said that the devil put corrupt bibles out in the world to cause strife. The true bible, the true story, the true teachings were always what those preachers were selling.
I prefer to have an ativan nearby if I’m gonna do some heavy drinking, these days. The anxiety is something that I was never warned about. If I drink, this old body’s gonna feel like it has pins and needles in its hands, there’s gonna be a heavy weight in my shoulders and chest, and I’m going to want to pray. I’m going to want to be prayed for. I’m going to want the comfort of a church or mosque.
Dad drank Everclear. Drank a pint of Everclear every day. One of my first memories of him was when they tied him to a machine at the ER in the city. Pops drank a lot. 9 months out of the year. Pops was difficult to get along with. He could be insecure, angry, stubborn, accusatory, embarrassing – and after his yearly ICU stay and likely coma, he’d sober up and return to being a mostly quiet fella who preoccupied himself with yard work and maintenance upkeep.
There was always a window somewhere in there, leading up to his eventual return to sobriety, where he’d pass out with the tv on some Christian channel, listening to preachers talk about the end of the world.
One of our relatives burned himself up after huffing gas. He disappeared for a long time after that. I wouldn’t see him for a few years. When he came back, he was different in a strange way. He talked quieter and was preoccupied with the end of the world. He was mapping current events onto the Book of Revelation. He said the Gulf oil spill was a sign of the end.
The Christians preached strange stories and never gave us a good-enough answer for a lot of it.
In the Seven Sermons to the Dead, Jung says he was awakened by the sounds of spirits. They went to Jung because they couldn’t find what they were looking for in Jerusalem.
At eighteen I found the monomyth and the work of Joseph Campbell, and that brought me to Jung and Terence Mckenna. I found psychoanalytic interpretations of Christian dogma and finally felt that we had some answers that made sense. The Book of Revelation, The Book of Job – the totality of the Old Testament, they were all cut apart by thinkers like Edward Edinger. Campbell brought myths from across the world under one umbrella.
We were not as distant as we thought.
One of these writers once said that the strength of the unconscious, its ability to create ritual and myth was so strong, so standard to various tribes in both North and South America, that the early Jesuit priests were convinced that the devil made it to the Americas first and taught the Natives a blasphemous version of Christianity to mock the Christians.
The Christians partook in the Eucharist, divorced from its original cannibalism, and were shocked to see indigenous cultures around the world living their myth literally.
The Jungians so succinctly mapped the psyche onto Christianity, that doomsday preachers no longer have any teeth. Conspiracy theorists can’t peddle these stories about literal giants, and we can’t so blindly believe, as many would like us to, that every miracle in the bible can be traced back to alien craft and beings.
If only we had active Jungians out in pulpits today to defang Christian Nationalism.
The Jungians and the alchemists have a way of looking at the world, one that makes sense. Jesus, as the son of God, was too pure to be identified with, by common people. So, they began to venerate Mary, as she was closer to humans. And in the Middle Ages, that was brought down a step farther. It was easier to identify with the Arthurian knights than the mother of God, or God himself.
The alchemists and the Jungians inverted the entire relationship by returning to the (blasphemed) early beliefs of Gnosticism. A divorced piece of God (the totality of God) became trapped in all matter. The process then, was to embark on the reunification of Sol and Luna within our own life. The Holy Trinity was incomplete because it was not balanced by both the feminine and the shadow. The early mentioning of a feminine presence in Proverbs, one who says that she was with God before the creation of earth, and our continued insistence on an Antichrist, points to a stubborn problem relating to what-it-means-to-be-fully-human in modern times.
Jesus, God, they don’t descend unto earth from on-high, only to run away afterwards. The alchemists and Jungians say that the Philosopher’s Stone is created in the dunghill. The Philosopher’s Stone is created through base matter. We become like lead in our psychological struggles, and we seek out the advice of modern medicine men, we become the initiate, asking for help from ritual elders (the therapists, if we’re lucky enough to find one), who encourage our examinations of our own psychological and mythological symbolic processes.
Von Franz said that “I am the friend of whoever is lonely” in relation to Hermes Trismegistus. The unconscious is the friend of whoever is lonely. That if we retreat from the world, we load up the psyche with power, and that power becomes a mirror, one that can show us a still-living spiritual process in our time. Not one that can only be viewed after death.
If ever there was a place capable of creating The Philosopher’s Stone, a place where the dunghill is smashed and pushed into wounds, a place where one can be allowed to be truly lonely, then it was this life.
Blogtura: Datura Posting L’s
I like to think that I’m agnostic or an atheist. I like to look down on tarot users and Christians alike. I think I’m being dishonest with myself. I think there’s an active discipline that I return to on occasion. These methods are not good for my mental health. I don’t think I ever really left the world of magical thinking.
In dreams, staring at the sky has been met with scorn from figures I can’t see. To look up when dreaming is to defy explicit orders from something ancient. The few times I have looked up, have been at the direct command of dream figures.
There was a curse placed on the wall, and I was shown it over the course of a week or so, and I had little to no way of defending against it. The methods for getting out of it were spoken of directly, when I had no one else to turn to. There’s a metaphysical shop downtown, by the university. It’s out of the way. They pride themselves on carrying esoteric items.
I asked if they had sage or sweet grass. They told me they specifically do not carry any of the Four Medicines to discourage “wrong use.” This was a problem, because I am from the Plains. We use sweet grass, sage, and ceder to pray. Even as modern people, who left superstition in the past, we still go to smudging if we have no other options, and at that point I felt absolutely hopeless.
I can say with complete honesty, that I unknowingly invited this into my life. It was a mistake on my part, and it had long lasting effects. I was unable to sleep in the dark, unable to sleep without Lakota prayer songs in my headphones, something visited me and refused to leave.
When I was young, I’d listen to recorded shaman singing from some Ayahuasca drinkers. It never really worked, is the problem. I mean, technologically, it wouldn’t work. If I was listening from a phone or an MP3 player, the stream would drop or the files would get corrupted. It seems as though there was medicine in there somewhere, some level of sanctity managed to stand up to ignorance of a spiritual tourist.
I often wonder why it is that we listen to human interpretations of biblical stories, instead of listening to the tales of those who have had Near Death Experiences. I listen to new Near-Death Experiences. I listen to old ones. I read them. The trail of something real and outside of this reality lies in their stories.
There’s a book about the Lakota called Lakota America. In it they talk about how our ancestors first approached government officials, whether that be French or American, I can’t remember. The main point is that they would go up to these officials and cry. They’d weep and ask for help. They did this ritualistically.
We are a people who hurt ourselves.
Those old wounds and that wiring still exists, at least in me, and in our sad relatives.
I get desperate, I get plenty desperate. I get scared, all the time. I get worried, and I don’t know how to solve my problems. The only path that I know is the creation of art. It’s devotion to the unconscious. I have reverence for dreams and visions. This outside world has never really been a place that gives comfort.
I look down on tarot readers and Christian prayers. But I have no qualms about using the I Ching as a means of divination. I have used this book for nearly 20 years, and it has been poignant damn near every time. It will reprimand me for asking the same question, while looking for a new answer. “It is not I who seeks the fool; the fool seeks me.” I have no problems with dream-incubation. If things are bad enough, I will turn to dreams for instructions or insights.
These are living paths to me. I unironically do not see the disconnect between what I do and believe, and what others do or believe.
In late 2024/early 2025, multiple streams met one another, and it was very hard to pull myself out of it. I can say, with hindsight, that something went wrong with me on a mental level. There was no guidance. There were no doctors. I had to weather it, and hope that things got better.
I have known about the Tibetan Book of the Dead for a number of years. Carl Jung and Timothy Leary spoke about it. Jung saw it as a metaphor for the individuation process and Leary saw it as a guide for the psychedelic experience. I saw it as a way of getting payback towards God and the hand He dealt.
You’re supposed to read it and familiarize yourself with it while you’re still alive, while you’re in the process of dying – someone is supposed to read it to you, and when you do die, someone is supposed to either read it to your body or to where you usually sleep.
I listened to it while trying to sleep.
I think that was a mistake. My dreams weren’t given a ritualistic or inward quality. Instead, I found a roadblock. I would see a decapitated head, rotten, skin dried and pulled back tight, a portion of the neck still attached, and this head would be next to me. It’d be next to where I sat and slept. It would vibrate and thrash around at speeds so fast that the damn thing became a blur.
Over and over again. Never seeing the Bardo Thodol. Never practicing for my dying experience. Instead, I saw a thrashing head.
Something got through.
I’m supposed to be agnostic. I’m supposed to be an atheist. These are just dreams. There are no ghosts. There are no spirits.
And here we were.
I would paint with my back against the room, with my desk facing the wall.
I could feel the presence of many-beings in the room. I don’t know about you, but I can hear when someone walks around a room, there’s weight blocking ambient noise. I know when there are people around me, and for a stretch there, I felt something. Somethings. They didn’t present themselves as human. They instead felt like disembodied orbs, invisible to the eye, but audible. They looked over my should while I tried to paint.
It got so overwhelming that, often times, I’d simply stop making art.
I lost out on cash because I wasn’t able to make new art for at least three weeks.
Something got through and it was everywhere.
I couldn’t sleep in the dark after that. I couldn’t sleep without sound blaring in my ears around the clock. I started hearing metallic voices exploding between my ears just before falling to sleep.
We use sage to cast out bad spirits; we burn sweet grass to invite in good spirits. We burn ceder for protection. I had to get what I could, which was honestly the silliest part of this dark period in my life. Spiritual protection was delivered to my doorstep after putting in my card info.
I started asking the dreams for help, because this was something that the Christians probably weren’t equipped to deal with.
The dreams were explicit in their diagnosis and advice.
First, I was shown what happened. There was a curse placed on the house, or maybe on, specifically, me. The curse was drawn on the wall. In the corner of the room, where the two walls meet, there was half of an owl drawn on both walls, meeting in the center.
Next, I was shown how to see what found its way into my life.
There’s a curtain on the window. The dream said that I should smudge with sage and push the smoke outwards to the window curtain. The spirit that was fucking with me would temporarily show itself, coming towards me, made visible by the curtain.
I found myself on a boat, floating in a massive body of water. I saw a Thunderbird, with my own eyes but it wasn’t like what I’ve read about, at all. It was a massive, slow-moving cloud. A section of the cloud seemed to be pulling the rest of the cloud behind it. That forward section took the shape of its head, and the entire cloud became its massive wings, while a storm followed closely.
A star fell to the earth.
I walked up to it and found a monk. He exuded peace and love. He was only peace, and only love.
No amount of prayer or sage burning could stop what was happening in that room or that house.
Symptoms didn’t lessen.
It took me leaving for it to stop.
Elders and medicine men exist for a reason, and I wasn’t either.
Behold A Red Horse 