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Blogtura: Where Have You Been – Campsite to Cabin

deloria424

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

deloria424

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

deloria424

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

deloria424

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

deloria424

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.

Dream Illustration Commentary: Death Premonition

deloria424

I wonder, a lot of the time, if I’ll ever get tired of licking my own wounds. The old world’s been gone a long time, and I still circle around it like everything just happened. Thinking this way ends up freezing the calendar. A decade’s passed at blinding speeds and my body’s all beaten down and broken. The concrete flowers done grew up, wilted, and got replaced with people from my generation! The bums from my youth have been gone a long while now, and familiar faces from my time have taken their place, have grown up to become tweakers, and a lot of them are just flat out dead.

They saw my friend back in our hometown, he was trying to get a ride to the city. Apparently, his eyes were all swollen and black. I’m not sure who did it but given how much he drinks, it wasn’t really a surprise. That’s not to say I’ve seen him be particularly shitty towards anyone, but those are the risks that come with the lifestyle.

I’d describe our decades long friendship as being based around convenience. We were both losers and losers need friends too.

I was always self-paced with new ideas. I tried to read or listen to anything new or novel. When I wasn’t a complete degen, I was following my own path towards what I thought were important ideas. My buddy wasn’t really like that.

We didn’t approach alcoholism the same way. I went inward; I quietly tried to drink more than I did before. I tried to ride that line between buzzed and fucked up. I tried to push my tolerance while keeping everything on track, as much as possible.

I never wanted to come across as sloppy. Problem with being a fuck up, is that when you do slip up, no one will remember you redlining it for years before. They’ll only remember you being a sloppy mess, so the overall project really didn’t help in the long run.

My friend was what we call a “soak.” He hung out all the time, but he never contributed shit to anything or anyone. Never as a courtesy, never “just cause”. It was the strangest thing, dude soaked up booze and smoke from everyone.

I guess we liked him enough when he wasn’t sloshed.

What I’m getting as this: we talk in circles when we’re drunk and that tendency doesn’t go away simply because you sober up. You learn to live with it as best as you can, and that’s about all you can do without venturing into mindfulness or meditation. I would never claim to have a real ailment that fucks with people, but goddamn is my brain a bit fucked. It’s like a minefield of hangnails.

Old memories live on. Old events live on. Regrets about the past live on. Never healing, never peeling completely off. Always present. And each time I stumble over a hangnail, I want to scream, I want to yell, I want to fire off all of my muscles to pull away from my own brain.

My buddy would talk in circles. Always about what we drank the last time we hung out, what he drank the last time he was drunk, we were in our mid-to-late 20’s, and he was still bringing up shit that happened ten years before. It was a challenge to hang out with him because he wasn’t really interested in anything. He lost a few people in his life and if he wasn’t talking about what he drank, he’d talk about them and other sad stuff.

I knew there was a person in there, I knew that he was interested in life at one point, and I had to pry it out of him. Had to fish for threads so he could talk about stuff that he used to care about. And that’s what we all are to a certain degree. And by “we” I mean my own specific strata of aging degen loser.

I was twenty-four when I realized that I could simply remove myself from miserable people. My other buddy sold a brick of government cheese for a liter of vodka and he wanted to share it with me, which, to be fair, was pretty sick. What wasn’t sick was the woe-is-me. It was a repeated cycle of stories, and he circled around them for at least an hour and a half. It got to the point where I could guess where each thread would lead to.

I appreciate the free buzz but if it means I have to listen to a drunk talk in circles and try to make me feel bad for their bad decisions?

Yeah, fuck that.

And that’s how I approached the situation. He started on another retelling of the same stories, and I stood up. Finished my next shot. Turned around and just walked away.

You’re allowed to do that, turns out.

He was a friend. Someone who had been in my life for a long time. But the lives we were living, the mental decline that we were inflicting on ourselves with hundred proof, that shit was making us slow.

I say all of that, to say this: I didn’t change much internally. I’m still licking my wounds. I’m still thinking about the past. I still relive all of it. I still get preoccupied by it. I don’t really know any other way to live. And the more I hold on to the past, the more time I lose out on. It’s a real problem, and a problem I wish could heal, or at least, lessen.

My parents used to terrify us with their old stories, and I don’t think it was intentional. I don’t think they were trying to one up each loss with more hurt. I don’t think they really knew what kind of effect it’d have on us. It was just who they were and these were the lives they lived.

I don’t have a family to trauma-dump on, so I do it through my art and my writing. Let it go somewhere where it can die permanently, like the final leaves falling off of a fucked epigenetic tree.

I don’t want to mention anyone by name, and there are stories I don’t think I should share, because they belong to someone else. They belong to different families and different friend groups. I’m not in the business of writing fiction or fictionalizing things that happened.

All of that to say, that I still think about the past. I still think about people who died. I still think about old friends. But I’m old now and I don’t really have as much of a connection to the past or those past feelings like I used to. It’s lot like getting a toenail removed. It hurts, but the skin hardens eventually. And sometimes a direct hit can still feel strange, but it ain’t like it used to be.

Death Premonition – my buddy’s been dead a long time now. Him leaving hit hard because we were similar. He was the type of person to get curious about stuff, and he’d search for some kind of answer, might not always be the right answer, but he was open to learning and thinking. Being open to new ideas, to new experiences, that’s a lot rarer than you’d think. Especially in a no-name, isolated ass town.

He died at the beginning of 2014. I would then proceed to drink more than I ever did before. That would go on for two years. And then I would eventually sober up. Sobering up meant that all of the people I used to associate with were left in the past. And the good people I knew before life got bad were long gone.

Life got quiet. Life would be quiet until 2021.

My family opens gifts at midnight on Christmas. They gave me two jugs of cheap wine. A bottle of cheap wine has as much of a kick as a single forty ounce of malt liquor. I got a hold of my buddy, who was usually up pretty late, and asked if he wanted to catch a quick buzz. He said he was down and that we should meet in the woods, which was a little over halfway between my community and town. “The woods” was a large creek area, with a decent fishing spot, that used to have a main road going through it about eighty years prior.

The state eventually made a proper highway and a lot of those old roads and bridges started to crumble into nothing. All that was left was a degraded dirt road, one that would get overgrown and washed out, more and more through the years.

The old bums called that creek area Ho-Chi-Man Trail, as a good number of them were vets.

Pops said he once found police negatives down there with pictures of a frozen dude, half submerged in the water.

I don’t know how true that is, but I do know that a pair of brothers died near that lake, one on one side of the road, the other on the other side, that was a long, long time before I was born.

Our bored imaginations used to search around for something interesting. We’d walk up that road to the church in the summer, about eight of us. Our grandparents were lifelong church goers, and the church would feed the community. Someone burned it down eventually.

Our older cousins would tell us about “tiny men made of sticks” that were hiding down there in the woods.

Time would paint that area as harmless. As I got older, I’d walk the actual creek line with pellet guns and .22s. When I got even older, I’d wander through in the middle of the night, with pupils the size of saucers, mind overrun by a mushroom, with stars hanging low overhead.

One day a relative would get beat to near-death just passed the creek.

On Christmas morning, 2013, at approximately 1am, the sky was clear. The moon was in its last quarter but still bright enough to light up the woods when reflected off the snow. My buddy came down from above, and we went for a walk. We followed the gravel road, passed the creek, up the hill, and down again, all the way to a hidden pond, about a mile away from town. We caught a buzz and caught up.

He was excited about a party happening on New Years Eve. I told him I could get someone to work for me, and that we could get a few people down near our little campsite/bonfire area. He wasn’t interested in that because the party was supposed to be a big one.

I don’t think I could’ve gotten anyone to work for me anyway.

It’s been so long that I can’t even fake a conversation between us for anyone reading this.

We drank two bottles of wine and started walking towards town. I went with him back to his street, said goodbye and made plans to drink soon.

I used to wash dishes at an old folks home. It was on the edge of town. It was a solid walk, you could take the highway or cut through the woods. I’d walk to and from even if the weather was shit, and the weather was shit. It was cold as fuck. But, when you get moving, it’s like an inner furnace starts goin’ and the cold doesn’t really fuck with you so much. Not as much as the frozen patches on the roads and sidewalks.

A section of the old-old road started to erode by then. In the real world, that thing was up to my chest. I got daily updates on a neighbor’s SUV. It got stuck in that eroded ditch earlier in the week. And each morning it got more and more fucked up. By the end, every piece of glass, every light, every window, all smashed and broken.

Between Christmas Day and New Years Eve – there came a dream. A vivid fucking dream.

In the dream, I’m walking that stretch of road and fall into that washed out section. It’s a lot fucking deeper than I remember. It becomes a cave system. There’s something calling out to me, telling me to get closer, so I follow.

At the back of the cave is a snake made of neon colored glass. It shakes its rattle before chasing after me.

I am not athletic.

I am not able to escape in time.

I try to climb up and out but I’m too slow.

It bites me.

I open my eyes and I’m in this massive space, inside of a dusty warehouse, but it felt like the inside of a teepee.

There are these massive, massive robed or cloaked figures, all standing silently.

I find myself falling to my knees in front of one and I start to cry and beg and cry.

“Are they going to kill me? Are they going to kill me? Are they going to…”

This cloaked figure presents a dead infant in front of me. I instinctively start smashing it with my foot. I’m scared as shit and WOOOOF.

I’m awake.

Fuckin’ shook.

Freaking out as the dream residue slides back like cooking oil in a bottle.

I had to work on New Years Eve and Day. I was kind of pissed, but only on a “I wish I could be getting sloshed” level.

New Years Eve – pops got me a bottle of wine, nothing strong, but it was alcohol.

Instead of getting shit faced off of some cheap booze, I painted. I painted and listened to a lecture by Manly P Hall. You can still listen to it as it’s freely available – Secret Powers and Why We Should Not Use Them.

He says something like, “prayer works, and because prayer works, we should pray for good things if we have to pray.”

I didn’t think much of it. I was never a theosophist, or a particularly avid Hall listener, but his lectures were interesting and strange enough as background noise.

I remember saying “I hope you end up in jail or a ditch.”

Not aimed at anyone in particular.

I was annoyed about not being able to drink, so I put some of that negativity out in the world.

Do I think I caused any of this nonsense with my attitude alone? Fuck no. Not one bit. But it is interesting, the way that things worked out.

Out of respect for my friend and his family I will end things here.

My buddy went missing that night. His family would go looking for him the next day, and the day after. I thought he got got for a night in the drunk tank, worst case scenario.

My ma would tell me that they found him about three days later. The weather cleared up and a good number of people were able to walk in a massive line out in a field. The big party he talked about was out in the country a good way. I’m not sure what he was thinking. We used to hunt out there; it’s a decent drive, and a walk that I never heard of anyone taking before.

I guess he figured someone would be driving and he could hitch a ride in.

Sometime later, after a lot of drinking and crying, and moving on, I had another dream. A dream that I think deserves a retelling here.

In the dream, I’m hovering over where he went missing. I’m a good way back and up, but I can see whereabouts they found him. And the dream says, quite explicitly, that I should go back out there with some sage. I should go out there, light the sage, and make sure there’s a trail of smoke from where they found him, all the way back to his grave.

I never did do that.

And I don’t think he’s trapped out there.

I’m too much of an atheist to think that way. I listened to too many near-death experiences to think that someone’s soul could get lost in the wilderness. I’m sure we’re all going somewhere strange, outside of space and time, or at the very least, we’ll return to nothingness again, and before you know it, we’ll cry and breathe again, in another life.

I do think, though, that these types of dreams are what informed the actions of old school medicine men and mystics, and potentially were why certain traditions or rituals started.

Art: Grandiose Ego and Self Hatred

deloria424

There was a full building of Native artists. All throughout the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation. The Gift of Mother Earth Art Show. Father’s Day 2022. I would have been in my fifth year of painting “professionally.” I moved off rez to be near art markets, and I managed to join a few. There was a “nerd con”, a few renaissance fairs, a beer market, a day long music fest in downtown Rapid. Opportunities were scarce. Having walked this path now for quite some time – I envy the lives that my art friends are living back home.

They have formal educations, mortgages, families, and fulltime jobs. They make art, they make good-to-great art. And their in-person art events are manageable. A few cons here and there, a few trips here and there, travel to Denver for a weekend or two, travel to Sioux Falls for a weekend or two, travel to Wyoming or what have you. Meet new people, network, and make some cash.

I made cash too. I made good cash most of the time. But it was all a solo endeavor. My gear was made piecemeal. Display racks and shelves were bought when there was extra money. Prints and stickers were made when I was clear of rent for the month. My art setup was just like my life setup. Everything should fit in at most three totes and that’s it.

In 2026, looking back, and looking forward – things never really improved. If I had to frame it in a way that made sense to myself, who isn’t a typical artist, I’d say I’m in my busking/songwriter phase. I haven’t reached that regional opener level. I’ve been at it for damn near a decade and things just haven’t fell into place. I’m still showing up to sketchy venues with three totes, making a display setup with what little equipment I can hobble together.

The shows I’m able to get in, the “galleries” I’m able to join – they aren’t real galleries. They’re warehouses in out-of-the-way factory districts.

I was never able to break through.

It is what it is, I guess.

Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation. Father’s Day. 2022. I’m set up at two tables. I have big paintings leaning up against the blankets that are hanging over my tables. I have milk crates with smaller paintings, the bulk of which sit on the tables in columns and rows. I have two light stands without lights. They are fully extended with two bigger paintings hanging off of the nub ends, swaying side to side with the currents of tourist breath.

I have these massive paintings with me, massive for my setup at least. They’re two feet wide, and three feet tall. They’re bright pink with rotting humanoids holding lyres made of skulls. Landscapes made of vivid blues and neon greens, with the silhouette of a lady breaking up from hundreds of leaves.

The tourists come and go, looking through the artisan stands. You can guess what you’d see at a Native art show with ease. Native art is by nature dogmatic. Programs that foster the arts in Native communities focus on the past. We’re stunted willingly. I think it’s because it’s easier to justify federal grants if the work is overtly Native. I have a lot of problems with the Native art world’s preoccupation with dogma.

My paintings are arrows. You can see it in the faces of onlookers. Like a jolt of lightning flying from the art itself. The few that resonate with it are struck. They come up and say, “I don’t really understand…” they motion to the rest of the venue, “but this, I get this.”

A security guard wanders around making small talk with the beaders and jewelers. Wanders a while longer before stopping a bit back from my booth. He stands around for a long, long time. After a bit he finally steps up and takes a closer look at everything. Starts talking about his life and his love of heavy music. Talks about traveling for concerts and this and that.

I wish I remembered his name. Nice guy. By the end of the weekend, he’d leave with a few of my nicer pieces.

A young man comes up and sorts through my portraits of melted, horned people. He finds one and says, “do you have one with just one horn?”

I look around, “yeah I think I might have something for you.”

I pull out a green and black piece of a sorrowful ghost with a single horn.

He sits there, all quiet for a long time.

“See. I wanted one horn because of this.”

He pulls his bangs back to reveal a massive scar.

It’s been a long time since someone seen my art in real life.

Sure, stuff goes out regularly, but those are always one-on-one. I see them in my little hovel, and they see them when they get the mail. I never get to see or hear about what this stuff means to anyone. And in a lot of ways, I don’t understand it anymore.

The last time I was awestruck by art was out in Hill City, Sd.

There was a contemporary art gallery, a very small one, called Warrior Works. They had full sized prints and originals from an Ojibwe artist named Joe Geshick. They were serene. They reminded me of religious paintings or something Carl Jung would make. Geshick had been dead for quite some time by the time I got to see his work.

I don’t know if it “floored me” but I was sure lost for a moment.

I take art for granted and it’s something that happened quietly. It’s like erosion of the spirit. It started at some point and just kept going and going and going. This obsession with not-being-broke took appreciation from me. I can’t take time out to chat. I have to make something new. I have to stress and cuss at myself and cuss at God again. My life, as an artist, exists in a thousand small moments spread throughout the week.

I don’t appreciate the way things are, I don’t appreciate the good things that came, or the severity of what it is I do.

I was living in a Best Western back in late 2022/early 2023. That was a hellish stretch, man. I finished my art residency at the foundation, which was good! The people were great, talking to tourists while working on new art, with a good budget, all of it was great. The house they put you in was great, all of it was great. But it was only for a month. And that month came and went fast.

October was here before I knew it and I hadn’t lined anything up yet.

I found myself at a campsite in Piedmont, SD. A now closed campsite. There are two, I stayed at both. One was nice and I would go back any time, the other, not so great.

It was hell.

Freezing.

That’s a story for another time.

I left that cabin in the winter because it was too cold. I left like the family in the original Amityville Horror. The place may as well have been haunted. I could see the floor through the cracks in the walls. I could see the stars and clouds through the cracks in the ceiling. We had a series of winter storms, and each brought colder and colder weather.

I’m at a Best Western and it costs 350 a week. I have to paint fast. I have to paint every day.

I can’t think about the people who receive the art. I can’t think about how history will think of me, if it ever does.

I get a message from a lady. She bought some art. Paintings on bison shoulders. She asks me if I knew any medicine men or if I was one. She said that since she got her paintings she’s been hearing and seeing things. Said she got a divorce and set out on her own life journey. It was then that I started to see what this art thing could be, and it worried me.

I’ve had vivid dreams. I’ve had dreams that gave me riddles to solve while dreaming. I’ve had death premonitions. I wallow in miserable feelings as some unhealthy act of self-flagellation. I’ve read plenty of books on Jungian psychology and comparative mythology. I’m familiar with esoteric ideas, with the occult, with alchemy. I could very well put on a mask and pretend to be something that I’m not.

But at the end of the day, I’m just a guy who paints.

I’ve had people send me pictures of their cut wrists, who were a long way into recovery. People who felt connected to what I make simply because I paint.

I’m always behind on my back orders because money is always tight, because life costs money to live.

I’m enduring a thousand small catastrophes throughout the week, and they distract me from the very heavy sword hanging over my neck. I can’t think of what art means to the people who like what I do. I can’t think about anything farther than “if I make one more sale, I’ll be closer to making things right.”

I think, vividly about leaving. That should be obvious from my art. I tried to hang myself and a closed box near me started banging from the inside. I stopped what I was doing. I think I should’ve been scared or worried, knowing that there was something out there, and it wasn’t esoteric or “just thoughts.” There was something sharing space with me, only a few yards away.

I stopped and said to it, “Okay. Well, if I’m not supposed to, then what am I supposed to do? Things don’t work out. Things aren’t working out. Nothing ever seems to work.”

It didn’t speak back. All it could do was bang on this box…

A nice lady reached out to me to check on her order and shared a bit about her son. Art means a lot to people who aren’t me, it means a lot more to them than I realize, and after he got his package, he sent me a nice email. Says he sees me as a survivor. Says he read some of my stories on some website. Says this art helps him.

Thoughts of leaving become selfish when I realize people like what I do.

I have problems with ego, man. You would too if you were there. It’s like you’re being torn in two directions. There’s a part of you that believes that we’re destined for great things, that the work we make matters, and then it hears stories from people, and it gets pushed farther and farther into these delusions – and then reality comes roaring back, all to slam me on my ass.

Sales dry up. My health goes down the shitter, and I realize that I’ve been at this for damn near a decade with nothing to show for it.

Influences

deloria424

I don’t think my work is in anyway unique. If you understand the ingredients that go into a “Datura” then you should be able to make one for yourself. Now, there are somethings that keep my work moving forward, and those “somethings” are self-determined. I’m talking about ego and editing. I found and find myself annoyed by stagnation in my own work. In the beginning, I was annoyed by making portraits without dynamic poses, I was annoyed by the recurring theme of “small guy faces off against giant”, I got annoyed by my limited color palettes. I’d get annoyed with paintings or drawings that I finished and would paint over them, draw over them, or edit and mash them into new pieces in photoshop.

If you were to follow the development of my art through the years, you can see me brute-forcing my way through new palettes. It started with black and white, black and red, blue and black, blue and white, pink and black, purple and pink, etc etc… It took a lot of trial and error to find color schemes and specific shades of paint that work best together.

I think my work stands out in color, mostly. And that was always the intention. My work is not anatomically great, my work is not great from a composition standpoint, my work is not great from many angles. What I can do to offset my lack of formal training is use heavily saturated and loud colors.

The skulls and faces are relatively simple, the anatomy of my animals aren’t particularly dynamic or real-world accurate, and the good thing about art, is that that can absolutely work just fine.

The idea I keep coming back to is subgenres in distorted-guitar-music. The truly great artists like Bekskenski create work that would sound like symphonic death metal, and my barebones style – I’d say it’s more to older hardcore. Something simple but hard hitting. And that’s always the gray line with dark art. If our stuff is too polished, then it begins to drift into video game monster or fantasy novel territory. If our stuff is too sloppy then we’re no different than the endless waves of no name Basquiat wannabes.

There are a number of contemporary artists that I draw heavy inspiration from, but I’m not too sure if they’d want to be associated with what I do or who I am. I have a good amount of self-hatred going on and that’s just always been the case, so I won’t mention or showcase any of them, but if you’ve followed me on Instagram, you should know which modern artists I resonate with.

Here’s how the basic stew is made, and you can mix them however you want.

BeksiÅ„ski – I go back to Zdzislaw constantly. I think every dark artist does. He was the first to do it at this level. His compositions are great; his color schemes were great. For the first two years of painting, I was primarily a finger painter. When I started to use brushes and more varied color schemes, I went to BeksiÅ„ski. I like to study how he lays out his compositions; I try to see his take on portraits and perspective.

Do I make studies of his work? No. But I think you can easily see his influence in what I do. And you should be able to see his work that I’ve gone back to time and time again. I’d highlight specifically his rotted horse rider piece. I’d say a lot of my landscape work is a bastardized expansion on what Bekskinski did. His landscapes were great, but there weren’t a ton of them, and they weren’t doing what I liked.

He has a few with a singular subject against a desolate landscape, but there’s not many. So my landscape work became that. Make what you want to see.

Gustave Dore – Dore is the one artist who managed to make a drawing that, to this day, still makes me feel uneasy. His Destruction of Leviathan carries so much weight, so much impact. I seen this thing twenty, thirty years ago, and it almost felt wrong to look at. The serpent falling into the ocean just hits. It has weight. You can feel the enormity of it all.

Dore was prolific. Our styles are very much different, he was an engraver and an illustrator, neither of which, I am or ever will be. His work, his anatomy, his compositions, they’re just wonderful. His darker stuff, probably because they’re in the public domain, turns up time and time again on album covers. If you want to create an ink-Datura, look at a lot of Dore. I can’t say enough about the guy’s work.

Francis Bacon – Who in our genre, ain’t influenced by Francis Bacon? His work speaks for itself. There are artists in our field that have made entire careers based solely off of Bacon, just like the Basquiat worshippers or the Zdzislaw worshippers. Some do it well, some don’t. I don’t know where I fall on that spectrum, we’ll say in the middle.

Almost all of my work, my humanoid work at least, features an open mouth with jagged teeth. I don’t know if that’s because I myself am a open mouthed, underbitten savage who wants some representation in his work, if it’s because showing a screaming mouth works as an amazing shortcut for conveying agony and loss.

I find a good bit of Bacon’s taste in color to be… muddy and not particularly great, but the good stuff is the Good Stuff. His sea green and black pope portraits, his violet and neutral blacks, grays, and browns, his reds and grays.

There was a time where I would add these geometric lines into my work, mostly because of how much Francis Bacon I was looking at, but also because some of those geometric lines just felt right. I think in the more… excited art, the more excited paintings, you can, or at least I can, see where things naturally segment themselves off into. It’s very easy to highlight these sections with a ruler and a gel pen.

Joel-Peter Witkin – Oddly controversial in art discussions. I guess I’m so desensitized to dark art that the mediums that he used don’t really hit as hard as they do for others. Yeah, he used real corpses for his work, but that’s just edgy shit. Edgy shit has been around forever. I get sanctity and respecting life, but what are we really doing here? The work exists, and the work is metal as fuck.

I think, if we’re going to pretend that there’s not some primal monkey-poking-at-a-rotting-snake level of fascination with his work, we can highlight his use of negative space. It’s wonderful. We don’t need to use the entire canvas to create effective art. Sometimes, a single figure surrounded by a few restrictive colors is all you need to make a good composition.

This entry is intended to be short. So, I’ll wrap up soon. But we’re talking influences, and one big influence on my work, that I wasn’t even aware of, was the work of Travis Smith. Back in my day, the day of print media – Wizard Magazine, Hit Parader, Revolver, etc. etc… – back in rural South Dakota, there wasn’t a lot of easily accessible darker media. We would sit in cars that barely worked, listening to radio static, hoping that the hard rock and metal station, based out of a city damn near three hours away, would break through for a few songs.

We bought albums based solely off of artwork, and we had to travel to even do that. The nearest spot to get music was in Pierre, SD. That’s a solid 70 minutes away.

I used to draw shit-I-found-cool in my magazines. It didn’t matter if I listened to the band or not. If it looked cool, I’d draw it. If it looked really cool, I’d draw it and redraw it.

And, what I found out, some fifteen years later, is that a lot of those album covers and shirt designs that I would redraw in my down time, they were all Travis Smith’s work.

I’m not super interested in graphic design, and I’m not the biggest fan of Travis Smith’s work these days – as in, I don’t follow him anywhere or seek out his stuff, but I can’t say that I wasn’t heavily influenced by him in the early years.

And his work is just straight up iconic. If you go through his client list, you’ll see great albums that you love or loved, and you might not know that it was this fella who did all of ’em.