October 2025

Journal 10.23.25

The osprey nests sit empty along the quiet roads. The combines are churning up clouds of soy dust. The kudzu is shrinking back into Mama: unto dust shall thou return. Have you journeyed deep into the kudzu? I have. It’s where I brought my fox-slaughtered hens to be swallowed up into her. She didn’t take me—we have our pact mortal and immortal I make my offering though she does not require it. But I prefer not to be ignorant of the rapture. There are no places separating the living and the dead. We are one. Time alone divides us. And it cannot be seen nor touched nor heard nor journeyed to or from… The forests are sweet with rotting pawpaws. And I trudge through them toward the clearing of sand and beach grass and a pang in my foot stops me: sandburs one two three four stuck to blue jeans and woolen socks. I excise them and there a foot away beneath the canopy of juniper a brittlegill—Russula sanguinaria—peaks above sandy dune. And I duck beneath short branches and reach for it the brown cap and rosey stem then another and another and I’ve got the scent like my hound dog ROOO! A-ROOO! my tail is high my nose is low and I’m getting pricked by horny branches they’re in my hair and I’m squeezing through bamboo and my canvas sack is full… in a place I’ve been a hundred times over to fish to swim to build sandcastles with my babies to scavenge for buried treasure ahoy! my little ones shout AHOY! their tiny screams gobbled up by wind and wave but I still hear them now AHOY MAT-IE! And I’d like to wish for their company though I know windswept and reddened and cold with curly wisps of blonde and brown stuck to their little faces that today they’d prefer to draw the beach from home instead playing at it as I sit here on a stump of driftwood stuck into the sand but yes the wind is picking up now and the notebook pages were never meant to withstand it and I’ll carry on again soon someplace else…

And my thoughts are like the bay splitting the land in two one side hurry and worry money money money and here on the shore quiet serene solitude piece nature MAMA MAMA MAMA and the briny water is turbulent today twas crashing and crashing and crashing on the little beach. And I have no November reservations and this week there are more empty seats than full and I could imagine the I-told-you-so’s rubbish rubbish I’ve no time for mistaken notions… Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing | Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms…* And I think that this place is not a restaurant it never was a restaurant it will never be a restaurant it is not a business no it may be a laboratory of ideas yes yes but more it is a place to tell my stories and I have many ways of storytelling sometimes in words and sometimes in food and sometimes and oftentimes the story is told just by being here in the way that I am the building built into the side of the hill looking out over that place where the big bay meets the river and in many ways this is the perfect place for a place that has many ideas that isn’t one thing or the other because the land and water that surrounds me isn’t one thing or the other. I can see the land of hurry worry money money money across the water in the distance and I can sit here in the place where bay and river collide quietly quietly and watch as my ideas mirror this on paper on plate…

And though metaphor is strong and often as clear as I desire it to be sometimes truth is better stated plain: I am an artist hear me roar. I have two businesses and they present themselves as such. But I can no longer allow this split in my identity and must forge them together. Like the river and bay and the Rockfish that passes through one to the other without ever having known. And henceforth I will not utter this word business. I prefer atelier: a workshop or studio, especially used by an artist or designer.

On the drive across the bay to the city I’m listening to Anselm Kiefer talking about creating a painting a sculpture a pile of hay he’s kept in a room in the back of an old brick warehouse for thirty years and it makes almost no sense what he’s saying and I love it I eat it up delicious delicious delicious because it makes sense to him and he tells a story of when he was a child he made tunnels in his mother’s garden and he put things there and he acknowledged the urge of children to do something like that without much of a reason and that’s carried over into his work… and how wonderful is that? To do something inexplicable to satisfy an urge with unknown origin within… And it goes like this during the ride to Baltimore and I’ve carried this aura with me as I enter the city and I’ve carried it with me as I pass the casino as I got stuck behind someone who double-parked on Pratt Street during rush hour to pick up his Dunkin Donuts coffee people honking swearing shouting flipping the bird the driver doesn’t care and I don’t care because I’m carrying something stronger within me some magic no I don’t care and I arrive and it’s early and I’m alone in the building in the room on the third floor with the big old windows and this thing within me hasn’t faded there are visions. I’m going to do something inside this place that I’ve never done before. I don’t know what that will be. It will be many things. Yes a workshop yes an atelier but filled with… what? I’m unsure. And what will I make or what will we make, the staff and I… and it will be sold yes the thing will be sold but it cannot be sold directly no somehow the thing I make will manifest in food and drink and… time moves on and the staff trickle in and I’ve made a new cocktail menu and I’m training the bartenders and how can I explain this to them? That they are working in a restaurant they are working in a cocktail bar that I’m going to kill slaughter sacrifice though we will still, afterward, sell food and drink but it will be different how do I tell them explain to them that somehow it will all become ART that if they’re here for money alone and not to learn to grow to touch their own souls… that the people who will work in this place will be something beyond bartenders and servers and hosts yes I’m turning those titles in. I’m trading those titles for something else apprentices, curatorial assistants, art handlers, gallery attendants… And the customers what do I tell them? I don’t say much of anything to anyone because words weren’t made for things like this: I must act and see what becomes of it and act again and act again and act again the creation will unfold bit by bit and the creation will do the talking and all of the staff has arrived now and completed the training of the new autumn cocktail menu the training that quickly devolved from something high within me to low and the chaos of flipping the bar over for the new drinks has overcome all and I’ve lost myself in the current it is all meaningless now what do cocktails have to do with the great artists like Kiefer like WeiWei what am I doing how is any of this something more than too expensive hipster pretention through a paper straw… Yes the ART is gone I can’t find it I don’t remember why anything within me relates to this shaking and stirring of drinks shaking and stirring shaking and stirring while Anselm Kiefer is showing at MOMA at the Guggenheim at… Well the drinks and the food aren’t art I’ve never claimed that I don’t believe that they are. This place is art. The drink is not a painting this place is a painting the activity that unfolds within this place is a painting the ingredients are the painting not the paint do you understand? Because we don’t use ingredients anymore we don’t touch ingredients with our hands we don’t pick fresh sage and dry it for use in winter. The sculpture is built when you enter this place and see and touch and begin to feel. The story is told in food in drinks in glassware and china in candlelight and dark rooms in prose that becomes poetry… there is an urge to do something here so I must do it. I don’t know that squash and sausages and citrus fruit and fig vinegar are anymore or any less than brush strokes. And you see I spend all this time working over what I think others think… and I remember what Picasso said: It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. And there is no choice but to satisfy this urge within me regardless of the whispers real or imagined regardless of explicable reasons. I have my reasons and I can do whatever I want.