I’m in pain, on drugs, and can’t paint.

If I COULD paint, I would be obligated to paint on three fairly time sensitive commissions that I have hanging, or failing that, Digger.

Naturally, this means that I have IDEAS, damnit, ideas like mushrooms after a hard rain, driving up through the blacktop of my brain, buckling the gray matter, shooting out little clouds of spores, ideas coating my skin like pollen from horny pine trees, sticking to everything and making me red-eyed and miserable.

But I really can’t paint. I tried, and some vital connection between brain and hand and eye has been jammed–the paint goes where I want it, but I can’t concentrate long enough to figure out where to put it. It unresolves into disparate colors. Sort of like saying a word over and over until it loses all meaning and you don’t know how it’s spelled–I can’t see how it should be, any stroke is as good as any other stroke, and I could find myself painting mice purple with lumps* and it takes a mental effort to go “No, no, that’s not how it works.” I find myself staring at the thing for minutes on end and not really seeing it.

I can paint the trees, but the forest is galloping away from me, bellowing, on elephantine cedar legs.

Tomorrow, ibuprofen only and back to work. And hopefully some of those ideas will keep. But if they don’t, I suppose it’s no great loss–the one thing I’m sure of is that the ideas always come from somewhere.

*But not a good purple. Or good lumps.