Had a good conversation with a friend yesterday, and he's inspired me to spring into action. Illustration.

With RH and CS gone, I have three weeks to draw a collection of illustrations, which I plan to post on my art blog, and hopefully use as a start for my portfolio, leading to some future career in some kind of...art. Drawing story boards? Illustrating books or book covers? CD covers?:) Whatever.

It's going to start with my man, Walt Whitman.

There he is. The man. The gateway drug for gay people (see, Art of Fielding). I'm planning to illustrate passages from Leaves of Grass, using pen and ink. I spent my time at my favorite spot today picking passages:

"I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loaf at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass... "

"Or I guess the grass is itself a child...the produced babe of vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, and it means, sporting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folk and white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves."

And so on. To anyone who has never picked up a copy of Leaves of Grass, I urge you to do so.

At this moment this morning, I am feeling energized and ready, ready to start anew and do things right. To support my family, to use my time wisely, to hug my daughter more, to spend more time looking up at the sky, to contact old friends and keep up with them finally, to read more and try more and do more, to be more. To always work, always play, always produce.

Which reminds me of that moment in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Francie Nolan, sitting at her desk on the day that the US has entered World War I, trying to create a living memory of the moment she read the news. She begins to become internal and abstracted, and this is the passage:

“Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”

The entire passage is very reminiscent of Walt, who is even referenced in that section, I believe.

When I die, I wish to have some passage of Leaves of Grass read at my funeral (or wake, or party, or whatever). And then I used to tell Ms. RH that I wanted to be cremated and the ashes scattered in Boston Harbor, where we used to live directly after college. I'm not sure this is what I want anymore--it's a little impractical because I'm living on the west coast now, and I don't even have relatives on the east coast, so anyone who wanted to come see the scattering would have to pay for plane tickets and hotels to be there and I don't want to ask that of anyone.

Luckily, there is time to think this over. And in the end, I'm not sure it matters one way or the other. Really, I'll be dead. Dead and occupied with something else by then. As Walt says (grossly paraphrased), I'll be grass under bootsoles. Drifting on the wind.

All goes onward and outward...and nothing collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.