Burning daylight
I can only work on the watercolor painting commission during the day. I don't have proper or good enough lights to see what I'm doing otherwise. (I could go into a long tangent about technicalities of watercolor painting here, but I'll spare you guys all that stuff.) I don't want a proper 'day lamp' anyway, one of those lights you can get that have a blue bulb in them and approximate the color of daylight. I don't actually like a whole lot of light, I'm somewhere between heliphobe and goth, I feel most comfortable in the soft grey light of late sunset, or maybe really dark stormy skies. Vancouver tends to cloud over, but light up bright white with diffused sunlight. Not really my thing. I don't want any more lights, so I'll just paint during the day.
The other thing is that I have to cut off the caffeine at six pm if I want- that is- to sleep. I have a bit of a problem in that the same force that through the green fuse drives my messed up blood sugar....
...also fucks with my serotonin levels, so I tend to need a caffeine prop to really get into that high-spin of creative thinking. It's not that I can't access that part of my brain without a snoot full of coffee. It's just that I can't sustain the energy and focus otherwise. I run out of steam. There's a long-view dietary cure that will repair- over a course of months, I guess- the blood sugar flywheels in my body. That will then allow the serotonin and betaendorphin systems to heal, too. But that's months away. So I need my coffee. So in a lot of ways, even though I'm a bit vampirish, I'm confined to daylight.
(Though, I should note here that the limiting factor is the endorphin. That's what I run out of. I'm on a mild antidepressant to shoot serotonin back into my veins. But there is no endorphin drug. I can zap it with caffeine- get a cheap endorphin spark that way. But you can also get an endorphin rush out of... well, a big-ass argument, a flight off to something illicit in the middle of the night, a loud party with friends, a run-in with some asshole shouting crap at you on the street and the accompanying adrenaline spike... so on. I used to do pretty well at my evening classes, endorphin-less or not, because I'd get an extrovert's buzz off of the energy of all the other people in the room. )
Anyway. I'm out of it today. Not enough exercise to start the ball rolling, I guess. I have a stack of books in my bedroom that I read- characteristically- by opening them at pages at random. I don't think I've read a book straight through in ages, I prefer to jump around and reconstruct the narrative in my own head. Anyway, one page I jumped on today described a massive midwestern summer thunderstorm. All the details I remember from Calgary- the sky turning purple, the strange green light, the mix of warmth and cold in the violent winds. Running around a big old house to close all the windows, and the rain smacking the glass a second after you have.
I kind of miss it, I guess, living in Vancouver. Vancouver is all soft white rain. I see lightning here maybe one or twice a year.
So to tie up the entry before I get all tangential in other direction, this all reminds me of something I read about when constructing the basic plot superstructure of CoH. It's basically the transformation plot, the 'beauty and beast' plot. In this plot structure, the beast is cursed symbolically- he's brutish and animalistic- a beast. The angels in CoH are cursed the same way- as angels- they're dollish and fetishized, they're completely owned body and soul by someone else, they live only to serve that person. But also, the beast's curse is carried out in complicated daily rituals and limitations he must carry out.
I guess I feel the same way. I have to eat certain things at certain times. The absolute necessity of getting my butt to the gym isn't hard to compare to the Beast's absolute necessity of tending his magic rose, day after day. Or the vampire's need to avoid daylight and mirrors, and mine to avoid sugar.
The other point I had is that I miss the violent elements. It would be cool if today, instead of the steady, heavy-but-soft rain that's falling was a big thunderstorm. There would be more energy in the air. I'd get a bit of an endorphin high off of that, I guess. In Still Waters, I was inspired to shut the two lead characters up in a snowstorm, simply because Vancouver was blanketed in snow and blizzards and high winds (that destroyed most of Stanley Park btw) at the time. I miss it.
But I should finish the story quickly and move on to the next part. It will be spring soon.
Anyway, my whole problem here is that I was too exhausted to haul butt to the gym this morning. Boo. Now I'm too tired to even bother.