Late one night while everyone was sleeping, I sat awake editing video…

Happy Hallowe’en! xo

I walked into the kitchen to wash my hands and met a ghastly hilarious sink filled with smelt. It took me by surprise. I stepped back, laughed and walked to the bathroom to wash there instead.

My uncle had been ice fishing for smelt and Mom was thawing out the frozen fish for cleaning, then cooking.

Later that night (last night) I attended a party at my brother‘s place. I was holding onto optimism that sales would increase this coming week and decided to leave my laptop, business and ideas at home so that I could relax, have a few drinks and hang out with great people, some of whom, I’ve known since early childhood.

A few hours into the party I secured a small design contract and a babysitting job.

So, how does self confidence relate to Smelt? Those fish in the sink, eyes wide and dead, no longer alive, being readied for gutting then cooking caused a realization that that could all to often be me, just floating there lifeless. Not progressing, not fighting, watching what everyone else is doing and not taking charge of my own life. This is not to say that I sit doing nothing and more importantly that I don’t work hard or do the things I need to do to better myself through continually learning. It just means that I was stuck for a few days in limbo…

…caught in many ideas mounting themselves to the brain and not being able to keep up and get them out fast enough. The creative process is such at times that it can make you feel worthless when your income drops and all the media pushes on you is Economics and how bad they really are right now. In actual fact things are not that bad.

Seriously, things are not that bad.

And when you let go of the notion that the world is awful, you’ll see that everything is connected and that your self confidence is directly related to your income level and the finality of your creative process.

When new ideas form it can be months or even years before the final fruit grows into being. It took months of planning, researching and designing both the product and packaging before finally launching the line of miniature greeting cards. I felt crazy during that time until the listings went live. And because I was diligent in perfecting the templates, process and final product they have indeed gone onto being one of my top sellers.

Here I am again, on the verge of completing a new product and I feel nuts, easily distracted and almost to the point that I want to float silently on water and let someone else decide the outcome. That will not come to be. And therein lies the truth behind the struggle.

Up until last Friday she had been living on her own. I miss her to pieces right now. We often joked about life, about love and about religion. She had a beautiful aura surrounding her everyday.

Oh, she could make me smile.

This is she and I in the photographs. They were taken by my mother in July of 2007. The one below I snapped on boxing day, 2007. She is so beautiful.

I remember being nine years old and staying overnight at her home. The next day we awoke and decided to go shopping. Grammie asked if I wanted to get my ears pierced. I said “Yes!”. We went together to the beauty salon and I winced as the esthetician stuck my first ear then the other, piercing them with little topaz gems embedded in gold studs. I was ecstatic.

I held my grandmothers hand last night while stroking her face and hair.

I love you Grammie.
xo
Jessica

Edith Keary – Age 93
Born – December 25, 1914
Died – February 02, 2008

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

I watched them pack sunflowers
I watched them pack autumn leaves
I watched them pack orange berries
amidst stems and wreaths

I watched them count
I watched them punch it in
I watched them count
I watched them pack

it in…

to oversize black garbage bags,

Autumns last breeze.

It will not compost
As it is mostly plastic

Nor be loved
or be seen for a million years
lest humans dig it up
in search of yesteryear.

^{I see things everyday not unlike you.
I do things everyday not unlike you.
Some of these things deeply concern me.}
At 80% off they didn’t sell

and

I moved Christmas into it’s place.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

The phone just rang. I answered. It was an acquaintance of my Dad’s. He says to me “Little Brian died.” I said I’d let my Dad know. Then I asked who Little Brian was. “Is he the Brian with the beard who worked with my Dad sometimes at the building? The man replied “yes”. I said I know Brian. He and my Dad are great friends. My chest heaved.

He went on explaining how he had been found in his room, that he had been dead for four or five days before they found him.

Brian didn’t have many people in his life. He had his drinking buddies. He had my Dad. Last month Brian had lost so much weight. The doctors hadn’t given him his prescription for Ensure. He had been starving. My Dad fed him. Ah my Dad is going to be so sad. He drove Brian a couple of weeks ago to the doctor to get that damn prescription and then drove him to the druggist to fill the prescription written for six cases of Ensure. Brian had trouble eating and only had one lung. He was an alcoholic.

I know what it feels like to be hungry and not be able to eat normal foods from having Chron’s disease 10 years ago and from recovering from addiction 2 years ago. And the only damn thing that you can keep down is Ensure.

I miss Brian now. My Dad is going to be heartbroken… They got together once or twice a week to work or go yardsalin’.

Wherever you are Brian you will remembered for your laughter, smile and frank eccentric way of living. The Doyle’s love you.

xo

Been witting writing around the blogosphere much of late. It has been fun. I feel like I am back from something but am not sure what I am back from. Maybe a true vacation, combined with a little trust and spiced with emotion! I feel scandalous. I like that word scandalous. I don’t think of it as a negative word. It is more like a rollarcoaster of events that leads one to where she is now. That is what scandalous means. Yeah! And how can being happy be considered bad? I, Jessica Doyle am happy

Maybe this is all just in my head. You know what?

IT IS!

Scandalously Happy!
The reality of a thank you
Do you like ads that have movement in them?
EastVanEsica’s take on things

And one other because I am such a huge Pepsi consumer…lmao! Thanks Liz. I guess this could happen… be wary of drinking to much pepsi people!

The other night Eric and I discovered the Death by caffeine calculator – It would take me 278.39 cans of Pepsi-Cola before <a href=”this would happen! Is there a death by burger calculator?

September 2001. High on weekends.
Homeless so to speak.
inbetween cities
inbetween life
I ran away
I stumbled. hesitated. fractured into too many pieces.
unable to contain them all – but one got away.
I’m still looking for that piece
images, flashes, deformities and laughless.
It was a movie I thought.
I was watching a movie and I thought briefly that I was in a movie watching this movie of two towers blowing up. falling down.
I’m in a starngers house.
His sister calls from LA
We realize we are watching NY
This is not a movie.
I am not in a movie.
I am in a city that I once lived in but one week ago.
It is Saturday afternoon.
He speaks to his sister.
I watch the screen.
Silent.
Separated.
fuck.
I don’t want to remember right now.
It’s painful.
I have not forgotten.
I had one cousin living 10 blocks from the epicentre and another cousin, her sister visiting her from OH.
Everyone felt guilty that night for dancing.
We were all sad.
Another while on the phone that morning while speaking to his client his phone went dead.
Dead. NY.
The clients voice gone.
No disconnection,
cousins running around grey in the aftermath.
husband somwhere near.
A week before
I did not look back
I didn’t look back.
I never looked back.
and I have never forgotton.

On September second of 2001 I left my husband of whom I had been living with for 8 years. Three of those years we were married. Three days before my third wedding anniversary I packed up and moved back to my hometown of Saint John. I began a routine that lasted monthes of travelling back and forth between two cities on the weekends to be with my friends. I lived with my parents during the week in Saint John while looking for work in the design industry. I left it all behind in Fredericton. My clients. My life. My marriage. I travelled back only to party on weekends. September fifth 2006, would have marked eight years of marriage for me. In 1997 my appendix ruptured and had been rotting for months from chron’s disease.

I don’t know how to put to words what is going on in my head today or for the last couple of weeks. I have been silently living, waiting, hoping that I get through this September without death, without fear, without sickness… and without doing drugs to blind my emotions from it all.

If there is anything that I have learned from remembering memories is that life and death will continue to co-exist for as long as we exist and remember it. I am sitting here smoking cigarettes, crying a little because my dog “moochie” died back east at my parents place and I live on the opposite side of Canada.

Just quiet. These are my late August and early September memories

My mind is pretty full most of the time. It’s runs around and I have to run after it. The past couple of weeks though I am not running. I am just living. At any instant things could change but I am not going to worry about what could happen nor will I forget about what happened. Right now I just am…. smoking a cigarette, drinking pepsi reading and writing.

I have been pondering the term addiction in how it relates to my pschy and life. It has been a while since I wrote of such. It has been many days, weeks even monthes since my last cap of GHB. The 26 of August will mark that one year has passed since I chose to live. This fact causes me to ponder am I better or worse off for that matter, could I be masking still what is inside that needs to be discussed or even just left in the dark to receed into the unknown human landscape we call forgotten memories?

It does not feel like it was yesterday to me. It does not feel like it was me, who experienced the disease of addiction. That holds true for Chron’s disease; was it me laying in a hospital bed talking to death everyday? Do people catch, get or develop a disease to communicate with the other side unknowingly, for that matter could we conciously choose to get sick? Do we choose to get better? Is better being alive and not ill? I am alive. I am not addicted to GHB anymore. But is it better? Is it better knowing that when you are sick you got attention or that when one is sick you know how to get attention? Or is illness and disease a symtom of life not death. Could it be that when we are sick we communicate life. Everything we do in life is to avoid death.

Think about that: Everything we do in life is to avoid death.

What if we accepted death to live. We all know deep down inside we will die. You will die, maybe not tomorrow or in five years but you will. What happens though when one is sick, wraught with disease would you say they are choosing to be sick or maybe they had no choice in the matter. Could we, be choosing to meet death head on to see what the other side offers?

Would you choose to do something that could potentially kill you? Would you smoke a cigarette? Would you jaywalk? Would you shoot yourself? Would you eat spoiled food? Would you consume drugs to discover other parts of your brain? Would you work or live in a city? Would you eat highly processed food? Would you choose to do all or some of these things for money?

Did you smoke to get cancer? Did you ingest substances to become an addict? Did you eat to become obese? Of course you did whether or not you like to admit it or not. You are the ones who are like me. You know what could happen or you don’t and it hasn’t happened. All you know is that you smoke, you take drugs or eat. You could know that you are dependant upon smoking, the ingestion of drugs or certain foods. What you don’t know is what the effect these choices are doing on the inside. What are these things doing to you? What do your lungs look like? How is your brain looking? Does your heart beat ok?

I can see pictures of other people’s lungs ravaged by cancer simply by searching for them. I can also see what the possible effects of smoking did to these lungs over the years. I can see other people’s brains reacting to or having had been exposed to different substances. I see the obese unable to walk. Maybe the potential cause of a disease is irrelevant. It could be that to treat the disease you show the person what it looks like in them not someone else. Give the addict a brain scan. Give the obese person a heart moniter. X-ray the smokers lungs. Seeing, or meeting other people with the same disease can be wonderful and can help knowing you are not the only one with said disease. This will only go so far to changing people’s minds about quitting smoking, adjusting their eating or drug habits.

The only thing that truly causes me to not ever want to ingest GHB again is the memory of my last night using it before I finished tapering on august 26, 2005. That’s it. Can you beleive that? One memory of death and life talking together within my brain… didn’t save my life nor did it kill me… they just talked it out and in the morning life won.

And why is it illegal to take certain drugs when you can legally over-eat or even skydive or fish for crab in Alaska? You only know what something is doing to you when you talk to the other side and only then are you able to choose.

Writing out questions unedited is a way to perhaps discover answers within ourselves. The only thing I will do now is go back over the post and add in relevant links, an image and corect any obvious spelling or grammar errors I see.