ADDICT, aka; THE GHOST in the PAINTING
Acrylic and gouache on canvas – 8” X 10” – October 3, 2005

Sometimes my paintings are like ghosts which are imprisoned within the blank canvas. They summon me to release them, yet I have no idea who or what they are, or what they look like.

If any of my paintings are like what I just described, it is this one.

This painting is a fearsome painting, for it is one page of a diary of a dead man. When I think of what this painting is saying to me, I should be fearful. And yet, I am not. Foolishly, my entire life I have not been afraid of these devils. I cloud my mind, and fears, with drugs, so I need not fully understand what these ghosts in the paintings are telling me. I am a coward. I am a fool. I am an addict. I’m telling you these things because I feel a great compulsion to tell about myself, and to tell the truth. This is a truth that had I known it when I was younger, I might have been a better man, and had a more fulfilling life. Maybe I can help one person to know this. If not me, perhaps the spirit in the picture can convince you.

Here is how this specter came to be borne; My beloved wife was diagnosed with cancer several moths ago. (On top of all the things you will think I am for my revelations here and other places, I’m sure many of you will think me even more despicable when I tell you I took her pain drugs!) Her doctor prescribed her morphine sulfate for her pain. For me to have that bottle of morphine in the house was like a 10 ton elephant moved in downstairs, it was ALWAYS on my mind. My wife, God love her, is an “enabler”, some one who enables a drug addict or drunk. She does it from a good heart and deep kindness, but no matter, the result is the same. (As I sit here and write this my body is covered in sweat. I’m “nodding out”. I keep falling in and out of dreams until my hands hit the keyboard or my head falls too far forward and the pain in my neck awakens me! I was just on a riverboat in the 19th century, speaking with an elderly back woman. I was a little child, No coffee, redbull or even “Whoopass” can pull me out of this haze. …

There I went again, I was a young woman arguing about makeup in some drugstore. I was wide awake earlier. These dream attacks come more and more. I find myself sleep walking also. I wake up, in other rooms of the house, at 4am. How and why am I there? That sleep walking is dangerous. Once I fell and work up on my ass. Strangely, I did not injure myself.

Back to the Ghost in the painting; I started taking my wife's narcotics. She said she didn’t mind. She could get more any time, (not true) Eventually she said that she didn’t need them and that I could have them. That was like getting my license to kill! In no time I was addicted to these pills. I was taking 5 or 6 60mg tablets a day. I chewed them up so they would hit me right away. The bitter taste became like ambrosia to me. (I keep drifting off into dreams … I may have to go lay down … I’m having a very hard time writing this … but NO, I MUST finish this!)

I took these pills for 2 months along with the other things I take, (I just had a dream that I found a suitcase that appeared to have a silver chest inside it, just as I went to open it, I woke, with my nose almost touching the keyboard) Finally my wife recognizes that the addiction had gone too far. She told her doctor that she did not want morphine anymore.

Now I had to quit! In order to make my withdrawal as painless as possible, I started charting out the daily consumption of what drugs I was taking, steadily decreasing sssssssssssssssssss, (those “s’s” happened as I feel asleep again with my finger on the “s” key, In the dream a black man was trying to sell me airline tickets. …

I was steadily decreasing the morphine, and recording all my drug intake on the chart, (other drugs: Zoloft, Xanex, vicodin , bupemorphine, valium, alcohol and percocet, (I was just going to type snake venom, but realized I’d dozed off again and dreamed that!)

The chart was on a canvas. A canvas in a size I seldom use. 8” x 10”. It was near me the first day, so I started recording my drug intakes on it; times, dates, amounts. All this information was very helpful and did lead to the day when I stopped the morphine. (ONLY the morphine)

I took the little canvas and laid it down next to my painting easel. When I had some (sxtra o-aaP … shit!, … asleep again!), extra paint on my easel, I’d toss it upon the little canvas, trying to keep some of the records still showing through the paint.

(I must learn the street slang language of New York because I’mm goigy t tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt …. Oh shit, there I went off again! )

Eventually, I picked up the canvas drug intake record covered with all that excess paint. Suddenly and unmistakably I saw a figure on the canvas. I took a small brush and some white gouache and began to paint the figure I was seeing. It was the ghost of the idea immerging from the canvas! I became excited because I wanted so badly to see it, and if the ghost picture had something to tell me, I wanted to know this too! (How can a person be awake and asleep at the same time? It would seem impossible, yet right now I’m doing it. I just tried to take a bite out of the big juicy steak I had on a plate next to me … but of course, there is no steak!) My dreams and realities seem to me merging together. That’s a little scary!

What you see here is the Ghost in the painting. I entitled it “ADDICT”, but now I will give it that second name; “THE GHOST in the PAINTING”

This painting, this is what it is like to be addicted. To be a slave to a drug. You see first that the addict is gagged so he can not speak. His power of expression is gone. The drugs took that away from him. He no longer has the confidence to speak out. He no longer believes in his convictions. His self confidence is eroded. This is both psychological and physiological. The drugs decrease your mental capacities. You really DO become more stupid!

Also, he is in a straight-jacket, a restraint. He can not move. He has no time to DO anything except seek and consume the drugs that make him dream and dream until he does not know what is real, the dreams or the awakenings? If he is dreaming more than awake, then for him, the dream is more real. It constrains him. He grows physically weak. He is tied down to his small world, afraid to move. Afraid to talk. He is becoming a “shut-in” in his own mind!

He has built a shell-like mask around him. The shell is like a cast you would have for a broken bone. An egg. An exoskeleton. It covers him. His eyes peer through broken holes in the shell, this is the only sight he has left. But what does he see? And can he understand what he sees? Does anything he sees even concern him? (only if it is a drug!) Does he see a “real” world?

And the wires that protrude from the broken holes in the mask, those are his lies. The tangled web of lies and deceptions that the addict must maintain with what’s left of his earthly contacts. His family, friends, lovers, employers … no one must know he is a addict! So he’s constantly telling lies about why he’s not there, or why he’s not feeling well, or this or that lie until they all come together and become a complex web of lies which he must maintain at all costs. Each thread finds an intersection with another and geometrically increases the amount of lies he must tell, and the people involved with his lies.

And in the background you see my intake charts – You can’t read or understand them but you know what they are. Did they help? Yes. Most of all they brought this painting to life.

The writings were the sperm, the canvas the egg … The painting is the child.

Now I am awake and I can go to my easel and work. I woke up! It was so hard to write this! The dream illness came without warning. Perhaps it came so I could write as I experienced it. I must have fell into dreams 20 times or more!

It’s the drugs kids – THE DRUGS! Just say fucking NO before you can’t.

This information could all come back to haunt me, but at least it is the truth. You see, the truth can be dangerous. But truth is the only thing worth trying to capture and express. Telling the truth will always be at your peril, and often significant expense.