Thunder Mountain Suicide

traveling, writing

Frank Van Zant doesn’t sound like the name of a famous Native American

In reality, he was probably just a hippie living on the western US, taking road trips across the country like many Americans of his generation did. He was a WW2 veteran from Oklahoma, and his gift to the world amounts to an array of wild sculptures many drive past through Nevada’s vast nothingness unknowingly. Located between Winnemucca and Lovelock off I-80, about 120 miles east of Reno and very close to the exit for a tiny town named Imlay with a population of less than 200 lies Thunder Mountain.

Somehow, through a late night click-fest on wikipedia, I learned of Thunder Mountain. The idea of it reminded me of a film I’ve loved for years called the Holy Mountain, so I wanted to check it out, being only a rough 5 hours northeast of the junk Mecca.

It was intended to be a shelter for the impending apocalypse after Frank Van Zant, aka Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder had an epiphany in the late 1960s. Made from concrete, old cars, typewriters, bottles, recycled metals and other miscellaneous junk, the monument was originally a series of homes which were created together on five acres off of Interstate 80 in Nevada.

What it looked like in its prime, I can only imagine as years of vandalism, arson, and abuse have tried to shred the beauty of this place away from it until in 1992 it was declared a historic site in Nevada and provided protection.

In 1989, Frank Van Zant shot himself in the head. His legacy lives in the garden and fascinating “junk castle” dedicated to the life and abuse of Native Americans well into 2018.

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I suppose..

writing

When you get so old you start realizing you are putting efforts into the wrong place. I read through past posts, the digital footprints I’ve littered across the internet because I’m too conscious to ever litter in the real world. This kind of litter, I guess it’s not that bad compared to a plastic grocery bag a turtle might get caught up in. Or an old Dr. Pepper can of soda that becomes the eventual home to a school of fish larvae in the gulf.

Various moods, visuals, different pains resulted from different situations, romantic partners, goals that swallow me up and spit me back out like I’m constantly treading the deep waves of the east Atlantic ocean.

Hello, I am Camille and I feel sad. Happy. Ecstatic. Terrified. Angry.

I’m feeling all kinds of ways lately. I thought 2014 was as bad as things could get but I didn’t know the capacity for pain life carries with it. I didn’t expect to have to deal with drug addiction in my family, again, with a sibling. I never anticipated a nephew that has to grow up in an environment as colorful and riddled in the stress of being the child of an addict even worse than was the situation for me and my siblings. I never imagined that kind of pain a little boy that survived despite the world working against him from birth would bring me. It drove me away from my home state of which I love. Gosh, it’s cold out here but at least I don’t know anyone and the pain ain’t so close to my heart. I can’t drive up the street and look at it. I don’t need to see those tattoos, those track marks, those rotting teeth looking back at me, asking to borrow money, asking for my forgiveness, saying cruel things.

I didn’t know how largely they could become stressors even from 3,000 miles away, building up at me and eating away at me until I can’t take it anymore and just cry. into my pillows, a strong shoulder, whatever is available. Grow up, be a woman, you’re almost 30 years old. I hate myself for it but it all seems so unfair.

I don’t know who to talk to, who could I talk to? They just say “I’m sorry” and I am sorry too because it’s a problem that can’t be fixed and if ever i had an enemy that situation would be it. I want to shake the world and find peace in the hearts of the people I love but my hand gets bitten, my heart turns cold and it just hurts and hurts and hurts.

Trying to let go is hard. All of the effort put into others was misdirected. Sure, I can proudly say I broke out of my caste system and made something of myself but I feel oh.. i don’t know. Incomplete. Like I left my soul somewhere on the floor and left the room and left the house and left the state and now I don’t have one anymore, it’s become a puddle somewhere that gets stepped on and ignored and is more or less a mess that no one will ever clean up.

Maybe it’s too late to get that soul back but I found a way to build a new one. Stop paying mind to everything that hurts and build a love inside myself. Cells multiplying every day, cells made out of love and maybe some biological material and DNA too but mostly love.

It’s rebuilding my soul, and sure it’s tiring and sometimes I think it’s probably the worst feeling but it’s rebuilding something I lost a long time ago and so the exhaustion, it’s probably worth it to me. It will be my greatest work of art. The building of a brand new soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“read things that make me cry because they are so beautiful”

Posts tagged as "artists" from the blog

I still don’t know why I cry so much. I sit around and read all day. I read things that make me cry because they are so beautiful. I will read things that make me so angry that I give myself a headache. None of these things are contributing to my future, just my right now.

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Like this photograph by Barbara Hammer pulled from an article on Hyperallergic. 

But that’s the power of the internet, isn’t it? So much content to absorb, it’s so easy to get sucked into things that are constantly manipulating the way that you feel. I loved all of Barbara Hammer’s photography and wonder what it would have been like the year I was born- 1989. As a woman. The way women have existed for the last few decades, and the centuries before that. I am grateful to exist right now where I have an open platform to address any concerns I have about the ways I have been unfairly treated. This platform, and your ability to get your words and feelings into at least a few eyes through clever use and placement of keywords and organization of your content.

Here’s to me, publishing a draft first typed 2 months ago. Say hi to your mom for me.

The whirring stops at half past three

Posts tagged as "artists" from the blog, technology

The whirring of course is my laptop, because I’m turning it off. I’m closing it all down and stopping work at 62% of full-time. I tried to compile all of the reasons why I wanted to do this but it was all over the place so I decided on another word-puke because I’m feeling moody.

I don’t respect Facebook. I believe that all of these targeting options we have available to get your messaging out only in front of certain audiences is a technology the world is not responsible enough to have, and no matter what Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions are with that platform that’s still a point we cannot ignore. 🙁

It could be used for good, the potential is so clearly THERE but he’s missing the point. Transparency is what we need. I’ve asked a few of my friends this question:

Would you trust ads more if you know why and how they targeted you?

And most of them said, yes they would. This did not surprise me at all. I only asked like 7 people so the sample size renders that experiment unusable but I it would still stand if scaled. Advertising is mysterious. People need to know how it is decided what content is in that stream that they are always stuck in.

Mobile phone addiction this year and in the foreseeable future is going to become more and more of a problem. Already, Facebook reports 56% of store purchases are influenced by digital interactions and 66% of those interactions are happening on mobile. We have our heads stuck in the screen and the trend is only growing, even for our children (alarmingly, pls don’t buy your kids phones ty).

I have all of this extra time now, and what am I going to do with it? Patiently wait for the weather to get better. Frustrating, pace around the kitchen and into each room. Wait for a new tenant to take over my apartment. Wait to move all my belongings out of Eugene, then somewhere else, and to figure out whats next because I accept that I love not knowing. Going to enjoy some soft lung bullshit on youtube and appreciate the ideas of all the digital and analog people I’ve met so far.

Drank 2 gallons of orange juice this week, it’s helping with the depression. I recommend you try it, too.

What happens when you die on the internet?

technology, writing

We’ve all been there by now. It’s 2018 and this is still a process untouched by technology and its powerful ways solving for all problems, even the ones we didn’t know we had. You have a friend or family member die, the person gone forever from your life.

Facebook shows you “On this day” posts from this person in the past.

You can go to their social media accounts and see a human and his respective data frozen in time. Whatever situation or mood they were in when that last post was made is how they will be remembered forever in the digital world.

A specific tragedy that we all saw coming

I’m thinking about an old drinking buddy of mine from back in Florida. I remember one night scrolling through Facebook seeing a lot of wild posts from him, blacked out drunk and posting nonsense on Facebook. The next morning was a Saturday morning, and he posted that he was lucky he didn’t wake up in jail.

That Saturday night, there weren’t as many drunken posts. Just a tag at a bar from earlier in the evening. The next day on Facebook, I’m seeing R.I.P. posts on his wall and my heart is sinking. His body was found face down in a pool outside of the gated community he lived in. He must have been too fucked up too walk properly, and had fallen into the pool and passed out. That beaming smile and fuck-it-lets-party attitude will never be sitting at the bar downtown. He’ll never be at another house party, or Florida Gamers event. Rest in peace, my dude.

Every few days I would visit his profile, and reread his posts about waking up in jail. It would ring out to me “someone should have been a better friend” or something like that. I come up with all kinds of narratives about what happened and how shitty it was no one ever put their hand on his shoulder and told him life could offer so much more.  I would sit there and think about how Facebook was just memorializing him at that point in his life, and not really anything about who he was as a person.

Every time someone died, I would do the same thing. Adoringly visit their profiles, as if they were tombs in a graveyard and rereading their posts as if they were unintended epitaphs to their life.

Is there a right way to handle death on social media?

This is something society never had to think about before, but it can’t keep sitting untouched a topic. Is it invasive, to have the digital content and histories of the dead reserved? Is it public domain? Is nothing sacred? Even I don’t know how I feel about it, but the thought is constantly itching at my mind. I wonder, what is the last piece of content I will leave behind? It’s like a form of accountability. Before you post this or that, would it truly be a good impression to leave on the digital universe after you go away? Are you leaving an impact? Is it pretentious of me to be thinking so deeply about it, even?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I cannot wait to see the world touch on them as it grows harder and harder to ignore the fact that people die every single day and the content they produced in the past piles up.

The implications of the digital afterlife are strong when you really consider ownership and privacy of memorialized digital content.

Yes, I drove from Central Florida to Central Oregon by myself.

photography, photos, traveling, writing

I got asked the question a lot while I was passing through long stretches of interstate gas stations mostly located in the middle of nowhere. Watching the landscape and hearing the accents evolve hand in hand as I reached each clerk and asked to filler’ up. leaving  Florida was bittersweet for me. I didn’t want to do it, but I knew deep down I had to. My Mini Cooper was filled to the very top, with just enough space to form a window of space that I can use for driving. Off we go. May 10th. Got to New Orleans, LA late that night and got a hotel room in the heart of the city, close to the famous French Quarter.

The adventure brought me into the window of a stranger’s van to hit a joint, on the stoop of some strangers home in the lower east side, completely lost, in circles, on a public bus, frantically searching for my car in a huge city of which I have never lived on a dying phone and buying beer for locals to help keep me safe as an act of self preservation. It worked and after 9 hours on my feet I finally found my Mini tucked away in a small parking area in the middle of the French Quarter and made my way Northwest towards and through Texas.

Texas took a very long time to drive though, it was vast and empty and beautiful. I drove 100 MPH through a small stretch of highway 100 miles away from the New Mexico border. My heart racing as I clutched onto my life at the steering wheel, pleased at how happy my car was purring along the highway. It was made for this. I only speed up to 99-102 a few times during the trip, and for only a few seconds at most. The roads were so empty for so long, and when you have over 3,000 miles left to go you need to do something to keep yourself excited.

That few days traveling from Florida to Colorado, I had to grow into myself and stand up tall and be defensive and strong and alone. There’s something about the solitude that makes you feel so vulnerable in the world. Some days its clearer than others that my discomfort is because I am a woman more because I am a human.

I was only in New Mexico for about 30 minutes while I traversed from Texas to Colorado where my Dad and his wife live.  It somehow managed to be the only state that I got a speeding ticket in. I got to Colorado City, CO the next day at 3am and slept in my car in front of an empty lot in a trailer park, unsure which was actually his due to the incredible low lighting. I wouldn’t suggest to anyone sleeping in a mini cooper, it’s simple impossible to make comfortable.

I woke up, of course as soon as the sun came up and met the handsome mountain across the street. He had snow on top and was one of the many mountains surrounded this small town and the surrounding towns of Pueblo county. At an elevation of  ‎5,853 ft , I was way up high for a gal from Florida for the past few years of my life.

I stayed with my dad, who is a blues guitarist and musician and a retired pot dealer. I had a great time with him and we went to several gigs where I could see him play and have a few drinks and dance! He is playing with an amazing group called Sonrisa.

Traveling through the rest of Colorado, Wyoming and then spending the night in Twin Falls, Idaho was an adventure filled with the most amazing landscapes I’ve ever had to pay minimal attention to because I was also driving in the snowy mountains. The rest of this journey, and a lot of my summer 2017 are kind of hard to think about, and especially to write about but I feel like with 2018 rapidly approaching, it’s about time I at least dance around it.

The truest description of this beautiful, crazy summer was just an explosion of very intense emotions that left me a little scared. Living in Eugene in nice and I have a nice bobcat brain on a shelf in my living room with a small tv and a couch and sure it’s a little cold outside and it will be for a while but I have someone to snuggle now and I have my cat and that’s the end result, then I’m ok with it.

I don’t know what I was really looking for when I left Florida.

But this seems alright. In 2018, I am opting to have less income and more time, for as long as is necessary to take something off the ground. What exactly? ///…

 

Colorado
Texas

 

 

Where am I going, and where have I been?

Posts tagged as "artists" from the blog

London, United Kingdom for one week in January 2017. The Startup I have been working with for 2  years and 9 months got acquired and to celebrate, we took off to London. I met my colleagues for the first time and celebrated a truly incredible accomplishment that served as a testament to everyones hard work.

Hendersonville, North Carolina To visit my sweet mom and her partner Doug in a cottage placed in the woods. Tranquility and poor internet quality aplenty 🙂

San Diego, California To a first professional conference I go, and see some incredibly smart people share awesome ideas about marketing and sales that are defining the future of ad technology. #TrafficAndConversionsSummit2017

Driving Across the United States from Florida to Oregon One of the most beautiful and peaceful experiences of my life. Driving through the county. Stopping for a week to visit my father in Colorado, continuing the destination and building memories for better or for worse that will always be carried with me.

roadtrip Part One

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Driving to Seattle, WA to see D.J. Taylor In 2012, my older brother Dan moved all the way across the country to live in Seattle Washington and I’ve only seen him a handful of times since then. As soon as it was convenient, I drove my ass all the way up to Seattle to chill with him and immerse myself in his impressively nerdy and reclusive film fan writer lifestyle and spending time with his roommates and city.

 

And now I am back home in Eugene. New home, new coast, new adventure. Fresh flowers, new humans, big happiness all around.

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Maybe we peaked early and now there’s nothing left

Posts tagged as "artists" from the blog

But an automatic life. Go to bed. Stare blankly,  turn right, long for cuddles from a cold shoulder. Stare blankly. Turn right.

Fall asleep.

Wake up and drag yourself to a computer. Type away, consider problems and their solutions. For hours. Take a break. Listen to loud music. Eat a light lunch. Go back to work. Stand up for ten minutes every two hours so your body stays healthy. Sit up straight.

Thinking about all of those years and that wonderful trait I love about myself where I do whatever I want and I have not any fear. I think it went away. It’s a muscle I stopped flexing. And I think that is okay too, because those whims don’t need tending to. There is a line, a path, trajectory that I can see now and it’s further away but I’m having fun deciding to carve at it, taking all of my time to invest in something truly sweet.

 

 

 

 

It’s pen or perish, never forget that

Art posts from the blog archives, Posts tagged as "artists" from the blog

That’s what he said to me, the man with thin hair and the long black coat. I joked in my head that he must be going to the matrix that day. He turned back to me and said “It’s pen or perish.” and I asked what, completely taken aback by his comment. He repeated to me, “It’s pen or perish. Never forget that.” and just kept walking in the opposite direction.

I cannot stop thinking about it, and granted its only been two hours I decided I don’t want to forget about it (maybe it’s important?) so I’ll write it down. After I walked in my direction another half a block, I was stopped by an older traveling woman with a backpack asking if I’d be willing to purchase some legal marijuana at a shop in downtown Eugene, OR. I obliged and kept thinking in my head about what the matrix man said to me.

It’s pen or perish. Is he telling me I need to keep drawing? How did he know what he said would be relevant to me?

 

That’s just today. This month is trying me. I’m 28. Officially. I’m sitting in my room listening to The Apples. So much for joining the famous 27 club. Here I am. I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on modern day women to get married off and procreate by now but I don’t really feel it, I just feel the ghost of a press into my mind’s flesh that should but isn’t there. People around me are flirting with me everywhere and I decided I don’t understand how to handle it despite how much biological sense it makes. It’s annoying and I wish it would stop and every part of me feels rude and problematic for feeling that way about it but the intensity has never been like this before.  The pheromones I am emitting are telling a story my mouth and mind never will.

I feel confused about my place in the world and I miss making art more than anything. I find myself often driving long hours just to stop at a coastal town for a coffee and turn around headed back home. As I often do. Is this what life is supposed to feel like, you are cheating on your soul just to survive? Am I just doing this all wrong?

I managed to keep some artwork happening in the last few months since I’ve arrived in Oregon. The new scenery is helping pull something from my guts. Scribbles. Paint. Making a mess. I hope I can wake up and do this every day, one day. If I’m not just going to drop dead at an early age I might as well start living for me instead of just living to survive and benefit someone else. I keep getting tired every day and telling myself excuses and being average and its making my bones shrivel up and my eyes feel dry and my throat feel like a leather wallet. I want to be a lush forest.