Up early and entirely unmedicated

There's a distinct possibility I may post twice today. 

Recently, lacking anything even vaguely resembling a schedule, I've been waking up pretty much whenever.  By this I mean roughly anytime between 8am and 2pm, although I find if I get up before noon I pretty much get up, have a smoke, take my Dilaudid to remain ahead of the headache curve, and then go right back to sleep, in which case I might not actually get out of bed until maybe 4pm.  Even under the best of (pre-skull fracture) circumstances, I require a couple of hours to get up and moving, so this means it's been pretty often that Meghan's been getting home from work around 7pm and I've barely even begun my day.  These narcotics, while they seem to have been the only thing capable of reliably maintaining a pain-free day, have some rather significant side effects.  First and foremost, they make me drowsy, so even if I'm not up until 4pm, I'm likely going to crash again (hard) by midnight.  My days are short, so by the time I'm feeling like I'm able to accomplish something, I've got a very small window of time before I start to get tired.

But today might be different.  I've been actively weaning myself from the Dilaudid over the past week, starting with an abrupt halving of my dosage last Tuesday from 4mg every 4 hours to 2mg every 4 hours (Side note:  this dosage schedule, which I've been on for like 6 weeks, requires I break my sleep schedule into 2 four-hour blocks, which means I can't allow myself to actually sleep the entirety of the night) and then gradually reducing my dosage or skipping certain doses altogether.  I've officially been off the Dilaudid for 2 days now, and yesterday, I only had to reach for the Tylenol twice to manage the withdrawal headaches.  I had a weird thing last night trying to sleep where the soles of my feet were convinced that something was just about to attack them, which kept me awake pretty late ( 'til 2am or 3am maybe?), which is likely another strange withdrawal symptom, because I never have trouble sleeping, but then I managed to miraculously still wake up this morning around 9am.

I've done a little grocery shopping this morning and am working on my first cup of coffee.  I'm feeling relatively good.  Of course I have a headache, but by this point, part of me seems to have come to expect that the pain may never entirely dissipate, and I'm learning to live with it. The point is, I might actually get some painting done today.

Which brings us to this:

This is a piece I've been working on for quite some time now.  More accurately, it would be fair to say I've been sitting here staring at it for months.  The background was created using a combination of a few techniques I've been developing.  Basically, two or three colours go into a squirt bottle together, and I give the mixture one or two really good shakes before immediately squirting them onto the canvas.  This begins but does not finish the mixing process, so that right away creates a certain texture in the bottle.  If I do it just right, I can create a situation where the paint actually has air bubbles in it which then get delivered to the canvas along with the rest of the paint and then begin to rise through the paint, complicating the texture.  I then tip the canvas in various directions, using gravity to create an overall sense of motion to the pattern, employing the use of a clay sculpting tool which resembles a paintbrush but which instead of bristles has a chiseled silicone head I can use as a sort of a squeegee to gently manipulate certain parts of the pattern to go where I want them to. 

I then let the whole thing dry, knowing I wanted to use it as a background for something but being entirely uncertain for what that might be.  Then, as happens more often than I probably ought to admit, I was inspired (unlikely as the photo above should suggest) by pornography.  I happened across a video of a couple coupling underwater, filmed underwater.  The weightlessness of the whole thing was mesmerizing in its own right, but the film was also edited in such a way that it looked very convincingly like neither of the people involved ever had to come up for air.  It was like they just lived down there.  Beautiful.

I started running Google image searches for people swimming underwater.  The character above is based on a photo I found of a swimming baby, so I like to imagine him as a baby robot.

I'm never quite as confident anymore as I used to be when working with brushes.  After all these years of experimentation with liquid paint, I always feel a little rusty.  As you can probably see, the baby-bot needs to be filled in and fleshed out considerably.  He doesn't have any real weight to him.  My plan for today is to get a good start on fixing that.  And if I can get on a roll, and want to tackle another project, it's possible I may work on my sketches of biomorphic nonsense shapes.  See that yellowish patch in the lower left corner of the painting?  I want there to be an object there for which the baby-bot is reaching and yearning the purpose or name of which will be entirely unknowable to us mere humans.

I'll be honest though.  For some reason this piece intimidates me.  I'm fairly certain I'll be doing some sort of artwork today, but it's very possible that this evening's post might be about some other project entirely.  We'll see, won't we?