JAMIE IREDELL / RECOVERY
Frida Kahlo’s life was being in recovery, so we have this in common. In 1945’s Without Hope, Kahlo—eyebrows and all—lies in bed, a four-poster, and she lay beneath an enormous easel on which she likely painted this very painting. A giant fleshy funnel suspended from the easel funnels into her mouth as she lies expressionless. In the fleshfunnel are fishheads and pigs and offal and a dia de muertos sugar skull and the entire thing drips blood and shit. In the sky hover a pair of eggs—the moon and a blazing sun—the eggs she could never and never would access. The funnel fueling her recovery, I guess. It is blood and sometimes—most the time—shit.
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Remember how Chris Farley made you laugh, though in him you saw the thing eating you? But you kept at it, always knowing everyone laughed for all the wrong reasons. Farley went the way he did. Farley’s family members talk about his hugs. Never hug. Were there a god, it would say, brother I hear you. Could anyone bring back a lovely being? The hiccups, Hiccu. Hiccup. Oh god. Oh Jesus. Fuck it. A cheeseburger. A hug.
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My cognitive distortions: all or nothing, catastrophizing, and my favorite: emotional reasoning. I’m the inside out of a fat man in a little coat. My therapist had a therapist face. Look at an empty plate. The kind you put food on. But she was (is!), actually, an excellent therapist. There will come a time and there is a season. I’ve made that joke before. I could grow hungry looking at her face. She made me talk to my mind. She has, I think, kind of red hair. Just a hint of the fire that burned somewhere. Wherever it was it was burning.
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Lie in bed, think of what to say. Say something definite. Say simply something. For one supposes that I. The saying is the evidence. Say, in the first place. A stone can say any old thing. Say I say there’s a there there when there never could have been. Here’s a picture: a man grows old next to his daughter, herself growing old as the two grow. And they lie upon a board or a bed, and within themselves there’s the present and the past for the future is a blank. At least, that is, for the daughter. For the father: life is the past. The old days of milk and shit and vomit. Golden baby days. Everything else is blank and black. How can these be reckoned? What’s past is future, and what future would the past tell its lies? But the lie lies within itself: the earth: it turns.
Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta.