It’s Wednesday April 16, 2025. I am sitting in the living room while my cat snoozes behind me. It’s 5:02pm. I was unable to sleep last night and my mind drifted to a plexiglass painting I made and sold 5 years ago. It was called “Last Sip of the Oligarchs” and it was a contour piece. I remember that there was a piece of writing across the entire back of the painting, but I couldn’t recollect exactly what it said.
Wired on too much coffee, I decided to go digging for any documentation of this piece in my “archives” (old notebooks, old phone photos, old documents/records/computer files).
I found what I was looking for in my notebook from 2020 (what a head trip that particular notebook is!). Here is a transcription of the writing piece on the back of the painting:
“4/30/20 - Greenough
Last Sip of the Oligarchs:
Living for the moment hasn’t always been a good thing. To tell someone to live for the moment - are you not possibly suggesting that they have no future? Do you not want a future for this person? Why is it irrelevant to them? I’m sure they mean well.
- An alien lands in the USA & tries to make a go of it (life) - I live in the present, & I am present, but only because I cannot consider my future. Not with a serious face. It is my fate to be doomed by illness. Most of us are. I have to look poor on paper to keep my health insurance. An insurance that doesn’t even consider all my body parts as important. I must not be that important. I feel sorry for my teeth. I hope they don’t have feelings. They would be hurt. My teeth hurt. How is it not in your best interest to help everyone? As we have learned - illness does no one favors. It picks everyone… Why not give everyone a chance to live a nice life? Have a nice time? Then, you are ill less. Therefore, those around you may also be well. Being well, together, is nice. How is that not everyone’s main pursuit in life? I think they call it happiness. Why not help those vulnerable? The general rule seems to be - treat others the way you want to be treated. Do you want people hunting you?/Fighting with you and your loved ones. Pointing guns, dropping bombs. Withholding food and shelter. Do you want to be pushed around? Silenced? Restrained for no reason? Do you want to be detained from your daily life? Do you want to be made out to be a villain? Or worse, not even warranting a title. Being made to feel like a speck of dirt on the bottom of a boot. Said boot once licked by said specks. But everything changes eventually. Especially if it doesn’t work - it will collapse. Broken systems are faulty. Good will one day prevail - I trust. In service to my present. Because the present is all I got. And guess who made it so.
_____
I get to experience the good, the bad, the awful & the ecstatic. I can only tell the good from their relation to the bad. The only useful example of a binary system that works, that’s been presented to me.
The feeling of being the uninvited guest - they manufactured this emotion. Imagine having manufactured emotions, daily. Imagine thinking you have a lot when you have so little. Imagine controlling others. Deciding their fate - as opposed to nature. Then nature got mad. Then others got mad. Solidarity among these “others” saved this species. I know there is a “good” that can prevail only because I saw the “evil”. Imagine “evil” existing? Lots of data to collect, but drawing conclusions from said data is the majorly confusing part. Imagine only having faith in those that hurt you? If time were unimportant - would this phenomenon still exist? Love you. ”
The whole thing makes me think about the cyclical nature of time and history. The older I get, the more I see lots of annoying, repeated patterns. In structures/systems, governments, culture, people. My theory is that aliens refuse to engage with people on planet earth because they can hardly be bothered by such stupidity.
Some photos of the piece:
I’ve been doing that thing again that I do often where I time-travel a lot. I recently went through lots of old media and documents on my computer and hard drives. I came across my personal notes from that time I got my US citizenship. It was 2008, and they were changing the prices of everything. My mom and my sister told me to get the citizenship now because the cost of getting it later would go up, and so would renewing my green card. So I decided to do it too because I hate extra stress and problems down the line.
These are the brief notes I jotted down while going to my citizenship interview. I was finishing up my third year of college (film school) and went to the interview by myself:
5/8/2008
11:51 AM
Government Center, Boston MA
39 minutes until my USCIS interview for my citizenship.
I am here by myself right now. How do I feel?
A little sad. Almost cried when I got here. Called Jon on the union phone. He and Em will meet me later. Didn’t cry. A little scared. I didn’t really study much. I’m dressed like a slob. I really have to pee. I’m too early. Took photos of the JFK building. Feels like a betrayal of my roots but a passage to my future. What roots? What are roots. I would like to pursue a vision of a world with no boundaries so I never have to feel this way again (or feel the need to take pictures of government buildings again). How cheesy! I feel cheesy, tacky. Is this something to mourn or celebrate? Neither? Just another appointment? Like a dentist, a doctor check up? An advisor meeting for school? Reading too much into it? It was rainy this morning but now the sun is coming out. Symbolic? Or is it just the weather? Weather. Get over it.
A man looked at me, suspicious. He’s waiting for someone/something too. Who is this girl, dressed all in black, taking photos and notes outside the JFK building? I hope photo film doesn’t get X-rayed and exposed when I go inside. Security at Government Center seems very tight. I’d like to go inside and blow my nose now. I’m sick today. Was late to work one hour because phone is broken and there was a multiple car accident at Packards Corner this morning. Hope no one died. Wonder what’s wrong with mom’s health. No one talks in this family. Wonder what they felt like when they went for their interview?
Went inside. Film was X-rayed but security guy said should be fine – only trouble is with high speed film, ISO 500 or more. Would’ve been a problem in the 1970s but not today. Went to bathroom. A woman came in and shit. I should shit my last Polish shit in the JFK building? Yeah. I should. Hard to shit with that kind of pressure. Ha.
Went to a room. They said go to this other room. Lots of window booths. Go to window 1 after going to front of line. Then go to window 15. But just wait in front of it. They’ll call your name, says a Spanish lady. Everyone is really nice here. Just waiting for my name to be called. I bet they’ll mispronounce it. I could have a citizenship in every English speaking country and I BET they will still mispronounce my name. Some things don’t change. Some labels stay the same.
When/if I have kids, what will they be? Polish? American? Will they tell their friends at school that they’re ½ Polish, ¼ Italian, and 1/8 Transylvanian? Buy bumper stickers with a flag of whichever one of those is most popular at the time? And buy college tapestry flags of whichever is cool? Will they hide it when it’s uncool? Will they say, simply, I am an American? I think either situation would be awkward for me, their mother: Polish but Americanized. But really wishing there were no nationalities or countries. All for one and one for all. Would be nice. But too easy? We’re all human, at the very least. Except those heartless sellouts in Hollywood, I guess…
They call my name. Stumble on the last. A nice, slim, professional young lady with frosty eyeshadow invites me inside for my test. She asks me to read a sentence: something about having a good job. She asks me to write out a sentence: “I have three children.” I write it. “That’s scary…” I say. We laugh a bit about how silly this test is for me. I am so American, apparently. I guess most immigrants really do have three children, at least., is the popular belief it seems. I take the test. A few questions (the ones I studied at the Union before this, THANK GOD). “What is the Constitution?” she asks. “Uhh… The Supreme Law of the Land,” I say, in my Gandolf voice. She smiles. The situation called for it. It’s a joke. I pass. A few official “PASS” stamps and off she sends me to E-170 to wait for the interview, I guess.
E-170: A woman is called. She tries to go inside with her friend. They stop her. You wait out here. She looks pissed and annoyed. Sits down. 2 doors keep opening every 30 seconds or so, and men in ties call out names. They stumble over the names, half-whispering them in embarrassment (embarrassment over their overly American-ness, even though we are after all, in a government building in AMERICA) probably because they are addressing a bunch of immigrants in a waiting room. Immigrants are always in waiting rooms in seems – let’s not piss them off, they must be thinking. Probably not. This is Boston. We are politically correct.
There’s a big picture with drawings and writings by children, you can tell from far away because of how scrawly they are. At the top it says “2004 Celebrate America 5th Grade Writing Contest”. Sounds like something I would have participated in while in 5th grade, trying desperately to get my shitty poems and stories in some rip-off lame anthology that only the parents of those who got in would actually buy. SCAMS. I did 2 of those in elementary school before I caught onto them. Before I realized everyone in America just wants money $$$.
This place feels anxious. CNN plays on a flat screen TV at the front of the room. I see a lady sitting up front from me. Looks like she passed too. I saw her studying hard, INS booklet and highlighter in hand. She once looked over at me, nervously. She looks more at ease, and now reads her own book. On the walls of this room are:
- non-geographic map of the world
- a picture/painting of sad looking “immigrants” in caps and handkerchiefs in front of Ellis Island. “ELLIS ISLAND” reads the top
- a picture painting of the swan boats in the public gardens
- American Eagle superimposed on an American flag; Pledge of Allegiance written along the bottom
- photo of NYC, pre-9/11, twins fully in view
One of the creative writing winners reads: “Why I am Glad America is a Nation of Immigrants”.
Remember that time you were in acupuncture and were slipping into that deep relaxed state, you know the one, where all that healing happens. You have to initiate this state in order to receive the treatment being administered to you. Without this space and state, you are just sitting in a recliner at the clinic with some random tiny needles sitting in your skin. But you don’t even get something cool out of it, like a tatty, so what is the point?
Anyways, that one time you decided to reach out to grandpa. He invited you into that room with the fold out murphy beds where we would sometimes draw with him. But this time - he said lets paint. I told him I couldn’t, because my hands hurt too much. He said not to worry and whipped out some special gold-speckled paint. He told me to brush it onto my hands and arms. We used a very light paintbrush, bristles like a kitten’s whisper. I moved my hand in the sunlight coming through the window and the gold specks caught all these shimmering glimmers. He asked if my hands still hurt. They did. He asked if I forgot for a moment tho - as I admired the gold paint. I had. What more can you ask for at this point, he inquired. I probably would have been really sad after all that, but I really wasn’t. I was still enchanted by the eye-catching gold paint on my arms.
