My first week back I raced a cop and ran 2 stop signs and a stoplight.
Accidentally.
I was pulling out of my street, saw the police car on the other side of the intersection, and something in my brain snapped on and took over.
I spun the tires on my little Toyota Corolla, cut the cop off, and proceeded to proceed to break three more laws with the cop right behind me.
Obviously they turned their lights on and pulled me over.
The cop was a young woman not much older than me: I'm not saying that things would have gone differently if she had been a male officer but something tells me it would have.
She said something to the effect of "what the hell were you doing did you not see me there right behind you?"
My answer was "Yes, ma'am I did see you there and that's why I did it."
The look on her face made it clear that she was going to need more information.
"I just got back from Iraq and this is my third day driving a car again.
In Iraq I drove convoy security and since cops over there are dirty and corrupt or might not be cops at all, just a stolen police car, we have to treat local police as hostile.
That means, we have to cut them off and keep them away from the convoy using whatever measures necessary in the event that they are actually a suicide bomber.
I'm sorry, something just kicked in I don't know why."
Luckily I had my military ID on me and my leave papers showing that yes, in fact, I had just arrived stateside.
"You understand that you just ran two stop signs and a stoplight?"
"Yes ma'am I'm sorry it won't happen again."
"I'm going to let you off with a warning and you had better wake up and get used to driving on American roads."
"Yes ma'am, I will, thank you."
Needing to wake up was the understatement of the century at that point.
I was having hallucinations, random blackouts, and dreams that would continue after I was awake.
I was exhausted, paranoid, and losing my grip on reality.
The first thing I did was sell my car and use the money to build 2 nice bicycles, a road racing bike and a mountain bike commuter.
I started riding my bike to work instead of driving.
I also took long bike rides in my free time, and got into the best shape of my life, doing 100 mile rides through the mountainous terrain of Northern California.
Things were almost feeling better until one day as I was commuting to work my tires shot out from under me in loose leaves and threw me headlong into traffic.
A car came within inches of sending me into the next life.
Maybe a week or two later, riding my other bike, a driver of a panel van looked right at me coming down a hill and either didn't see me or didn't care and pulled out.
I wrecked the bike against the side of his van, and might have caved in the side of it a little with my body.
He got out and yelled at me (I had been going the speed limit with a reflective vest in a bicycle lane).
This painting was made around that time.
For me the painting stands for what I was experiencing at that time: a life rapidly spinning out of control, that seemed intent on throwing me straight into the afterlife.
The bloody hand print on the wall was a memory from Iraq so you can see how at this stage my memories of war were already starting to creep into my artwork.
The bicycle actually became a symbol for me: a symbol of running from something that I couldn't quite identify, of a life that I was moving fast through but couldn't find my place in, and of a once familiar world that suddenly felt foreign.
I did a whole series of work after this featuring that "lost bicycle" which I will share soon.
Looking back for files of my "bicycle series" I came across the above image.
It's a random sketch from that time that pretty much shows the kind of agony that I was feeling inside.
If I were to connect it to another piece, I'd have to say that it is the demon from "Demon's of the mind's eye"
@corpsvalues/demons-of-the-mind-s-eye
rearing it's head inside of me and fighting for control.
Let me try to explain how it feels when I look at these demonic images.
Every part of me rebels against the idea that what I am looking at actually came out of my own head.
I have ZERO recollection of the creative process.
That means, every other piece that I created from the same time period, say the "bicycle series" I remember the creative process: I remember plotting out the piece, sketching, filling in, erasing, detailing.
I don't remember anything about the creation of the demonic pieces.
I can look at them and recognize once again, that recurring bloody hand print from the painting top center is also the demon's right hand, and that like "demons of the mind's eye" it is a strange hybrid of human and demon, in a struggle.
Fugue state? Maybe.
But that's how the first 5-6 years after separating from the military felt, at all times: ugly memories that chased me through my dreams, my waking thoughts, and my artwork.
And my life was spent running from those memories and fighting them with every weapon that I could find.
