A comment on travel.

The three photographs here were taken inside the Space Needle in Seattle, WA sometime in early October during a meeting of Seattle artists and musicians working together to keep the city proper clean and safe, or something like that. The conference didn't need any two cents from me because I was only an invited guest of my friend Luke Randall from the Rapin' Revolvers and I don't live in Seattle. So wandering around with a drink in my hand, I guess, was my official place in the afternoon. At the refreshments table while filling up a glass of wine, it was a keen surprise to bump into an old friend named Carla Boche, who I had first met in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at Public Salon years ago while on tour with Unwed Sailor. Being that she was an out-of-towner guest like myself, both of us were compelled to commit ourselves to the diligent role of wallflowers, which ended up being a lot of fun.

During a break in the conference, I skipped out of the room with Luke and Carla and her friend Jonathan Poneman from Sub Pop Records, and Carla and I did this very short shoot, which lasted the length of the song 'Tears of Rage' by The Band, which Johnathan was playing on his iPod. A journalist acquaintance of mine named Kyle Larry was composing an article on the conference and liked the photographs; they were subsequently run in The Stranger in the article, so it was a lot of fun and I really love going to Seattle because something interesting happens every time.

I do wish that I could get up to the city more often. The people I meet there are interesting to photograph, and I miss Luke Randall a lot.

Good-night,
JARET.

All I could do was lose faith in it.

6:49am.











Good-night,
JARET.

When you want to, please tell me.

3:20am.

Perfume was all I could think of, with roses and lilies.

The way she looked when our grandfather was here after his stroke, when we milled around by the soda machine in the waiting room for half the day, thumbing through childrens books and newspapers.

I could still smell the perfume on her, mixing with the stale air and the chemicals on the walls and floor. That dark orange dress with the white flowers sewn into the hem. Running faster than me. Beating me to the whatever it was -- the everything, of anything there ever was. A part of me loved that, but the real version of me that I believed in detested that I had been such a simple fool.



The shock was still working against the hard parts of my muscle and my body just wouldn't work right, tensing up at the most inconvenient of turns, but I carried all my stuff and shuffled past the reception desk at the front entrance of the floor and made a perfectly respectable exit from the hall, down the elevator and into the lobby. To either side of me in the vast room at the bottom of the building there shone the possibility of a different life, spilling in from the glass doors, waiting for me outside. In here was a death hall, and all of these guests only haunted the lobby ahead of the ghosts waiting in line upstairs, filling the building. The doors shone brighter. Tellingly, but almost fantastical anyway, because of the floor to ceiling glass, it was angelically bright with the sun, and glowing as a healing wound to the stifled murky air of the lobby. I could sense the very importance of it, staring at the doors and how close I was to getting out. A tinkling of bells sounded in my head, tiny and wintry like chimes over the threshold of a door, leading me outside regardless of what was waiting for me.

The skin on my arms and belly crawled underneath the suit. I pulled at the knot in my tie, slow and curious and unable to get a hold of myself, and I undid the top button. All while walking briskly out of the building at an embarrassing, awkward pace, sighing, carrying a box of clothes and a few manila files with hospital reports that looked more like selfishly assumed pencil sketches of people who had survived car accidents but wouldn't ever be considered truly human anymore.

They were blueprints for my sister's new body.



What was waiting for me outside was uneventful -- a hot, muggy afternoon, laced with distant chatter and the sounds of cars circling in the crowded lot. I felt drab and cheated. Nothing interested me and I felt free. What a cheat. What did I escape?

Objectively, I was unaware of most everything in my life. The hospital somehow exemplified some kind of possessive, insistent pull at me that had always seemed to reel itself before my eyes but never formed into something I could grasp. The hospital itself felt like it had always been there in my heart, sitting over the hill like that, sucking up nutrients from the ground as it grew more ancient and total. It had been there my whole life, changing shape as the years shifted around, showing itself now in the form of the building. If I'd been unaware before, I was now seeing things more clearly. Before the doctor could even really make me understand what had happened to my little sister, I'd torn loose from the room as if I'd just been let out of an unjust jail sentence, and though I did not seek safety or being free as I ran, I was nonetheless searching for something.



In the parking lot, behind the wheel of my car, I gazed out over the hot steam rising from the hoods of the long line of vehicles that led up to the hospital.

Structurally, it loomed above, high up into the dome of the city sky. The windows were mostly white with drawn curtains, pierced here and there by black dots with opened windows that looked inward like unhealthy pores in the dirty concrete body. My sister was in there, behind one of those white spots. The nurses would have their hands on her by now and the doctors would have their hands sticking into her. Her skin would smell sour and her hair would be brittle and sweaty. She wouldn't have that pretty smile, and her body would be separating under the knives that would make her fit for life only in a wheelchair.



Somewhere there in the building was a doctor in mid-sentence, whom I'd escaped before he could do this to me. Whatever it was his words had meant, I'd escaped it fair and square. Shrugging his shoulders, he would now be watching my sister in her lapsed sleep. In the building, in one of those rooms, her insides were being pressed and pulled. The legs she used to run with -- and which would beat me to wherever we used to be going -- were on a metal table away from the bed.

Yours,
JARET.

Corpse On Pumpkin Photography show.

Hello. I will be able to resume more regular blogging in February, but in the meantime, here is what I have been working on that's kept me away from most stuff:



CALLING OUR SKELETONS HOME
14 Art Nudes by JARET FERRATUSCO

Portraits of isolation and loneliness, sedate emptiness of surrounding and the solemn grace of the female body to create something both quiet and not too emtionally near. Shot on black and white film by Portland photographer Jaret Ferratusco, hand printed and framed.

OPENING RECEPTION on Sunday, Feb. 1st -- 6pm to 9pm
Showing the entire month of February.

Opposable Thumb Gallery + Café
3312 SE Belmont St
Portland, OR 97214 / 503.235.0146

Ladies, gentlemen, lonely people, housewives and gamblers encouraged to attend, in formal attire if possible.

Thank you.

Divided section of body, draped across the hospital bed.

11:09pm.

There were ashes on my cuffs and the hem of her skirt when we left the Community Center, and a dusting of traffic in the road preceding the interstate. When a small boy on a bicycle brushed past on the sidewalk, I gave him a light, untellable push against the shoulder and betwixt that and the child's velocity, his momentum brought him downward and toward the street. I shut out the sounds of the traffic and the shuffling tick-tick-tick of my wife's heels, and listened in the event I might hear a bone in the boy's tiny body shatter. But before the child could collapse upon the street and break something, the bicycle connected instead with a small tree planted just over the lip of the curb, and he was caught in the branches, falling easily to the grassy dirt amidst a tangle of weak wooden limbs and leaves.



My wife held her face in her hands as I helped the boy up to his feet. His expression was simple; confusion creased his brow, under which embarrassment painted the cheeks red.

He thanked me for my assistance, and I told him that one ought to be more careful.

My wife cried as I held the automobile door open and she slipped inside. The hem of her skirt fluttered momentarily in the breeze as she bent. I pushed the door closed, quite softly, letting up once the nearly silent click of the locks coming into place sounded under the blanket hum of cars whirring past on the interstate, and the faint cries of children playing in the meadow across from the Community Center.



On the way to our dinner reservation, I placed my hand on her knee and smiled to her. She smiled back at me, with dried streams of tears sparkling orange and brown on her cheeks in the late afternoon sunlight.

For just a moment she reminded me of her mother.

I squeezed her knee just a touch and smiled again. And as before, she returned the smile, closing one hand over mine as we drove past the bland white boxy structure of the Sheriff's Station, its unassuming deadpan twin the town laundromat, and after that, still squeezing my wife's knee, we passed a small crowd of people cheering wildly as they fought for a better view, assembled like a steaming cloud of brutal glistening and jabbing fists and wide white teeth and flowing spit and shouts on a street corner viewing two ruffians at physical bouts with one another.



The wake had been solemn, and without much emotional bloodletting. People had said hello, then said good-bye, and the womb that had birthed my wife would be interred and that would be that. I pasted a cut-out of her mother's casket face in my mind, propped up alongside a cut-out of my wife as she was now sitting beside me, and they were virtually identical. A shudder creased my body and if not for the steering wheel to get in the way, I might have doubled over inside the drivers seat. My wife, in time, would come to look like her mother. This I pondered, while sifting through the day's events. I had spent the better part of two decades beside this woman. Listening to sobs and watching tears, watching the sun set day after day. And I pictured her on her death bed, repelling me with her bared teeth and bitter words. Blaming me for her sicknesses.

And how I would always remember our first date, so long, long ago. When I took her to the mill after the parade and we kissed in the moonlight without so much as knowing each other's last names.

Good-night,
JARET.

With bad eyes you can see just a little.

9:45am.

At some curse, or some speed, I pulled the door wide and almost tumbled into the elevator, crumbling up a small lady with a cane. I righted myself soberly, tossing off the indifference I truly felt with a fake smile that I did genuinely believe might have been worth a thousand dollars if not for the terror of the shock of the end of life's lessons that had weighed heavily on the sagging skins of this terrible old birdlike little lady. She gasped and swung the cane at me, pricking my shins like a lithe little thorny branch in the wind. I was momentarily astounded at the look on her face, which told awkwardly and so assuredly of mistrust and misgivings in spectacular abundance, and then I smirked, ready, so completely ready, to just let go and give her the hardest punch I could muster, right in the mouth. She had no right to hit me with her cane, I reasoned; crazy or old or whatever, she simply hadn't the right to inflict this upon me.

But the urge to strike her was only a passing fancy, as most violence surely is, and I smirked again as she huffed and pressed the same button for the ground floor once and again and over and over. Like singing along to a pleasant old tune drifting out across the room from a small transistor radio, I hummed along to her angry sighs and bobbed my head, entirely unsure about myself but somehow properly composed nevertheless.





When we hit the ground floor and the elevator began to settle, she filled up the doorway of the elevator with her spindly little bone-body and pressed the cane length-wise into the frame like she were expecting a tide of attackers once the door finally opened. But she wasn't meaning to prevent any such entrance. It was my exiting before her that she guarded the doorway against. The rage in me felt hotter than the awful need to let it slide. And so I narrowed my eyes toward the back of her witchy scarecrow head.

The sheer nerve of this son of a bitch old little mummy, I thought.

I could have struck her in the back of the head. Almost - I did feel the fucking urge - I almost spoke into the back of her wiry gray head, "Are you a widow? Are you lonely now that your husband has left you for a much better place than in your old, fractured arms? You are alone, old lady. Alone."





But of course she was. Old fucks like this always were, weren't they? Widows, lonesome crazy widows. Of course they were.

But I let the bell sound, and I stood back while she carried her fragile dusty body out into the lobby of the hotel. And she sure did shuffle slowly. If I doubted for a second the intention in that aged, crippled march, then I was a fool when she turned her head and sneered at me. The nerve. How calculated is the heart when it turns to such mockery of civility?

Suddenly I wished her husband would come back from the dead and hit her in the eye. I wished he would crawl into the lobby, smelling of his grave, and strangle her in front of me and then drag her out to the gutter and let the leaves in the wind cover her.





But I said nothing, only held the dry scentless flower in my hand that I'd plucked from the bedstand and I whisked past her as if she were no more than just another potted plant along the corridor, and I paid the morning's due at the counter.

Carolyn was at the counter. Dressed smartly in her purple hotel blouse, with her name stitched in pink over her small, purposeful breast, igniting in me some kind of minuscule reluctance. Her effortless beauty seemed to sink me. She smiled and typed in my information, accepted the cash and peeled the bills away with fingers so exacting that it was like a spider wrapping up a fly in silk, and once the bills were in the right slots, she smiled approvingly to the open cash drawer and snapped it closed, then looked up and thanked me.

I took my eyes away from her hands, and the name over the breast on her blouse, and the thin, painted lips of her pressed smile, and never felt as cold in my life as I did then, when I realized the barrier of client and hostess would never be crossed.

Behind my back, I stuffed the colorless ill-attended flower into my back pocket where she could never know that it had ever existed, hearing it crumple in dry cracks and raspy scratches.

"Thank you, Carolyn," I muttered, staring blankly into her eyes, filling no void in the ensuing silence. And I stood there for a bit, unalarmed at all, feeling my body lose heat and pressure while my head in turn expanded like a balloon. I closed my eyes for a bit and pictured that decrepit old lady from the elevator and how I prayed for her pain in a hospital bed to be unlike anything another human being had ever suffered, and I passed gently over a thought as to what her dead husband must have been like in his prime, and I pictured him making love to the old lady when she had been in her prime, too, and the motions they would set underneath the brittle, starched woolen coverlet of the hotel bed, like young snakes awaking from womb of the serpent mother.



I smiled to myself, forgiving the old lady her trespasses. Age was awful lonely, after all.

All things must end. So too would I. And Carolyn would be dead one day as well. And the mortician would pop open the buttons of her blouse, take the shirt down past her shoulders and remove the bra, then insert a scalpel blade vertically down her middle and witness the bones of her and the stillborn heart and he would never know the desire that I once had in my little life for this speechless hotel counter girl.



When I opened my eyes, Carolyn was staring at me with distress and confusion, and when she asked very politely, with a properly somber concern, if I was feeling ill today, of course I said yes, and that it was just a mild head cold, but enough to leave me a bit out of sorts of course, and I smiled nervously at her and pretended every bit of the way that it was just a cold. Only a passing cold.

But it's not just a cold. It's a cold life, but not just an affliction that will be passing any time soon. I might stay at the hotel indefinitely. And in sleep might I dream of being the perpetual mortician, and would I too dream of her tonight, on the steel bed, lit up by hard fluorescent lights, saddled dreamily with the task of preparing this beautiful girl for the sleep of eternity.

My cold, loveless hands on her cold, lifeless stomach.

Yours,
JARET.

Just your promises and love only.

6:08am.

Not quite naked, I waded out past a thick patch of lily pads. My shoes and socks looked hollow and untouched in a benign clump under a thicket of branches and trash and thorns. The only people out here would have been lost or losing, yet I hid my shoes and the socks because it would not be very safe walking back to the highway barefoot. Brambles and microscopic granules of glass and larger pieces of glass from cracked abandoned bottles would get the best of the wanderer in situations as unlucky as this. Someone fishing might find the shoes and make off with them and that would set off the domino effect and I would lose a leg from the poison barb of a plant, or the appropriated fisherman might land a hook into my skin and I would yelp just as helplessly as a hound.

The water splashed lightly and softly against the lilies and the oasis of the skin ahead of me and I realized my fears were just projections, though. For who would waste time out here on a still autumn night like this? Highway strips aren't prime social spots. Only it's just that I wanted to be here so much that it became impossible not to materialize others feeling the same. I could practically feel some bastard's eyes roving from the road down to the water and wanting to stop, come out to the edge and fish, smoke a cigarette or drink a beer. I could feel them, but they weren't there.

Just projections from dizziness and desire.



Lonely little coves like this are trafficked seldom, actually.

Broken bottles and pieces of steel and sharp slices of plastic were haphazardly strewn about everywhere on account to the water's proximity to the highway. A bridge over un-compromised water is very hard not to toss trash into, and I could testify to that a thousandfold. Shit that shot out from destiny and flight and drive, it littered the horizon from my view here at the edge of the cold, cold water. Forgotten, uncared for crap built up around me in mindless little rot cities. All of this shit and weeds and mud, and my shoes and socks bundled up under some branches, and my sick stomach from the way the flies dug in through my nostrils and stuck to the inside of my throat.

Up to the collar of my shirt in the dark blue water, I began to float out toward her, and then I was paddling lightly, not swimming but just coasting slowly toward the body. Even as slowly as I moved, the motion of my arms and legs caused the surface of the water to ripple, shattering the steel facade of the lilies, lapping against the floating girl's shoulders and breasts and upturned face.



Small tides washed into her mouth and then receded. Surges of fine blue chalky water pumped in and out from between her gaping black well mouth and blue velvet lips.

When I was next to her my heart was pounding, and my breathing acting up exponentially. The water felt frigid, no doubt responding to the cold pulses from the heat of the beautiful corpse. She was a snow volcano, boiling in frost and set to rupture in an ecstasy of cold, lifeless, ex-explosion. I wanted to climb her and look into the mouth of that volcano, into pumped water and the fly nests and the squiggly amoeba or tadpoles and minnows and see down into her black throat and kiss the tissue before it could decompose and become unkissable.



This close, still wading, I could see below the surface of the water, as shimmering reflections of her breasts slid from tiny wave to tiny wave, curling along ripples, overlapping other images of her breasts over and over again as the tiny waves danced across the surface of the water, with the permanent ragged peaks of her nipples hardened like the channel of a stone canyon. Duly, in time, this flesh would too erode and become an expanding canyon. The water would nip at her fibers until it carved rivers through her, and in time she would become tatters of fabric and ruined tangles of algae, weeds and a watery windchime of moldy green bones.

But her eyes.







Awake to the afternoon more so than mine, her eyes sparkled. I could make out soft hues of sky blue, mossy strands of green and shattered fragments of velvet red furiously splintered in her irises. There was a life in her eyes that was alien to me. I swam to her; daunting cave mouth, egg host and fish nest, arctic nipples and blank bloodless bulging eyes.

I held her floating carcass, which collapsed in my arms with the accordion note of a music that was so much like the sigh of a large animal dying that I looked around me, shuddering at the thought of a whale that would now swallow us. Heat and gasses escaped her mouth when I squeezed her tight, disintegrating in the fly-nests and the choked weeds she was caught in. I breathed in but felt no extra desire at sharing her breath; the deterioration in her cells moved my stomach to hitch, but within moments I was accustomed. Because I had to. I could begin to understand this because I felt like I had no choice.

Had she been hit? Had some bastard knocked the life right out of her in a hit-and-run? I pushed her body to the surface and it floated easily. I turned her around, my fingers exploring her cold body, but there were no marks to make an understanding of, no crushed bones. No gashes on the four intact limbs. Where did you go wrong, beautiful? I want to go wrong there too, but back in time, with her, but maybe survive it. Or at least get knocked into the water with my hands on her body, gasping timid little fucked-up stupid breaths, just trying to understand that I was dying with her, certainly not alone, touching her body under the water as we tried to float to safety even as we died.

A lot of garbage. I bet she flailed. She didn't try to save herself, probably. Just probably she bobbed up and down, gasping for lack of breath instead of for fight. Maybe she was dead before she hit the water. Out here, in the middle of nowhere? She might not have been so seemingly walking along after all. Probably someone put her here and that she was long dead. Or maybe she was killed here. No marks on her body that I can see, though.

Mysterious dead angel. Naked as the day she was born.

Suddenly I felt wrong to be so clothed so I took open the buttons of my shirt and undressed underwater as best I could without drowning.



I rested my cheek to hers. Who knows how long she'd been dead and floating here, but she was still soft to the touch. Fate had positioned her here. Some awful fate. There was no joy in her eyes but I wanted to find it for the both of us, if possible in this infested water.

Maybe I would stay with her. I could fall asleep on the raft of her body, and maybe in sleep I would fall under the surface of the water and perish too but never know it was happening. God, I hope not. I couldn't take my eyes from her, but I didn't want to die for her, or die here with her. But then again I didn't know what I needed either. Maybe I needed something right now but did not know it or understand the signs. Such an easy thought, but as an action? Futile. Even if I started to drown I'd wake up for sure, and swim to safety in the twilight. I'd be dry on land before sunlight. But far away from her. I knew I wouldn't have the guts to swim back out after catching my breath. Not while the sun was down.



You can't win, ever. You can't have what you want.

I just wanted to know who she was and why she was floating in the water off the highway. Who hated her so much that they'd do this to her?

Or who loved her enough to? That was an eerie thought indeed. I shuddered under the water, naked as the day I was brought into this world. This poor girl. Her fish house chest, probably swimming with the lives of untold water creatures too small to see in this dimming light. Maybe even spiders had swum into her ears and were spinning nests to lay water eggs and they would grow fat and powerful inside her head while the rest of her body just fell apart under the water. Fishes would nibble at her thighs, breasts and stomach. She'd be food belly and eaten legs, fat food bloated and thick. Birds would take her eyes before the sun could rot them out. All I wanted was to know her a little better.

Who was she and why had she snatched up my heart like this?



In my small life I'd never find an answer. I could kiss her cold lips, but the thought of sharing her mouth with parasites hitched my stomach up again. Unwilling to accept this as plausible, I kissed her anyway, against all odds and parasites. Then, I pushed myself away from her body after kissing her, feeling content, and I floated in front of her with my legs tangled in hers and we both floated on our backs and watched the sky change colors. She was anchored somewhat by a tangle of weeds, so we didn't coast along into deeper water, where the creatures were probably bigger too and more dangerous still. I bet when she was alive she had never done something like this with another person, alive or dead, lazy in the water just looking up and watching the sky. Looking back on it, I hadn't ever done it myself either. Unburdened, floating in the highway run-off of trash and water, I swam with her and watched the sky burn away from orange to gray.

But there was no joy in it. Because I was forcing her dead body to experience this. In a way, forcing myself too. But the fact that she couldn't swim away was a small and cuddled comfort and it was easy to watch the sunset, even though my arms began to hurt and the way the water surrounding her smelled was making me blue in the face. Very cautiously, while still on my back, I lowered my mouth into the water and sipped from it, and swallowed water in sour little soundless gulps, seeing us reflected in the shapes of the clouds. Only up there we looked like doves soaring and not two people floating in the weeds and minnows beside the rush of the highway, one person being dead and the other working harder and harder to support their combined weight on the surface of the water.

Yours,
JARET.