So much travel these days - I feel displaced, disoriented. I space out a bit and don't know how to ground myself in place - am I in Staunton? Am I at the last airbnb? Am I in Virginia? But I'm right here, on my porch, drinking red wine and feeling my toes go dumb in the cold.

My new sleeve is killing me. All my other work (last sleeve session aside) has been brief enough that the pain felt almost novel, a pleasant kind of buzzy hurt. Six hours in the chair and your body goes into a light form of shock - you get shaky, physically trembling, confused, and it's hard to speak. My skin was ice cold when I finished up. 

It's weird: objectively I know it's beautiful and she did an amazing job, but I have this kind of disassociation about it, like I haven't caught up my mental image of myself. It's so... flowery, it's so yellow. I think I'm going to get a little nasty, mean Elkhorn banded water snake under the flowers and that will make it feel more metal and balance the whole thing out. In the meantime, I like that you can see the flowers dripping with my blood. 

As ever, I like the woman who tattoos me. She's this little darling tiny creature with big eyes and rainbow hair and she has the character trait of "asks a lot of questions." I was really struggling a few times since those flowers wrap all the way inside my elbow and as I mentioned, it fucking hurt so I didn't really have a lot of considered answers for her. She asked me if I ever wanted to be famous, what I liked about history, and why I didn't want to publish my book. 

I'm tired. Another bad weekend in terms of my emotions. I left the airbnb around 1am and walked the swamp roads. This morning (was it only this morning?) there was a great blue heron hunting outside on the log sticking out of the lake. She was gorgeous with a big dark spot on her shoulder, and I could see her reflection in the black of the pond water.