Dear Blogger, last night I dreamed that London has some weird ideas about public bathrooms.
A week ago today I got the news that one of my clients died. I have been a public defender for almost five years. We always struggle with burnout. It's a hard job and people resent that we are needed. Client's insult us to our face (Just last month a client told me I was "a piece of shit" because the police hadn't turned over full DNA notes yet), make false claims about us in order to change attorneys, and constantly make these ham-fisted attempts to manipulate us. Prosecutors think we getting in the way of justice (literally told this), and judges ignore us (the judge fell asleep every day of my last murder trial).
I haven't been handling it super well for the last year or two. I gained about 100 pounds, got in the habit of drinking every night, and was sick all the time. When my client died it sent me over the edge. She was someone I was especially close to for a client. A really great person and completely innocent. She was accused of aggravated assault for pulling a gun on a man who was smashing her head against a concrete floor. It was a classic case of self-defense, she even called the police immediately after fleeing her attacker and the responding detectives recommended against pursuing charges, but still she was charged. She had never been in trouble before, had no drug or mental health issues, and was in every way a completely normal person, not at all like most of the people that come through the system.
We'd been pending trial for almost 2 years now, which is pretty standard for someone that was not being held in custody. During this time she lost her job (normal for someone pending charges), was diagnosed with MRSA, and became addicted to the opioids that were prescribed to her while she was being treated. Last Friday her fiance called me to tell me that she had passed away, probably from a drug overdose.
I've had a client die before (suicide), and I've seen far too many innocent people go to prison (my last trial, the one with the sleeping judge, my client went to prison for life plus 60 years on a murder charge; all five eyewitnesses said it wasn't him), but this one was it. Her life was completely derailed for no reason and it led to her death.
My SO and I figured out that I could live off of her for a little bit and try to make money as an artist and distiller. I've been painting ever since a kid and making whiskey for a little over a year. So this is going to be a little diary of the process of leaving my job and, hopefully, improving my life. My boss was nice enough to give me a week off, and Tuesday is the day I give notice, so I'm pretty much gonna drop everything and see what happens. Weirdly, absolutely all of my friends saw me quitting a mile away, so... I guess that's a good sign vis a vis it was pretty obvious that I was miserable.
I've never really blogged or anything before, so bear with me. I'm not super used to talking about my emotions, and a big part of this blog is going to about me learning how to be myself.
The last few days have been pretty good, I was a bit manic up until I went to her funeral, but the last few days I've just painted and worked on my whiskey recipe, and I've felt happy for the first time in a while. I find myself smiling randomly, I'm nicer and more friendly to people I meet randomly, and I've worked harder than I've worked in years.
Tuesday was a bit of a hiccup. I got drunk, which in and of itself wouldn't be a big deal, except that my SO had just agreed to scale back on everything that she loves in order to support me financially, precisely so I didn't have the pressures that led me to drinking every night. So, not a great confidence builder...
Anyway, a bit about me. I'm 31, a dood, and here's me being fat at a pear (take that pear):
I've been drawing since I was 5, I got into digital painting about 10 years ago, and I've been making corn whiskey for a bit over a year. Zombie Kill Girls comes from a character I've been doing for a looooong time, which has more or less become an alter ego of mine (called the Zombie Kill Girl) and I'm sure I'll talk about her more in the future but this is getting kind of long, so I'm gonna wrap up for today.
My artistic inspirations are Taiyo Matsumoto (Black & White), Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl and Gorillaz), Ed Roth (Rat Fink), and the Disgaea video game series. I consider myself a big time feminist (a lot of ZKG stuff is, in my mind, about playing around with beauty standards and confronting the fear of female sexuality), though I know that may be hard to believe given that my list of artists is all male (I don't know a lot of artists so please feel free to send any my way that you think may fit my style).
I'll be writing here, here is where I'll be posting artwork, collections of my favorite artists, and reference material for those who want to see the process behind some of my stuff, and I'll post a link to my etsy shop as soon as that's up and running.
And here is the dog that's super happy about getting to be home with me all day every day:
He's not sad that's just his face.
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