Everything in my yard is dead except for this one weed in my backyard that is FLOURISHING. This fucker is taller than me and probably much 100% healthier. At this point I can’t cut it down because you kinda have respect that level of growth and also, it might be sentient. For real, what is this?
2. Tomorrow we’re taking Hailey and their sweetheart, Laurel, to Japan for a few days. I’m a wreck because I have no energy at all and I worry that I’ll slow everyone down. I assumed it was just another depressive episode but then I started getting dizzy and nauseous and turns out I have a terrible ear infection (from allergies – not anything contagious) and so now I’m less worried about the energy and more worried that my head will literally explode from the ear pressure of the plane. If that happens, please make my tombstone into a bench that is engraved in such a way that it leaves an imprint reading “NICE ASS” on the rear end of everyone who stops to visit. Fingers crossed the antibiotics get to me first.
PS. My mom will be here taking care of the cats and dog, so please don’t burgle my home. She is also an infamous weed-puller so it’ll be interesting to see how she and Ally Weedy fare. (Does Ally Weedy work? Ron Weedley? Weedy Harrelson? Sorry. I am clearly not at my best.)
Here’s a tiny recap in case you have the same memory problems I do.
The art works were from the 1950s and were signed L. Perea. They were mostly images from inside of a mental institution and were both brilliant and harrowing. They reminded me of the pieces that Van Gogh had made while in asylums, and it struck me how many people never had an opportunity to tell their story…particularly people who were hidden away in institutions in a time when mental illness was something to be ashamed of or feared. Her art spoke to me because I struggle with mental illness and creating art and writing has saved me over and over. I have family members who died in institutions when mental illness was something to be feared, so in some ways I felt a kinship.
I was really conflicted though, because I wanted to protect her privacy and her family, but also I wanted to break the stigma of shame so that her art could be seen and her story told. Through research I’ve found she was the last living descendent of her family. (She could have very distant cousins on her mother’s side but none that I’ve found.) I also worried that perhaps she wouldn’t want her art shown, but what I do know is that she created homemade paper frames for almost all of them, and I don’t think you do that with art you don’t want to be seen. I hope I’m right.
So I’m going to tell you her story…the small parts that I’ve been able to discover…and then let her art tell what I think she wanted the rest of the world to know. I hope she’ll be happy about that, wherever she is now.
After I wrote the first blog about Laura I had a chance to return to the home where I bought the art and dug through piles of ephemera to find a few more of her pieces. The owner of the home had been an antique dealer and he couldn’t remember where or when he’d acquired them, so that was a dead end.
It’s actually because of readers here that I found the first thread…Laura Perea, a patient listed as a resident at the local San Antonio State Hospital Mental Institution in the 1950s census. I wasn’t convinced though until I compared this drawing she did in 1955…
…with a photograph from the San Antonio Express showing female patients outside the hospital and recognized the same unique fire-escape stairs in both.
The news story that accompanied the photograph was a horrifying story of severe overcrowding, understaffing and dehumanization…with one psychiatrist for every 280 patients. And it backs up the images from Laura’s art.
Here is what I know of Laura’s story:
Laura’s paternal grandfather was the first hispanic man ordained as a presbyterian pastor (in 1880) and he had a wild life. He rebelled from his wealthy Catholic upbringing in Mexico, ran away to sail the world for 5 years, searched for gold in California, became a shepherd, a missionary, and supported his school-teacher wife in starting a presbyterian school in New Mexico until the local jesuit priests convinced the children that the schoolhouse was possessed by Satan and that Laura’s grandmother “consulted with the devil” each night. The pair started several churches, but personal tragedy followed them.
Their first 5 children all died before age 10 of various illnesses. Their next oldest had a history of mental illness and when he robbed a drug-goods store at age 18 his parents testified that “insanity in his case was hereditary, having a number of very near relatives confined in asylums”. He was committed to the Territorial Hospital for the Insane in Las Vegas. The newspapers at the time blamed his mother for his insanity because she’d witnessed a run-away accident and saw two of her children die of scarlet fever while she was pregnant which made her son insane. (Jesus, patriarchy.) He was later released, but died soon after in a grisly coal train accident, age 24.
The next oldest child started working as an evangelist for Spanish-speaking people, but by at least 1917 (age 26) he’s listed at the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane in Kentucky, where he remained until his death at age 46 in 1938. His death certificate listed what we’d now recognize as a form of schizophrenia.
The only surviving child to enjoy a successful adult life became a language professor and the registrar at Trinity University (in Waxahachie and later San Antonio). His wife gave birth to their only children, twin girls name Helen and Laura, in 1914. The girls excelled in school and both attended college at Trinity University from 1933-1936. In the newspaper stories Laura was recognized for having the highest grades in her class and she graduated summa cum laude of her university, however neither Laura nor her sister were ever named or photographed in any of their college yearbooks. (Possibly because they were both starting to struggle with their mental health?) In the 1940 census Laura and her sister are 26, and are both residents of the West Texas State Hospital for the Insane in Big Spring.
In 1948, Helen dies by suicide at her parents home.
The 1950 census shows Laura living at the San Antonio State Hospital Mental Institution.
The 1960 census hasn’t been made public yet so her history is largely a blank after that. When her last parent dies in 1982, Laura is the only surviving member of the family and so she should have been the next-of-kin informant on the death certificate, but instead it’s an unrelated man who works for a funeral home, which makes me think Laura may have still been institutionalized.
Laura died here in San Antonio in 1995. No known photographs of herself or her sister exist. She was cremated, location of ashes unknown.
I’ve requested a copy of her death certificate but that can take a long time to arrive.
I reached out to various museums who display outsider art because I want them to be seen and I want her story to heard, but no response. But then someone reminded me that I own a bookstore…and that’s why on May 24th we’re going to have our first (and possibly only) art show, where we’ll be displaying Laura’s art at Nowhere Bookshop. Maybe no one will come. Or maybe someone will see her art and be moved, like I have been. The art will be up all day if you want to stop in, and at 5pm we’ll have a casual reception where we can talk about art and mental health. We can explore the symbolism in each piece. We can recognize the forgotten voices and see how very far we’ve come in the treatment of mental illness, and also how far we still have to go. It’s totally free. Come by.
I tried framing them but they lose some of their magic under a glass, so instead (in true outsider-art style) they’ll be raw and unframed and as tattered as they were when I found them. Because in some ways that tells a story as well. If I can get my shit together I’ll have some prints available for sale, with all profits going to NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Health.
And perhaps by then we’ll have more information. The San Antonio Express will be doing a story about the art, and maybe someone who knew Laura will see it and share what she was like.
It’s an exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks, what makes us who we are?
Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn’t be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can’t shake the sense she’s hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.
It has a great cover that I loved until my kid asked, “What’s that supposed to be?” because they’ve never seen a VHS tape and now I feel old.
While going through their parent’s belongings, three siblings stumble upon a collection of home videos and decide to revisit those happier memories. However, the nostalgia is cut short when one of the VHS tapes reveals a night back in 1999 that none of them have any recollection of. On screen, their father appears covered in blood. What follows is a dead body and a pact between their parents to get rid of it, before the video abruptly ends. Beth, Nicole, and Michael must now decide whether to leave the past in the past or uncover the dark secret their mother took to her grave.
Need more than one book to get through the month? Here are a few new releases I enjoyed:
The Ministry of Timeby Kaliane Bradley – A time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingeniously constructed exploration of the nature of truth and power and the potential for love to change it.
Lore Olympus: Volume 6by Rachel Smythe. This graphic novel love story of two Greek gods—Hades and Persephone—brought to life with lavish artwork and an irresistible contemporary voice is now on volume 6 and I am addicted. Feel free to judge me. I own every volume.
Spitting Goldby Carmella Lowkis – A deliciously haunting debut set in 19th-century Paris , blending gothic mystery with romance as two estranged sisters—celebrated (and fraudulent) spirit mediums—come back together for one last con.
A Haunted Girl– This graphic novel collects the first 4 issues of a paranormal comic about teenage girl struggling with mental illness who is also responsible for the fate of all life on earth. It’s volume one so it’s unfinished, but a promising start.
Yesterday I saw our yard squirrels running in circles in our yard and I said, “Oh my god, those squirrels are fucking nuts” and Victor said, “No, baby, those squirrels are storing nuts” and I laughed much longer than I should have.
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At the bookstore I overheard a woman who dropped her books yell, “Oh hell’s taint!”
It is now my new favorite phrase and I will be using it daily.
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Sharing this drawing on my substack because it’s reminding me that nothing lasts forever and that my depression (that always seems like it will never end) always passes. I’m worth waiting for. So are you.
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It’s May and my xmas tree is still up. New personal record? Not even close.
We had blackouts in our neighborhood every few hours the past few days and so when it all came back on yesterday I spent hours trying to reset everything in the house to get the internet to come back up because Victor is out of town and whenever he leaves things stop working properly and I become accidentally Amish almost immediately. I finally got my computer to work again and decided that I guess I can just live without tv and then I found this on my door this morning.
Pregnancy Calendar at Alpha Mom: Amalah’s week-by-week guide to the miracle of pregnancy and all the various indignities that come with it.
The Mack Files: Digesting life in bite-sized pieces through the lens of clichés, quotes & “truisms”. Often irreverent, always honest.
Barking at the Moon: If your dog is your furry child, you will laugh out loud at Tracy Beckerman’s book about her family & a one-dog wrecking ball named Riley.
Stephen Metcalfe Words: Novels, Screenplays, Stories and Plays that reach around the heart, massage the brain, and usually give a happy ending.
Welcome to xanaru: A mostly funny blog about the quest for happiness through authenticity, Great Danes and indiscriminate swearing. Plus hand-painted, custom artwork on bags, jackets, backpacks & more.
How the Hell Did I Not Know That?: Humorist Lucie Frost shares daily Instagram reels with learnings of the day—words, music, whatever–with plenty of laughs and all the curse words.
Beautiful Writers book: Writers! This coming-of-career memoir (w/ the BEST advice from celeb authors, real shit you haven’t heard) is life. A page-turning beach read doubling as how-to. #Magic
The Dating Days of Marta O: When I told my sister I was building a blog she said: “Do people still read blogs?” I do not know, but if YOU want to read it, here it is. Keep in mind, my stories about dating after 40 are for the brave.
CONNECTED: A Personal Journal for Ketamine Therapy Created by writer & patient Katherine Davis for this powerful clinical treatment. If considering ketamine for major depression, check out this essential tool.
Eye Candy: Ethereal original art and reproductions, streamable painting instruction & art journaling lessons for curious minds. Daydreams & mystics welcome.
Sylvia Shults, author and paranormal reporter: I sit in dark, spooky places so you don’t have to. Check out the award-winning Gone On Vacation: Haunted Zoos, Museums, and Amusement Parks, available in print and ebook.
Cake4Kids: We bake and deliver free birthday cakes to underserved kids who might not otherwise receive one.
Immerse yourself in Marcy Lane’s A Mercy of Widows: A story of love, loss, and legal battles over assisted dying (MAID) laws in Canada. This gripping debut is a finalist in the 2023 Wishing Shelf Book Awards for fans of heartfelt, humorous, and humane tales of life’s toughest choices.
