It is hot today.
 

The Summers in Joshua Tree are notorious.  The dry heat saps your strength.  Your will to succeed.
But this is where Linda and I have ended up.  We are artists, city bred and trained.  We did not move here because things were going well.  But the damnedest things happen.  Just when you think you've reached the end of the (dirt) road, well you can either pack it in or set out across the fields on foot.  We didn't care that the fields were full of cactus and snakes.
 

I moved out here because there was nowhere left to go.  Linda followed me about a year later.  Actually, I found recovery from my ills here, and knew Linda was struggling horribly in LA.  There was a cabin near me that was for rent and I thought of her.  Cheap rent, lots of space, and solitude of the kind you only dream of in big cities.  I told Ruth about Linda, and she said to bring her out and show her the place.  That's right, Ruth Denison.  The grand matriarch of Vipassana Meditation.  The woman I had run to when things were beyond repair.  Landlord of the sick and feeble mind, she (and AA) had cured me of my obsession to drink and stew in the unresolvable grimness of the past.  Perhaps Linda would have  similar luck.  But that's not what was on my mind.  If Linda didn't get out of LA and into someplace safe she would probably be dead within the week.
 

The following are the recollections of my brief sojourn with Linda Carmella Sibio.  She is unlike anyone I have ever known, and I like to think I've known them all.  Her art is magnificent.  Her ability to work for endless hours on the most demanding of tasks is matchless.  She is capable of intense love and joy. 
 

She is also the most tortured human being I've ever met.
 

I lived with her for two years in a cabin in Echo Park, an artist community near downtown LA, and it nearly killed me.  I landed in the hospital twice before I had the sense to seek the cactus fields.  Why, you ask, would living with someone cause such a near catastrophe?
 

Well for one, I'm an alcoholic.
 

And Linda is schizophrenic.
 

And the two together, unchecked and unaided, are a recipe for disaster.
 

Nonetheless, I have recovered sufficiently to start Omencity and return to my music career, and Linda through it all hasn't stopped producing art.  She tells me that she simply can't not do it.  It is her only link to whatever sanity she can manufacture through the skewered view of reality that bombards her senses daily.  New medications have helped to a very noticeable degree, but lingering only a half-a-breath away is that eternal sinkhole filled with in-the-flesh hallucinations of intractable phantoms performing the most insane and barbaric mindfucks ever conceived by God and his grandest creation: Nature.
 

And so it seems I have recovered enough of my courage to journey back into the grim past of mine and pull out some of the memorable and interesting moments of my life with Linda.  It's the least I can do for someone who, it has turned out, was the guiding and intractable force behind my Phoenix rising once again, and this time, it would seem, to rise from my own ashes for one final go at this crazy thing called life.
 

So begins the story of a girl who discovered that there is ART in MADNESS.
 

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