i often feel embarrassed when i reach out to someone and get no response. a non-response happens much more often than a response so i'd better get used to it, but i never do. i just found out someone was back in town i broke the connection with a couple years ago due to him announcing he was a trumper. i saw that he had a show here and then looked him up in the white pages and saw he had moved back from lalaland. i never thought they'd do that, though he never seemed to belong in l.a. last time i saw him i was still a drunk, and was probably freshly sober when we ceased to communicate. i have a lot of his paintings and a few sculptures. i hadn't looked in some time and suddenly was curious to see his new work and i like it, which was hard to reconcile with some of the hateful stuff he said about blacks and immigrants. i guess we're complex beings. there's a gentle quality to his work, and to him, but a severe quality as well. he never spoke about feelings, or dreams, to me, but he conveyed his anger readily. that was something we did, i did too, and as long as we were angry about the same things we got on ok, though conversations were pretty exhausting. and when he went fully over the hate line with trump i could no longer converse. how do you talk around that? anger would just go straight to hate. my anger was not that kind, and my anger was hard enough to carry around. i can't imagine the weight of trumpian hate. and the gentleness of the artwork vents none of that hate. 
so i sent a note to the gallery, and i think there will be no reply, and that's ok, i wanted to say i still like the art, and acknowledge his relocation, secretly i suppose i hoped he had had a sea change by the time he left l.a.
anyway i'm glad to think about it now and not feel hurt so much or angry, i feel kind of sad, like now it's just the kind of sadness that underlies my anger about so much of the production of this world. but i still like his art, and i wonder, will his art ever mirror his anger? i think his art is a refuge from the anger he feels in the angry trumpian world. and trumpianism is no refuge, no sanctuary, no life, the dearth of earth and art.