mae west #2: blood in the water

My previous Mae West collage is the most popular image in my Flickr stream, by a huge margin. So I thought I'd make another one. The medium is cut-paper collage postcard. Mae West is in the dress bedecked with ermine tails that she wore in the movie "Klondike Annie." Her arms are replaced by those of Vin Diesel, from "xXx." The shark inside her diving helmet is a mako.

For those of you who're curious about what Mae West is covering up, it's a page from my journal of nearly 30 years ago. At the time, I was doing neurophysiology research in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the following, "slice prep" refers to a complicated setup for keeping alive a slice from the brain of a rat (killed humanely, of course). Bob is my husband, Ray was the head of the lab, and Dr. Bayer was a therapist I left behind when I moved from Houston. The page reads:

"I had awful nightmares last night, scenes of blood and violence. I was working to get the slice prep going, and sharks foraged in waist-deep murky water. They found the corpse of a small child who had died there, and they picked the bones clean. Ray and myself and the grad student Steve, we had to throw the bones out in the hallway before going back to work. . . My dream indicates that I am worried that my anger is eating me up, despite the surface level of insouciance. (Ray and I sitting on the counter, swinging our legs just inches above the bloody water, waiting for the frenzy to be over so we could go about our business.) Bob has observed that I haven't really thrown myself into my work, that I am resisting it, fighting it somehow. I think I am fighting the reality of this time. I don't want it to be real that I'm not Dr. Bayer's patient anymore. It's too much. It threatens to strangle me. It comes like the shark, whose initial bite is felt as a strange, thudding, pulling sensation. And then you look down, and your leg is gone, and you wait to be eaten alive. You wait for death. If I'm not with him (in him, of him), then I'm not the person I was. And therefore I'm dead. The sharks feed on my mangled corpse. The new 'me' goes on with her life."

The last sentence on the page ends with "...Chapel Hill called 'This Side of Heaven.')"

I don't know if this counts as an art journal page, or not...