Changing Gears

Need to step it up a notch for the next several weeks. In Boston, a couple of weeks before the next opera, we'd put in 100 hour weeks, pull out all the stops AND still do good work. Always that edge. Doesn't mean as much if you work extremely long, hard, hours and turn out crap. You have to assemble the right crew. There were times that we were brilliant, and not that many screw-ups, considering the scope of what we were doing. Ms. Caldwell was generous with her diet pills. We ate well. We had a courier who brought us gold-seal hash from the middle east. One scene I remember, the orchestra was rehearsing and we couldn't do anything, make any noise, and my crew were all sleeping in the aisles of the theater, it looked like there had been a mass murder (and the music played on) in the darkened house. The number of impossible things we figured out how to do in less than a day, and the really impossible things that might take as long as a week: building an armature, sculpting, painting, and erecting a 25 foot high statue of Pallas Athena; for which we had to dismantle a pipe organ, to, you know, clear the niche. Normal day, things are going along fine, and then at the end there's a plumbing disaster. The fate of the janitor is to deal with shit. It's good to spend some time in a diary barn, consider the product, consider the circumstance. Consider pork. Fuck Leviticus. Prohibition against what? The people will not be denied, they'll god-damn well cook it up in the bathtub, or run it through the radiator of a dead 35 Buick. One way or another. No one has died from eating pork for a very long time. The solution is that we grow bunch-grass or Jerusalem Artichokes in the median, on the interstates, and use that to fuel the next generation. We need to more fully understand what happens when light strikes a surface. We need to be more efficient. Speaking for myself, I waste almost all of my energy, a black hole of what I might have been, who knows, maybe this is time well-spent. Real lessons are layered under levels of consideration. Sedimentary, Watson. Yes, yes, but was she fully settled? I wrack my brain for an answer.