Saturday Staff

Deserted town. No one everywhere, but Kroger. Run a few errands before work. Last four hours of the Wrack Show. I take a chair out and sit in the middle of it, read one of the Steven Havill, Posadas Novels. He's a good writter, his characters are very good, plotting is excellent. When people come in the gallery I tell them I'm baby-sitting. Below the floodwall, down on the first terrace, which is often flooded, there's a bloom of benthic growth, bright green and scary. Benthos is the bottom, the bed, right up through the littoral, great word I heard some geologist use when they were dredging Sesuit Harbor, mid-seventies maybe, the same day I found my first at-latl (there's another word that suffers many different spellings) weight, a whale fluke in basalt, with notched decoration. You remember days like that and that word was part of it. Museum actually very quiet today, treated myself to a tray of sushi, and medicated with wasabe. I spot mopped, cleaning muddied areas from the recent rains. Had this extended fantasy today, while mopping, took several forms, one was a One Man Show, where the Janitor is discovered on stage, mopping, talking about his experiences; then it morphed into the opera I might like to try with Barnhart, where the Janitor sings of his lost loves, and they appear, as visions or flashbacks or bad dreams, which would allow rounding out the cast and, of course, a chorus. I'm most interested, right now, in creating a cohesive manuscript, feel good about it, I see where it might go, some things it might do, but I don't want to stop writing you, and I only have so much time. I parse it out, I juggle. Time disappears. Someone I don't know questions my tense. They have no idea what I actually wrote. I won't let this become a problem but it is common. I am not me, and you are not you, get used to it. Fucking hit me, the bifurcation, the way we split at that watershed, the way the one thing was circling the wagons, holding the family close, and the other was learning from experience. A frick doesn't work, if frack is fucking with you. You have to bring out the big guns. First thing you know there are bodies, you have to deal with them. I know what everyone wanted to say, it was always my talent, I knew what you wanted to say, before you said it. Lose it in the backwash, it was nothing, anyway, what they thought they were doing.