Saving Pieces

Loaded the Goat Head in Glenn's car for the trip to St. Paul. Linda liked the piece. Good that some pieces from the Wrack Show will find a home. I'm taking the Calder piece and several of the balls: bowling ball, Barbie Ball, a few others. A kind of sadness that things end. Most of the sticks are in my woodshed, through the summer I'll bow-saw them into stove wood, reminded, next fall, every time I start a fire. Nine months to collect, four days to install, four days to dress (a set, in theater, is dressed after it's installed), open for five months. Tuesday past, we deconstructed the damned thing in three hours, a pile of sticks, no longer an installation. Brought home most of the burnable material in two truck loads. Ephemeral. New show for the main gallery arrived Wednesday, Along Water Street, started installing on Thursday, will finish tomorrow, new show for the Richards gallery (where dwelt the River Sticks) to install next week. Still a fair amount of detritus among the debris, what I thought I meant. You clear up space as you move along, what you thought you meant. What happens is private, check the record. Favor a damaged digit and you usually injure it again, so I'm watching a new thumb nail grow. At the end of the next day now, and the main gallery is installed. No labels yet but we'll get them up before opening Tuesday morning. Needed poster board for mounting them and you can't buy poster board on Good Friday. Still, we won't need to work Monday as we had long projected we would. Small mercies. Linda sent a copy of Emily's letters, excellent reading. Dog showed up yesterday or the day before, with a bright orange shock collar, having escaped her confines. Glenn tried to lure her away yesterday morning but she's back last night and this morning. Has a phone number on her collar and I tried to call, no answer, so I feed her some table scraps in a greasy skillet. Tonight she gets a fried bologna sandwich. I had a couple for dinner, with sliced sweet onions, so good you remember things that never happened. Davenport said somewhere he lived on fried bologna sandwiches and they sounded good. I'll have them again, for Easter supper: a performance piece, played at the island, reading the Apocrypha out loud, a section from Judith, drinking Irish whiskey, eating bar food. Too bad the film crew has gone home. The movie opens with this older guy, thinning stringy hair, work clothes, he looks a lot like me, slicing off a slice of bologna from the mother loaf, making some radial cuts on the slice, so it won't curl out of hand, slapping it into a skillet, sizzle on the soundtrack. Next he prepares an onion, peeling and slicing it carefully. In a small bowl, he mixes mayonnaise with Arby's horseradish sauce, some mustard. He slathers sour dough slices with the mixture, slaps on a sizzling slab of meat, arranges onions so that they cover everything, sprinkles on lots of black pepper. (First morels, and I have them, fried in butter, on toast points.) He sits at the island and there is a rock he uses to hold the holy book open. He slices the sandwich in half, gets a drink, Jameson, neat. He eats the sandwich while he reads the opening of Judith, an engineering marvel, and then he rolls a smoke, turns to the camera, and asks -what next?- Glenn set me up with a file and a system to work on a manuscript and several other things that I didn't know how to do. Comes right down to it, I'm the doofus, I need help, and medication. Allopathic, homeoepathic, ridge-based or whatever, the crows were waiting for me at the lake. They know I slow and roll the window down, attentive to what might unfold, and they conspired together. I'm not being paranoid when I say they acted in unison. Crows are smart. Generally speaking, the natural world is a better construct, birds sing, there is relative silence, you can find yourself in a space -time thing, searching madly for a handle. What he thought about what he thought about what he thought we were saying. Him and the horse he rode in on. Why would he be immediately objective? The crows dictate that I park my truck exactly there. I suspect that's merely because they want to shit on my vehicle, and give them that option, and they cover my truck with shit. Did I mention I wasn't good at avoiding stumps along the way? So when I notice something it is worthy of note, the fox, whatever. listen, there was this guy at Janitor College, I never trust anyone with three names: Frank John James. He so didn't fit the profile. Imagine, instead, something else. Someone else, almost you, what do you do with that?