Aesthetically Impaired

You hear some really stupid things in an art museum, offset by the occasional brilliant aside. Most common dumb thing is -I could do that- which, of course, is precisely not true. First you have to have the idea, then you have to have your tool-kit together and know how to use it. Rarely does anything come without hard work and sacrifice. The nature of the beast. Sanded and painted, D on the road, collecting Functional Ceramics. The Main Street group that used our kitchen this past weekend left things cleaner than they were when they started. This has never happened to me before. I tie up a bag of food trash and put in a larger bag, because the garbage doesn't go out until Thursday, that's it. Check to see if everything is returned to the proper place, and it is, they are. A hillbilly couple were in the main gallery, I'd come out of the kitchen, from washing a paintbrush, going to get a chocolate Kisses from the dish Bev keeps stocked at the front desk. The couple had a boy-child, and the father had him shouldered, straddling his right shoulder, a hand pressing the kid to his head so he wouldn't fall. Didn't look safe to me, but the kid was very happy, beating daddy's head with his hands, and his clavicle with feet. They were all standing in front of Aminah's most abstract piece, cloth glued on paper, and they liked it, the flow, thought it looked like a creek. Aesthetics is where you find it. I'm pretty sure it's not comic books that become video games that become movies. Story is critical, no matter how abstracted. Remember reading those Barthleme stories in The New Yorker. The nature of reality changed, a 7.5 on the Ritcher, I never saw things the same after that. The nature of truth is called into question, the nature of fiction. Since janitors are assumed to be deaf, I'm in the unique position to hear what people say. I'm a cynic to begin with, and nothing I hear changes that, people out of work, birds waking me up in the middle of the night, fires. I'm perfectly prepared to talk about what I look at, the things that interest me. I really don't care about anything else.