Poke Shoots

A great dinner of poke shoots and scrambled eggs with salsa, fried salt-pork, toast. You can take the boy of the country. I'm usually on my feet most of the day, but the last four or five work days have been excessive. Had to get all the packing boxes out of the back hall, six elevator loads, then carry them, 42 feet, around obstacles, stack them in the pedestal storage room. Hanging the part of the show that needed to be hung, we worked our way around the gallery. Always a huge amount of math involved with hanging elements, and I forget, between installations, that I can do it so well. It's simple math, only rarely complex, and I consciously tap a short-term number trick I learned at an early job (16 years old) when I was a "counter" on a crew that inventoried stores. I compute with a pad and a pencil and call out the numbers very quickly, and call them out to D, then immediately forget them, if you asked for the number again I'd have to recompute, but if you want to be fast with simple numbers, you really have to forget quickly. We did our magic, hanging, and goddamn we are good at this. We discuss questionable attachments in a language few could understand. There are several trips to the hardware store. A show like this, where the pieces are prepared for installation by the artists, is a comedy show of jury-rigging. Two pieces, by the same guy, we're going to secure with a dowel up their ass, which means drilling a pedestal top, which means repair and filling, but not really a big deal, considering the wedding reception and the value of the pieces. Potters are very bad, some of them, when it comes to figuring where the load is carried. These two large pieces stand on very small bases and in one case the base isn't in exactly the right place. Sara tells me there will be no drinking at this reception, and that's good news, but top-heavy Fragile items scare me. A possible tombstone, HE USED A LOT OF MUSEUM WAX. That'll keep them guessing. Finally did something I'd been meaning to do, the pampas grass, across the parking lot, had retained all of last year's stalks, and I wondered what the growth pattern was. So I walked over there and poked around, shoots, of course, uniform in rank, and I thought this was probably an umbel of pampas grass, where multiple shoots shoot off a common root-like thing. I remember looking it up, much the same as you might remember a movie. (I take out as many words as I leave in.) This small forest of pampas grass, that will rivet next fall, the way those Kroger birds will, if nothing, carry a certain weight, The Golden Rotor. Hey, I was just joking.