Wearing Hats

I wore a great many hats today, filling my pathic and empathic functions. D dumped a bunch of data from his old main-frame onto his lap-top, then upgraded the computer in the office where I'm set-up to write. Not my office, but the office for Pegi's new assistant , when that new hire happens. I've been talking with Pegi about it, needs to happen, she needs help. And the result is that I'm working on a much faster machine. D calls it a dinosaur, but it's like a hundred times faster than my dial-up on the ridge. Felt a very strong connection with Paul, who drove down and over from Pennsylvania with Roberta, to talk about the Carter Collection; we talked mostly about water use and wood, but touched a lot of bases. I liked Roberta a lot too, I love bright women. I'm going to propose that I visit them, cook a meal, spend a night drinking and talking. I really enjoyed them. D walked something over to John's print shop and on his way back, walking through the alley, discovered one of the basement windows broken. This was a bank, this was really thick glass, behind bars, someone really wanted to break it. We revue our options. On the inside, this particular window jamb is almost inaccessible; when the weather is warmer I could get to it, but not now. So we agree that what we need is an outside temporary repair. This is tricky ground, where the temporary becomes permanent. D buys a sheet of tile substrate, they all have cute names, but they are durable and cut with a circular saw. He gets some concrete chalk, which is also cementitious and will bound perfectly with both the backer and the jamb. The back side of the backer board looks just like the limestone slabs that face the building. This temporary repair just became permanent. When I can get to it, I'll insulate the back, but this gap, 18 inches by 54 inches, at grade, in a shaded alley, was pouring cold air into the basement. We fixed that. We did some other things. I stood D to a pint, after work, so we could map out the week ahead, won't see him again until a week from tomorrow, when we do the floors. I've got to ship a show out, in the mean time, and a list of other chores. Never a boring moment. I elected to go back to the ridge because of the mud. There is nothing worse than two inches of slush over a frozen substrate. Where you slip and fall. We can laugh about that now. Read more...

Reconsidering

The fact that I'm a virtual hermit, that I hate almost all artifice. I do love Art Nouveau, though, and a lot of things that really straight people would consider camp. I don't like small dogs nor a whiney quality in anyone's response to anything. My standards are a joke. A parrot and a Rabbi go into a bar. I often mean more than I say. Dendritic drainage. Take time to draw a flow chart and it resembles the roots of a tree. Brownian motion. The edge always resembles the edge ever finer. Patterns. If you travel with a magnifying glass, as I do, and examine the edges, you begin to see patterns. I found a perfect portrait of Elvis recently, in a tortilla. I ate it quickly, because, frankly, I didn't want the traffic. This stint in town, what I realize, is that I can be alone anywhere. You, maybe, knew that, but I wasn't sure. Isolation is important to me, because it allows me to think about things. Stare into the middle distance. Intrinsically, I'm not sure anything actually signifies. Meaning is a can of worms. But I like losing myself in the middle distance. Everything sounds like a Bach progression and the light is perfect. Keep your hands at your side and listen. Back to the ridge tomorrow. A good day, today, walked to the library and liquor store. Lunch at the pub. A bit of banter with a couple of people I know well enough to talk to. Chili in the crock pot generates (rather, holds) all the moisture, so I added a can of crushed navy beans. Excellent. D set his computer up for me to watch some TV on Hulu, where you can see five episodes of almost anything. I found I could read and watch, so went through most of the shows that people had mentioned to me, over the years. I watched stuff for a day-and-a-half. Then got very bored. I never really watched more than a few hours a week. If I had cable I could wile away a few hours watching cooking shows and The History Channel. Mostly I read and stare off into space. I spend a lot of time writing paragraphs. Some of them take a long time, with many diversions. This morning, looking at the altered furniture in the upstairs gallery got me thinking about chairs, so at the library I got a history of chairs. The book Neil sent, "Mechanization Takes Command" also takes an interesting look at furniture generally, but chairs in particular. In my current state (one in which I study things closely) reading about chairs seems about right. Having the library nearby is very cool. Reading about cast iron stoves, now, too. Rumford. Another guy, Philo Penfield Stewart, one of the founders of Oberlin College, developed a stove (he ended up building 90,000 of them, "Oberlins", and they helped to fund the college). Technology was slow developing, because the guys that built stoves weren't engineers. Rumford and Stewart developed prototypes of the modern range. I've used so many wood-fired stoves that I can follow the language and schematics with attention to detail. Engages me for an entire afternoon. Over to the pub, again, for a draft Guinness, at Happy Hour, where I ignore conversation, smile, happily, over certain smoke chases and damper arrangements. I'm a cheap date. Back at the museum, I eat another bowl of the thickened and improved chili, with saltines, smeared with an herbed butter, and hot pickled pepper slices. It's very good, a transport, actually, and then I write you, which pretty much fills the time remaining. Usually, when I start writing, that place I'm in, remembering, doesn't allow a serious interruption until a final period. Increasingly, I leave part of a paragraph in limbo, go back later, make some changes, correct the flow, alter the time-line. It's all non-fiction. But even the next day I can seldom remember what actually happened. I make a show of it, present evidence, but I don't really know what happened. This is the problem, of course, with history, it's just another lie. Read more...

Movement

Duchamp probably saw Muybridge photographs. Muybridge got the idea from the frenchman E. J. Marey. It had become necessary to accurately depict movement through time. The assembly line was just around the corner. Already existed, in primitive form. Modern assembly line starts in the meat packing plants in Cincy,1870. Pigs on tracks. Even earlier, though hardly modern, was the biscuit bakery for the British Navy at Deptford, 1833. Having high speed internet and more than one computer really puts a spring in my step. Fairly sure the mend to the roof is good, similar weather conditions to when the new leak leaked and no leakage. Steady filling all three humidifiers, struggling to get the humidity up into the range to which we're committed. Not so important (it's always important) for the shows now, but the Mid-Western Modernism show specifies temp and moisture levels. I can tell, fairly closely, what the relative humidity is by how quickly my mopping evaporates. Often, in winter, first thing in the morning, when I first fill the units, I'll wet mop the floor with plain water, to give the level a boost. Side-tracked up to the roof, to watch the snow melt one last time before everything re-freezes. Then watching the re-freezing. A tongue or finger of water develops a skin, which stops movement, then things solidify. Watching anything, I'm amazed at the gaps in my knowledge, by the unanswered questions. Iron filings, for instance, and the interference of a magnet, becomes form and design. The language of phenomena. Seems anti-entropic. But I've read Maxwell and I know I'm wrong. Art, though, is not science, and Duchamp, breaks on through, to the other side. Movement depicted in a single frame. Not a simple parlor trick. Then too, modernism bows to the primitive, Braque and Picasso, visiting those caves, where the process of 'over-drawing', year after year, also depicts movement in a single frame. Vaucanson is an interesting dude, that duck was amazing; Jacquard and his loom. Their work adumbrates the punch card and computers. Count Rumford, a notorious Tory, and a genius, invented a stove that re-circulated hot gases from a wood stove, around the oven, before expelling them out the flue, for a soup kitchen he ran in Munich. An ingenious inventor, with his regulated cast iron plates, invented the modern oven. Also 'green', in that he saw no profit in wasting heat. I've always loved him, because his fireplace was such an improvement over the Franklin Stove. From arcane texts he developed an algorithm involving depth and width of fire and the size of the flue. Solving for three unknowns. Mostly it's poets that can do that, or pregnant mothers. Read more...

Alone Again

I spend a great many holidays alone. It doesn't mean anything, just that most other people are busy and I hate to intrude. Today I read "The Best American Essays of the Century" and a book by Roy Blount, Jr. "Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard". Fixed a fine crock pot of chili and took a long walk in a deserted town. That pretty much used up the day. Everything was closed, of course, and I spent most of the walk looking closely at architectural detail. A light snow this morning and I was able to go up on the roof and examine the repair to the EPDM membrane. No sign of leakage. Out of the blue I remember Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts "God' Man", one of the first graphic novels, I used to own a copy but I haven't seen it in years. Remember a quote by Satre, about Genet (probably in "Saint Genet") about elegance being the quality that transforms the greatest amount of being into appearing. Can't help a certain quotient of retrospection. The lean and leather years, the number of xmases holed up with a good book, steady feeding wood to a fire. Finding a range of comfort in situations that most others would find very uncomfortable indeed. Neil sent along an interesting book, I got it at the mailbox on the ridge yesterday: "Mechanization Takes Command". The writing, I think, is fairly dreadful, condescending and asinine, but the subject matter is really interesting, redeems the book (1948!) especially the section on The Mechanization Of The Bath. I might yet write a history of shit. A subject about which, I find, I know a great deal. Ending my outside-job-working-career as a janitor in an art museum continues to be instructive on that subject. The less said. But I had an experience recently that had D apologizing that he hadn't been there to help me with the mess. Nice of him to say that, but it was fine, I'm not offended by bodily function. Too many animals, too many years. When you've had your arm stuck to the shoulder up a goat's ass, trying to correct a potential breech birth, changing a diaper isn't a problem. And to extend that thought, dealing with art, everyone is a critic. One man's waste is another man's mortar, or fuel, or whatever. Hardware you might need to hang a door, some cable you could use as a windlass. Just saying. A degree in technical theater or a few years at Janitor College might almost prepare you, but the world is a rocky place, mostly you learn it off the road. A dirt-bike spinning out of control. Listen. First thing you have to do is listen, to determine where you are. Right, the Flats seem to say one thing, but mean another, 5. Glenn, you have to help me out. Nothing makes any sense. Read more...

Ridge Report

Nice to be back in Arial 10. Need to go back to the museum tomorrow for a couple more days, and not just because more snow is forecast, but in my new capacity as Night Watchman. Seems our whole security system is essentially non-existent, and until it's resurrected and improved, next week, Pegi will sleep better if I'm there. We need for Pegi to be well-rested. Market Street was closed early for the holiday, and good for them, so we had to get coffee at Starbucks. There was still some coffee in my travel mug and the lady asked me if I wanted her to rinse it out. God no, I said, it's like a sour dough starter, I never rinse it out, it's what makes my coffee what it is. She looked at me curiously. Years ago, when they built the new high school we salvaged a carton of paper, 1200 mother sheets, 38 x 28 inches, but the cardboard carton had broken and the whole heavy thing had become aggressively floppy. It needed to be removed from the basement into D's truck, he can use it for dozens of books, and it's in my way. We slid a piece of plywood under it today, and got the damned thing into his truck. Also a very heavy, stainless steel drying rack, top of the line. We salvaged a huge amount of stuff when they moved into the new high school. A treasure trove. I'm teaching myself to become a graffiti artist, using paste pottery glaze as a medium (I have two cases of the stuff); I'm just doing large letters now, but I hope very soon to advance into pictographs. Herbert Senn could draw a nearly perfect capital Bodoni 'B' freehand. Try that at home. The really good painters I've known, it was all in the stroke. Fully charge the brush, Helen would say, and she would proceed to paint an entire Acanthus leaf in a single stroke. Sidetracks are often the message. I was going somewhere: right, the ridge. Did a few things at the museum, got rid of the paper, and I could then re-stack the pedestals, a little more space is all. Had to get dog food (Sherpa Carries Dog Food For Reality Show Host's Poodle On Their Attempt Of Everest) to the ridge. Needed to get home. Then I had to examine that and wonder what 'home' meant. Then think about what meant meant. Loops to get caught on. Without 4-wheel drive, I couldn't even get into the bottom of the driveway, so I parked in the mailbox pull-out. Probably safe enough, though I could get side-swiped if two vehicles passed there, long odds. Slog up the hill, with dog food and groceries in my back pack, another bag of dog food in my left hand, my mop-handle walking stick in my right, crampons, of course, stopping to admire the view. And the view, my god, black stick trees against a glaring white. It's stunning. This is my world. This is where I want to be, I just need to focus more attention on making it easier. The first take. Then the second take when I realize how fucking cold I am, and I need to start cutting wood now, for next winter. Talk about vacillate. I'm back in long-underwear, with jeans, a sweatshirt, fleece bathrobe and watch-cap, and happy as a stuck pig. Don't get me started on that. Camus on the killing floor. What is 'happy' and what is 'as'? Dog is crazy, running in circles, I feed her, to stop her antics. Get a drink, roll a smoke, consider my down pallet on the floor. Read more...

Distancing Myself

Standing outside with D, having a smoke, talking about bookbinding, and especially that final moment in making a hard-bound, when you 'tip' the finished insides into the finished case. The most difficult step. I go get the mail and there's a small package from Glenn and Linda, a handmade book from Florence. Bound in some very thin leather, it is a perfectly made object, flawless, tipped perfectly into the case. An older guy, Linda said, not a word of English, and this book represents a life-long apprenticeship. Exquisite. Craftsmanship tells. It's always a joy to see something so well made. A cold, clammy, windy day, much more uncomfortable than many days colder, and just when I'm about to leave for home, it starts spitting snow pellets. Without 4-wheel drive, I have to postpone return to the ridge. Tomorrow promises some sun and I must get out there, if only for a few hours. I may spend the holiday in town. Snow forecast. Loose ends at the museum, cleaning some truly awful things out of the fridge, hauling trash to the dumpster, mopping salt-encrusted floors. D joined me for a beer after work and we discussed plans for the weekend. His family is all close around, and there's a schedule; mine involves a trip to the library, making a pot of chili, and reading. I did my family thing at Thanksgiving. It's difficult to explain my attitude toward holidays, I love my family and my friends, and I'm comfortable around them, but I dislike crowds and mouthing platitudes. Pegi said I was welcome to stay at the Cirque studio, where, in the basement, there's a TV with cable; and I might go over there, watch a movie or some sporting event, the History Channel or something. Or I might just walk beneath the floodwall, examining wrack, I don't need reason for what I do, but there probably is one, buried somewhere. Reason enough. The fact that D was surprised I knew the name of the pass the Greeks were defending is surprising to me. I've not seen the movie but I know my history. Be it ever such a fiction, a matter of record, if you choose to believe anything. Fortunately my name is Thomas and I can doubt everything. Peeping, even. Read more...

Roof Work

Just above freezing, a new dusting overnight, but we've narrowed down the general area where the leak must be, so D and I on the roof, sweeping away debris. With a large push-broom D urges the the last of the melt-water to the scuppers. We leave it to dry, busy ourselves with other chores until after lunch. An excellent tomato bisque. Back on the roof, he amazingly finds what we think (process of elimination) is the leak: a glue failure on the flashing around a vent. A tough repair in this weather, but we actually have an EPDM mastic that is factory spec for application in damp cold conditions. It must be massaged into flexibility, easily achieved with a disposable plastic putty knife on a piece of scrap matt board. The repair itself takes five minutes. Probably too good to be true, but we are ever hopeful, and besides, we haven't spent a dime. Worth a shot. D has web work to do, and I have to clean the theater and mop where road salt has tracked footprints inside. My Fantail Loop is the agent of change. I'm ready to go home, early, when Pegi asks me to please stay one more night, as a wintery mix of precipitation is due and she wants to be sure the roof repair will hold. OK, I tell her, I'll stay in the heated museum one more night, with hot and cold running water, and the pub just across the way, twist my arm. D leaves a little early, since I'm staying, because he and Carma are supposed to go view a dead person (I don't understand many religious customs) and Pegi and Trish are both staying a little late to balance numbers for the final report on a grant. I lock up and go to the pub for a pint, banter with the staff and owners, and when I get back, the museum is empty and quiet. Take a sponge bath at the kitchen sink, doctor the various cracks on my fingertips, take a smoke break outside, then retire to the seclusion of an upstairs office where I read an interesting article about earth-like planets in other solar systems. Seemed like a good day to me, although maybe I didn't suffer enough, I didn't split any wood and I was never really cold; hell, I'm not even wearing long underwear. A cruise in the Bahamas. Elide from one thing to another. A choppy style, until you catch the rhythm. Then it's purely jazz, a couple of notes, then an off-beat thing, then a cow-bell, Mickey Hart on drums, and then the theme returns. Not unlike Wagner. Music is a game, as words are, as life is, really. Note what I mean by game. Lives at issue. Three kids killed in a fire, a school bus overturned, that hard line where friends die by their own hand. Read more...

About Town

Forgive me, for I have signed. Up early, and it's not as cold, mid-twenties maybe. Pegi asked me to stay, in case a new leak recurred. Make a pot of coffee, wash my hair and shave in a warm bathroom, then walk over to Market Street for a breakfast wrap, which they do there in some style. I've measured, inside where the water was actually dripping, though with roof leaks this information is notoriously useless, especially in roofs that are EPDM membranes. Still, one needs a place to start. To further complicate the search, the immediate area, above, where the leak drips, below, is in a space comprised of "crickets" (built up sections of underlayment) that direct water toward a scupper (a hole in the parapet) so that it might escape. I spend several hours, to no avail, looking for a crack or hole or flashing failure. Lunchtime I go over to the pub for a pint and something to eat. They serve Shepherd's Pie on the weekend and reduce the price on Monday to get rid of the left-overs. Huge hot bowl of meat and vegetables with a mashed potato crust. I eat myself into a coma for 5 bucks. After lunch I walk over to the library, then down below the berm and floodwall at Glover Street and along the banks of the Ohio. A pair of muskrats in a debris filled eddy, not as elegant as otters, but plenty interesting to watch. I'm squatted on the riverbank, watching them frolic, under the new bridge, at the edge of a small parking lot where there's a kid's playground, and a city cop drives up, wonders what I'm doing there. I point out the muskrats, roll him a smoke, he squats and watches them with me for a few minutes. We talk about night-fishing for catfish, strickly catch-and-release, you can't eat bottom feeders when the bottom is toxic sludge, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the contest. Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie. I'd better go, next thing you know I'm eating Bambi. Read more...

Caught Out

The Freedom of Information act could get some janitors killed. Must be the internet, but my understanding was that all the records had been destroyed. To have it thrown back in my face now is quite a shock. That damned Barnhart is a ferret when it comes to search engines. I was at the Lamasery Lavatory Complex when the shit hit the fan. That much is true. But it was at Podoisk, not Potala. A great deal of time and money was spent on that ruse, despite the fact that Mary and I had both assured everyone that a cover-up would never work, the stink was just too great. Podoisk was where Lenin liked to meet his cronies, some agency got wind of something going on, and as there was a very good school there, offering graduate courses in Frozen Pipes and Composting Under Adverse Conditions. The Cold War going on, but there was still an exchange of information. We were inserted in the guise of simple Mid-Western students. As I'm the only one left alive, for the record, I feel the need to set things straight. When the "dirty bomb" went off, I was several miles away, looking for my glasses, in a sod hut, where, two afternoons a week, I'd meet a lovely Latvian exchange student, Greta, and we'd attempt sex under the weight of several bearskins. Movement was impossible and we often just talked about old movies. Because the sod huts were dug into the ground, when the explosion happened, I was several feet below grade, on my hands and knees. Everything at ground level was swept away. A day later, huddled under a bearskin and turf, I signaled a chopper, within days I was back in Iowa, told never to say anything to anyone. My life as a spy. Read more...

Final Performance

A zoo. During the celebration after, I stationed myself in the center of the main gallery, to prevent young kids from caroming off the walls. Too many sweets. One stopped toilet upstairs (a wad of toilet paper the size of my head) and a case of projectile vomiting in the Ladies Room on the ground floor. I was, early in my career, used to cleaning vomit. My first job, after Janitor College, was at the medical school, Long Island University, and when the students started their first dissections there was a lot of vomiting. I had a one year contract, to fill in for the long time janitor, Thorvald Isaacson, who had taken a sabbatical to study Organic Chemistry in Uppsala, Sweden. He was a wonderful fellow, a mentor of sorts, that I had met at a Janitor Conference where he had delivered a paper on protein binders. He had a taste for strong liquor. The lurid reports of his death as a terrorist bombing were finally put to rest when it came to light that he had built a still in the basement of the Chemistry Lab and the fumes from his triple-run apple brandy had ignited from the propane burner he was using to fire the operation. He was a smart guy, so I figure there was a ventilation failure, he was often drunk, and probably wouldn't notice, three sheets to the wind, a simple electrical outage. How do they generate electricity in Sweden anyway? Raindeer farts? At any rate, I kept the job for four years, and would have been tenured, but I couldn't stand dealing with hacked apart cadavers. Fucking students would leave body parts everywhere; and besides, I had my own interests by then, my first major paper, "Gender Differences In Treatment Of Public Bathrooms", and a grant that would send me to Japan. The ephemeral nature of things. In hindsight I probably should have just stayed on as an adjunct mopping instructor. But I had aspirations. Aspirations are the kiss of death. History isn't memory, it's a complete fiction, I can't even remember yesterday. Read more...

Marginally Better

Start a day with a couple of hours shoveling heavy wet snow, and breaking up the ice underneath where people have walked and the rest of the day is a piece of cake. Pegi had a performance tonight and two tomorrow, she asks me to please stay at the museum so I can lock up and look after things. Fine, I say, but I really have to run out to the ridge tomorrow for a couple of hours, make sure things are ok, get some clean socks. Getting colder, again, and the roads are terrible. As soon as the show was over tonight, I sent her home and dealt with the adrenalin crazed, sugar fueled cast. Finally got everyone out of the building, did a little clean-up. Need to haul trash tomorrow, clean a bit more, and restock the bathrooms. My floor is again a mess, what with road-salt footprints and cupcake icing in the grout joints. D and I talked logistics today, as the two main shows come down at the end of the month, another comes in for upstairs, the downstairs is black for a month, for major patch, repair, and painting. A long list of things that need to be done. Care and feeding of your facility. I miss the ridge, the wildness of it, not the brutality of the life, but that sense of being deeply embedded in the natural world. I've lived that way for so long, so close to the edge, that I'm accustomed to whatever degree of discomfort, in exchange for a life in which there is no mediation. A classic debate, the pope or bishop or landlord tells you what you can or cannot do, as opposed to doing what you damned well please to do, with the attendant dangers. I thought this hiatus would answer some questions, instead, there are only more issues. After all these years alone, I have trouble compromising. I'd rather die in a tree-tip pit, heating beans in a can, than listen to a sermon. After work, before the evening performance, I go over to the pub for a pint. Lively conversation. Astra is a thing of beauty, the way she moves breaks my heart, when she pops Isaac with a towel, I think, oh please, step on me. Read more...

Nasty Weather

Six inches of new snow, early morning to mid-day, and the town and county are out of money so there is no plowing. Everything is closed down. No one can get to work. I field staff calls. Tell everyone to stay home at least until afternoon, sit at the reception desk, read, answer the phone. It's payday, so Trish finally gets to the museum and walks over to the accountant's office for the payroll checks. The only people in the museum all day are Cirque staff to get their checks. Add bursar to my job description. Don't want to be away from the phone, so I walk over to Kroger and get a few things I can microwave and eat during the day. Bumper cars on the roadways. D gets in around 2 in the afternoon to get his check and says even the major county roads are awful. We have a smoke out back and watch cars sliding out of control. The reception desk is so close to the museum art library, I dip in and out all day. Pictures. "But what is a book without pictures? " asked Alice. One of a woman playing a kithera (plucked instrument, proto guitar) from Pompeii. Hiroshige wood-block prints including the lovely "Tree In Rain". Some Persian soft-porn, "Lovers" by Riza-i-Abbasi, beautiful stuff, miniatures. Decide Baroque is mostly an imitative mannered style. Discover that Durer was using water colors quite spectacularly (his "Hare" is incredibly realistic) 300 years before Winslow Homer. And I absolutely love David's (or one of his follower's) "Mlle Du Val Dogne". The light is fantastic. Pegi has a show tomorrow night, weather permiting, so after 8 tonight I walk over to Kroger again and get the makings for a large crock pot of soup. I noticed this morning that they had some Andouille sausage, so I make the largest pot possible of an Andouille, kale, chick pea thing, with chicken stock and chopped chilies. Instead of salt I add a small tin of drained and mashed anchovies. This is really the secret ingredient, if there is one, not at all fishy in the finished soup, but adds a depth of flavor that is pronounced. At home I keep a tube of anchovy paste and add it to almost everything. Sometimes I just eat it on crackers, pretend I'm having a meal. Walking back from that last trip, the roads had been partially melted by traffic, but now had re-frozen as black ice. Every step was treacherous. I'm good with this, it's so much easier than navigating a steep slope in the dark, with a head lamp and a heavy pack. They'd find my body so much sooner, in the Kroger parking lot, than on a hill, far away. Not that it matters. But I'd hate to be like that bloated dead critter on the side of the road that they don't discover until spring. Not my worst fear, but right up there. You live alone, long enough, you ring all the changes. Double round bob. Read more...

Cobalt Blue

Skeleton crew. Trish is out and D is off to Cincy, delivering art. Lauralee is in the classroom with a bunch of second graders, making something. Pegi is firmly lodged in her office working on the final report for an Ohio Arts Council grant. I meant to get out to the ridge tonight, but another serious storm is forecast. Pegi's husband, Steve, calls to warn us that the entire county could be under a Class Two Snow Emergency by morning. I finish the floors and start cleaning the theater for next weekend's final three shows. Walking down to Biel's, for some office supplies, notice that all the birds, grackles and doves mostly, are puffed out to the point of exploding. The Kroger parking lot is full, as everyone lays in supplies. If it is bad, in the morning, I'll make a crock pot of something, for whoever might show up. D got back from Cincy just before five, we closed up, and went over to the pub for a pint. Chatted with the owners. Everyone talking about the weather. We rolled cigarets, as we always do, just before we drained our glasses, so we could walk back to the museum, smoking, and linger a moment before we parted company. This particular evening, for reasons unknown, the sky is a deep cobalt blue. A rare color for the sky to be, hereabouts. It's beautiful, like a lustrous pottery glaze. I'm drawn to sit in Pegi's offce, in the gloaming, watch the last of the color drain from sight. When it's finally quite dark, I heat up some soup, consider where my life has taken me. Skeletal crow flies in from the forest, perches on a stop sign under a street-light, and has a few words to say. The walls are too thick, I can't actually hear him, but like Beethoven and those last string quartets, I sense what's being said. Structural cross-trees. Down-hauls, and the whiteness of a particular whale that shatters your meager boat. The luck of the draw, you alone, left to lie about it. Non-fiction is just another fiction. History is merely memory, slanted toward the victor. Or the survivor. Survival is a bare thing, not something to brag about, but a close call, lucky to be alive, you nod to various household gods, the lares and penates, Janus at the doorway, sacrifice a goat, and try to get on with your life. I've lost the thread, but I'll try to get get back to you, something about meaning. I'm suspect about my intention. There would be no reason for you to trust me, because I don't trust myself. Read more...

Being Janitor

I'd forgotten D would be full-time for a few weeks before classes resume in Athens, so was surprised to see him this morning. Very cold, single digits, a merciless wind. We go to get coffee and scones, then to the Janitorial Supply store because I really need a new mop head and a cleaning product called Damp Mop that is my favorite floor cleaning agent. The floor in the main gallery is badly soiled, from the many events this fall. D and I agreed to rent a power scrubber next month and deep clean, then resurface, but in the mean time it needs attention. Damp Mop is a powerful cleaner that doesn't need rinsing. I don't know how they do that. Spartan Chemical Company. They stick with plain names, other products include Terra Glaze (the resurfacing finish we'll use), BH-38, which will remove tar from a wood floor without destroying the wood, and Xtraction II, which will clean glue residue from concrete. I mix up a batch of Damp Mop in my rolling Rubbermaid bucket (with attached Geerpres Floor-Prince mop wringer) because a new mop head needs soaking for a couple of hours. And the new mop head is a thing of beauty, a redesigned 32 ounce Fantail Loop that brings tears to my eyes. The two sides, continuous strings, are separated by top and bottom gussets of some very heavy red synthetic material, protecting the mop itself from the bail that holds the head to the handle. The gussets used to be just wide enough to accept the bail, now, in the new and improved model, they're four inches wide. A dramatic redesign, because on the second squeeze professionals use for wringing a mop, the doubled gusset serves as a sort of top plate for expressing excess water. Very clever. Fantail, in the name, comes from the fact that every dozen strings, near the working end, are gathered together and stitched around with a muslin band. Another great advancement which adds great strength to the ends of the strings, where failure is most common. Altogether, a wonderful mop head, and when I get it mounted on the handle, before I put it in to soak, I take it upstairs to show Pegi, who allows that it is quite handsome but doesn't really share my level of enthusiasm. Civilians. The enhanced wringability alone makes this the mop of my dreams. Before I can use it, I have to collect the trash, dust-mop the bays into piles, clean ground cookies from the grout joints with a knife, and it is after lunch before I can swing my modified chevron, with the new girl on my arm. She glides like a Greek nymph at the end of my out-stretched reach; leading me, leading her, in a dance I've never done before. I surprise a couple of visitors, humming Strauss (I hate Strauss) waltzing with my mop across the floor. What conspires. A wonderful day. Read more...

Taking Notes

Any stigma serves to beat a dogma. Faulkner said about Henry James that he was "one of the nicest old ladies I ever met". Don't know where that came from, but I make a note. It was before dawn this morning, I was sitting in the dark in Pegi's office, watching the snow fall. Streetlights and snow are a lovely combination. The idea of a warm bathroom is sinking in. I suit up and walk down to Market Street for a free coffee and scone. Walk along the river, watching barges of coal pushed against the tide. A piercing wind and blowing snow. I cut across the deserted college campus, stop at the library long enough to warm my hide, then head back to the museum. " My art belongs to Dada", Cole Porter. "I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds." Mark Twain. "Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?" Harold Pinter. Too much time time in the library. Living on the ridge, zipping to town with a list, aiming to get back home as quickly as possible, I rarely spent much time cruising the non-fiction stacks. It's a treat to spend an idle hour flipping through the pages of books that might interest me. Walk to the pub for a bowl of stew and a pint. Walk back to the museum (walking everywhere) and read through the afternoon. A large salad for dinner, with half-a-loaf of warm french bread. More snow forecast and the temps are falling quickly. I'm sorry to not be at my house, but I'm comfortable, for god's sake, warm; and not preoccupied with mere survival. It's a question of money, of course, I can't really move to town before I sell my place in the country, and you all know what the market is. Glenn mentioned, years ago, and I paid it little attention, that if my readers pledged a nominal fee, a dollar a month, five dollars a month (I'm sounding like NPR here) that my financial worries would be lessened. The mercy of the court, I'm asking for feedback here. Would that be too much to ask? In many ways it seems to me it is, because I don't write for money. I write to be writing, it's the main thing in my life. But I'd like to be more comfortable, I'd like to stop abusing my body. Tell me what you think. Could I be subsidized by my readers, or not? I don't know. In truth, I don't know most of the people that read me, nor how many there are; and I'm not quite desperate here, but looking for a solution. Read more...

Sunday Morning

Very quiet of a Sunday morning. Wake up in a warm space, go downstairs to a warm bathroom (what a concept!) shave and perform my ablutions. Walk over to Kroger, where there's a Starbucks, get a coffee, sit there at a table, eating a bagel with cream cheese, reading a free newspaper. Light snow. Go to the laundromat and wash all the long underwear. Several of us there, early, needing clean clothes before the storm socks us in. Back at the museum I read for a while, then clean the theater for the Cirque matinee. On a smoke break outside, I see the cardboard guy collecting boxes at the furniture store, and the can guy spearing aluminum cans at the dumpster across the way. Sunday morning salvage. Open up the museum for the Cirque crowd at noon, walk back over to Kroger and get sushi for lunch, hole-up in the office during the performance, reading some essays on art from the museum library. Take a walk down deserted Main Street. High speed internet so I'm able to find an Emily poem I remember: ...but no man moved me till the tide / Went past my simple shoe / And past my apron and my belt / And past my bodice too, / And made as he would eat me up / As wholly as a dew / Upon a dandelion's sleeve / And then I started too. When the show is over I tell Pegi to go home, she's exhausted, I'll clean up and lock up, because, in truth, I can't wait to be in a deserted museum again. No traffic, the muffled sound of a train across the river in Kentucky. I'm not finding anything I don't like about this. No anxious driving in snow that obscures the verge, no sherpa antics, climbing with crampons and a full pack after dark with a headlamp, no splitting kindling when your hands are so frozen you don't even know you've cut yourself. Read more...

Night Watchman

Firewood this morning, cleaned house, two more ricks inside. Then bailed to the museum. Don't know what this storm is going to do. Talked with Glenn and Linda in St. Paul and they already have two feet of snow. Can't get caught on the ridge without 4-wheel drive. Needed at the museum, as it happens, go into my old stage-manager mode and solve a couple of minor problems. D is staff, and we talk about the next show he's curating. He leaves at 5 and the Cirque people arrive for their second show. I retreat upstairs, get my first edition, hard bound copy of Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" out of the vault and check some references against the "GR Companion" (Steven Weisenburger), amusing myself for several hours. When the performance is over and the people all finally gone, I clean a bit, turn off the lights, and lock up. Alone with my ward. I walk through all the galleries in a red almost darkness lit only by exit lights. Quiet and slightly strange. I set myself up in the extra office, get a drink, go outside for a smoke. Rain and cooling temps. It climbed into the 40's today, and the driveway was a slick mess coming down, a thawed layer of mud over ice, tonight it starts sleeting, changing over to snow by morning, and the temps falling to single digits by tomorrow night. A monster storm, but probably mostly to the north of here. I'm in a warm place with hot and cold running water, comfortable and not anxious about mere survival. Seems like heaven to me. Read more...

Signs

A good day. Got all the trash together and hauled away, cleaned the bathrooms for Pegi's "Winterscape" performances, cleaned the theater. D set me up so I can write from the museum. Took a few more things into town, in case I get stuck there, brought a few more things home, in case I get stuck here. Covering the spread. Went back to the library because I had already read the book I checked out, didn't realize it until I'd read the first few pages. The lesson is to always read the first few pages before you check it out or know that you want to read it again. If I want to read it again I usually own a copy. Books and manuscripts are attracted to me, stick around, papers collect in piles. A piece of paper stuck to me today, when I was walking to the post office. Came from the furniture store next door. Packing instructions, or unpacking instructions. International symbols, no words. One guy, plus sign, another guy, and under that line (of text) was another, that showed the two guys, one on each end, lifting a rectangular object. Side bar, just had the thought that I write here in Arial 10 point and I didn't notice what font and size the extra machine at the museum wrote in, so maybe a change of face. Shouldn't matter, but I'm used to seeing my thoughts emerge in Arial 10. I could change the setting but probably won't because I have a bad history of changing settings on computers. Inept in regards to most modern technology. I'm good with a hatchet or a froe. Odd that I write in a sans serif type when the fact is I much prefer old style serifed types. Would the style or substance of what I say be altered by a change of face? Yes, I think, but I'm not sure why I think that. These paragraphs are ephemeral enough without thinking they would be affected by serifs, but because they are so ephemeral, they would be. I'd probably speak with a Scottish accent, or some voice that was impossibly Italian. Types I've known and loved. Forms that have stuck with me. Writing in blocks of text, with a jagged right margin, just letting the line wrap wherever it wants to, has always appealed to me; writing single-spaced, so that a density was built-up, and the referents could build a terminal mass. Event horizon, where string theory predicts many different universes might have been born. Where did the mass for the Big Bang come from? In a very real way, we're only two questions away from infinity, sometimes just one. Rain, changing over to snow, temps dropping sometime Sunday; noon, they're saying for Athens, which is a good bit east. There's a play, a Christmas spoof, at the pub, Saturday night, I'd like to see. I might just stay over. I don't drink and drive anymore. Down pallet on the floor. Fuck a bunch of risk. I'd rather sleep in your front yard under a sprinkler than slam into a bridge abutment. The first installment of the "Night Watchman" begins tomorrow night, I can hardly wait. The trailers are vague, but the narrative seems solid. You're always in, or about to be in, the curl. It might be beach volleyball, sing Misty for me, or pouring cast iron; the important thing is being alive in the moment. Our hero, Frank Short-Pants, might argue, but he's an idiot really, soon to be excised from the gene pool. He died in that odd incident where a manatee took a man with tanks to be a mate. Still strikes me as funny. What we see. I was sure the manatee knew more than she was saying. In the old days, we just took a witness downstairs, beat them with a rubber hose, made them see what we needed them to see. Now, there are so many constraints. Read more...

Kid's Day

Seventh and eighth grade classes, bouncing around on cookies and punch. I'd forgotten punch. I felt like a hallway monitor. After they left, checking the bathrooms, discovered a mess of vomit in the men's room. He had aimed for the sink, missed, mostly. Not too bad a clean-up, as it was fresh; dried puke has certain cementitious properties that make it more problematic. Carried some things to the museum, in case I get stranded there, extra razor, wash-cloth and towel, a pillow, a blanket, a sweat shirt. Carried supplies home, baking powder, condensed milk, beans, salt-pork. Beans and cornbread in my future. Also ground beef, onions, and potatoes for a Shepard's Pie. Go to the library tomorrow. Work on firewood Saturday, then I can bail out on Sunday if I need to, take my dirty laundry with me and wash it on the way to the museum. Do a couple of episodes of "The Night Watchman". Theoretically I can access my AOL account from there, write on the computer in the extra office. A taste of life in town. Got to get D to figure out the linkup. I like the idea of writing from the museum, I've never done that. A change in habit (two nuns go into a bar...) would do me good, I think. There are a couple of singer songwriters that play at the pub I'd like to hear. Mostly I'm interested in the way I'll respond to a much higher noise/sound level than I'm used to. Florida, motel rooms with the girls, are not really a fair test, because I'm not writing. When I first started working this way, there was a very proscribed ritual, writing in that odd shaped piece that came to be known as a "Reverse Idaho"; I still get a drink and roll a smoke, but that's about the last remnant comparison. Now I write anytime of the day or night. Finish paragraphs the next day. The whole operation is looser, which I prefer; but at the beginning I needed more ritual to access the remembering. This last trip, in Florida, I wrote a piece in my head. The girls, Kevin and Karol and I, on the back porch, laughing, drinking, really enjoying ourselves. Kevin went off to play his war game, Karol left, the girls went inside to watch some specific TV show, and I was alone, in the dark. So I wrote in my head, much as I'm writing now: going back, changing words, altering punctuation, and it seemed to go fine, if I'd had a laptop it might exist, along with all those pages I've lost due to user error. Shit happens, and vomit. Maybe I need a smart phone. An electronic bulletin board. What I really need is a load of dry firewood, and a day to spend under my floor, repairing what the dog has ripped asunder. Relationships are hell. But at least you can snuggle at night. Never go to bed with a toaster-oven. Better, heaven forbid, to go to bed with a goat, than with anything that could shock you. Assuming a goat doesn't shock you. Sailors are a long time at sea, using even the vent hole of fowl to satisfy their need. I think I could write anyplace, let's go see. Read more...

Alice Quilt

I hate missing a day at work, because it throws me behind. Spent the morning getting rid of garbage and cleaning the kitchen from the weekend events. Discussed scheduling. Put the big screen up in the theater. Unplugged a toilet. Then lunch, and after lunch remembered we needed to hang the fabric show in the small gallery upstairs. Kate's residency. An Alice In Wonderland quilt, a lovely thing, done by eighth graders working with her for a couple of weeks, and a dozen small pieces of fabric art done individually by the same core group. Reception is tomorrow and Sharee came over to see the show (to see if we'd hung the show) and we had just started, but when she left, an hour later, it was all installed and we were making the labels. You guys, she said, beat anything I've ever seen. Kate had the kids sew on pop-tabs, as hanging attachments, and we hung them on small brads, mostly empirically as they were all irregular, and it looks good, a little funky, but cool. First time these twelve kids have ever hung in a museum. I suppose the reception will be milk and cookies. A large winter storm looming for Sunday night, big snow, and I need a plan, a two-part plan actually. I haven't driven in since before the trip, so I need some supplies here, to weather the brunt; and also a set of supplies at the museum, in case I need to crash there for a couple of days. The museum is easy, it's heated, there's hot and cold running water, a microwave, a computer I could write on, the library is two blocks away, and Kroger is across the street. Sleeping on a carpeted floor, with a pillow and a couple of blankets, is way ahead of many places I've slept. Navigating the edge, I set some simple goals: avoid frostbite, watch your footing. The dog was dancing a weird dervish, the last pup was dead and frozen solid under the house. She seemed to be happy that she was spared involvement. She was certainly a lousy mother. She's young, I don't fault her that, but killing your kids seems extreme. I shovel out the carcass and throw it downwind. Fuck a bunch of ceremony. Worms, dear Percy. Decide to make a kale soup and enough cheese grits to feed an army. Make a list. This is the way the world goes, one step at a time. Slightly altered, but nothing to take your attention. A good set of waves, or nothing, all afternoon. Maybe some birds singing along the riverbank. Fill in the blanks. A life worth living. Two daughters, after all. I lost the thread, I was thinking about comparing one thing to another, but it wasn't working out, I kept ending up with negative numbers. Pure thinking is hard, everything gets in the way. I dissected an oak gall tonight, looking for something I'd not seen before. I don't know that much about oak galls, and I'm not that good at dissection, but some things appear obvious. Check the number of teeth in the lower jaw-bone. I better go. I have to generate a couple of different lists. I'm sure I can do this. Read more...

Wood Work

Probably could have gotten to work, but didn't. Roads were fairly bad and I don't have my 4-wheel drive. Worked on firewood, hauling, cutting, splitting. Melted snow for wash water. Six inches of snow and temps hovering in the low teens. Broken sun, for a short while, then back to flurries. A windless, muffled silence. I split a billet of Osage orange, for some nighttime logs. A difficult wood, very stringy, very strong, very dense (.95 specific gravity) but the color was so spectacular, when I finally got the round split in half, that I just sat and studied it for a long time, smelled it, felt it. Intense orange-gold saturated color. I'm sure it contains some kind of silica, because it certainly does dull a chain. Split some sycamore, also a pain in the ass, no straight grain, but it burns well. It's a lovely wood, really, pale, pale tan, almost an off-white, with an odd ray pattern and a certain iridescence when it's first split. One length of slippery elm, not large, three sticks out of it, but I peel out some of the inner bark and chew it. Soothing, but kind of nasty. Remember Tyrone Slothrop in "Gravity's Rainbow" with his box of Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges. Some sore muscles, working out the kinks, so I knock off about 3, come inside; snow melted into water is steaming, the stove is stoked and red-lined, I strip down and take a sponge bath, quick dry off, into long underwear. Shave, standing at the kitchen sink, staring at myself in a five inch circular mirror. This is it, pretty baby. That visage that stares back is not aware, merely reflects. All those millions of genuflecting sunflowers in North Dakota are just following the sun. Independent action isn't an easy thing. I mean that as a personal lament, more than as a criticism of anyone else. It's difficult to keep even a part of yourself free, from the influence of the media world. Even if you want to. I make a batch of biscuits, eight large ones, and eat half of them hot with butter and a jalapeno jam a friend makes. My hands are drying and cracking, but not painful yet. Hot biscuits make everything better. Hot biscuits and gravy, you're on your way. Tomorrow I need to remember to bring back in some sausage, a shaker of pre-sifted flour, and black peppercorns. Where I come from, gravy is a beverage. Read more...

Frigid

So cold I suit-up and get outside to split wood before coffee. Full set of stretches to try and prevent damage. Snowing all day, harder in the afternoon. May not be able to get to work. Winter Storm Advisory until 7 tomorrow night. At these temps though, it should be all powder. By 2 o'clock I feel a tightening in my back and shoulders that warns me to stop for the day. Late lunch of potatoes, eggs, and toast, then a wee dram of Irish to warm the innards. Cleaned the stovepipe and the smoke chase in the cookstove this morning, before starting a fire, then, through the day, stocked all the stations with wood, built a couple of ricks inside. Having forgotten to get baking powder, I make a hoe-cake of corn and acorn meal. Increasingly obvious I'll not get to town tomorrow, as the ridge is getting much more snow than forecast. I'll sharpen a chain for the chainsaw tonight so I can cut, split, and rick, inside, more of the red maple tomorrow. Hard to beat red maple for a quick hot fire. Split several rounds of Osage orange today, marginally better than even oak for holding a nighttime fire. The next three nights I'll need to set the alarm for a late night stoking. All the leaves are gone and the landscape has become stark. During a lull in the snow, I ventured out one last time, and the dog stayed home (a testament to the cold) nested in the insulation she has torn from my floor. I walked over to the head of the driveway, admiring the perfect blanket of white. Too soft to hold a print, but nothing is stirring anyway. The quiet is absolute. I carry a round of maple home, stash it in the woodshed. The trip, coming when it did, has thrown me out of step with the season. One should go to Florida in February, to remember the promise of spring. The lake will freeze over by Wednesday night, except for those few pools kept open, for a while, by some heat vented from below. Springs, probably. Even cold water from a spring is relatively warm. The remaining ducks and geese will congregate, in those open pools and leads, in a way that reminds me of honey bees in a swarm. Then the last of them will fly out, except for a couple of families of mallards that someone on the other side of the lake feeds, who take up residence under a Park Service picnic shelter. A murder of crows gathered in the snag near the outhouse, and their raucous partita is the song of the day, near the end a Pileated Woodpecker flies in and lays down a counterpoint. Cold and muscle sore, but oddly elated by the last trip outside, I roll a smoke, get another dram of Irish, and watch the snow from inside, through the various window, each of which frames a different view. I dig out the long underwear tops (I've been wearing the bottoms for days) and the down sleeping bag. I need to sleep on the sofa for the next few days, so I can more easily stoke the stove. Snowing hard now, an inch an hour, and we were only supposed to get an inch. I need to melt thirty-six gallons of snow tomorrow, into three gallons of water, and cook a pot of beans. Don't have any salt-pork, to cook with the beans, but I do find a couple of sausages in the freezer. Made a large pot of coffee, that I can reheat, mug by mug, on the cookstove all day tomorrow, as my espresso pot has chosen this opportunity to blow a gasket. High on the list of life lessons is that sophisticated equipage fails when you need it the most. Hatchets are good, hand-saws and mauls, given that handles fail on everything, eventually. I need to build a new handle on my splitting hatchet, the hard rubber finally split. It's an Estwing, and the curved metal goes all the way through the handle. Must be form fitted, not wood, and after thinking about it for a while, I decide to build up the form, off the metal, with duct-tape, and then seal it with a rubberized gripping agent. There is such a thing, I've used it before, to repair some shoes. It's very good for leather soles in winter. I'm sure I can make a satisfactory handle that'll last a few years and cost just a few dollars. Not so much the economy of any specific thing, but that I could do it with materials at hand. Important when you're snowed in and 17 miles from town. B was over, I had thought he would be, for a dram of Irish and a little conversation. We talk about our winter's reading, what we're both cooking, the history of rock and roll, the weather. When he leaves I make a nice supper of chipped beef and gravy on toast. Mom instructed me carefully on this visit, and I can now make a milk gravy that would feed the gods. Browning the flour in bacon fat is key, adding the milk gradually, and whisking it in. Lots of black pepper, a goodly pinch of salt. Ambrosia. Caramelized onions and mushrooms, added at the end, served on toast, is very good. A bit messy, but very good. I haven't mastered keeping gravy off my shirt-front. Call to order, what will you be doing tomorrow? I have to roll some logs to the house, cut and split them, stack them in the house. Not very complicated. When in doubt I caramelize some onion. More for the smell than anything else. Bacon is like that, more for the smell than anything less; just smell it, and whatever you're eating tastes better. I sometimes cook bacon just to make the house smell good, never has a strip gone wanting, but that wasn't the reason I cooked it. The sausage bean stew is wonderful. Everything is fine. Read more...

Winter Camping

What's real might inculcate what's almost real. Too much Derrida. What I mean, really. Consider you might sleep under an overhang, almost a cave, a place you might block with a fire, so wild things wouldn't eat you. A refuge. Imagine you dream, much like me or you. Scary shit, where you might fall to your death, or there are large predators that could rip you asunder. Read more...

Home Again

Two nights in a motel with the girls so I could get them off at 5:44 this morning. Snow event Saturday, so we stayed in town Friday night as well as last night. Train was two hours late, so we went back to the motel and had the free Continental Breakfast, then back to the station which was more or less like one of those rain shelters at a school bus stop. Watched movies on TV, ate sushi and pizza, laughed a lot. Great visit. They're off to NYC for a week. Stopped by the museum this morning, to check out the damage from the wedding reception Saturday, and it wasn't too bad, except for the artificial snow and glitter. Fucking glitter, man. Not much snow in town but four inches on the ridge, so I parked at the bottom and hiked in with minimal supplies (Irish Whiskey and tobacco) wearing crampons for the first time this season. Need to split wood tomorrow as temps below freezing all next week, lows in the teens at night. I'm second on the list for an apartment in the building I most desire, so this chapter in my life may be coming to an end. I'll miss the extreme contact with the natural world, but I won't miss the shear brutality of it. Beautiful though, the undisturbed whiteness of new snow in the forest. When I attain the ridge the house is so cold I can sweep up the ice and snow I track inside before it melts. Less than a week ago I was using air-conditioning and now I can't get warm. Virgin snow is eye candy, but the piercing wind I could do without. I harvest some clean snow for water. Nothing makes much sense. So exhausted I have to take a nap, when I wake up, I just catch the fire, stoke the stove, and silence reigns supreme. A new dusting, but in this cold, it's merely powder; fluff that is blown away by the first passing car. Nothing I can't deal with. Winter camping is a state of mind. Getting those elephants across the Alps. It all comes down to logistics. What you thought you meant. Read more...

Back Home

Coming back, one day driving in the rain, and the second half-day in the snow. Air-conditioner in the rental car yesterday, the heater today. Great drives, both ways. The habit of consequence. First Welcome Center, there's a little dog on a leash, peeing on one of those giant poles that carry the overhead awful yellow lights. Dropped over onto State 17 south of Savannah and it was a lovely part of the trip, air off, windows down, cd out, smelling the fecund marshes. First thing Mom asked, after the hug, was what was I fixing for supper. Most of the time in Florida spent on the back screened porch, lovely weather. I'm making some notes, the morning after I arrive there's a huge splash in the lake, I swivel around and an osprey is coming out of the water with a small bass he can barely carry. My sister comes over and we talk about the old house in Jax, where, one street over, there was a monkey, and Brenda tells a hysterical story about being on the beach with Starr Parvin, who also had a monkey. We were all at the beach one day, and Starr left the monkey with B while she took a dip. The monkey climbed onto sister's head and dug in, and she fled to the ocean to get the monkey off her back. I see a sign, on a run to the beach, that says Advanced Disposal and I wonder what that means. Watching a marathon run of NCIS with Mom and the girls and there is a very funny Fruit Of The Loom commercial with an endless clothesline of underwear. Cook, cook, cook, then eat left-overs to clean out the fridge, then make soup, then made another soup and freeze many meals for Mom and Dad. Rhea has taken to an old Polaroid camera and is shooting some interesting shots. My folks don't have, never have had, a dishwasher, and keeping up with the dishes is an endless task. Three sheets to the wind, trying to explain to Karol the way things are remembered. On the way home, falling out of sequence here, I pass the Sand Gap Baptist Church on Sand Suck Road, somewhere in Kentucky. The house is freezing when we get back to my place, maybe 50 degrees, and I can't get the it warm. The next morning I have to be at work and when I get up the house is frigid, in the 40's, and the girls can hardly deal with extremes that I've grown to accept. Troopers though, and we get to the museum. I haul away all the garbage since I was last there, prep the kitchen for the hospital Christmas party (they pay well, treat the place fairly, and Jennifer is a cute little thing), and check the several hundred light bulbs for failures since I last checked. I have to get a motel room for the last couple of nights the girls are here, because they need a shower and a warm place to sleep. I'll be gone another couple of nights. Just wanted to say. Read more...

Supplies

Looks like a good day for traveling on Monday, temps high enough that the roads should be dry, and I'll make it off the Piedmont down to the coastal plain. It's a plan. Picked up road supplies today, then stopped at the pub for a pint of Guinness and a bowl of stew. Warmer today. Back home I split some wood, tomorrow I'll split a little more and load the house, pack, take out the air conditioner, button the house up, get out of here by 7:30 on Monday. Be a relief to just be on the road. Got a couple of James Lee Burke's on CD, at the library, that I might or might not listen to. Made a list of things to carry in the rental, in case I did get caught by weather. Winter traveling I stop and get gas more often. Carry water, some food, a blanket. Landscape is what I notice, on a trip like this. The terrain is different and I'm constantly surprised. At Janitor College, there was an optional course in wall damage. I signed up because I heard the professor was really good, a progressive dude, into change, cool; but it turned out this progressive dude was actually a Republican, in leathers, with a whip. Nonetheless, he knew his wall damage. Dr. Wally Jitters, always raving eschatology, final things, death, judgment. He died my senior year. Had built an out-door wall that he repeatedly brutalized and repaired in his famous open-air seminars. He was buried alive, and killed, when the wall was struck by a meteor during one of his classes. The students suspected a trick, some Houdini thing where he'd struggle from the wreckage and rebuild the wall. But he was well and truly dead. Final things indeed. Don't know why I thought of that, but this could well and truly be the last time my daughters see my parents. Talked to Mom this morning, and she's thrilled we're doing a non-typical Thanksgiving. My sister, bless her heart, took their pass and shopped at the commissary on the Naval Base, NAS Jacksonville is huge, and thinks she got almost everything I'll need to cook for x number of people for 5 days. Mom has been collecting tins of premium crabmeat and I can't wait to introduce her to my stripped down crab-cake: enough mashed boiled red potato to hold the crab together, salt and pepper, a squeeze of lime juice. Cooked in butter; butter, and a little cream added to the potatoes. These are on my life-list. I'd love to have a crab boil while we're down there, maybe Kevin can arrange it. Live Blue Crabs, boiled with a strong spice mix, spread out on a table covered with newspapers, everyone with their own hammer and pick. A primal meal, where there isn't much talk, mostly grunting. A tray of roasted vegetables in the middle of the table, some beer. I've gotta go. Pack, check my list, last posting for eight days. Doesn't mean I don't love you. Read more...

Last Day

Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" is crayon (and casein) on cardboard. Not exactly an archival medium. When D and I were matting and framing some pieces for the fund-raiser, a print and a watercolor, both of which needed to be suspended on the inside of the matt, we used archival matt board, archival Japanese tape which needs to be moistened, and, as everyone I've ever seen do this, instead of using distilled water, we used archival spit. I've got to go to town tomorrow, pick up a few things for the trip, vitamin water, power bars, some trail mix, a couple of books on CDs, a big bag of dog food (B said he'd feed the dog), and some foodstuffs for the house, so there'll be something here when the girls and I get back. Sunday I need to fill all the stations of the cross with firewood and kindling. Out of here at eight on Monday morning. Someone else will have to clean the museum on Tuesday, after several weekend functions. I cleaned up the kitchen again today, set up tables and chairs. Almost all I did this week was clean the kitchen (a food event every day) and move tables and chairs around. Yesterday I felt poorly, my feet hurt and I was tired, last night I crashed early and slept like a log, this morning I was a new man. I look forward to being away for a week, no concerns but my family and a change of scenery. Route 17, from Savannah, Georgia, to Jacksonville is one of my favorite roads, across the marshes, with that fecund tidewater smell and a hundred hole-in-the-wall diners that all serve great crab and fried perch meals. Eating my way down the Georgia littoral. I can talk the talk, and my accent changes, when I cross the line into the deep south; I often just take something, on the tines of fork, back into the kitchen, and ask the cook how he'd done that. They're always completely open and unpretentious, it's the peanut oil, or the cornmeal in the batter, or something he'd learned from his mother. In Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" in the right hand panel, "Hell", there is an ultra-modern iceboat, skating on thin ice; I was examining a very good reproduction of that painting, today, with a magnifying glass, and found a thousand details I had missed. Another one, I'm far from my sources here, but I it was "Lady With An Ermine" I think it's Michelangelo, her right hand, stroking the ermine is incredible. The fingers. The implied mobility. I looked at that hand for half an hour. The painting as a whole is almost frightening, her expression and that fucking ermine, but her right hand, nearly centered in the painting, is a thing of consummate beauty. It's the best hand I ever saw. Bumps a Sargent hand, I saw in Naples, Florida, into second place. Better than God and Adam reaching across the gulf of that ceiling. This is now my benchmark hand, the hand for the ages. I find her, actually, kind of sinister, and that goddamn ermine with his black-hole eyes scares me to death, but her right hand is a thing of beauty. I'm not a romantic, as anyone who knows me would verify. So what is being said, that I respond to so strongly? Certainly those fingers, he probably didn't mean anything, just drawing some fingers. But they look like they mean something. The Smothers Brothers did a routine that always cracked me up, where confusion reached a terminal mass, the particulars escape me, something about how they had interrupted something that was said. Artist talk a lot. Confusion Metal to Tommy Smothers. He stands alone. Fuck, I lost the thread. Read more...

Cleaning Up

I know everyone has a lot to do, and I'm not complaining, but everyone mostly sits on their ass and expect things to be done. It's a disease. Take taking the skirts off the tables, never used to be my job, but now it is, because I did it once, and now it's expected. One of my problems is that I too easily take on the tasks of others. I don't mind washing dishes. I don't mind mopping the floor. D, acting where I wouldn't, told Trish to get the skirts off so we could move the tables. Easy enough. Easy enough drive in because, by local standards, I go to work late, leaving the house at 8, giving myself, always, an extra 30 minutes in case something interesting might appear. If nothing appears on the drive in, I get my free coffee at Market Street and go below the floodwall. There's always something down there. I don't know why Spell Check doesn't like 'floodwall', and it turned my 'ass-holes' into Achilles. Which I don't understand at all. The vagaries. Anyone has a fairly recent Webster's College Dictionary that they want to get rid of, it's what I keep at hand and mine's falling apart. I actually have to stand up and walk two feet to get to the dictionary table, which I do several times a day, but I need the handy, smaller, dictionary, because I'm a terrible speller. God, that storm last night. It wasn't just me, it was pretty wide spread. Expected to have to do some road clearing on Mackletree, so I allowed even more time. But since I'm so late, relatively, all the work had been done. Which freed me up for a saunter at the river's edge. I kept my hands in my pockets and picked-up nothing. I'm getting rid of stuff, I'm not collecting. On the other hand, I'm interested in doing a show based on Specific Gravity & Weight Per Cubic Foot, for which I would need a cubic foot of a great many things. I want to curate this show with Anthony, because he had a similar idea. Think about it, then send me a cubic foot of something, send it to the museum. Kim, if you do a cubic foot of cast iron, I'll come and get it. It would still be yours, of course, and I think you need one, but it might sell. I thought Kurt might do a cubic foot of live oak, because it is so close to water, .98, and is so different. There'd have to be a cubic foot of water, the benchmark. There'd need to be a couple of scales, so people could weigh things, whatever they could lift. What's a cubic foot anyway. Molecules don't align, there's a lot of wasted space. Mostly, there's wasted space. One thing we'd be talking about is density. Things dry, and get smaller, you end up with less than a cubic foot of oak and it's still more than 10% water. What are the rules? And everything shrinks at a different rate, so there are no simple answers. Take concrete, 90% cured in 28 days, 100% in 28 years. I have to line up the rental car tomorrow. I can pack in ten minutes, everything I wear is the same, 2 pair of jeans, 3 denim shirts, 5 pair of underpants, 4 or 5 tee-shirts, 7 sets of socks. A cubic foot of clothes. On second thought don't send a cubic foot of anything, I have to think about this. Phone went out last night, so I couldn't SEND. Up too early this morning, and couldn't get back to sleep. Drizzling rain earlier than forecast, and I had to wait for the driveway to firm up. An hour late for work. I've got so much accumulated time it's ridiculous, plus my four weeks of vacation. I'm using a week and a day over Thanksgiving, then two weeks, an hour at a time, getting home early in January and February, assuming I'm still on the ridge. I really can't leave the house unoccupied. When I get back from Florida I have to re-insulate the other half of the floor, maybe a four hour job, if I can get Anthony to come out and help; a brutal eight hours if I have to do it alone, what with the climbing in and out. Still a small price to pay, because my life would be so much easier. I talked to Amanda at Enterprise and I'll have a car at 8 AM on Monday. Should be able to get to Columbia, South Carolina by dark, then on to Jax by early afternoon the next day. I promised Mom I'd cook a meatloaf, with mashed potatoes and gravy. Mostly they like left-over meatloaf as a lunch meat, with a thin layer of mashed potatoes and gravy, a slice of onion; I can't argue with that, it's a perfect sandwich. Read more...

Perfect Failure

Unpleasant dream. A sense of helplessness. Can't get back to sleep. Nothing specific. Get up and make cheese grits, a cup of coffee; then sit in the dark, listen to the rain. There is no sunrise, but the day gets lighter. Eventually, I walk down the hill and go to work. The museum, and especially the kitchen, are trashed. Food AND drink functions are tough on the facilities. First, though, I have to work in the kitchen, because Trish needs space to prepare lunch for a board meeting. A lot of dishes, all the platters, and 150 wine glasses are dirty. Load the portable dishwasher with half the glasses, but don't hook it up because I need the sink, wash the sink drain-board full of dishes, then wash platters and dry them by hand. Get half the surfaces clean, for Trish to make lunch, and when I get back from my lunch I'm right back where I started. Re-clean the kitchen then put away 100 chairs and 15 tables, then sweep up debris. In real time, tonight, as I write about the day, big winds, not in the forecast, 50 mph or better, the house creaks, the trees scream like banshees. Turn on the radio to see if there's a tornado warning. Probably lose the phone. It's blowing like a bastard out there right now. Some hail. A full gale. I suspect it's just a line front, the Ohio river is often the boundary for colder and warmer air meeting. The weather anywhere is always interesting, I've lived a lot of places, this place is a cauldron of undecided. A major system can miss or hit us here, within just a couple of miles. I wanted to eat before I lost my lights so I very quickly made three crab cakes. They were almost perfect, I used nothing but a couple of small red potatoes and crab, salt and pepper; because I had Anne's remoulade sauce, which, I think, had some sweet relish in it. Excellent combination. The cakes were a bit crumbly is all. The presentation was a bit shoddy. I may start using just a little library paste. The ones tonight, I cooked them in butter, and I turned them too soon, they need to caramelize before you turn them. I'll get this down, I'm studying on it. The last one, after I had learned some lessons, was one of the best things I've ever eaten. Nights like this, I put a little single cell flashlight in my pocket, so I can find a larger flashlight, matches and some candles, then get out the oil lamps, a pen and paper. I'm rehearsed in this, things are where they need be. Now it's 4 o'clock the next morning and the lights just came back on. What a blow. I don't know what time the power went out. I'd finished the crab cakes and gotten a drink. Thank god I took off work an hour early yesterday, had a good fire going (burning ash table legs, from a Scandinavian Modern table I got from a dumpster) before the hail started. It was late enough, and I was tired enough, that I just went to bed, after knocking over several piles of books in my fumbling. Hell to pay when the power did return. Book-slides. The timbers were creaking, I'll tell you that. The house was bending, like a longboat in a heavy sea. No warning, is the odd thing. Usually they blare a warning on the radio and issue a High Wind Alert or something. I get the feeling that this one was just for me, a micro-event that focused forces on Low Gap Hollow. Picket's Charge, The Light Brigade. I'm still standing, at any rate, though ankle deep in books. The hail was vicious. The roof on the woodshed is just tin over purlins, and it sounded like a young war. Before I went to bed I went out back with a flashlight, wearing a football helmet (yard sale, $1) and the pellets were the size of marbles with the occasional golf ball. Fucking dangerous. The unexpectedness of weather. Now it's quiet. I can still hear the wind, but it's a murmur. I was never really concerned, I built this house after all, but it was like being at sea with Conrad during a really bad storm. "I set out now, in my boat, upon the sea." Olson, not Conrad, but you get the drift. Whatever I meant to write, I didn't, so rudely interrupted. Society is corrosive, nature is merely intrusive. If I had my faculties down, I'd tell a joke here, but I can't think of one. Two parrots go into a bar. The natural world is relentless, it bangs against your window. Thinking back, I prefer a cave, with a single mouth I can protect with fire. A long time ago, but I still remember. Spitting my hand-print on the sandstone wall. Read more...

Feedback

It's a good question, what you mean to me. Everything, really. I don't get a lot of feedback, I mostly write in a vacuum. Emily at Amherst. I try to be transparent, she did to, I hear her strangled voice. I try to use punctuation to clarify what the words are trying to say. Late at night, when I'm awakened by something and return to writing, or start a new paragraph, I often turn on the radio. Never when I first start writing in the evening, hell, I have to kill the breaker to the fridge when I first start writing; but late at night, it's often a line from an old blues song that gets me back to my black-haired beauty (as other people have labeled my black Dell). A somber gray day. Finish rereading Maxwell Perkins' letters, split some wood, carry a few boles into the shed, take the truck to the bottom of the hill against projected rain and snow. Perkins was strange, by all accounts, not that verbal in person, but goddamn could he write letters. He dictated his letters, mostly, as did Mark Twain his autobiography (I heard that fact on the radio yesterday) and I'm amazed. I have to see the paragraph emerging in letters, bang out the rhythm with two fingers. I think of my writing as a kind of jazz. I did actually write my last book of poems, "A Summer In Hell", 14 years ago, using a small voice actuated tape recorder, and it's difficult for me to work that way, but I was living out of my truck, my options were limited. I had a portable typewriter, but in the desert of SE Utah it gummed up with wind-driven sand. I'd get a motel room once a week to transcribe what I'd taped. Mostly the sound of wind as I drove over to Colorado to get the girls for a weekend. For the first time this season, I hear a train over in Kentucky, five miles as the crow flies. A week from today I leave for Florida, eight days off-line. I'm concerned about leaving, but I have to go, not so concerned that red-neck thieves will steal my books as that they've leave the door open. You rob a place, least you can do is lock the door behind you. Janus knows his place, a door is a portal, an opening in. Read more...

Nothing Much

A squabble over compost. I hesitate shooting a coon because I'll have to deal with the dead body. Rain sweeps in from the northwest. Colder temps. A harmonica riff, been alive in the blues. James Cotton. Robert Cray. A distant solo guitar. Draws at my heart strings. If you need me, call me. Don't wait too long. I saw a stranger with your hair. What comes around. You've got everything you need, a succession of lyrics. Janus holds the door open. Why wouldn't you enter? The next thing I thought about was waiting for me. A dust devil, a swirl of leaves, nothing that made any actual sense. Ricky Lee Jones. John Lee Hooker. Black snake. Harmonics. Leo. People rush like water down the drain. Who is that? Neil Young. That strained voice. I couldn't see the trouble underneath. Nothing ever moved. I was watching closely. The world in which we live. Doctor John. If it wasn't for one thing it was another. Mountains to the sea. Late night radio (early morning) is sometimes quite interesting. From out of nowhere, the antiphonal chanting of plainsong. A lovely sound. Sleep a few more hours on the sofa. Put on a crock-pot of grits while I was up. A cup of grits, four cups of water, and a goodly pinch of salt. For breakfast I make cheese grits in the microwave, and top them with a perfect egg. Good enough to make you cry. Suit up in the black Carhartt bibs and split some wood. Reading the letters of Maxwell Perkins, who might have been the best editor in history. The flotilla of geese I saw at the lake yesterday, several hundred, are heading further south and I'm on their flyway; off and on, all day and into the night, skeins of them fly over, with the occasional lamenting cry. A little fire of various wood scraps and I roast a sweet potato right in the firebox. I'll miss the cookstove, if I ever do get off the ridge. Over ten years cooking with wood, took five of those to learn how. I must have burned between 20 and 40 cords of wood in that time; all in a firebox that's only 12 inches wide and 15 inches deep. I wonder how hot peat burns, or cow paddies for that matter. Things that can be burned. An all wood house, filled with paper, fully inflamed, could reach over 1600 degrees. Maybe I should be cremated in my house, just thinking here, but Clay recently drew me up a legal will, so I might not die intestate, and that gets you thinking about things. Disposing of the body, that kind of thing. I've researched the laws, and it really is ok, in extremely rural areas, you just dig a hole, and bury the body in a cardboard box. All you need is a death certificate, so you have to pay the coroner plus mileage, then you have to hire Booby to dig a hole with his backhoe, and fill it back in. Maybe two hundred bucks. Why would you spend a lot on a funeral? I don't get the logic. To my credit, I never did. You're organic matter, you're going to rot. I'd rather be fertilizer for a couple of grapevines than rotting soup in a bronze casket. Booby would probably dig the hole for free. Probably only cost a hundred bucks. If we can run him through the chipper, and use him as compost, we'll pay you ten bucks. I'm here now, and then I'm gone, my major thought-stream of the day; I don't give a shit about my physical body after I'm gone, burn it, dissect it, do what you will. Even everyday living takes it's tole. The body itself, is an outfit; you see that, you know everything is a game. I've said for years, to anyone who would listen, that it was all mirrors. I could duplicate anything, if I had enough images. Duplication is fairly easy, having an idea is hard. I have to go sleep, I've done nothing other than split wood and read some letters, somehow, it seems enough. Read more...

Punch List

One thing about opening a show or having an event, is that it will happen, barring an act of god. I remember one time, during a snow emergency, that we opened a day late, but only because I didn't want to hike 17 miles on foot through 12 inches of new snow over a crust of ice. I'm not sure why people rise to the occasion, but by the end of the day yesterday, I was dead on my feet. I'm too old for this game. Mare est in turba, the sea is in turmoil, I can only do so much. The grackles play their show. The flush, when they vacate a tree, is tangible. Loops meaning nothing.  Birds, for god's sake, what could they possibly mean? We moved the police station to the fire station because of black mold. Check. Imagined health risk. Black mold can't be good. The opening went well. Maggie Taylor, the artist, was a sweetheart, the auction netted maybe 5 grand, admission another 4, wine maybe 1500, bar maybe another 500. Not bad for Portsmouth. I had fun pouring wine, chatting. I didn't wear the hat, Sharee wanted to wear it, and bless her heart. I wore my Smithsonian ball-cap. Crazy busy, opening bottles and pouring. The art crowd are drinkers, even at 8 bucks a glass, 34 bottles in two hours (and a lot of people drank beer, or the drink for the occasion, a Pink Flamingo, which is citrus vodka, triple sec, and cranberry juice). I sample all the wines, 3 white and 3 red, liked the Shiraz quite a bit, a big wine, like the zins I prefer. Sipped Maker's Mark on a few cubes for the rest of the evening, weak drinks, I stayed sober for the drive home. 14 deer on the last 2 mile section of Mackletree. Weaving between statues. If you've never done theater, or installed a show, it's probably pretty hard to imagine what opening day is like. Or maybe not, it's like having that first Thanksgiving family feed at your house, 16 relatives and you're an in-law. Like that. A list of similar events could follow. I suppose we all have them. But it is actually what I do for a living. Serving the wine, I didn't have to mingle, people came to me. I spun a line of talk. I only do this once or twice a year, so I create a fiction on the fly, a story that sounds correct, and people tend to believe me, because I'm sitting on a stool, wearing a ball cap. Go figure. I scored heavily with the board tonight, because they were drinking a little and I was serving, and I came off as a really dedicated employee, which I am, and could talk on any subject. My chit-chat tutorial was helpful. Mostly, no one listens. Doesn't matter what you say. The rules of the game are established by the playing field. And then. And then, the rules of engagement change. Went to sleep on the sofa before could SEND. Weary. Back to town this morning, laundry, soup and a Scottish ale at the pub, then opened the museum so I could re-hang the front wall which we had un-hung so we could hang the art work for auction. But first I had to pick up hundreds of little wooden skewers on which much of the finger food last night was served. At public functions people just drop these on the floor. There was a nice remoulade, for dipping. Beef tenderloin chunks, large shrimp, fried ravioli; excellent food prepared by Ann(e?) Jewitt, a board member (Asa's) wife. Also today, I was finding shrimp tails everywhere. I was hoping for enough left-over shrimp to make a bisque, but no such luck. The beef was all gone too. Olives left, so I snacked on those, while I policed corners and crevices. My first museum condom, in the projection booth for the theater. A good choice of location, because the theater was deeply dark, and we had almost blocked access by temporarily storing the shipping crates (oversized, a logistic nightmare) for "Alice" on that upper landing before you start down the awkward carpeted steps through the steeply tiered seats, down to the stage. That landing probably has a specific name, most things do, but I don't know it. We had, however, left a narrow path, because we needed to access the theater lights, which are controlled from the projection room. A perfect tryst location, whether scouted ahead of time, or just accidentally discovered. Guessing from scant evidence, I'd say sitting position, involving a pedestal. Making sense with words is sometimes a strange process. The tangents. Writing just that line, involved getting another drink and rolling several cigarettes, thinking about strange places I had made love. One, I'll share with you, I was a Senior at Janitor College, and we were a pretty good venue for road shows, the best for hundreds of miles in all directions. And there was grant money available, Bringing Art To The Far North, so we hosted a lot of events. That summer we booked a British Sitting-Room Comedy; the ingenue was a hot young thing, and I'm a fool for accents; I've been told that if I mention her name I'll be shot, so let's call her Jane. We hit it off. She'd never had the opportunity to completely release. There was a sofa on the set. After I set the ghost light, we would fuck until dawn. I digress. Hard not to. What life is. What's thrown in your face. I really wasn't going anyplace. Fucking condom, man, diverted me completely from where I thought I wanted to go. The way life is. She died early in the third act, and had time that we could, if she did her curtain calls quickly, regroup in a burrow we had wallowed under a hedge near one of the rear exits from the theater, and fuck our brains out while the patrons were leaving the building. Hard not to remember. The smell of bacon in the morning. I fried some shredded potatoes in the last of the bacon fat, fried a perfect egg, nuked an extra scone I'd scored this morning, slathered it with butter. A great dinner. Who's keeping time? Who cares what time of day it is? Read more...

Dead Modem

No telling when I'll send this. No chance to get a new one before Saturday. The current dead one is the fifth modem for this computer. Just about ready for the big event tomorrow night. Finished up my wine station today, table cloths and hand-towels, and got 22 bottles of white wine in the fridge, 24 bottles of red in the vault at 68 degrees. I'm pouring the reds, one of Pegi's moms is pouring the whites and another dealing with the cash. The wine table generates a lot of cash. I'll have to sample them all, and that's a nice perk, so I'll be able to bull-shit about them. I actually do know a lot about wine, the product of 20 years actually making the stuff, so I can talk the talk. Since this is the "Alice" opening, there will, of course, be people dressed up as characters and it is even remotely possible that I'll be wearing a funny hat. A reach for me. But a chance to be the white rabbit, and it's a really cool hat, and the very idea that the janitor would be the white rabbit is a progressive idea. I can't see what's on my head, I might do it. My tendency is to wear the ball-cap that says "Simple" but I've probably worn that mule to a frazzle. I've been practicing chit-chat. If my math is correct, or even close, five ounces is half-a-cup plus two tablespoons. Dr. White, who chose the wines, said a serving should be five ounces, so I mark a glass and practice pouring; ten repetitions and I'm within a really close margin. Close enough. The magic phrase, if you've ever been in the trades. "Close enough" always marked that point of diminishing returns. Where further effort to make something more nearly perfect was really just wasted time. You work at the top of your form when you work freely. No mediation. The moon is a ghostly galleon, behind stick trees, her bow is raised in an oncoming wave. A Japanese wood-block print. I pulled all the connections and licked them. It often helps, saliva is a good connector. Moisture merely. I have a connection. The problem is usually dust. Read more...

Preparations

Moving apace. Actually crossed more things off my list than I added. Bell-weather day. The Ladies brought out all the stuff for the auction, a lot of stuff, some of it very nice. D, between interruptions, matted and framed two prints and a watercolor, I made just one trip to the hardware store. Set up my wine station. I need to clean up on Thursday night and take in a change of clothes on Friday. Everyone else goes home to change, but I don't have that option, because everyone else goes home. I have to un-hang the front wall of the "Alice" show so we can hang the art that's for sale, and I sense that might be an issue, because the artist of the "Alice" show will be there, the show is sequential and narrative, and pieces three through eight will be missing. Not my problem. Tomorrow, I have to meet with the local wine expert and discuss how much to pour and what to say. I'll need to taste them, of course, to arrive at my own conclusions, and I probably won't spit anything out. Promised Sara I'd come in and re-hang the front wall Saturday, I'll have to do my laundry anyway, do some shopping, before colder weather returns. But my god it was lovely outside today. I watched a flock of grackles flying into and out of the Oriental Pear trees in the parking lot across the way, amusing and graceful in their swoopings and turnings. Those particular trees, 800 feet lower than the ridge, are still almost totally leafed, in beautiful scarlet leaves, and the grackles infiltrate a specific tree completely, they're packed in like sardines, and when they feel the Jones to move, it takes dozens of seconds for them to vacate one property and invade another, with various loops between. A kind of play, certainly, triggered by the change in temperature. A really smart set of birds are the ones that live at Home Depot. It's heated, for god's sake. Why migrate when you can live at Home Depot? Of course, within a couple of generations, you've gotten too fat, on pop-corn droppings, to even think about migrating, your wings have atrophied and you're too heavy to fly. Tradeoffs. I heard a great joke, I'll try to remember: if you have one minor fender bender you're not known as Crashing Tom, one night sleeping under the hedge doesn't make you the town drunk, but you fuck one pony. I'm just saying, it doesn't seem fair, she wasn't hobbled. An ungulate in heat, will accept any prick, I've lived on the farm too long. Not that I ever would, but who cares? we're all so different. You might still believe in God and I could believe everything was happenstance. The initial moment is a problem. A huge problem. I choose to carry a butterfly net and act as if nothing is happening. Fuck you and your helmet to helmet contact. I'd prefer something more considered, we might think about contracts. Read more...

Lovely Weather

Mid 30's at night, mid 60's day time high. Most of the leaves are gone. The switch back to EST means that if I have a beer with D and Anthony after work, I get home in the dark. I don't like driving after dark anymore. But they have a great Scottish Ale on tap right now. Friday night I'm pouring wine at the fund-raiser, good stuff, 6 and 8 bucks a glass. I told Pegi I'd pour the wine if she got one of her Cirque moms to handle the cash. Won't get home before 10. Deer season, will need to drive slow, especially the last five miles, on Mackletree, because the deer browse the under-story on both sides of the road. It can be a gauntlet. D ask me what I had done today, and I had to stop and think about it. I did three dishwasher loads of wine glasses, in prep for the party, took two loads of stuff to the basement, set up tables, hauled away garbage, vacuumed the plaster dust from setting 90 anchors (a job from hell, really), made numerous trips to the third floor, carrying glass and mats from the last show, spent an hour walking around the building, mostly outside, with a guy from a company who's giving us a price for doing some exterior work on the building. There's a grant involved. I'm a little sore, from working hard, and it feels kind of good. On my way out of town I stop and get a roast beef sandwich and some curly fries, no way I'm cooking tonight. The rest of this week, for that matter. I'll probably eat a burger too, all my sins remembered. A footer with onion rings, which I will have eaten before I get home, because the smell will have stopped me at the lake. This weather, I usually carry a beer under the driver's seat, because you never know. What if I got stuck in traffic? There's always a book in my pack. When everyone else is getting upset, I'm rolling a smoke, reading a book, drinking a bottle of beer. Any break in any imagined routine is fine with me. I'm heading to Florida a day early, so that if I'm delayed a day it wouldn't matter, I'll make crab-cakes and we'll talk about cornbread. I'll have to make greens. The vote is in for baby-back pork ribs at Thanksgiving, with a sweet potato thing, butter beans, and coleslaw. I'm good with that, as long as Kevin can pick the girls up at the airport, because I'll need to be cooking. Evidently Kevin and Rhea have been tweeting. Arrangements made, I'm merely the cook. Cool, I can deal with that. Variations on crab-cakes. Read more...

Expectations

There was always the assumption, that if you made it through Janitor College, you'd end up at the Met, or the Chicago Institute, or someplace where you just manipulated robots to do the actual cleaning. I hadn't foreseen hanging art as a final occupation. Had long imagined, as Dr. Quint railed, that I'd end up in knee-pads, in an area I had cordoned off with orange cones and plastic tape, with a comb, flipping bits of dry shit free. His lesson was that shit wasn't difficult to deal with, if you let it dry. You flip the shit free, after it's dry, and vacuum it up, wipe the area with cheap perfume. It's not rocket science. Turned down a lucrative gig recently, because I don't fly, dealing with the carpet in Buckingham Palace, where there's an aging Queen with old dogs. I couldn't trust myself to remain civil, even if I could fly, which I can't. At some point the dogs stay in the doghouse and you visit them there. You don't walk the dogs through the dining room. That's akin to inviting failure. The orange traffic cone was Dr. Quint's invention, he was just looking for a way to let shit dry. His stainless steel comb looked like a weapon but he just used it to flip flakes of dried matter free from the fiber of carpet. Beautiful, really. A stroke, a note, a nod to the unknown. Bach as janitor. The scene opens with a view of empty warehouses, then we focus in on a strip mall that's barely surviving, the soprano sings a lovely aria of loss, her family (oriental, Chinese) restaurant is failing, the bass counters with an argument for violence, as if that could be a solution. The tenor, meanwhile, was making off with the ingenue. The lovely daughter with buck teeth sings a ballad. Our hero, the baritone, was a orthographer who could give her the correct font. Not to be underestimated, the bad guy, the bass, argues we should kill everyone. The sultry maiden cautions we should, maybe, slow down. Opera. Read more...