Screeching

God awful sound outside, three in the morning, it's a feral house cat squared off against a rabid coon. I throw chunks of ice at them until they move off into the dark. Fuck a bunch of nature. I was having a pleasant dream about the perfect apple, maybe it was a peach, I was making a pie, Pegi's girls were dancing around, squeezing limes into coconuts. A state of grace disturbed by a squabble at the compost pile. Then I can't go back to sleep, because I'd forgotten something I needed to do. I have to get up and check my list, which I seem to have misplaced, and decide to have a fried egg on toast, my snack of choice these days. Must have left my list at the museum because it's not in this house, but I did turn up a magazine with an interesting article on pre-stressed concrete. I entertain the idea of building a small house using insulated concrete panels. At five in the morning it makes perfect sense. I visualize things very easily, either a blessing or a curse, I learned this from Herbert, I think, my early days in theater, when he would simply draw an idea on a scrap of upson board and you'd see what he meant. Building sets, making props, you imagine things into reality. Illusion. (That's strange, in Arial you end up with '3' in roman numerals.) Illusion. Like that. Meaning is a slippery slope, keeping with the 's' as a motif. I don't give a shit what any slimy slippery bastard says. Sense accumulates, like leaf litter. History is a compost pile. Nothing matters. The smallest thing. The slight tracery of a spider web could be enough to nudge you over the edge. I've never minded being lost, why quibble over loose change? I'm most happy when I can write you, spew whatever I've been thinking. The body politic is a mystery. Mid-term elections are always a pain in the ass because they skew the balance of power. Grid-lock. A nap, I beseech you, my kingdom for a nap. I did sleep, for a couple more hours, then headed to town. Stopped at the lake to examine the napp over the spillway. The escaping water actually lifts the ice/snow layer and slips beneath. In town, I go immediately below the floodwall, note some stumps I want to harvest, but the mud is serious and I'm not dressed for that kind of work (disposable clothes are in order) and I meet D at Market Street for a great breakfast burrito. Open up the museum, then I head to the laundromat, the library, the liquor store, then back to the museum to put away tables and chairs from last night's music/food event. Lunch at the pub, then finish cleaning; discuss D's next show in the main gallery, what he has in mind, what he has lined up; and despite having a family, a job, and going to school full-time, he is completely on top of his curatorial responsibilities. I look forward to that show, which will engage the idea of construction. Many different mediums. I only caution him that we need some large flat works for the walls, some photographs or renderings, but he's all over that already. It helps, I think, being a curator, if you've been a preparator first. I hated the few times I ever worked with an architect because they had never built a house, they didn't know jack squat except for pretty roof-lines. In the trenches is where the lessons are learned. You can't learn from a chart what wood can do. I get ahead of myself, of course you can, you can learn almost everything from books. I'm self-taught in any number of disciplines. But I was trying to get to that point about materials speaking for themselves, how, as a designer, you often had to get out of the way. Sometimes the raw material is the message. As manipulative humans, we go out of our way to impose design. Consider the various flowers, branching dendritic drainage. It's a wonder.