Saturday Duty

No one else wanted to work, so I was staff at the museum. Didn't do anything but slump in a boardroom chair and read, and, besides, the museum is air-conditioned. Have to get a small unit for the house because my computer is complaining about the heat, even with the ice-pack and fan arrangement. Brought a vat of left-overs home for the dog and culled a couple of meals for myself, enough shrimp for a fried rice, and enough meatballs for a meal of some sort. Too hot to think and too tired to care. The show looks great, I walked around all the galleries, straightening pictures, knowing I had installed everything and remembering very little about the actual process. The last two weeks is kind of a blur; a ship on the ways: you do everything you can, double check the math, and finally just launch the damned thing. At the Market Street Cafe, Loretta had left instructions on how to prepare my breakfast burrito, and it was perfect, breakfast and lunch, as it happened, because I just had a Stella on tap, with chips and salsa, later, and beat a path home. Meatballs on toast for dinner. The music was too loud for casual flirting last night, or I might have brought someone home. Such are the wave-fronts of chance. There was another party, after, but it was in the wrong direction and I was peopled out, too much music and too much idle chatter. I'd of had to sleep on their sofa and pee in their yard, in my green jungle not a transgression, but I've noticed other people frown on my habits. Can't SEND as the phone line is down. Sleep for nine hours, wake to the hottest day of the year, breakfast on home-made polenta and eggs, plop on the sofa, after 12 straight days of work, and finish "One River", ethno-botany of the Amazon, then the power goes out. Take a wooden chair out on the front deck, pour a gallon of tepid water over my head, dry my hands, read until I'm dry. Can't call Dad (Father's Day) because the phone is out, and can't write (I make some notes) because the power is out. Not really a conspiracy kind of person, but I keep expecting large guys in black suits and bullet-proof vests to pop out of the woodwork. Finally get electric and phone back around seven tonight, and fix a nice dish of party leavings, a shrimp bisque, with some little garlic-toast rounds, and a side order of avocado with lime juice. Comes down to how you live your life, what is a minor inconvenience for me might be cataclysmic for you, or the other way around. Living without things, for long periods of time, makes you sensitive to the needs of others. Like Saturday, I wasn't going to do anything anyway, so I might as well read at the museum, where there is air-conditioning and I can at least be comfortable. No one else could work, so I did, reading in the coolth. Fuck a bunch of correctness. People were picking up rejected art, and I had to keep a game-face, I deny any accountability. That world, out there, is your imaging. Mostly what I do is write in the dark.