The List

With the addenda and the sub-sets, the list has taken on a life of its own. We do spend most of the day in the basement, achieving what might pass for order. Dirty ugly work, especially when D decides (correctly) that we need to rip out an old door-jamb (no door) in the interest of widening a bottleneck between the elevator and the new crate storage area we created today. Truck loads of debris. Then tackled the pedestal storage area and got rid of another truckload, this one of useless boxes, and increased our storage area there by 25%. Swept everything clean, and even using a sweeping compound, the dust fills every pore of our clothes and bodies. Took delivery of the glass show, seven large pieces, off the back of a truck from Cleveland. Unloaded over ice and snow, nicely crated but no handles. Last thing today, we took the pieces up to the Richard's Gallery, six of the seven; five in the elevator, one at a time, and one up the stairs. The seventh has to be uncrated downstairs and carried up. It's seven feet tall. Might fit in the elevator, after uncrating. Sneezing fits in the afternoon. When D leaves I forgo a beer at the pub, wash my hair and take a sponge bath, bag the complete set of clothes for separate soaking, get a drink and read for an hour. Essays by Stephen Harrigan, middling good. Talks about some places I've been. An atlas becomes a book of memory. Five below, when D left his house this morning, zero when he gets to town, I'm waiting, in the back doorway of the museum, outside, smoking a cigaret. Actually, I'm leaning in the doorway, like a character in a French spy film, and when D makes the turn into into the Entry row of the bank parking lot, so that he can Exit toward Market Street, for coffee and scones, I flip the butt into the alley and flat-foot across the ice to his truck. But today is Saturday and we get Loretta to make us a Breakfast Wrap. It would stop a charging Rhino. Read an interesting essay about a tiger killing a keeper at the zoo in Houston, merely being a tiger is called into question. Memory and fiction are a lot alike. I might write some fiction. I was thinking, the grace of being a B writer, I think of myself as a B-minus, certainly someplace in the B's. I've always graded oddly, so I wouldn't trust me on this. At my adjuration (earnest solemn appeal) they judged me mostly on my crooked smile. I wouldn't lie if it made any difference. Trust me. I have to laugh. Fucking narrator. Cut the shot closely, he flips the cigaret butt into the alley, and walks to the truck. Cut. Voice over, some Bach in the background. I can't do everything, really; I can't do much, anymore. You and yours, I don't have a clue, but I do, what you need is the most simple repetitive thing possible. Lift weights. I'll rescue you tomorrow. Stand off to the side when I blow the door, then, follow my lead. We don't need to talk.I hate you, you know that, that you could understand means I could know, should know. That meant if you did know you should have at least made a move.