Above Freezing

Dry hands, from the white cotton gloves, the endless washings, and splinters from crates that have been abused. Numberless venues. Working up to speed. Over-taped and under-manned. The Alice Show still sits, like a pregnant rabbit, in the middle of the floor. That rapscallion of a crate, over 300 pounds, that will surely have to be loaded by me and just the driver of a Fed-Ex art shipping truck. Push that thought away, I can always get a couple of guys from the bar next door. I lose track of time, it's already tomorrow, and I haven't slept well, another million dollars worth of paintings to uncrate. The Thomas Hart Benton, "Untitled, Landscape" looks like a cowboy, with his hat, looking down. Punch-drunk, rolling around in board-member chairs, D and I offer criticism to whomever will listen. Anthony is firing a kiln, I have to write; if you subscribe to String Theory, everything can happen at once, which it does. So the theory (a set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena) might or not be true, based on your definition of true. I have trouble with the word 'authentic'. Sometimes I have to just go to bed, stop thinking. A trick I learned from a Sufi master, was to lay on your back and count backwards from 10, only think about your breathing, concentrate on the in and out, the extraneous shit blows off in the first few breaths, and you're left with a void, the black hole of unconsciousness, and you can sleep. We've all failed, miserably, but we need to sleep and eat. My trick, for not killing myself, is to wonder what might happen tomorrow. Another million dollars worth of paintings, a few more paper cuts, maybe, if I get lucky, another splinter. I fester, therefore I live. Garcia, "Old And In The Way", you know that album? Bluegrass has never sounded so good. I'm so easily distracted. I was going to pee, today (yesterday), we'd just unwrapped a painting that was worth more than I'd earned in my life. The crate weighed maybe 200 pounds and the painting weighed maybe eight pounds. Just to give you an (the) idea. In some cases, I've seen this painting before. Full circle. My night course in art history is coming around. The hours I spend in the library. It's strange, actually, to hold a painting you've seen in a book. Imagine. You're standing there, using your drop-point Gerber (that Linda gave you) to free a painting from its wrappings. You know that it's worth more than your life. Take a bullet for the republican asshole you couldn't care less about. Art, you know, transcends mere political bullshit; taken with a good dose of that metallic taste of irony. And we have a show to hang. How do you feel about that?

Tom

Above Freezing. When I print, I don't get a title, so I'm going to start adding the title, as a postscript. More my concern than yours. I shouldn't have said anything. You'd probably know what I was doing. If I could write code I'd figure out a way to remind myself what I was remembering. I'm accused of being academic, but I'm not. Just a poor lost soul. I have to laugh, the parameters I set for myself. The janitor as night watchman surveys his domain.